So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
I’ve never understood this mentality that people who read and watched handmaids tale, caused some done kind of weird obsession built on a literal fiction story, a made up story… especially since the reality is not only the polar opposite, but in no place on the planet have things ever been better for any people relative to all other places of their time than in the very European societies and cultures that you types are so suicidally fixated on being destructive of.
The irony of the handmaids tale types from my experience is that they/you are, in their/your suicidally manic self-harming obsession, advocates for the spread of Islam in the very western countries that have provided all of humanity all of its freedoms and comforts, which would ironically will lead to an actual handmaids tale type scenario you constantly warn of.
Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did? It makes the handmaids tale sound like a wholesome family dynamic.
> So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?
Who were the other female composers of her generation?
> polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators
to composers. Even the male composers of whom we know the names are few and sparsely attributed. Just look at the Notre Dame school and how little we know except two names with no attached biography and some beautiful music. And even only that by 'lucky accident' since a single, anonymous student wrote them down.
You'll definitely find abbesses like Herrad von Landsberg who did write and educate in her generation.
It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.
It's laughable to paint Islam as the enemy of Western liberty when it is masked agents of a Christian nationalist regime who are terrorizing the streets of my city and cities across the US.
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.
But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.
In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.
This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.
Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets
A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.
A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.
The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.
Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...