Recent Comments

1. 10 days ago on Clay Jones

   If anyone cares to see an example of scholarship in IndoEuropean Poetics, you might check out a wonderful book by one of my teachers, Calvert Watkins. This is “How to Kill a Dragon”. Here’s what wiki has to say about it: "How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics is a 1995 book about comparative Indo-European poetics by the linguist and classicist Calvert Watkins. It was first published on November 16, 1995, through Oxford University Press and is both an introduction to comparative poetics and an investigation of the myths about dragon-slayers found in different times and in different Indo-European languages. The book consists of seven parts and 59 chapters. Watkins uses the comparative method to find cognate formulas and mythological features that could be traced back to a common past in ancient texts written in Indo-European languages. He claims that it is not possible to understand fully the traditional elements in an early Indo-European poetic text without the background of what he calls a “genetic intertextuality” of particular formulas and themes in all languages of the family."

2. 10 days ago on Clay Jones

   This thread is getting pretty long, but I feel that your note deserves a reply. When I was writing my PhD dissertation a relative of mine asked me for a post-card summary. He had heard someone say more or less what Sowell is saying: that anything longer than three minutes is BS. I thought about it for a while and gave up. I work in a rather technical side of Classical Philology, what’s sometimes called IndoEuropean Poetics. It took me four years of undergraduate study and five more of graduate study in the relevant ancient languages and ancient authors even to formulate the problem I was investigating. I could state the problem fairly briefly, for someone who had the background to understand it. But then proving my argument took about 250 pages. I think there’s a value in post-card summaries, but with the understanding that a post-card summary may be intelligible only to those who have a lot of background. Think of a proof in calculus. It may be relatively easy to show the proof, if you already know trigonometry, for instance. There’s a good reason that courses in math have prerequisites. The same is true in my area of scholarship.

3. 10 days ago on Clay Bennett

   Applying the rules always calls for judgment. Rules are general, events are specific. You have to ask, Does this actual event count as an instance of the rule?

4. 10 days ago on Clay Jones

   I just don’t buy that. It’s a cheap put-down of serious thinking. Our friend DD Wiz is one of the best posters here, and I look forward to the detail he brings.

5. 11 days ago on Ted Rall

   Hi martens, good to see you!!!!

6. 11 days ago on Clay Jones

   Why go to the trouble of defending obvious gibberish?

7. 12 days ago on Clay Jones

   I’ve read about half a dozen of Mieville’s novels. Some I liked a lot, but others less. I loved The City and the City. Even the ones I didn’t love I admired. I don’t keep up with recent science fiction, because of the press of other projects. My new book will be coming out in September and we’re in the final stages of pre-production. I’m beginning to feel my age, but I think I have one more book in me, so that’s where I’m putting my energy these days. I’m curious to read his book on Marx. I sometimes think that Marx (like Freud) is created anew by each reader. Some years ago I was much influenced by a three-volume study titled Main Currents of Marxism, by Kolakovski (sp?).

8. 17 days ago on Matt Wuerker

   I should make it clear, however, that getting rid of Trump is a priority, in my opinion, so we can go on to these other problems.

9. 17 days ago on Matt Wuerker

   What I most dislike about Trump and Trumpism is that it keeps us from talking about how we can make the nation and the world a better place. We need urgent action on the climate. We need to re-imagine economics to reduce the disparity in wealth. We need to promote gender equity around the world. That’s a start. I can go on…..

10. 17 days ago on Clay Jones

    I’m willing to bet that Neo wrote “reign” as a joke. It would be like him.