The coast freezes for close to half the year and that means they cant have good ports there and trade and commerce is affected.
2/n
Russia is vast. It is unimaginably massive. It is 11 timezones long & has a 36000km long coast and 17 million sqkm in area
Then, why does it still fear losing support of Ukraine and desire it's landmass so badly?
The answer is 'Geography'
A simple history explainer 🧵
The coast freezes for close to half the year and that means they cant have good ports there and trade and commerce is affected.
2/n
Here comes the answer - Ukraine.
Ukraine has a coast along the Black sea and connects to the Mediterranean which opens up the entire world.
Russia so dearly desires this.
Ukraine got caught in the middle. Eastern part of Ukraine supported Russia & the west with EU
Russia had a lease to use this warm water port & run its ships for trade.
But if Ukraine went into EU or NATO, there was the risk of losing this port.
So, all the more reason for Russia to not let Ukraine go also to the west.
Ukraine dropped the EU plan but it had already lost Crimea
'If you compress the spring all the way to it's limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this'
🥺🤯🥺
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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
As someone\u2019s who\u2019s read the book, this review strikes me as tremendously unfair. It mostly faults Adler for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had! https://t.co/pqpt5Ziivj
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) January 12, 2021
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
