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zarinastone

Whale Tail Sculpture Catches Dutch Train 30 Feet Above Ground : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...racks-is-caught-by-statues-tai

netherlands sculpture art train save

shared by zarinastone on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A Dutch train burst past the end of its elevated tracks Monday in the Netherlands.
  • But instead of crashing to the ground 30 feet below, the metro train was caught — held aloft by an artist's massive sculpture of a whale's tail. Despite some damage, no injuries or deaths were reported.
  • It's unclear why the train didn't stop.
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  • The architect who created the sculpture, Maarten Struijs, was shocked it held u
  • "I am amazed that it is so strong," Struijs said, according to The Guardian. "When plastic has stood for 20 years, you don't expect it to hold up a metro train."
ethanshilling

World War I Memorial in Washington Raises First Flag After Years of Wrangling - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-war-i-memorial.html

politics memorial washington

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Memorials to the war dead of the 20th century are among the central attractions in the nation’s capital. So it has always been notable that one of the most consequential American conflicts, World War I, lacked national recognition.
  • Now, as the United States withdraws from its longest war, a memorial that recognizes one of its most complicated ones officially opens in Washington on Friday, after years of tangling among preservationists, urban planners, federal officials and the commission that realized its creation.
  • “Our objective was to build a memorial that would stand shoulder to shoulder with other monuments and elevate World War I in the American consciousness,” said Edwin L. Fountain, the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission
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  • The design, restoration of the original park and construction of the new memorial will cost $42 million; the commission has $1.4 million left to raise.
  • Critics — many of whom fought Mr. Fountain’s concept with every tactic available — say the structure falls short in marrying a historically significant park with a big-dream memorial.
  • “The real question is: Did the memorial leverage the power of place in which it now resides?” said Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, who tried to have the park added to the National Register of Historic Places, which trimmed the memorial planners’ large-scale plans.
  • Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, tried for years to expand the memorial effort on the National Mall before he retired. Congress considered transforming the District of Columbia War Memorial, at the end of the mall, into a national monument.
  • “I was doing very myopic, classical male figurative sculpture derived from Hellenistic art,” Mr. Howard said. “Neither one of us was ready. It is just insanity. You are entering into this process that could take away 15 years of your life.”
  • Mr. Howard said he was conscious of making the sculpture visually engaging but also educational. “My client said, ‘You have to make something that dramatizes World War I in a way in which visitors will want to go home and learn more about it,’” he said.
  • Accuracy gave way, however, to artistic license. The piece, which depicts Black, Latino and Native American soldiers, blurs the reality.
  • While Mr. Howard changed the helmets of the Black troops to reflect that, he said he was unmoved by the broader argument. “You had segregation in the Army ” he said in an interview. “However, on the battlefield, there is no distinction.”
  • As such, even if Black soldiers were depicted in a way that was historically incorrect, he said, “they needed to be treated as equal stature.”
  • The memorial is unlikely to quell longstanding criticism that too many monuments in Washington focus on war and death.
  • “There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, who was a landscape architect in the early stages of the project.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: You Say You Want A Revolution? - 0 views

nymag.com/...say-you-want-a-revolution.html

revolution iconoclasm woke Cultural Revolution Mao Jacobin cultural repression illiberal orwell extremism

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before.
  • The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole.
  • for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.
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  • Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself.
  • bram X. Kendi, the New York Times best seller who insists that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, now has a children’s book to indoctrinate toddlers on one side of this crude binary
  • Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression.
  • These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame.
  • They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.” Mao first blessed, then reined in these vandals.
  • take this position voiced on Twitter by a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada this week: “Here’s the thing: If whatever institution you are a part of is not COMPLETELY representative of the population you can draw from, you can draw only two conclusions. 1) Bias against the underrepresented groups exists or 2) the underrepresented groups are inherently less qualified.”
  • Other factors — such as economics or culture or individual choice or group preference — are banished from consideration.
  • Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.”
  • Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today.
  • The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute.
  • The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.”
  • The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school.
  • The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.
  • And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible.
  • You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.
  • So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment
  • It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment.
  • Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality.
  • But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.
  • The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.
  • But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
  • We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.
ecfruchtman

