Mark Lawrence Schrad writes that Republicans have abandoned policy to promote the public good, including assistance following natural disasters.

William Lindsey :toad:

@wood5y @philip_cardella I fear you're exactly right. My spouse is German-American and has spent years reading everything he can get his hands on about the Holocaust, as he struggles to understand how his people, German Catholic people, could have been responsible for or have silently colluded in mass murder. He's concluded that the notion of progress as history unfolds is total bunk. He says that the same battles have to be fought over and over again against inhumanity.

Steve Woods

@wdlindsy @philip_cardella The fact that the plays of Aristophanes are still being performed after millennia is indicative of human nature's lack of changing despite the changing times.

William Lindsey :toad:

@wood5y @philip_cardella Very well-noted. I can hear my 12th-grade English teacher Margaret Hamilton saying those very words as we read Aristophanes for the first time in our lives in her class.

Steve Woods

@wdlindsy @philip_cardella I've never read him. Must remedy that before I'm put to bed in pine pyjamas/pajamas.

William Lindsey :toad:

@wood5y @philip_cardella "Lysistrata" is a wonderful starting point, and a play that remains surprisingly timely right to today.

Philip Cardella

@wdlindsy @wood5y lol. I love that play so much.

Steve Woods

@wdlindsy @philip_cardella Downloaded to phone.

It'll be next on my reading list when I've finished George Orwell's Collected Essays.

Cheers!

Philip Cardella

@wdlindsy @wood5y I recommend a translation that's not fully literal. If I recall that's the play where some women are selling "pigs" by the side of the road in the literal translation but in the slang adaptation it's "cats" and it makes a lot more sense to the modern reader.

I definitely remember the plot of that play but might be mixing the selling of "cats" up with a different play.

Possumantha

@wdlindsy @philip_cardella I think the distraction industry may kill democracy. Too many people are getting their information 8th hand from influencers. All the fascists have to do is get people to not act.

William Lindsey :toad:

@kastope @philip_cardella Excellent point. I agree. And I like the phrase "distraction industry."

William Lindsey :toad:

@philip_cardella @wood5y I think the best translations are always the non-literal ones, don't you? I can remember my surprise when my fourth-year Latin teacher in high school, a very proper, well-educated old lady, gave me a volume of Catullus' poems, some of which are racy, to say the least, with English translations on facing pages, and those translations were full of words we'd have been forbidden to say in school. Modern words considered smutty and very much slang….

William Lindsey :toad:

@wood5y @philip_cardella You're making me wonder if I've even read Orwell's essays. I do remember his Road to Wigan Pier, which went beyond essay format, but am not sure I've read any of his essays.

William Lindsey :toad:

@philip_cardella @wood5y It never quite leaves my head after I read it in my 12th-grade world literature class in high school. Many years ago!