That's what we were thinking. This person is in the UK, so there is someone there reporting these things to the proper authorities.
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It's extremely disturbing. This is why my son doesn't have any social media accounts. This scares the hell out of me.
Indeed. But as I’m away for a few days starting tomorrow, I’m not going to complain if it’s unseasonably good.
That's one way to handle the problem, it might be because I'm in my late 20s, but people like that on social media is why I think educating children about how to navigate social media is super important. I can't see myself shielding children from social media.
Though I'm not 100% sure how I would do it. Like, when (or if) I become a parent do I gather up with other parents to make a local social media site for families and family friends? That could be super fun, plus if we have to vet members, it could be neat to have a "it takes a virtual village" approach where trusted adults and their kids join. Then everyone regardless of age could learn how to have a healthy relationship with social media in a space friendly space. But that requires everyone to want to use that, it'd be an uphill battle to get folks off Facebook.
Got this in my inbox as I subscribe to this newsletter from the excellent website Brain Pickings every Sunday.
This will grab the attention of @yaxomoxay as it quotes Marcus Aurelius and it certainly spoke to me as I have had a rather interesting 4 years or so since losing my old job and my medical emergency. I think we can all learn from it from this Covid era are we have been living through.
The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
I highly recommend this as well as reading the "Meditations" yes a second Macrumours member recommending ancient literature.
This will grab the attention of @yaxomoxay as it quotes Marcus Aurelius and it certainly spoke to me as I have had a rather interesting 4 years or so since losing my old job and my medical emergency. I think we can all learn from it from this Covid era are we have been living through.
The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.”
By Maria Popova
Most people live with a great deal more suffering than is visible to even the most proximate and sensitive onlooker. Many have survived things both unimaginable and invisible to the outside world. This has been the case since the dawn of our species, for human nature has hardly changed beneath the continually repainted façade of our social sanctions — human beings have always been capable of inflicting tremendous pain on each other and capable of triumphal healing.
There is, however, a peculiar modern phenomenon that might best be described as a culture of competitive trauma. In recent times, the touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognized and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering and comparative validity. Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.
I highly recommend this as well as reading the "Meditations" yes a second Macrumours member recommending ancient literature.
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Good luck in your new job. Change is never easy. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Enjoy!
Oh, definitely! Education is key. There are, however, some circumstances where just not having it is the best way forward. My son is on the Autism spectrum and while I work to educate him on things such as this, he can't generalize from one situation to the next. While it's not perfect, it works for us.
This coming Monday (4th Oct) is Labour Day here in NSW.
Which we celebrate by taking the day off, and not doing any work...
Which we celebrate by taking the day off, and not doing any work...
Enjoy. I’m off all this week. Well away for a few days actually.
Sadly I over did it last night and am feeling rough this morning. My trouble is I do rarely drink, when I do my body really reacts badly the next day. To the point where I think I should just give it up completely as it’s really not worth it.
Thank you for sharing!! For the record, the Annotated Meditations is a great version of the book as the translation is quite readable and the notes very useful.
However, I don't like that the article pushes as a fact the notion that Marcus Aurelius was not heterosexual, an idea that is sadly derived from the book Marcus Aurelius in Love, a very biased book with little historical context and quite a few episodes of butchering of MA's writings. There is no indication that he was not heterosexual - quite the contrary he had a wife and several kids. Now, it is possible that he was homosexual (he would've not been the only Roman emperor to be one), but the truth is that we do not know because there is no evidence of it. Sadly, the idea is due to a clearly biased reading of his letters to Fronto, which in modern language contain a lot of "I love you" and such, which were actually regular courtesies exchanged from one person to another especially when there was some power imbalance. (see https://digitalcommons.macalester.e...sredir=1&article=1013&context=classics_honors). The truth is that Fronto was Marcus Aurelius' rhetoric teacher, we don't know much about them, and all the letters between them (at least those that survive) are exercises in extreme rhetoric. Here's a much better study on the matter: https://www.academia.edu/8178444/Wh...Studia_Humaniora_Tartuensia_10_A_3_2009_p_1_7
Now, does any of this impact MA's legacy (both good and bad) in any way whatsoever? No, but I'd like to set the historical record straight, especially when a figure is mythologized to the excess (and I might be guilty of it myself) is involved.
Marcus Aurelius Mecitations was on the study literature at University when I both took Literature and Religion. 95% of all those books are up in the attic now. But opened my kindle and there was also 3 different versions of Marcus Aurelius Meditations. Belongs to the classic literature.
I wouldn’t believe a thing from Brain pickings actually. Remember visiting it like waaay back. Thought it was rubbish then, and opened it now and my impression was even worse.
But each to their own.
I would never ever give donations to anyone who equals love with money, and who ask for donations in that way. There’s plenty of better ways to spend money on quality in my opinion 😄
I wouldn’t believe a thing from Brain pickings actually. Remember visiting it like waaay back. Thought it was rubbish then, and opened it now and my impression was even worse.
But each to their own.
I would never ever give donations to anyone who equals love with money, and who ask for donations in that way. There’s plenty of better ways to spend money on quality in my opinion 😄
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I actually have a TikTok account, too. I liked nothing but cat videos, and now it shows me nothing but cat videos.
I only follow tech/YouTube people on Twitter, and so my feed is just people talking about tech and comedy.
I… Facebook… uh
How old is Marcus Aurelius in Love? I'm no historian but it does feel like the past was way more queer than some folks want to let on. I can totally see someone with more anti-LGBT opinions try to sanitize an historical figure which could explain the backlash where other historians and non-historians try to explore that element of their lives.