French court says Virgin Mary statue must go - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 11 Dec 16
     
    The Grenoble Tribunal Administration ordered the statue's removal after a judgment found that it violates the country's core values of secularization. The tribunal's ruling says the sculpture must be removed within three months. But the town's mayor says he isn't budging -- yet.
Javier E

Buenos Aires Erects Statue of Pope; Francis Orders It Removed - 0 views

www.patheos.com/...pope-francis-orders-it-removed

Pope Francis

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 13 - No Cached
  •  A life-size sculpture of Pope Francis was installed yesterday on a patio outside Buenos Aires’ cathedral, where Jorge Bergoglio presided over daily Masses before he became pope in March.
  • Argentinean newspaper Clarín reports that the minute Francis found out about the statue he telephone the cathedral in person and demanded it be “removed immediately.”
Javier E

Spanish colonization of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...h_colonization_of_the_Americas

Spain colonial Americas history latin america

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores
  • The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.
  • The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.
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  • But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.
  • A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
  • Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.
  • During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain
  • The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.
  • These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s
  • In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era
  • It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.
  • The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.
  • The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.
anonymous

Reformation: Four things about the 500th anniversary celebrations - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-41817418

reformation Luther celebration

shared by anonymous on 31 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A special religious service is being held in the German town of Wittenberg to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
  • Ahead of the anniversary, Mrs Merkel said the ceremonies provided "the opportunity to reflect on what changes resulted from the Reformation".
  • The Reformation caused lasting change in Europe, leading to wars and persecution, but also to greater freedom of religion and expression.
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  • Thousands of visitors from around the world have visited the town - about 100km (60 miles) south-west of Berlin - in recent months as it forms the focus of the anniversary celebrations.
  • Amid ceremonies marking Luther's legacy 500 years on, there have also been protests about an anti-Semitic sculpture (Judensau) which remains on the facade of another church in Wittenberg.
Javier E

