reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @mualphaxi

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

I've been thinking about 2 big trends: -Layoffs in media, entire sites closing -Huge mineral discoveries in California and Wyoming Wouldn't it heal our country to work on a solution together? My idea is an FDR-style program for laid-off journalists to get jobs in mining 🧵 https://t.co/sy5HVxifQy

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

As Taylor Lorenz recently pointed out, it's been a brutal time in the media business. Nearly 20,000 layoffs in 2023. Just in 2024, Sports Illustrated and Vice have effectively shut down. Long-term job security is... dubious. The business models just aren't the same. https://t.co/86HhMHJhA9

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Journalists have been trying to strike and protest the layoffs - which is not a very promising strategy. It's understandable why they're upset: they know that work as a journalist is more precarious than ever. https://t.co/4o7VKe16hA

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Things are going much better in the mineral world. In California we've discovered that the Salton Sea has higher lithium production capacity than anywhere in the world. It could produce enough for 400 million EV batteries. https://t.co/ExS94OqIEb

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

And in Wyoming, mines that were about to be defunct due to falling coal prices are now worth tens of billions because of rare earth. It's a new American gold rush for the minerals we thought China would dominate. https://t.co/cv8iKjViNh

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The Media and Mining - two divergent economic stories, two divergent industry futures. Journalists need our help adapting to the future.

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

I consider myself a centrist, and I believe in compromise and compassion. This could be a 21st century grand bargain: we help laid-off fake news journalists by getting them more dignified work in open pit mines. https://t.co/Yy4il5aM5a

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

They can keep their unions together and strike when they think conditions need to be improved. It's just not going to work unionizing newsrooms. Money doesn't grow on trees, but it does grow inside the ground over millions of years, and we can mine it! https://t.co/PYc7ja6qdN

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

It's not a perfect solution, but the truth is that working in the mines is more honest than what many journalists are doing now - caused by bad business models and poor career incentives.

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

https://t.co/VFiOG8iPZG

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

WSJ, 2019: the oil boom sees barbers making $180,000 in West Texas shale towns. I'm telling you, journalists will be better off mining zinc than they are fighting like street dogs with private equity firms for scraps in the news media. #LearnToMine https://t.co/xwClfY7NeV

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

#LearnToMine

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The New York Times has spoken: Google's total erasure of white people was racist against... you guessed it... "People of Color" Absolutely exquisite. It's 200-proof, pure distilled essence of progressivism https://t.co/DRxbmfMDvC

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The most lucid 3 minutes from a politician that I have ever seen. https://t.co/sWPBrMZWdA

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

And maybe the best thing about him is his pressure on entrepreneurs They have a duty to oppose socialism No “neutrality” here

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

1 month from today, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad comes out. In 2017, she became the first woman ever to translate the Odyssey into English I want to be careful with my words here: her translation was abominable, a crime against the classics. Now she’s back Part 1: https://t.co/1ygvgRIPiQ

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

I hesitate to use cliche, but “Woke Homer” wouldn’t be a *bad* description of Wilson’s work. Before examining the translation, let’s look at her public comments and motive. Here she is writing in the New Yorker: “The Odyssey traces deep male fears about female power” https://t.co/tXqjJvOVAs

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The New York Times Magazine interview with Wilson doesn’t leave any mystery as to her agenda: “The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice” Radical indeed. https://t.co/OXrUyAjpCp

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

She has attacked male translators for “gender bias” She says she examined her identity as “a cis-gendered woman” and “gender-aware feminist” when doing the translation. The classics are being strangled by critical theory https://t.co/AsaUzSktxb

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Eidolon, the now-defunct foundation started by Donna Zuckerberg to promote wokeness in the study of Greek and Roman literature, praised Wilson for deliberately changing the meaning of passages through feminist translation. https://t.co/3aZZDeDgTn

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Disclaimer: I took a year of classical Greek at Stanford I was an average student, definitely not as good as the experts here, including Wilson herself. I couldn't translate it myself But I think you will see that many of my criticisms don’t require any knowledge of Greek

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Her translation of the first lines of the Odyssey is so bad that I don’t even know where to start I almost wonder if I’m contributing to the crime by even commenting on it. This is it — but in order to set up just how bad it is, you need to look at a few normal translations. https://t.co/zfLLVGG2nT

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

To my mind, there are four great Homeric translators of the 20th century. They are all American men: Richmond Lattimore Robert Fitzgerald Robert Fagles Stanley Lombardo For reasons I will explain, Lombardo is my favorite.

