thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

Is Kamala Harris not the second highest ranked official in an administration actively arming genocide and providing intelligence, aid, and money to keep that genocide going? It’s like arguing that high ranking Nazi officials weren’t responsible for the Holocaust because they weren’t “in charge.” She’s actively serving in an administration carrying out genocide. She could always just resign. She hasn’t. She is participating in genocide, no question.

Yeah I’ve even read about a revival movement of writing books exclusively in the language. Their resilience is impressive in the face of losing so much of their written history.

Oracle Bone script, the earliest written Chinese, is definitely a lot more graphical than modern Chinese, but not nearly as organic or graphic as these Mesoamerican glyphs. That’s why losing all of this is so tragic, there’s really nothing like it!

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It’s so painful to think about tbh. Written language only ever independently developed four times: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. We’ve almost entirely lost that last branch. That whole writing system of glyphs, all the culture around it, intentionally destroyed. Barbarism to the highest degree.

Oh absolutely we lost things. For instance, I really wish more of Euripides plays were extant (specifically Bellerophon, would love to read that one based on the fragments we do have), and we know that the Library of Alexandria had copies (there’s a famous story, perhaps apocryphal, that the librarian had all of Euripides’ manuscripts sent from Athens, meticulously copied and disseminated across the Hellenic world), and they probably burned. But plenty of others had copies too, and none of those have survived to the present. But it is different in that we often know what we lost. The Little Iliad, for example, or Sappho’s poetry. And we do have a mass amount of stuff we didn’t lose. In the case of the Maya, we lost everything. We have only a tiny idea of what texts were out there. The texts we do have a fragments, none complete. Hell we only decoded Mayan glyphs in the mid 20th century!

Yeah I think there is something to be said on the emphasis around human sacrifice and the “evils” of the Aztecs vs the “pious” Spanish who had just finished a brutal genocide of the Taíno people in the Caribbean. Like slavery (the British in particular used “abolition” as justification for many African colonies, despite like decades earlier being the chief purveyor of the slave trade lol), human sacrifice is often used to ipso facto justify colonisation.

Well this is measurably different. The Mongols sacked Baghdad but within two years of the sack the libraries were back open. Neither Arabic nor Persian culture was intentionally suppressed, their languages and great works did not disappear, and the sacking of a city and its destruction is rather dissimilar to an intentional destruction of all cultural artifacts and memory of an entire people. Same with the Library of Alexandria; the works of the Greeks are still extant, there was no sustained effort to destroy and bury ancient knowledge, etc. It’s just a siege. What the Spanish did in Mexico is leagues worse.

I mean no, the human sacrifice stuff is very well documented in both extant Mayan art on surviving buildings, various Mayan poems that have survived into the modern era, and detailed in the Madrid codex, one of the four surviving codices mentioned in this post.

I’m always gonna choose Godard over Truffaut

Imagine being sorted into Anglophone filmmakers. Could never be me.

Best part of this is that Russians have three names (a first name, surname, and a patronymic) and they love using nicknames. So the main character is Rodion (first name) Romanovitch (patronymic) Raskolnikov (surname), but can (and is) called by any of those three names. He’s also got nicknames like Rodya, Rodenka, and Rodka. So this deranged individual (who decided to call Raskolnikov “Pete” I guess) is going to be hopelessly confused when somebody starts referring to Rodya, and he’ll think the book is filled with like five times as many characters as it actually is.