The End of 'Civilisation' - 0 views

www.weeklystandard.com/...the-end-of-civilisation

civilizations civilization confidence culture multiculturalism history

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When she was a mere sprout of 14, Mary Beard tuned into the first episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous BBC documentary, Civilisation, and felt a “slight tingle.”
  • “It had never struck me,” she wrote last year, “that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.”
  • on her way to becoming an accomplished classicist, would start to feel queasy. She became “decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the ‘great man’ approach to art history—one damn genius after the next—that ran through the series.”
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  • “Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.”
  • Beard is one of three “presenters” (or hosts) of the series, joining the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga for a round-the-world, millennia-spanning tour of human hustle and bustle. The series has its faults of pacing and plotting, but it offers plenty of opportunities for Beard-like tingles
  • The new program is best understood as a kind of delayed rebuttal, sometimes quite explicit, to Clark and his view of history
  • The association is all to the good, and to Clark’s benefit, if it leads audiences back to civilization, and Civilisation, all 13 episodes of which are playing 24/7 at your neighborhood YouTube.
  • He wasn’t a natural TV star, but he was an accomplished lecturer, a brilliant stylist, and an unrivaled historian of art. When, in 1966, the BBC decided to produce a series on the history of European culture, Clark was the unanimous choice for presenter.
  • The job fell to the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to introduce color to the BBC audience. He got the idea to film a survey of the greatest artworks of Europe, as a way of bringing color into British living rooms as tastefully and vividly (and cheaply) as possible.
  • It is hard to imagine, at this remove and with the conventions of documentary TV so well established, how strange Civilisation must have seemed 50 years ago. Color was just the first of the technological innovations, and the range of subjects and locales was unheard of
  • No one had seen a single presenter so dominate a nonfiction program of such length as Clark did. Unprecedented too were the long stretches in which Clark disappeared, leaving the camera to move tenderly over the surface of something beautiful.
  • The narration, full of anecdote and grand pronouncements, was pitched at the highest level, without condescension or pedantry
  • About that word civilization, the mere utterance of which set Clark off on his great televised adventure. He confronts it in the first episode’s opening moments, as he stands on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame Cathedral rising up behind him. “What is civilization?” he asks us. Then, amazingly—this is, after all, the title of his TV show—he shrugs! “I don’t know,” he says. It is a shrug at once amused, modest, and perhaps genuinely baffled. “I can’t define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He turns to look over his shoulder at the cathedral. “And I’m looking at it now.”
  • a sense of civilization’s meaning, by his lights, forms soon enough. Throughout the programs certain words come up over and over: enlarge, deepen, extend, broaden, expand, and above all, life-enhancing. An act or piece of art that is life-enhancing—that allows us to have life, and to have it more abundantly—is civilized; one that isn’t isn’t.
  • In the first episode Clark compares the ornamental prow of a Viking ship, showing a fearsome animal head, with the head of a once-celebrated sculpture from antiquity known as the Apollo Belvedere. The prow is “a powerful work of art,” he acknowledges, and “more moving to most of us” than the Apollo.
  • Each expresses a cultural ideal. The prow emerged from “an image of fear and darkness” while the Apollo, the product of “a higher stage of civilization,” emerged from an ideal of harmony and perfection, justice and reason and beauty held in equilibrium. This is the civilizing ideal that Western Europe inherited from Greece and Rome
  • it’s hard to see how any survey of European high culture up to the First World War could include large numbers of nonwhite non-males, since it was produced almost exclusively by persons who had the temporary advantage of being white and male
  • He was a confessed “hero worshipper.” “I believe in genius,” he said. When an excellent biography of Clark was published a year ago—Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton—nearly all reviewers mentioned this hoary defect. Clark’s approach was “scandalous,” “outrageous,” and of course it was stuffed with dead white males
  • As Beard says, his “great man” theory of history was even then at odds with the prevailing academic view, which saw (and sees) history as a process swept along by technology, economics, and shifts in the balance of brute power.
  • Clark was too sophisticated, too honest to be a cheerleader. Alongside the glories he shows examples of what happens when civilization goes wrong.
  • Clark was acutely aware of his program’s shortcomings and omissions. He regretted not dwelling more on philosophy and law, but he “could not think of any way of making them visually interesting.”
  • Critics too often forget the subtitle of Civilisation: A Personal View. “Obviously,” Clark wrote, “I could not include the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes, at least.” Ditto India, China, and “the world of Islam.
  • He reckoned that any misunderstanding was worth the risk. “I didn’t suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.
  • Yet the charge against Clark hasn’t been that he was forgetting non-Western cultures but that he was willfully dismissing them, committing an act of denigration.
  • relativism—a term that Beard and her costars would reject as right-wing cliché—is the motive force behind the series. A variety of academics, plus a narrator, are brought in to reinforce the presenters in their judgment that it is wrong to make judgments.
  • The story Clark wanted to tell was relatively straightforward—one critic cleverly compared Civilisation to a relay race, with one great man passing the baton to another. Civilisations, by contrast, does a great deal of jumping about, forward and backward and sideways, not merely in geography and chronology but in the sequence of ideas
  • question-and-answer combo recurs throughout Civilisations. It has a dual purpose: It’s meant first to rattle our confidence in our objective judgment—hey, that figurine is pretty!—and then to turn our attention back on ourselves to discover the cultural conditioning that has manipulated us into the illusion that our judgments are objective—that we have good reason to think the figurine is pretty. “Different eyes behold different things,” we are told.
  • To the extent Civilisations treats particular pieces of art, it dwells on their function—to what purposes were they put? Mostly, it turns out, art was about projecting and protecting the power of an elite
  • If you are uncomfortable with this approach—seeing the glories of human creativity reduced to tools for class warfare—too bad
  • “I love the history of art,” he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.
  • “Sinister” sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive
  • Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last
  • “But far more,” he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.” His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.
manhefnawi

The Tirol's Last Knight | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/10200