In the modern age with more LGBT+ visibility and Internet discussions we are creating language to describe our romance and sexual attractions in much more nuanced detail. And for a lot of people, your romantic feelings are different from sexual feelings. In my time online, I've seen folks describe themselves as "pansexual aromantic" and much more. Maybe Marcus was homoromantic and heterosexual? We ultimately will never know, backwards time travel doesn't exist to help us just ask Marcus about his relationships. I just think it's funny that "I love you" is apparently enough to make a bond romantic or sexual.
Thank you, I don't want to risk going off-topic or into forbidden territory here but I completely agree with your take on MA's alleged orientation. Be aware that the author of the blog, does have a bias in this direction being a member of the LGTB community herself. That's fine but sometimes in searching for "representation" the temptation is to find something that doesn't exist or to look at a very different epoch with the understanding and mores of today which is very wrong minded IMHO. The bold is exactly what I mean.
I follow some skaters, a pilot and singer - all female.
Cats I leave to Youtube.
Once I reached thirty, my experience of hangovers, or "feeling (rather) rough" the next day, became a lot more pronounced, and yes, occasionally painful.
That easy, and effortless recovery of one's younger years was now a barely remembered vision in time's rear view mirror.
My solution - for I do like a glass of wine or a beer - is to always (but always) have a glass of water alongside my wine or beer and to drink it at the same time; thus, I will usually have a glass of water for every glass of wine, or beer, and I find that this helps matters considerably.
Anyway, I hope you had a good night and enjoyed it thoroughly.
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Remember what Dean Martin supposedly said....
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
The book (MA in Love) is from 2006.
Well, to remain on the historical and avoid PRSI content, I have absolutely no problem in saying that what we know about the past is often wrong. Nero and Commodus are probably vilified with descriptions that worsen what they actually were, and Marcus Aurelius and others are probably "cleaned" of some of the bad stuff. Ancient Roman historians are also known for their biased depiction of historical figures, especially if there was a disagreement with the Senate. I am also in agreement that Romans were probably more queer than what we think of today, although I believe it would depend on the period (I would expect much more common homosexuality in the later period rather than the pre-Caesars period). Much of our knowledge of history is a somewhat distorted representation of the past (I mean, gladiators were chubby and not with screaming abs like Russel Crowe
). My point is that simply we can't know about MA's sexuality, and describing him factually as queer based on a few letters translated from an old language (a language for which a 1:1 translation is often impossible, as Latin is mostly context-based and quite different than English or even Italian), with older customs, in a specific scenario, among two people of different age and different roles from 2,000 years ago is wrong on many, many levels. Now, asking the question is more than fair; we should always ask questions. But describing it as a fact, "a fact" that is gaining some traction as absolute truth for no reason whatsoever is simply erroneous and biased. That's my simple point. Now, does it change much? Probably not. The fact that a dude from 2,000 years ago was heterosexual or homosexual has very little impact on our lives and probably had very little impact even then. Kind of the same way of Galileo's words at his trial, "Eppur si muove" ("And yet it moves"); words that he has actually never spoken, but are a much later artifact by a British individual that wanted to steer some sort of political talk.
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I had a feeling that was the case, although after skimming through the first article and reading the other Brain Pickings article that was linked about In Love, I can see how Popovia and others feel that way. I was fully expecting "I love you" in a more platonic friendly/sibling sort of way, I have no idea how much was lost in translation to English and how much we don't understand the cultural differences, but even ignoring the possible LGBT history at play here, those quotes are very intense at least to the modern reader. I definitely wouldn't know what to do if I got that in a text, lol.
I think that's why Popovia ended up describing Marcus as a "queer teenager" rather than simply say he was homosexual because yeah... I'd say queer is accurate since that encompasses way more than just sexuality. But it's as you said, that's looking at it from modern LGBT culture and history.
I think that's fair, like I said, we'll never truly know and in the LGBT community, it's not cool to speculate then use that speculation as fact to describe living people's sexuality or gender identity. And I think that should apply to the dead unless that person has good evidence saying or doing something/or identifying as queer, especially in a modern context. The American figure, Public Universal Friend comes to mind.The book (MA in Love) is from 2006.
Well, to remain on the historical and avoid PRSI content, I have absolutely no problem in saying that what we know about the past is often wrong. Nero and Commodus are probably vilified with descriptions that worsen what they actually were, and Marcus Aurelius and others are probably "cleaned" of some of the bad stuff. Ancient Roman historians are also known for their biased depiction of historical figures, especially if there was a disagreement with the Senate. I am also in agreement that Romans were probably more queer than what we think of today, although I believe it would depend on the period (I would expect much more common homosexuality in the later period rather than the pre-Caesars period). Much of our knowledge of history is a somewhat distorted representation of the past (I mean, gladiators were chubby and not with screaming abs like Russel Crowe
Well said. I mean, anything is possible, but at the end of the day I think that it's mostly a case of wanting to have some representation as @decafjava mentioned. I am 100% sure I am guilty of the same, it's probably a human trait to find some "confirmation" by biasing something or someone else entirely. I think that part of it is also that we often want a figure that we like to be almost entirely in agreement with us and our ideas.
Those times I wish Dr Who (or Star Trek in its time travel aspect "nuclear wessel") was real, would love to meet Marcus Aurelius and settle this. Seriously there would loads of questions I would ask him or many other historical figures.