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Home » Open thread 2/7/24

Open thread 2/7/24

The New Neo Posted on by

I read a book about her that really disturbed me when I was a child of around nine or ten:

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Open thread 2/7/24 — 30 Comments

  1. It was often life-threatening to be closely related to royalty, or to those who wanted to be royalty. In this case, religion and competing inheritance claims combined to doom Jane and her family.

  2. But I don’t get the insistence on saying Jane was queen. She was a claimant, like Lambert Simnel. That’s all.

    And it was a misfortune to her, the family she was born into. There has been 500 years of propaganda trying to make them favorable, but I don’t see how anyone can read the history of the Tudors without realizing they were a nasty lot.

  3. Tudors were nasty, but not any nastier than anyone else in power in those days (and these days)

  4. I’m with Shirehome on this. The ascension of Henry VII, the first Tudor king, ended an extremely nasty decades-long English civil war. Mary Tudor, who succeeded her half-brother Edward and the nine-day Jane Grey, suppressed dissent in a way that had her called, perhaps partly unfairly, “Bloody Mary.” Elizabeth I, who avoided execution when her half-sister was queen by being very, very careful, eventually had to execute her cousin Mary Queen of Scots when that Mary and her supporters made some moves that threatened Elizabeth too much. That Mary’s son became the king of England and Scotland; his son Charles was beheaded. The Tudors weren’t particularly worse than any other dynasty of their era.

  6. This is my alma mater by the way:

    https://www.campusreform.org/article/indiana-university-facing-federal-civil-rights-investigation-over-anti-semitism-response-exclusive/24792

    Ever since I graduated they’ve hammered me with solicitations to donate money. For thirty years now I’ve been in a position to do so, and never once considered it. Even back then I could see higher ed, IU included, was total crap, and couldn’t be trusted with that money.

    What I can’t understand is why all these famous rich people, like Bill Ackman, Mark Rowan, etc., who are supposed to be smart, are just figuring it out.

  7. Tudors were nasty, but not any nastier than anyone else in power in those days (and these days)
    ==
    ‘Sez who?
    ==
    Henry Viii was a man of brobdingnagian appetites who ran over every convention in his drive to obtain what he wanted. The result was dreadful and wholly unnecessary suffering.

  8. brobdingnagian??

    Def not the only one to look that up!.

    8th grade teacher would give our class a new, unusual, word several times a week.
    Instructions were to use it on incoming class as we passed in hallway in order to confuse them.
    He had a good sense of humor, and was the type of teacher you could sidetrack into telling stories about sports and interesting anecdotes

  9. well as josephine tey, noted in thief of time, the tudors had top flight publicists like thomas morton, who shakespeare cribbed liberally from, ,who knows maybe polonius of hamlet fame wasn’t so bad after all, Just like ill macchia was pushing the values of his borgia bosses in the prince, and diminishing rivals like Catherine Sforza the Duchess of Imaldi, Dorothy Dunnett has made amends on that score,

    when Churchill wasn’t his grandfather a duke or somesuch, said ‘democracy is the worst system, except for all the others, thats what he hinted at, the Bourbons, the Romanovs the Hapsburgs all had their flaws,

  10. Speaking of skullduggery, the Mayorkas vote was poor planning by Speaker Johnson, but the Republicans may have a chance to impeach anyway. It looks like with Steve Scalise’s vote, the measure will pass, despite the traitorous three. One yes vote switched to no so he could bring up a motion for reconsideration. With Scalise’s vote, the measure will pass by one vote. It will be sweet if the traitors’ sellout fails.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-vote-count/

  11. if they want to do something, they do it, no matter how self destructive, like forcing george santos, out of the chamber, before there is a conviction, have we not seen this movie before,

  16. King Charles’s prostate? I’ve not been following that.

    God save the King, since the NHS won’t.

  17. I think they were using shorthand, a major disruption in more than a half dozen countries would attract attention no,

  19. Shirehome,
    The stopped clock of political commentary, Bill Maher, said about Colombus: “Yes, he committed some atrocities. But people then were generally atrocious.”

  23. A Catholic, Mary I executed Lady Jane Grey, an innocent 16-17 yr old girl & cousin. By her own beliefs, she condemned herself to hell. The irony is literally biblical.

  24. I’m working my way through a series of French podcasts on Joan of Arc of the 15th Century. All the intrigues and treachery involving the French court and the English invaders!

    Thankfully, we are much more civilized today in the West. We don’t usually execute our opponents and we almost never burn them at the stake.

  25. AI Good News: An Ancient Roman Scroll on Pleasure Was Just Decoded Using AI

    A Roman scroll, partially preserved [almost charcoal] when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and decoded using artificial intelligence.

    https://time.com/6691588/ancient-roman-scroll-decoded-ai/
    ________________________________________

    AI Bad News: Greg Lukianoff is the president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a collaborator with Jonathan Haidt. Lukianoff considers himself a Democrat or at least in the current parlance, Democrat-adjacent.
    __________________________________________

    We’ve raised concerns about the federal government funding development of AI tools to target speech including microaggressions. And later this week, FIRE will file a brief with the Supreme Court explaining the danger of “jawboning” — the use of government pressure to force social media platforms to censor protected speech.

    But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge. A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas, and even questions are permitted in the name of “safety” or “alignment.”

    https://greglukianoff.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-congressional-hearings
    __________________________________________

    AIs learn from the datasets they are given:
    __________________________________________

    To hate all the people your relatives hate
    You’ve got to be carefully taught

    –“”You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” – SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk

  26. So I asked Chat. Now do the Voynich Manuscript and the Easter Island Rongorongo script.

    I regret to say, Chat’s response was … rather evasive.

  27. One point: the Wars of the Roses were NOT devastating to the English, except the ruling class. If anything, they were a prosperous time for those not in the aristocracy.

    Another: be VERY wary of the stock portraits we get. They are dominated by a few extremely partisan writers, with Shakespeare leading the pack, and Churchill prominent among them. Being a great writer does not make you a great historian. (I’ve always been puzzled that people treat his Marlborough as somehow impartial.)

    Do we really know Jane was wholly innocent? May have been, sure. But she was a heroine to the side that ended up winning, and has dominated Brit history since. That should leave the door open for residual doubt. I was lucky in going to college in the 70s, when a non-radical revisionism had an opening.

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