Maximilian Habsburgs Rulers Charles V Holy Roman Emperor

shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • Habsburg rulers, the 'last knight', Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor from 1493 to 1519
  • The central starting point for the Trails is the city of Innsbruck which Maximilian made the centre of his rule and from where he set about fulfilling his ambitions to establish a complex scheme of dynastic and marital alliances The result of these enabled his grandson, Charles V, (nephew of Katherine of Aragon – the connection caused Henry VIII much grief when he was trying to persuade the pope to give him a divorce while Rome was under Habsburg occupation) to become by far the greatest ruler of sixteenth-century Europe with a travelling schedule that would be familiar to any chief executive of a multinational company today
  • His indecisive father, Frederick lll. King Arthur, Godfrey the first Crusader king of Jerusalem and his wife’s father Charles from the Bold of Burgundy (from who the Hapsburgs took over the order of the Golden fleece and a patchwork of rich low countries territories
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  • Maximilian also put new technology to good effect with his Zeughaus, or armoury, back in Innsbruck where the same expertise that was lavished on coins and memorial sculpture was used to produce state-of- the-art artillery to protect the scattered Habsburg possessions
  • His life was streaked by tragedy: his first wife, Mary of Burgundy, was killed by a fall from her horse while out hunting, pregnant with his third child; his son 'Philip the Fair' died in his twenties; Philip's wife, Joanna, mother of Charles V, earned her epithet of 'the Mad' by carrying her husband's embalmed body around with her on her travels, with frequent inspections. But Maximilian was, nevertheless, a man who enjoyed life – as the rollicking reliefs on the Golden Roof illustrate
  • Like England's 'Merry Monarch', Charles lI, one feels he would have been a convivial dinner companion
  • For all its splendour, Maximilian's tomb is empty
  • his heart is not in Austria at all
malonema1

BBC - Culture - The vandalised Little Mermaid - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-the-vandalised-little-mermaid

culture

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • As protesters target a famed Copenhagen statue, it’s worth remembering how views of the mythical human-fish hybrid have changed over time, writes Kelly Grovier.
  • Spare a thought for The Little Mermaid. In the 104 years since the Danish-Icelandic sculptor Edvard Eriksen created his bronze statue of a young half-woman half-fish – who stares wistfully from her stony perch beside the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen – the 1.25m (4.1ft) tall sculpture has been decapitated twice, bludgeoned in the neck in another attempt to sever the head, dismembered, defaced with luminous paint and soldered-on sex toys, and blown off her base by a bomb that sent her blast-pocked body tumbling into the harbour.
  • The head and face are those of a ballerina, Ellen Price (who declined to model nude for the sculptor), which have been grafted onto the naked physique of Eriksen’s wife, Eline. The result is a work of enforced fusion, one that seems forever to hover on a hazy margin between states of being – fact and fantasy, hope and harm, this world and another.
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  • The many levels of The Little Mermaid’s disturbed and disturbing identity were brought to mind this week with the emergence in the news of a fresh image of assault that the statue suffered on the 30 May, this time at the hands of anti-whaling activists
  • Beneath the veneer of red paint, the statue’s bronze surface burns through, giving the work a lustrous haemoglobin glow, as if the mermaid were herself drenched in blood. Under a veil of vandalism, the hybrid creature can be perceived as both the perpetrator and the victim of the violence – an eerie ambiguity that transforms Eriksen’s statue from a totem of fairytale wonder into something haunting and ominous.
Javier E

