my fatigue with palace intrigue

[amw]

After threatening to dive into the Confucius wiki hole a couple entries ago, i decided i'd do just that. But rather than going straight to the man himself, i figured it'd make more sense to get a broader overview of Chinese history before deep-diving on philosophy that i've previously barely shallow-dived on. Also i figured it'd help so next time i

Comments

[geminiwench]

I recently read a collection of treatises, declarations, and published letters from the medieval period of Europe,... and things were feudal, but they were also exactly the same. Rich people being assholes, the poor struggling, the poor revolting, the rich people having THEIR shit burnt for once, the rich punish the poor by raising an army to pay off the peasants or kill them... and the survivors pay additional taxes to cover the lost payments of the dead when that rich asshole has to not just maintain himself... now they've got to build a bigger wall and hire more soldiers so prices were gonna increase ANYWAYS but now...the poor are being punished three ways. The endless work of the ruling class keeping money in their own hands while someone else does the actual work.
The violence...continues.

[amw]

For sure the Chinese don't have a monopoly on this sort of history. Whenever i try to follow western ancient history i hit the same roadblock. I love the mythological stories of heroes exploring distant lands, defeating mysterious monsters, taking on the gods and winning... that stuff is great. But at a certain point - perhaps aligning with the rise of the Roman Empire? - the written record seems to become disproportionately about fabulously wealthy and all-powerful rulers being terrible to everyone

[geminiwench]

I became obsessed with Solon once upon a time, and was upset that I wasn't taught about him at all even though we "learned" about "Greek Democracy". Before Athens really committed to democracy in about 500BC, it spent about 200 years flirting with democracy. That is.. there was voting (by the landowning freemen) but most people didn't want to abdicate power and/or run for election again, so mostly Athenians were voting for their next dictator or "Tyrant" which was the actual title of the 10 year position as supreme comptroller of the city, and only gained its more infamous meaning due to the corruption that was connected to the role and the fact they never seemed to want to leave when their term was over, since Tyrants were also not re-electable

[notte0]

During my time in primary and high school, students from non-Chinese family background can opt out of Chinese class. As my school was an English based school, “Chinese class” included everything from language, grammar and history. How they cram all that to a 1-hour twice a week class, I dunno

[amw]

I think there is some aspect of history that helps with the language. In my recent learnings i have found that quite a lot of 成語 reference some historical event, or were famously attributed to a historical person, so knowing that gives you some context. Also it seems to help with politics a bit, like i was reading about some boring general or other who became a 門神, i think he was 關羽, and then there is some quote from 鄧小平 which reference some story about it that no foreigner would know what they are talking about if they hadn't explicitly learned it. It's just so boring though