6 ms·

The Cult of Mary Beard (2018)

39 points by revolucien 5y ago

js290 5y ago
"One nonwhite can substitute for another. If that’s not racial supremacism, what is?" https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/the-insidious-racism-of-mary-beard-et-al-8b6b768b4575 https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...
jimnotgym 5y ago
When all of thay stuff between her and the black swan bloke (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) happened, I was amazed with how he sought to bully her with his opinion, how he tried to drum up hate towards her, and his utter contempt for field other than statistics. I realised then that this was exactly why she had to write 'Women and Power' etc.
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  I think he just called her a fraud, and honestly, I never seen him making a mistake in this regard. Here: https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/the-insidious-racism-of-mary-beard-et-al-8b6b768b4575 https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge... pretty entertaining twitter thread https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892567659342114816 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892567659342114816
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Mary Beard is absolutely not "a fraud" just because you disagree with her view on diversity. (fwiw I also don't particularly like that tweet of hers, but come on.)
    - AzzieElbab 5y ago
      well, I guess neither of us is a member of same ethnic group as Taleb. For him that was personal
      - marcellus23 5y ago
        So? That makes it okay to call a distinguished scholar a fraud? (is that a claim Taleb ever made? or just you?)
        AzzieElbab 5y ago
        absolutely. He demonstrated her claims to be both baseless and racist
        booleandilemma 5y ago
        Part of Taleb’s philosophy is “if you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud”. I don’t think he calls people frauds lightly.
  - andybak 5y ago
    It's possible that she's nice and wrong and he's right but a dick about it. It's also possible that there's more nuance to this than that.
- gremloni 5y ago
  I honestly buy his perspective on her. I also feel like you’re severely misrepresenting academic discourse as “bullying”.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimnotgym 5y ago
    I don't think calling another scholar a fraud based on your forensic takedown of a 140 character tweet could be anything but bullying.
cafard 5y ago
I wasn't aware there was a cult of Mary Beard: perhaps you have to be in Great Britain to be aware of it. The author certainly seems to be a paid-up member. I did recently read and enjoy SPQR.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- the_biot 5y ago
  Just because The Guardian has an article saying so, doesn't make it true. It's a propaganda rag, not a newspaper. Getting your news from multiple sources is a good thing, but exclude the extremes from all sides.
  - andybak 5y ago
    Judging the extremes rather depends on deciding where the center lies.
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    The Guardian would only appear extreme to those who's world views have fallen off the other side. A simple question helps get things back on keel: "Do you care about other people beyond those that directly benefit you?"
    - toyg 5y ago
      > The Guardian would only appear extreme to those who's world views have fallen off the other side. Eeehh... I'm a long-time leftist and I used to think that, but over the last decade I've grown to be much more skeptical of the Graun. On issues of sexual identity in particular, it occasionally reads like some breathless pamphlet produced by university hotheads; and their treatment of Assange and Corbyn has been utterly shameful.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    The Guardian ought to be blacklisted here. The articles are terrible and predictably devolve into flamewars in the comments.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269954 - Jan 2018 (92 comments)
calderapenguin 5y ago
"Last year, when a far-right conspiracy theorist attacked a BBC cartoon...." lol. You mean Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Who is probably better known than Ms. Beard? Good Lord, is there any reason to even read a newspaper anymore? They're all just propaganda pamphlets.
nsonha 5y ago
is it just me or there is something off about The Guardian website? The 4 stripes borders that they have everywhere in their design, they look ugly and, as a webdev, creates the impression of a css bug, even though they're not.
hilbert42 5y ago
There are two people who I've never met but who I would have loved to have had as my teachers, one is Mary Beard and the other is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. What's amazing is that both of these remarkable teachers are from Cambridge University's Faculty of Classics. The Faculty and its students are indeed very lucky. Whenever they're on TV I'm always glued to my seat. Beard's Pompeii and Wallace-Hadrill's Life and Death in Herculaneum are two of the best documentaries I've seen in many a year as they bring history to life in exciting ways that I've never seen before, Ancient Roman society is presented with such feeling, exuberance and authority that one can almost imagine being there. I was thinking how truly exciting history has become in the hands of these consummate professionals in comparison to my own rather dull introduction to the subject many decades ago as school. Not that it was bad or lightweight, one of my history textbooks, A Brief History of Ancient Times — a rather nondescript book with a mustard/yellow colored cover, which incidentally I still have—was by the Univ. of Chicago's influential historian/archaeologist James Henry Breasted†. By the time I had to study it Breasted had been dead for many decades so its style was rather heavy and stodgy which didn't inspire much. Beard and Wallace-Hadrill's enthusiasm changes all that and they make a subject that has a potential to be boring to really sparkle. Both are really engaging individuals but in some ways, they're very different. Wallace-Hadrill is polite and I'd reckon he'd go out of his way to never offend anyone, Beard calls a spade a spade and if you don't like what she's saying then it's tough titty. With the shambles the world's presently in, it seems to me we need many more people of Beard's caliber and outspokenness to put things into perspective. † https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted

39 points by revolucien 5y ago

"One nonwhite can substitute for another. If that’s not racial supremacism, what is?" https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/the-insidious-racism-of-mary-beard-et-al-8b6b768b4575 https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...

jimnotgym 5y ago

When all of thay stuff between her and the black swan bloke (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) happened, I was amazed with how he sought to bully her with his opinion, how he tried to drum up hate towards her, and his utter contempt for field other than statistics. I realised then that this was exactly why she had to write 'Women and Power' etc.