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Of the four, my least favorite Odyssey opening is Lattimore. He maintains a meter *approximating* the original Greek dactylic hexameter, with 14 syllables in most lines. Hexameter is better in Greek than English; sometimes he has to add extra words but it’s good. https://t.co/zwHyYtr4dr

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Fitzgerald splits the lines up a bit more, producing a natural English rhythm regardless of the number of lines or their syllabic length. Nothing shockingly different here. https://t.co/5jG24jKcb4

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Robert Fagles is really good — a brilliant poet in his own right. Two beautiful alliterative phrases stand out: “the man of twists and turns” “the hallowed heights of Troy” https://t.co/hO72BvyNeu

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Lombardo is much more liberal. It is modern and designed to be performed aloud. He opens with an allusion: SPEAK, MEMORY — (the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir. It’s a nod to the American canon.) Lombardo shows you *can* stray from the original Greek quite artfully. https://t.co/moianKDTv2

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The "Speak, Memory" reminds me of C. Scott Moncrieff's translated title of Proust's epic novel "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" It could be perfectly rendered as "In Search of Lost Time" but he went with "Remembrance of Things Past" It's from Shakespeare Sonnet 30. Artful! https://t.co/9D8vqtbAaa

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Wilson also strays from the Greek, but not artfully. It's awful. She opens like so: “Tell me about a complicated man.” She just can’t help insulting Odysseus… in the first line. It won’t be the first time! https://t.co/V0w50JCevA

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The first adjective is polytropon, a declension of πολύτροπος. Poly = many and Tropos = turns. The word is modifying ἄνδρα (man) Fagles: “the man of twists and turns” Lattimore: “the man of many ways” Lombardo: “the cunning hero, the wanderer” Wilson: “a complicated man” 🤦‍♂️ https://t.co/lLyBXDtnFb

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Wilson LAUGHS as she explains to the NY Times exactly what πολύτροπος means (turning many ways) And then she just translates it as "a complicated man” anyway. She doesn’t care about the truth. https://t.co/KRKNLPUmOC

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

The last line is the other problem. The word ἁμόθεν is very tricky. Nobody knows definitively what it means, and it appears just once in the text, so I’ll give her some slack. But “tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning” is atrocious Find the beginning?

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

It’s almost like she’s announcing in the first few lines — after insulting Odysseus and calling him “complicated” instead of praising him — that she’s going to modernize the whole poem. To suck the ancient life out of it because she rejects the ancient manly virtues.

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Where is the celebration of virtue and excellence? Where is the ἀρετή and ἀνδρεία? Wilson answers that, telling Vox that “there’s an idea that Homer has to sound heroic and ancient.” Homer is heroic and ancient OH MY GOD how could you say that https://t.co/KqrxvqdYyL

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Now we move to the beginning of her Iliad. It is not as bad as her Odyssey. But still the life - the pomp and circumstance - have been stripped from it. We only have bits and pieces so far, and I don’t think she’s going to send me an advance copy https://t.co/UF31wSSUTy

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Though Wilson was the first woman to translate the Odyssey, Caroline Alexander beat her to butchering — er… I mean translating — the Iliad in 2015 Wilson’s saving grace may be that Alexander’s translation of the opening was much, much worse. Just a word salad https://t.co/c9cAv0Xx5b

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Here’s Lombardo, who accomplished what Alexander failed to: make the first line readable. It has rhythm and mood — in the language in which it will be recited: ENGLISH. https://t.co/EE739AI3P3

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Here’s another snippet: Wilson turns “King who devours his people” to “Cannibal king, you eat your people up” You have got to be kidding me https://t.co/HgDmGQRb8O

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

This is the first of MULTIPLE threads analyzing one of the great literary crimes in history, a crime that's only getting started. Woke librarians are going to be purging the old translations and bringing in the Wilson ones. I have much more to say. Follow me to keep up.

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

Part 2 is now live. If you can stomach it, I have videos of Wilson "performing" her translation of the Odyssey. Compared with Lombardo's epic performances https://t.co/Ff8nJNMKIz

@mualphaxi - Max Meyer

That didn't take long hahaha I will continue posting right here on @X and fight back against the impending corporate onslaught via NYT and other propaganda organs promoting her translation https://t.co/8Nd7y26H1r

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

If you thought the DEI law dean exploding in front of a federal appellate judge was bad, I have some news… Stanford is a fallen institution. It has gone insane since 2020. Here are the most ridiculous stories from the past few years, some of which I documented. Thread:

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

Stanford’s IT department created a list of banned words and initiated purges of university websites (they didn’t finish) It included the word “American” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptable-words-elimination-of-harmful-language-initiative-11671489552

Opinion | The Stanford Guide to Acceptable Words Behold the school’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. wsj.com

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

September 2021: the Stanford campus opens for the first time since the pandemic began. Students wore masks on bicycles at twice the rate they wore helmets! By yours truly https://stanfordreview.org/stanford-bicycles-helmets-masks/

Review Analysis: Stanford students are more likely to wear masks on bicycles than helmets In April of this year, I witnessed something on the Stanford campus that will be seared into my memory forever: a student on a bicycle, wearing flip-flops, AirPods in ear, going the wrong way through a roundabout in an active construction zone, with no helmet. But like any good follower stanfordreview.org

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

Dec 2021: when Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted, the Stanford CS department denounced him. That same department encourages students to read the memoir of black nationalist terrorist Assata Shakur. https://stanfordreview.org/stanford-cs-goes-woke/

Stanford CS Goes Woke: department slams Rittenhouse, praises Ibram Kendi, and promotes terrorist autobiography! The Department of Computer Science is the crown jewel of Stanford. It minted trillions in Silicon Valley wealth, engineered large parts of the internet, and continues to be a powerhouse for the tech industry and American capitalism. It’s also the largest undergraduate department. But today, Stanford CS has fallen stanfordreview.org

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

2022: Stanford threatens to withhold my completed degree from me because I didn’t take a “booster” shot. No more academic requirements for graduation; just pharmaceutical requirements. https://maxmeyer.substack.com/p/how-i-almost-didnt-graduate-from

How I Almost Didn't Graduate From Stanford A tale of bureaucracy and "booster noncompliance" maxmeyer.substack.com

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

STANFORD’S WAR ON SOCIAL LIFE By @ginevlily, who ignited a revolution. You MUST read this peace https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/

Stanford’s War on Social Life palladiummag.com

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

June 2022: a Stanford medical professor tried to have me expelled for making fun of masks. Authoritarian campus. https://maxmeyer.substack.com/p/a-former-biden-covid-19-official

A Former Biden COVID-19 Official Tried to Get Me Expelled from Stanford for an Anti-Mask Tweet Yes, really. maxmeyer.substack.com

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

2021: it turns out that star professor Jo Boaler, an advocate of woke math education, is also a fraudster and a scammer. She wrote the California math framework that axes calculus. https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is-worse-than-we-thought/

Review Investigation: Jo Boaler, Cathy Williams, and the Woke Math Scam It’s been a busy few years for Jo Boaler, star professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Last year, the California Mathematics Framework — of which she is a primary author — ignited outrage due to its low-standards and equity-obsessed approach to math education (including axing calculus and describing homework stanfordreview.org

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

2020: the craven faculty senate votes to condemn Dr. Scott Atlas, who was totally vindicated. The treatment of @DrJBhattacharya was unspeakable as well. https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/20/faculty-senate-condemns-actions-hoover-fellow-scott-atlas/

Faculty Senate condemns COVID-19 actions of Hoover’s Scott Atlas | Stanford News In its last meeting of the autumn quarter, the Stanford Faculty Senate condemned the COVID-19-related actions of Hoover senior fellow and presidential adviser Scott Atlas. The Faculty Senate also approved a new policy on Open Access to make scholarly works more widely available. news.stanford.edu

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

2023: Stanford is aggressively cutting the enrollment of white students. One last hurrah before the end of affirmative action https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-racial-engineering/

Stanford’s Racial Engineering Stanford’s enrollment rate for white students in the Class of 2026 was 22%, a drop from 40% for the Class of 2016 just ten years ago. While Stanford claims that “the University does not use quotas of any kind in its admission process,” a further exploration of Stanford’s stanfordreview.org

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

Now: scandal currently embroiling Stanford’s president, who is accused of falsifying research data when he was a pharmaceutical scientist and executive. https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/17/internal-review-found-falsified-data-in-stanford-presidents-alzheimers-research-colleagues-allege/

Review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s research, colleagues allege His paper was called “the miracle result.” But it never turned into an Alzheimer’s treatment. Now, four former Genentech senior scientists and executives allege that an internal review in 2011 discovered the paper had been based on fabricated research — and that Marc Tessier-Lavigne kept the results of the review from becoming public. He denies the allegations. stanforddaily.com

@mualphaxi - Maxwell Meyer

Finally: you must read the reporting of @StockJabber about the last decade in Stanford. Unbelievable numbers of student suicides and other misconduct. The university is being run like a clown show. https://theymustresign.substack.com/p/stanfords-president-and-provost-must

Stanford’s President and Provost Must Resign Twelve Student Deaths, Corruption, Coverups, Lying to WSCUC Regulators, and Lawsuits theymustresign.substack.com