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  1. Dr Doran

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    How about BUTCHERS? It feels like those are slowly vanishing. In some places, at least. You can get meat delivered to your store in pieces, requiring very little skill.
  2. Dr Doran

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    the old armory in SF (Mission street) is now an S&M establishment. That's SF for ya ....
  3. Dr Doran

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Hee hee!
  4. Dr Doran

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Has anyone written a history of Granges? lately? Could be a great topic to write a book about. Especially if no one else is going it. - Tim the Dissertation Hunter
  5. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    I must not have understood your point. Ancient Greece was composed of many independent cities. I thought you were referring to Greece in the collective. Some cities were oligarchic, some democratic, a few were monarchic until monarchy went out of style in many places around 500 BC and then came...
  7. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Agreed -- few huge events are monocausal. Even if you point out a hurricane as a huge event, one could argue that if the infrastructure of a place has been allowed to rot, people won't be able to deal with the hurricane. Thus you have another cause.
  8. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Edward Gibbon is mainly read for prose style at this point, not for his analysis, although I certainly like him. Since he was writing during the Enlightenment, as part of that ideology he was highly critical of Christianity and blamed a lot of the Empire's fall on Christian wimpiness and...
  9. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Thanks, Diamondback. As for Plato's republic, that was science fiction. Plenty of eugenics, though, if that is what you are thinking about. Athens was fairly democratic from the reforms of Kleisthenes around 510 BC, then it became highly democratic after the Ephialtic Reforms of the late...
  10. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    It does not sound overly communist to me at all, and as an ancient historian I feel fairly qualified to say that it seems to be a pretty accurate description. I agree wholeheartedly with your political notes in your previous post but I hope that this thread won't fall into a vortex either...
  11. Dr Doran

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Some of my students call me Mr Doran, but I am only a grad student so I would feel very unusual about insisting on that. The custom here is to have the students call you by your first name if you are only a graduate student. I called all my professors Professor (last name) when I was an...
  13. Dr Doran

    Show Us Your Purchases....GUYS !

    lol lol I see. Now we understand your great love of shoes.:p :p :eek:
  14. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    KAKISTOCRACY ... For those who do not speak Greek, kakos means 'bad' and was used in elite classical Athenian texts, mainly of the 4th century BC, to mean bad, ugly and most of all (in my translation) worthless. It is thought to be an onomatopoeic root from the same source as the (later, but...
  15. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Natural selection is replaced by social selection ... a good thing in some senses, since this way the most brutal do not survive as often as do people who can make a living (and invest in their offspring) using smarts and charity and all those good things. (That is my leftist side speaking.) But...
  16. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    A fine film illustrating the downside to all this eugenic thought. (And much more visually pleasurable than IDIOCRACY.) Perhaps it should be viewed as a counterweight to some of the less charitable thoughts that may form in a viewer's head upon watching IDIOCRACY.
  17. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    That takes many, many, many generations. But I agree with your larger point that evolution is continuing to happen in front of our very eyes. It hasn't stopped, and it will never stop. H. G. Wells' The Time Machine is a perfect illustration of this. One of my alltime favorite books. Even...
  19. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    An utterly fascinating issue. If a population gets biologically stupider for one reason or another (water supply poisoned for generations, for example), culture will follow. If culture gets stupider for one reason or another (decisions by the leaders to discourage learning either deliberately...
  20. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Yes, Shirt, I waited also. I'm 38 and my only child thus far is almost 2. My wife is 34. We have a few more years. 1 - 2 more children with luck. The fact that this movie pointed out this very important eugenics lesson made the movie more impressive to me. A good comedy is often horrifying, so...
  21. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    But Beavis and Butt-Head makes fun of America and everyone loves THAT and wants to see it. South Park, too. In addition, sometimes the dummies who are being made fun of in satires like this take the satire not as a satire, but very differently -- as, indeed, a source of pride. "YEAAAH!" The...
  22. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    I agree completely. This is why I teach Latin and ancient history and at some point soon, ancient Greek. My tarot card reading skills could use some polishing ... I hope so!
  23. Dr Doran

    IDIOCRACY ... spoilers

    Ha ha! I agree.

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