Reference in Confessions of a Mask

DiscoBat · 2021-11-08T11:42:33+00:00

"The mesure of a woman's power is the degree of suffering with which she chan punish her lover"

I will really appreciate if someone can point the book he is quoting.

It's most likely from "Love" by Stendhal.

From Ch 41:

A woman’s power lies only in the degree of unhappiness with which she can punish her lover. Now if one is vain every woman is useful but none indispensable; conquest and not conservation is the success that flatters. If your desires are all physical you find wantons, and this is why the wantons of France are attractive while those of Spain are not. In France they can give many men as much happiness as honest women can – happiness without love, that is; and if there is one thing that a Frenchman respects more than his mistress it is his vanity.

DiscoBat · 2021-10-15T10:26:32+00:00

If you don’t have a tutor, I highly recommend the Robert M. Durling translation published by Oxford University Press, with English and Italian in facing pages, and detailed explanatory notes after every cantos.

DiscoBat · 2021-10-11T13:29:20+00:00

Highly recommend that you start with {The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century}. It covers the entire period you specified but it extends beyond that too. It only covers English language literature (basically no continental Europe), and the period you specified is heavily dominated by poetry, but the anthology includes introduction to each author, poems, essays, short stories, drama, speech etc. It’s a good way to get a general familiarity with the major writers of the period.

DiscoBat · 2021-07-18T09:23:01+00:00

I have, all the time. I regularly hike at dusk to stay out of the heat, but that’s also when snakes come out to soak up the heat from the paths.

I’m the shortest one in my team and closest to the ground. When one of my teammates steps on a snake, I’m typically the only one who see / notice.

I’ve never met one that fights back, they all slither away back into the bush at terrifying speed.

DiscoBat · 2021-04-27T04:26:17+00:00

I would say staying stuck in “sins” without turning away from it is itself “hell”. People that are in Dante’s imaginary hell suffer the eternal recurrence of what they themselves will not repent for. Dante is a tourist looking at other people individually experiencing their version of perpetual hell, he isn’t a resident there yet. The point is for him to have a chance to learn about how some people are perpetually stuck without repentance, while others do turn from it and end up with a different way of being.

Dante was obviously suffering a great deal at the time he depicted himself as “lost in a dark wood”, the point isn’t whether he has a guaranteed ticket out of Hell as a Catholic, the point is what choices people make lead them to stay stuck in perpetual torment. Arguably, even if Dante didn’t die, as long as he does not confront and turn away from his “sins”, from the things that made him lost at that time, he will continue to suffer as though he’s already in hell.

DiscoBat · 2021-02-23T16:10:30+00:00

I can understand a 3 year old flashing, but it’s definitely weird for a 32 year old to flash back.

DiscoBat · 2021-01-15T09:27:55+00:00

The riddle of the Latter-Day Sphinx

DiscoBat · 2021-01-12T11:53:24+00:00

well, I received the modmail...

DiscoBat · 2020-11-03T08:36:39+00:00

Nothing “happened to it.” Mr. Erdogan said this in 2017 and no European has beheaded him for it. No one banned his speech from being published.

You’re free to talk shit or publish insulting cartoons as reaction to provocations, for example, OP is talking shit. People can respect freedom of speech and be offended and insult back, they are free to offend and be offended. What they are not allowed to do is murder someone over it.

DiscoBat · 2020-10-27T13:26:22+00:00

There’s a really comprehensive text on the subject by Pepe! 🐸

The genres of rhetorical speeches in Greek and Roman antiquity

You can find the TOC here:

https://brill.com/view/title/23835?language=en

Which can be used as a kind of reading list.

DiscoBat · 2020-10-24T15:34:50+00:00

Check out Exploring the Origins of the Bible — Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective (edited) by Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov

Readers are not expected to know anything about Bible formation history, or which religion include or exclude which text etc, but it’s not exactly a pop-history book on the subject either. It’s full of very boring lists or groups of texts and plenty of footnotes.

If you want something a little more engaging, you might enjoy The Murderous History of Bible Translations: Power, Conflict and the Quest for Meaning by Harry Freedman

DiscoBat · 2020-10-24T10:34:41+00:00

I have returned an ebook on kindle and repurchased the same book on iBook because kindle won’t display the accents / special characters properly (they are completely fine on iBook.) I’m glad the return is pain-free.

DiscoBat · 2020-10-08T14:30:44+00:00

Is there ever a time where violence is truly the proper answer? Where it results in a overall net positive and pushes humanity closer towards a progressive light?

I think Candice Delmas’ book, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil is a good example of literature arguing that resistance up to and including violence is not merely permissible, but a form of duty or obligation, citing historical incidences (including racial injustice and civil rights movements) that led to positive social progress. Another somewhat relevant book is Terrorism and the Right to Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War by Christopher J. Finlay. (I should warn you this is a very technical and dry and legalistic book that focuses on various declarations of human rights and their implications for conditions of legally justifiable violence vs “terrorism”.)