It's a golden age for Chinese archaeology - and the West is ignoring it - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ology-egyptian-bias-sanxingdui

archaeology west china western civilization history Culture

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • Discoveries at Sanxingdui have totally transformed our understanding of how multiple, regionally distinct yet interrelated early cultures intertwined to produce what came to be understood as “Chinese” civilization.
  • Why is there such a gap in the attention paid in the West to the Egyptian archaeology, as opposed to Chinese archaeology — given that each is important to our understanding of human history?
  • Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition
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  • Second, attention to discoveries in the Mediterranean world reflects a persistent bias situating the United States as a lineal descendant, via Europe, of Mediterranean civilizations. Links between ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome — and Egypt’s appearance in the Christian Bible — enabled ancient Egypt to be appropriated and incorporated into European heritage, and therefore into the story of American identity
  • Chinese archaeology, in contrast, is viewed as unrelated to American civilization
  • The dominant narrative has presented the origins of Chinese civilization as rooted in a singular source — what is known as the Three Dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou), situated in the Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in contemporary Henan Province, Shaanxi Province and surrounding areas. These dynasties lasted from roughly 2,000 B.C. to the unification of China, in 221 B.C.
  • roughly 6 percent of Americans identify as ethnically Asian; that population is part of the American story, and therefore so is the history of civilization in Eastern Asia.
  • all ancient civilizations are part of human history and deserve to be studied and discussed on their own merits, not on their geographical or supposed cultural connection to the Greece-Rome-Europe lineage that long dominated the study of history in the West.
  • Chinese archaeology has a very different history from Egyptian archaeology. It has largely been done by local, Chinese archaeologists, for one thing; it was not an imperialist project. And it was also tied, early on, to nationalist claims of identity.
  • Under Chinese scholars such as Li Ji, however, archaeology, quickly became a discipline closely intertwined with traditional history — and it became attached to a particular story
  • that view should be rethought for multiple reasons
  • In the late 1920s, Chinese archaeologists began to unearth what turned out to be the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (dating to circa 1250 to 1050 B.C.) near Anyang, in Henan province, right in the heart of the Central Plains. These excavations revealed a city with a large population fed by millet agriculture and domesticated animals; there were palace foundations, massive royal tombs, evidence of large-scale human sacrifice and perhaps most importantly, cattle and turtle bones used in divination rituals and inscribed with the earliest Chinese texts
  • The sophistication of the society that was revealed in these digs helped to solidify belief that there was a single main source of subsequent Chinese culture: This was its epicenter.
  • second major archaeological discovery contributing to this theory was the uncovering, in 1974, in Xi’an, of the terra-cotta soldiers of the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin
  • The location of those artifacts helped reinforce the notion that Chinese culture followed one line of succession, with roots in this region.
  • But finds at Sanxingdui and other sites since the 1980s have upended this monolithic notion of Chinese cultural development
  • The Sanxingdui discoveries, which are contemporary with the Shang remains, are located in Sichuan, hundreds of miles southwest of the Central Plains, and separated from them by the Qinling Mountain Range. The site is similarly spectacular. At Sanxingdui, we see monumental bronzes, palace foundations and remnants of public works like city walls — as well as the recently discovered, ivory, anthropomorphic bronze sculptures and other objects. Crafts reveal extensive use of gold, which is not much used in the Central Plains, and the agriculture is different too: Rice, not millet, was the foundation of the cuisine
  • it seems clear that Chinese civilization did not simply emerge from the Central Plains and grow to subsume and assimilate the cultures of surrounding regions. Instead, it is the result of a process whereby various traditions, people, languages, cultures and ethnicities have been woven together in a tapestry that is historically complex and multifaceted.
  • There is no objective reason the monument-constructing civilization of Egypt bears any closer relationship to the heterogeneous bases of United States culture than the cultures of various other regions, including Asia
  • While it may be going considerably too far to say that the recent violence against Asian Americans is caused by the media’s neglect of Chinese archaeology, an assumption that the Chinese story is not “our” story is a subtly pernicious one that contributes to the notion that Asian Americans are “others.”
anonymous

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/colston-slave-trader-statue-bristol-display-intl-scli... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A statue of colonial slave trader Edward Colston has gone on public display in Bristol, England, almost a year after it was toppled during Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city.
  • On June 7 last year, demonstrators denouncing historic and systemic racism and oppression defaced the controversial monument with red and blue graffiti. They used ropes to tear down it down from its plinth before rolling it through the streets and dumping it into the River Avon.
  • The statue -- which for many was a symbol of Britain's colonial legacy -- is now displayed at the M Shed museum, alongside placards from the protest and a timeline of events. The figure is lying down on its back, on a specially crafted wooden structure.
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  • After it was pulled down, Colston's effigy -- which had stood in the city since 1895 -- was briefly replaced with a life-sized sculpture created by British artist Marc Quinn. His statue depicted a black woman with her fist raised in a Black Power salute. At the time, Quinn said in a press statement that he was "committed to reflecting what I see,
  • Colston, born to a wealthy merchant family in Bristol, rose to prominence through his role in the Royal African Company (RAC) during the Atlantic slave trade. He helped facilitate the transportation of tens of thousands of people from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean, mainly to work the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Virginia. The company branded the people it transported as slaves -- including children -- with its RAC initials on their chests.
  • As the artist did not receive permission from authorities to erect the statue, it was removed by Bristol City Council the following day.
  • The question of how to deal with historical monuments depicting colonial figures such as slave traders has been a subject of debate in many countries in recent years, with calls for their removal intensifying amid global protests over the death of George Floyd last year.
magnanma

Palace of Versailles: Facts & History | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/-versailles-facts-history.html

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  • Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.
  • France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.
  • The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.
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  • Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.
  • Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.
  • A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature
  • Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.
  • After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.
  • In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.
  • Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history. 
pier-paolo

The Renaissance: The 'Rebirth' of Science & Culture | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/55230-renaissance.html

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  • The Renaissance typically refers to a period in European history approximately between 1400 and 1600.
  • "Renaissance" comes from the French word for "rebirth."
  • Some major developments of the Renaissance include astronomy, humanist philosophy, the printing press, vernacular language in writing, painting and sculpture technique, world exploration and, in the late Renaissance, Shakespeare's works.
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  • The Crusades played a role in ushering in the Renaissance
  • that there were three main periods that saw resurgences in the art and philosophy of antiquity: the Carolingian Renaissance, which occurred during the reign of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (eighth and ninth centuries), the Ottonian Renaissance, which developed during the reigns of emperors Otto I, Otto II and Otto III (10thcentury) and the 12thCentury Renaissance. 
  • classical texts and knowledge never completely vanished from Europe during the Middle Ages
  • The Black Death helped set the stage for the Renaissance,
  • The fall of the Byzantine and Roman Empires at the hands of the Ottomans also played a role
  • The Medici family moved to Florence in the wake of the plague. They, and many others, took advantage of opportunities for greater social mobility. Becoming patrons of artists was a popular way for such newly powerful families to demonstrate their wealth.
  • The printing press was developed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. It allowed Bibles, secular books, printed music and more to be made in larger amounts and reach more people.
  • Patrons made it possible for successful Renaissance artists to work and develop new techniques. The Catholic Church commissioned most artwork during the Middle Ages, and while it continued to do so during the Renaissance, wealthy individuals also became important patrons
  • Florence was the initial epicenter of Renaissance art but by the end of the 15thcentury, Rome had overtaken it.
  • the Catholic Church's influence was waning as the 15thcentury began. The re-emergence of classical texts and the rise in Renaissance humanism changed society's approach to religion and the authority of the papacy
  • "The Renaissance was a time of transition from the ancient world to the modern and provided the foundation for the birth of the Age of Enlightenment," said Abernethy. The developments in science, art, philosophy and trade, as well as technological advancements like the printing press, left lasting impressions on society and set the stage for many elements of our modern culture. 
Javier E

Eleanor Holmes Norton's push to remove the Emancipation statue - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

monument history politics culture emancipation Black Lives Matter

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • he also has joined the national debate over monuments, aligning herself with a much younger generation of activists by introducing legislation to remove the Emancipation Memorial and the statue of Andrew Jackson across from the White House.
  • The Emancipation Memorial was paid for by freed slaves, who had no input into its design. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist who spoke at the memorial's 1876 unveiling, was among those who criticized the sculpture for denigrating African Americans
  • a number of African American historians and leaders say the memorial should stay. Jesse Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman, said the statue evokes a moment near the end of the Civil War when Lincoln, while greeting former slaves on the streets of Richmond, urged one who knelt at his feet to stand up.
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  • “That’s the existential context of the statue. It’s not just a statue of a man being subservient to Lincoln,” said Jackson, who described the moment in his 2001 book “A More Perfect Union.” For years after the dedication, he says, former slaves came to the statue and laid wreaths at its base.
  • “We can’t tear everything down,” Jackson said. “You can’t, on the one hand, celebrate Juneteenth . . . and then tear down the statue that marks the event. How much sense does that make?”
  • “You see a new generation that says, ‘All right, your generation wanted to get rid of segregation law, anti-discrimination laws — thank you, people — but you didn’t take care of all of it,’” Norton said. “Now we’re scrubbing. We’re scrubbing the country of remnants of racism.”
  • “As long as those symbols of racism are alive and well, we have not gored the snake,” she said. “It lives among us.”
  • Norton said destroying statues or placing them out of public view “is about the worst thing you could do.” Instead, she said, they should be preserved in museums to “tell what is still the untold story” — how and why the monuments were conceived and erected and “why they came down.”
  • “Oh, boy, that is important,” she said. “In fact, the statues are a better way to tell it than reading it in books.”
  • Norton said the country needs to be careful that it doesn’t “erase history for its own sake.” She said a commission is needed to study the lives of the Founding Fathers, and suggested additional markers could be added to existing monuments that reflect the complexity of their lives. Although Washington owned slaves, she pointed out, he struggled with the morality of the practice and, at the end of his life, ended up freeing them.
  • In her 20s, as she attended Yale Law School, she became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, work that took her to Jackson, Miss., and a meeting with Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963.
  • Evers picked her up at the airport that day and later dropped her at the bus station, from where she traveled to Greenwood to visit a voter-registration drive.
  • The next day, she learned Evers had been shot to death in his own driveway.
rerobinson03

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Reading a Civilization Through Its Ancient Shards - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hrough-its-ancient-shards.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • ENTERING the Worcester Art Museum, the first thing a visitor sees is a sixth-century late Roman mosaic, more than 20 feet square, set into the floor of the entrance hall.
  • This spectacular and brutal scene paved the floor of a private house in Antioch, founded in 300 B.C. and one of the great cities of the classical world. Today ancient Antioch lies beneath the modern Turkish city of Antakya, near the Syrian border at the northeast elbow of the Mediterranean. The mosaic, along with other equally stunning and tantalizing glimmers of an almost mythical place, arrived in Worcester nearly 60 years ago.
  • Four silver-gilt tyches on display -- female deities personifying the good fortune of a particular city -- representing Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch attest to Antioch's status. Sculptures, mosaics, jewelry and intriguing inscriptions, most of them from the second to the sixth centuries A.D., bring to life a complex metropolis that thrived in an era whose economic, political and spiritual circumstances were in many ways similar to our own.
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  • Until the 1930's, Antioch's remains were almost entirely literary; its physical glories had been obliterated by earthquakes, floods and invasions from the east.
  • Since then, however, as the study of history has focused as much on ordinary citizens as on their leaders, attention has shifted from throne rooms to dining rooms. Only 10 percent of Antioch's population was rich, according to the fourth-century pagan philosopher Libanios, and only 10 percent was poor. The remaining 80 percent lived remarkably well, and at its height, Antioch's population numbered more than 400,000 citizens and freedmen, not counting women, children and slaves.
  • The exhibition focuses on their dining rooms, or triclinia, in order to recreate the city's great middle-class era, and for middle-class America at the beginning of the third millennium, those ancient houses reveal a familiar ostentation.
  • Antioch: The Lost Ancient City'' reunites many of the artifacts and objects excavated by the expedition, including some of the most beautiful mosaics. During the five years of preparations for this show, scholars examined for the first time in decades some of the material from the excavations that had been in storage, and the show's catalog presents much of their new research.
  • Antioch marked the crossroads of trade routes between Persia and the Far East, Egypt and Rome.
  • During the centuries of the Roman peace, Antioch flourished; its baths and wide arcaded streets were theaters where strangers -- Romans, Syrians, Jews, Christians, Persians, Greeks -- mingled and learned from one another. Its dining rooms set a more intimate stage upon which to continue the dialogue.
  • The city's pivotal geography proved the source of both its vitality and its vulnerability. Persian emperors of the Sasanian dynasty coveted Antioch, sacked it twice -- in A.D. 256 and 540 -- and incorporated the phrase ''better than Antioch'' into the names of the cities they built closer to home. Sasanian stylized art, using birds and animals in patterned design -- a mosaic border of ram's heads, for instance -- found its way into Antioch's houses.
  • Probably they discussed religion. The Pax Romana, of course, has found its modern parallel in the Pax Americana, in the worldwide exportation of American culture. Ideas, art, politics and religions circulate, blend and clash. The yearning for a spiritual haven was perhaps even more urgent in Roman Antioch than it is today.
  • The expeditions of the 1930's dug up no pagan temples or synagogues, but they did uncover in Antioch's port remnants of a church whose ambulatory was paved with a mosaic of animals and birds. Elephants, flamingos, zebras, gazelles, peacocks, a lioness and her cubs: all creation circled the church in a docile parade.
  • In this floor, pagan entertainment translated into a vision from Genesis: the bloody staged hunt has been converted to a peaceable kingdom.
Javier E

