Rob > Recent Status Updates

"The [Soviets'] permitted narrative of the war also excluded the fact that Jewish citizens had been specifically targeted by the Nazis. Rather than focusing on the horrors of the Holocaust that were revealed toward the end of the war, Stalin had stoked a new campaign of anti-Semitism and the official Soviet account insisted that Hitler attacked the USSR in general, rather than any one group in particular."

This is going to take a while to get through.

The Catholic-Orthodox split has definitely been neglected in our textbooks - both the ones I studied and the ones I've taught from - in favor of the Protestant Reformation.

"Mohandas Gandhi, who visited twice, pronounced him 'one of the great statesmen of the time', while Winston Churchill in 1933 described 'the Roman genius' as 'the greatest law-giver among living men'. ... Thomas Edison called him the 'greatest genius of modern times' after a short meeting."

They were talking about Mussolini. Gandhi, Churchill and Edison are totally #cancelled.

Interestingly, this book is not pure free market apologetics: Cowperthwaite learns a hard lesson about bank failure and gets credit for compromising on trade negotiations with the US and Europe.

Two things: I learned the story of a defector who left NK in 1997, went back a few years later when his SK business failed, set up a barbershop in the North, then re-defected to SK because it was "too repressive." And I'm like, "Have you tried Thailand?"

And also, she discusses North Korea's strategy of 'tu quoque" when faced with US human rights abuse criticism, and notes that it works "because it is true."

Time to learn about classical liberal governance at its finest.

Currently well into the section on life in prison camps. Anyone can recommend an antidepressant?

Finally made some progress after a long illness. The passages about the persecution of faith communities is heart-rending.

Calvin's view of predestination and hell is based on "a notoriously confused reading of scripture, one whose history goes ... back to the late Augustine--a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history."

Evidently the data shows that student evaluations reflect how much fun the students had and how charismatic they found the teacher to be, but not how much they learned. Oddly enough, I always got good evaluations, but there were always a few who docked me for not being friendly enough.

College graduates fare better than those without college degrees because they had the skills necessary to earn a degree in the first place, not because of something they learned in college.

Also, Harvard and Yale graduates tend to be more successful than those of other universities because of the exceptional skills that got them admitted in the first place, not anything Harvard or Yale offer.

One of the lessons from his dog is not getting uptight about things, and he uses political debates on Facebook as an example, saying people shouldn't talk politics there or should restrict themselves to civil debate. Problem is, discussions of politics are too genuinely important not to happen at this level. Plus, I'd like to have civil discussions, but it's entirely up to me.

The best parts of this are definitely the economic change and relaxation of restrictions on wealth accumulation. This is certainly not a biography of Kim.

Never let it be said that I don't read stuff that contradicts my worldview.