james_nicoll

RIVERS OF BLOOD! RIVERS OF BLOOOOOOOOOOOD! THE KNEE GROWS AT MIDNIGHT!

I have heard people make the claim that Enoch Powell was not personally racist. And this might very well be true. On the other hand, dude went to Mississippi to speak in front of actual racists, sort of the way Ian Paisley got his degree at Bob Jones University.

Enoch Powell may or may not have been a racist; but he was an extremely reactionary upper-class product of empire, with all the elite privilege that goes with that background. And he never learned to question innate privilege.

Excellent. Pretty chuckleworthy in places.

A friend of mine who did classics in university remarked once that she was reading some ancient Greek dude lamenting over the lengthy hair and lax morals of the young, who liked to walk around in rock band t-shirts tunics embroidered with likenesses of Titans and such things. Apparently some things never change.

I'm sure their music was lousy and their personal hygiene lacking, too. And no respect for their elders, right?

I would dearly love to know who wrote this and the title, if you could ask her. It sounds perfect.

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (allegedly; I haven't found a proper source for that).

High levels of literacy was considered a symptom of the End Times of the day?

The Romans were constantly worrying that the martial virtue that formed Rome was being undermined by the soft intellectualism of the Greeks.
-- NPH

Maybe he saw it as a sign of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Whether it's your theory or that of "NPH" that rules the day, it seems horrific that possessing literacy skills should ever be considered a threat to one's own nation.

Sadly, I suspect that quote is spurious. A nearly identical one is sometimes attributed to an "Assyrian" (or "Babylonian") tablet from "2800 BC" (or "3800 BC"); a discussion in this open thread at Making Light traced references back to 1908, without getting anything like an actual scholarly source.

That's brilliant. It actually reminds me of an article from BBC Music Magazine about a decade ago, about the supposed decay in standards of (classical) musicianship and composing -- starting with a contemporary Times of London editorial and then skipping backwards in time every few decades, always finding some authoritative critic, musician, or composer complaining about the sad state of music these days, not like it was earlier, ending somewhere in the Middle Ages. (I think one of the quotes was from Galileo's father, about how no one was composing proper madrigals any more, or how awful polyphony had become, or something like that.)

Kids these days don't know anything about decent music.

Oh, and get off my lawn.