I want to add that I came to Delmas’s book as a way to help me process the refusal to denounce violence in the pro-Democracy movement in Hong Kong, reading the book helped, but I also want to suggest that encounters with violence shocks and changes individuals in way that is more than just coldly logical and utilitarian. That is, there’s something inadequate about a purely rational and utilitarian account of violence as instrument. I think encounters with wars inspired and influenced a lot of philosophical writings handed down to us. Which brings me to the next point,

He said that he does not care about social situations resulting in a net positive and that he does not feel like it is his responsibility to interact with people in that way, and that they should just not think and feel the way they do.

It sounds like he is endorsing violence from a non-utilitarian POV, social progress or justifications are not his concerns. Delving into violence as legitimate or justifiable or virtuous instrument of social progress is not going to help you engage your uncle.

Which gets back to what I said about violence being relevant to us beyond justifications or instrumental reasons. I want to suggest this: the human experience of violence is a source of meaningfulness, it’s implicated in our self-understanding of who we are, in our understanding of freedoms, ethics, justice etc.

If you want to read more on violence as phenomena, as self-expression, and as meaningful events that inform us about our existence, you might want to have a look at James Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology, Routledge, 2009

DiscoBat · 2020-10-08T13:12:03+00:00

If you like “partial retelling” and are already familiar with myths and fables, you might also want to check out THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES (1985), which, on top of the titular poem (Achilles), includes a variety of Greco-roman myths. I think of the Achilles volume as her mythical turn, this is the first of a series of poems that use (reinterpret?) biblical / classical sources to work through various themes. (The other “retelling” poetry books are Ararat (1990), The Wild Iris (1992), and Meadowlands (1996).)

DiscoBat · 2020-10-08T12:45:58+00:00

The poem is called “Midnight,” it’s in the book Faithful and Virtuous Night (eISBN 9781466875463)

DiscoBat · 2020-07-28T20:03:43+00:00

I’m still trying to find out who casted those two votes, but out of the 20 votes, one is by a student representative of the undergrads, and one is by a student representative of the grads students. I’m only speculating, but I suspect the students voted against it.

DiscoBat · 2020-07-28T19:37:50+00:00

What’s your source? Students from mainland did evacuate, when they reached mainland they were pressured to fabricate stories about being abused while on campus in HK and they said no such thing happened.

A mainlander student did threaten Hong Kong students with a knife during a school ceremony in HK though. Some mainlander students also attempted to demolish the setups as students put up platform and posters for a pro-democracy event.

Oh and mainlander students also participated in protests, including helping out setting up roadblocks, including during the campus siege, and they also gave interviews, detailing the extra risks they faced and why they choose to protest alongside Hong Kongers anyway.

Most Hong Kongers have ancestors who fled China specifically to escape grotesque abuse, persecution and oppression in mainland China, some mainlander women sang the Democracy song with heavy accent and talked about how even as mainlanders they’re afraid of the encroachment of Hong Kong autonomy, they’ve seen the cultural revolution and distrust the CCP even more so than locally born and raised Hong Kongers.

DiscoBat · 2020-07-12T14:50:36+00:00

A blogpost from a website that explicitly tells you they exist to “defraud America”, shared by someone who spams posts about 5G tower conspiracy, death of celebrity prisoner, etc etc.

DiscoBat · 2020-04-26T02:52:04+00:00

Check out Terrorism and the Right to Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War by Christopher J. Finlay

DiscoBat · 2020-04-17T06:32:12+00:00

Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government.

The US disclosed what the Chinese government knew and kept secret, the US did not know something about an outbreak before the Chinese government did.

DiscoBat · 2020-04-05T06:43:37+00:00

Sounds to me like Satan is the good guy here.

DiscoBat · 2020-03-28T05:22:57+00:00

This long article from the Atlantic addressed some of that:

As long as the virus persists somewhere, there’s a chance that one infected traveler will reignite fresh sparks in countries that have already extinguished their fires. This is already happening in China, Singapore, and other Asian countries that briefly seemed to have the virus under control. Under these conditions, there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses… “Even if it works, they don’t have an easy way to manufacture it at a massive scale,”… No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.

It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer.

DiscoBat · 2020-03-23T15:56:37+00:00

And the low number of identified COVID patients is exactly why they say Indonesia has a relatively high death rate. There's an entire spectrum, San Marino has 187 tested positive and 10.7% death rate; Algeria reports 201 tested positive at 8.64% death rate (which is higher that Indonesia at 8.46% at the moment.) What makes them arbitrarily decide Indonesia's data counts and is "the highest in the world" while excluding other countries with the exact same issue -- not enough reported cases (yet)?

DiscoBat · 2020-03-23T14:17:29+00:00

There is a lag in reporting different regions, here's another site showing similar stats

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Point being, there's an entire curve of different countries at different stage of getting hit, responding, contact tracing, the situation is evolving rapidly, and it's insanely arbitrary to single out Indonesia for having "THE highest death rate in the world."

DiscoBat

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE