Recent Links

 The Isle of the Dead It has an evocative sound, doesn't it, like The Well at the World's End and The Young King of the Black Isles? Lewis declared it impossible to write a story that lived up to the title.

 Nehalennia has long remained a controversial figure, with all sorts of theories arising over the years regarding her origin and how she is depicted. Yet the latest research indicates that Nehalennia was a Germanic goddess who had a particular connection with Britain.

The illustration is attributed to Andreas Bonn, but it looks far too modern and nothing like Bonn ever did. That is is a watercolor by Peter Speier fairly leaps out at me.

David Foster reviews Red Plenty

How might this actually be accomplished? Stalin mocked the idea that planning an economy required much in the way of intellectual depth or effort. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that. 

The DSA Sweet Spot  Nate Silver looks at who are the voters of the Democratic Socialists, and notes that the strongest group are people with high education and low income.  This has been said before, and discussed.  The finding is consistent across groups in America, which makes it more likely that it is measuring something real, but there's a catch.  The effect is not that large. Education itself is stronger. Note: There is a reference to Omnicause voting.  I interpret that as more social aspiration than ideological.

Colin Gorrie of Dead Language Society is writing a book about English before it was English, that is, from Proto-Indo-European through Germanic through all the subsequent splits to the beginning of Anglo-Saxon, first written down in the 600s.

Bernard-Henri Levy does not agree with Niall Ferguson that historians have lost the war against antisemitism. This is just another chapter in the long war against truth. 

Post-truth was not invented in Silicon Valley but in the Agora of Athens.

It did not come after truth; it was born alongside it, as its shadow.

It is that force which, with the death of Socrates, seemed for a time to triumph and plunged the Fergusons of that age into despair.

And yet.

In the end, it is the spirit of Socrates that prevails, while his opponent Gorgias sinks into oblivion.