AzzieElbab 5y ago
I think he just called her a fraud, and honestly, I never seen him making a mistake in this regard. Here: https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/the-insidious-racism-of-mary-beard-et-al-8b6b768b4575 https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge... pretty entertaining twitter thread https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892567659342114816 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892567659342114816
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Mary Beard is absolutely not "a fraud" just because you disagree with her view on diversity. (fwiw I also don't particularly like that tweet of hers, but come on.)
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    well, I guess neither of us is a member of same ethnic group as Taleb. For him that was personal
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      So? That makes it okay to call a distinguished scholar a fraud? (is that a claim Taleb ever made? or just you?)
      - AzzieElbab 5y ago
        absolutely. He demonstrated her claims to be both baseless and racist
      - booleandilemma 5y ago
        Part of Taleb’s philosophy is “if you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud”. I don’t think he calls people frauds lightly.
- andybak 5y ago
  It's possible that she's nice and wrong and he's right but a dick about it. It's also possible that there's more nuance to this than that.
gremloni 5y ago
I honestly buy his perspective on her. I also feel like you’re severely misrepresenting academic discourse as “bullying”.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jimnotgym 5y ago
  I don't think calling another scholar a fraud based on your forensic takedown of a 140 character tweet could be anything but bullying.

cafard 5y ago

I wasn't aware there was a cult of Mary Beard: perhaps you have to be in Great Britain to be aware of it. The author certainly seems to be a paid-up member. I did recently read and enjoy SPQR.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
the_biot 5y ago
Just because The Guardian has an article saying so, doesn't make it true. It's a propaganda rag, not a newspaper. Getting your news from multiple sources is a good thing, but exclude the extremes from all sides.
- andybak 5y ago
  Judging the extremes rather depends on deciding where the center lies.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  The Guardian would only appear extreme to those who's world views have fallen off the other side. A simple question helps get things back on keel: "Do you care about other people beyond those that directly benefit you?"
  - toyg 5y ago
    > The Guardian would only appear extreme to those who's world views have fallen off the other side. Eeehh... I'm a long-time leftist and I used to think that, but over the last decade I've grown to be much more skeptical of the Graun. On issues of sexual identity in particular, it occasionally reads like some breathless pamphlet produced by university hotheads; and their treatment of Assange and Corbyn has been utterly shameful.
- thrower123 5y ago
  The Guardian ought to be blacklisted here. The articles are terrible and predictably devolve into flamewars in the comments.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269954 - Jan 2018 (92 comments)

calderapenguin 5y ago

"Last year, when a far-right conspiracy theorist attacked a BBC cartoon...." lol. You mean Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Who is probably better known than Ms. Beard? Good Lord, is there any reason to even read a newspaper anymore? They're all just propaganda pamphlets.

nsonha 5y ago

is it just me or there is something off about The Guardian website? The 4 stripes borders that they have everywhere in their design, they look ugly and, as a webdev, creates the impression of a css bug, even though they're not.

hilbert42 5y ago

There are two people who I've never met but who I would have loved to have had as my teachers, one is Mary Beard and the other is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. What's amazing is that both of these remarkable teachers are from Cambridge University's Faculty of Classics. The Faculty and its students are indeed very lucky. Whenever they're on TV I'm always glued to my seat. Beard's Pompeii and Wallace-Hadrill's Life and Death in Herculaneum are two of the best documentaries I've seen in many a year as they bring history to life in exciting ways that I've never seen before, Ancient Roman society is presented with such feeling, exuberance and authority that one can almost imagine being there. I was thinking how truly exciting history has become in the hands of these consummate professionals in comparison to my own rather dull introduction to the subject many decades ago as school. Not that it was bad or lightweight, one of my history textbooks, A Brief History of Ancient Times — a rather nondescript book with a mustard/yellow colored cover, which incidentally I still have—was by the Univ. of Chicago's influential historian/archaeologist James Henry Breasted†. By the time I had to study it Breasted had been dead for many decades so its style was rather heavy and stodgy which didn't inspire much. Beard and Wallace-Hadrill's enthusiasm changes all that and they make a subject that has a potential to be boring to really sparkle. Both are really engaging individuals but in some ways, they're very different. Wallace-Hadrill is polite and I'd reckon he'd go out of his way to never offend anyone, Beard calls a spade a spade and if you don't like what she's saying then it's tough titty. With the shambles the world's presently in, it seems to me we need many more people of Beard's caliber and outspokenness to put things into perspective. † https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted