We need to talk about Mental Health. This it has been decreed for the past ten to fifteen years or so.

The exact reason why might shock you. I wasn’t always an online Richard Burton impersonator. Back in 2010, I was a policy analyst for what was then the Department of Health. I’m not sure what it’s called now but I believe it’s been converted into a care home.

Connery was 32 by the time he was cast as James Bond. Before that he’d been a modestly successful competitive bodybuilder and model, and was a talented footballer who’d been scouted by Manchester United. You’re comparing elite-tier talent to some random guy with autism.

https://twitter.com/Empty_America/status/1857517895107899899

Connery was also bald by the time he played Bond btw, he did the role in a hairpiece.

It also isn’t “just religion” or “just superstition” (sorry Reddit atheists), nor is it the product solely of low IQ. Many very smart people are terminally djinnbrained, although it’s definitely more common among the less intelligent. It’s more like a “spiritual tendency” as described upthread, driven by dysfunctional social environments and specific assumptions about how both human and superhuman affairs are conducted.

After they were mostly absorbed by the Romans, Seneca the Younger characterised the Etruscans as believing that everything in the material world occurs because it has meaning, that “clouds collide so they might release lightning”.

We’d describe this as “superstitious”. In fact, the Romans described Etrurian behaviour as “superstitious” as well, even as they admired their achievements, contrasting their highly involved divination rituals (which the Romans eventually adopted) with their own native austerity and practicality.

I’m not sure that people really understand what Anton – who is correct – actually means when he says this so here’s a short primer on what life is actually like for the top 5%-ish-ers in third world countries.

https://twitter.com/smnhmd/status/1734458783521247567

Obviously this varies from place to place but I’ll try and keep to broad generalities. I say “top 5%-ish” because we’re talking roughly about a segment which corresponds to Anglophone professional classes.

“Middle Classes” are an interesting phenomenon and our understanding of them tends to be obfuscated by modern preoccupations, political hang ups, or junk Marxist sociology.

I think however that a “middle class” as Pine Baron describes it can be given a clear definition.

https://twitter.com/spiritofpines/status/1664090889827016704

The “middle class” in most modern western societies tends to be defined with reference to things like education and home ownership and other similar “bourgeois” values and lifestyle markers. But these in and of themselves are circular and of little descriptive value.

You've heard of the 80/20 rule, of course, but allow me to propose a more developed pointless heuristic: the 1/5/15/80 rule. Not very catchy, but potentially information rich. In any given domain, you should presume 1-5% of people have sufficient capacity to actively participate.

A further 15% will have the capacity to passively participate: they'll be able to engage with and take cues from the top 1-5%, but won't have the mettle to do what they do.

Last year I did a thread on Edward Banfield’s “Moral Basis of a Backward Society”, the seminal ethnography of a low-trust community.

Today I revisit Banfield to look at an aspect of “amoral familism” I’d previously passed over but now see as very important: doing nothing. One thing Banfield notes early on in “Moral Basis” is that although poverty is a natural explanation for the suspicious, asocial attitude typical of the Montegranese. Even the peasants themselves employ it. But it is, in fact, a poor excuse.

Thinking about laryngeals (as you do) and how they might have been articulated. None of the options seem particularly good. Let's have a look at them. The basic theory is proven: there must have been two sounds that colour the PIE vowel /e/ to /a/ (h₂) or /o/ (h₃), and which produces a long /ā/ or /ō/ in some otherwise anomalous roots (e.g. *dō ultimately from deh₃).

(Not attack). Hoplites were indeed drawn from the middle ranks of citizens, but the citizenry of a polis constituted a ruling class analogous to the nobility medieval continental Europe or the gentry + nobility in England: around maybe 5% of the population of a given city.

https://twitter.com/grimytimey/status/1628239059637227522

The misunderstanding comes from trying to analogise industrial class divisions to an agrarian society which was structured around the complete military domination by a small military elite of a large population of slave and semi-free peoples.

Today I am going to tell you why the centum/satem distinction in Indo-European historical linguistics isn't real. And I don't mean "isn't real as an isogloss", I mean it doesn't exist at all.

(This is going to be a long one.) The (generally accepted) reconstructed Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory is so strange it stretches credulity.

Today, Vilfredo Pareto is mostly remembered for his work on wealth distribution. (If you've ever invoked the 80/20 rule, you're echoing his original observation that 80% of Italian property was owned by 20% of the population.)

But he deserves to be better known for a few others. Pareto is credited with transforming economics from a branch of moral philosophy into a "data driven" enterprise. But when his mathematical models of society failed to predict how people would actually behave in the real world, he turned to sociology for explanations.

This is one of the most boring and factually incorrect arguments of LW pinhead on this or any other site so let's take an impromptu look at That Immigration In Full:

https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/1587714079673679878

It's ridiculous to call Roman settlement in Britain "immigration" when it was actually, bluntly, a military invasion and occupation. Most of the Romans who came to Britain were soldiers operating as part of the military garrison.

The idea that Britain should be competing for “top global talent” is one of the weirder thought terminating cliches that circulates around the immigration issue in this country. Genuinely talented people from other countries would be insane to come here. There’s almost no skilled jobs where a person genuinely gifted on a global level couldn’t either earn multiples more money or have a much higher standard of living in another country (usually but not always the US.)

I think we’re all mature enough on Twitter to talk about the real elephant in the room of British political life.

Okay it’s not really an elephant. It’s more like a sacred cow.

Or actually it’s more like an albatross.

Can we talk about the NHS for a second? Broad strokes here obviously but none of this is untrue: the NHS is failing and everyone knows it. In fact it’s been failing since the mid 1990s. Remember that date, it’s important we’ll be coming back to it in a second.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans called one of these characters a *wĺ̥kʷos. As with many PIE animal names – especially those for animals that they held in a particular esteem – this is a nominalised adjective describing their most important trace. In this case, *wl̥kʷós, "wild". *wĺ̥kʷoes were particularly important in Proto-Indo-European culture because of their religious and symbolic relationship to the *kóryos. Like *wĺ̥kʷoes, a *kóryos lived a "wild" existence, hunting for sustenance and wholly reliant on their capacity for guile and violence.

In 1955, American political scientist Edward C. Banfield visited a town in the south of Italy that he called Montegrano.

His account of his visit—published 3 years later as "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society"—paints an interesting picture of a world without social capital. In Montegrano, Banfield observed a society in which material selfishness was the default behaviour—specifically, a self-interest focused entirely on the wellbeing of immediate and extended family networks.

To describe this outlook, he coined the term "amoral familism."