Germans Protect Memorials to Soviet Troops Who Defeated Nazis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...many-soviet-war-monuments.html

history remembrance monument germany wwII

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.
  • “We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
  • Red Army memorials are just some of the divisive symbols that persist in Germany long after the political systems and social mores that sustained them have vanished, a reckoning with parallels in the United States and elsewhere.
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  • Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.
  • This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.
  • Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.
  • Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.
  • “Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”
  • In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.
  • “This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”
Javier E

Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675946

democracy tech billionaire anti-democratic stagnation immortal culture

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.
  • why does he want to cut off politicians
  • But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.”
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  • Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.
  • Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.
  • For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
  • Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”
  • Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.
  • His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.
  • “Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.
  • He admits now that it was a bad bet.
  • “There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
  • eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment
  • Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.
  • “Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.
  • he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.
  • He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.
  • Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied
  • on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”
  • Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.
  • He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine
  • He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity
  • Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?
  • He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.
  • More than anything, he longs to live forever.
  • Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”
  • Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.
  • But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.
  • Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.
  • How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”
  • During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.
  • Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach
  • But something changed for Thiel in 2009
  • he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.
  • ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
  • By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape
  • The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).
  • Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution
  • His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics
  • It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.
  • “There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)
  • As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz
  • Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.
  • When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”
  • You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”
  • None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias
  • He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.
  • Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200
  • The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”
  • This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.
  • He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”
  • “It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”
  • Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.
  • In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)
  • Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”
  • he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.
  • When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”
  • “I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.
  • He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.
  • When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.
  • “I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”
  • Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian
  • he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”
  • Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”
  • Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.
  • “That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.
  • ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.
  • A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.
  • “I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”
  • Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.
  • “Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc
  • He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.
  • there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss
  • Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic
  • Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.
  • He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”
  • He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”
  • he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”
  • “Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.
  • Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”
  • “the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
  • “Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”
  • Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests
  • “It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”
  • About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?
  • Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them
  • He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”
  • besides, a different cause moves him far more.
  • Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.
  • Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.
  • All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.
  • I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?
  • “Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”
  • Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.
  • . “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”
  • You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”
  • No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.
  • There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.
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Renaissance Period: Timeline, Art & Facts - HISTORY - 1 views

www.history.com/...renaissance

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  • The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.
  • Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T
  • Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.
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  • Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated,
  • Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.
  • In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.
  • Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.
  • Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor, and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
  • Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.
  • By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.
  • Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
  • Michelangelo (1483–1520): Italian sculptor, painter, and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.
  • Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance.
  • For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.
  • Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.
  • Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)The Last Supper (Da Vinci)Statue of David (Michelangelo)The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
  • Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.
  • Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.
  • While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.
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