I’ve been doing a lot of muting on the Twitter this morning – over eighty separate accounts, all of which tweet out short extracts from that early P.G. Wodehouse story I’ve discussed before, as well as other stuff that I can’t be bothered to look up. For the most part, that’s all they do; whereas the accounts I muted back in the autumn generally sent out images or gifs as well as text, apparently advertising things like betting sites for the World Cup, the vast majority of these just individually meaningless fragments of text (the exceptions are a sub-group that include pictures of anime girls). (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Thucydides’
The Bots Are Back In Town
Posted in Musings, tagged Thucydides, Twitter on March 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Oh, Well
Posted in Musings, tagged commemoration, G.B. Grundy, Sphacteria, Thucydides, topography on February 24, 2023| 2 Comments »
What makes for a decent academic legacy? How should one want to be remembered, and by whom? Such a potentially morbid and self-regarding train of thought is not in fact prompted by the fact that I’ve now added a broken foot to the Long COVID, insomnia and constant general tiredness that are making me feel old and useless. (more…)
Road To Nowhere
Posted in Musings, tagged documentaries, history, Thucydides, tv on February 10, 2023| 2 Comments »
There’s a familiar idea that Thucydides might be considered the founding figure for journalism – rooting out the truth of contemporary news events through own observations and interviewing eye-witnesses – and perhaps especially war reporting. There is perhaps an even better case for discerning his spirit in the classic tv history documentary format: ‘what he saw himself’ represented by archive footage, supplemented by plenty of interviews with participants looking back on events, all tied together by a portentous narrator (can’t you just hear Larry ‘World At War’ Olivier reading Thucydides?) – and, to a far greater degree than in actual war reporting, a huge amount of selection, evaluation and artful arrangement of material going on beneath the surface in order to produce a seamless, true-seeming narrative. (more…)
Time Out
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides, William F. Butler on December 27, 2022| Leave a Comment »
‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ I spend so much time thinking of ways to correct this misattributed Thucydides quote politely and constructively, and occasionally noting the context (a lot of “We need a President who lifts!” this year…), that I rarely take the time to think about it in its own right, or why it has such a powerful appeal to some people. (more…)
Measure of a Man
Posted in Musings, tagged China, quotations, Thucydides, translation on December 6, 2022| Leave a Comment »
It’s been a quiet fortnight on Thucydides Twitter – if you discount the 2000-odd P.G. Wodehouse bots continuing to pump out incomprehensible adverts for something that may or may not be linked to World Cup betting. The Social Jukebox bots that used to offer dodgy quotations have vanished, either because they’ve been closed down or because they decided that Space Karen’s far-right takeover was bad for their image; one weight-lifting account announced that ‘We need a President who lifts’, with the inevitable result of a couple of people bringing out the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote, and a couple of far-right and/or bot provocateur accounts with Thucydides handles have been churning out ghastliness, but that’s about it – with one minor but interesting exception.
“Man is the most important thing, and everything else is the fruit of man’s labor.” (more…)
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Posted in Musings, tagged education, P.G. Wodehouse, Thucydides, Twitter on November 18, 2022| 2 Comments »
Something even weirder than normal is happening on Thucydides Twitter. I hesitate to use the word ‘invasion’ because of its association with the UK government’s racist anti-migrant rhetoric, but certainly I feel like a scientist in the opening act of one of those movies, puzzled by the suddenly anomalous behaviour of the pond snails he’s been studying, not realising that this is just one small segment of a rapid montage, the dots that will not be joined by anyone except the viewer until Act Two… (more…)
Here We Go Again
Posted in Musings, tagged economics, Melian Dialogue, Thucydides on September 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Events of the present and future will tend to resemble those of the past – or however else you want to paraphrase Thucydides’ key assumption about the usefulness of his work – or at any rate will remind us of them. This week has been very much a case in point, as commentators have looked back to previous disastrous budgets and currency crises in search of a bit of historical context and/or a yardstick for evaluating disastrousness for the present Kwartastrophic Trussterfuck. I’ve been thinking a bit about my early childhood in the early 1970s (and how much this may have influenced my current instincts to preserve vegetables and hoard firewood), but even more my thoughts have turned to the Greek economic crisis, prompted by the wonderfully Thucydidean phrase used by someone from Nomura finance in the early stage of the pound’s collapse, “hope is not a strategy”. Yes, it’s the Melian Dialogue redividus, once again pitting the Batshit Brexit Party against another inexorable facet of reality. (more…)
Friends Will Be Friends
Posted in Musings, Podcasts, tagged Origen, Plutarch, quotations, Thucydides on September 21, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Okay, this is a first for me; I’ve just produced a new episode of the Thucydiocy podcast (Podbean link here; iTunes always takes longer to process), without it being based on a previous blog post. As I tend to use the blog as a repository in case I need to check up on misattributions and misquotations, this is potentially slightly tricky, and so I thought I should simply add a rough transcript (or rather, an expanded version of my script notes) for future reference… (more…)
Sphinx 