throwaway3060

All of those also had some amount of brain drain around that time.

I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.

Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".

Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.

I've read that article too, and never got the impression it quite went that far. That there wasn't some unified group, sure, but I never heard anyone claim that (maybe reflecting when I first learned about them?). Maybe that's what Wilson meant, but if so it isn't very clear - it sounded to me like she's claiming that all those constituent groups the Egyptians wrote about, that Bret Devereaux touched upon, didn't actually exist (and worse, that this is the consensus position).

Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review.

Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.

Suddenly started happening to me out of nowhere while browsing. Really does feel like one of the last pillars of the old internet just toppled - that reading is open to anyone. New Reddit is basically unusable.

Edit: I still am a strong believer in anonymous usage of the internet. Increasingly it feels like we've become an endangered species.

This is not what the word "colonialism" means in modern times; which imperial state is exploiting the resources of the destination?

Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.

Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.