consider sacha baron cohen the leading chronicler of human hubris
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i heard one time while hunting, there was a man who tried to attack you, and you had to shoot him in the face?
no. [laughs] well, that’s a bit of a, uh, distortion. we were hunting, um, quail with shotguns.
you were hunting the vice president quayle?
well, it wasn’t vice-presidential quail. it was… there’s vice president quayle, whose name is q-u-a-y-l-e, and then there’s quail, and it is the birds that we hunt
and which one were you trying to kill?
birds.
okay.
watched rocco and his brothers, immigrant cain and abel. milanese subtitle for italian "encore" said "again?" but should have been "once more?"
read the doomsayer speculators. we might have this level of predictive power next decade, probably not this one
historians have not, as a whole, accepted turchin's terms of surrender graciously. since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones. (as jo guldi, a historian at southern methodist university, put it to me, "some historians regard turchin the way astronomers regard nostradamus.") instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. the idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory
read the amalgamated interviews of kurt vonnegut. literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. thank you
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