Astral Codex Ten

Italian

4 min read

Italian

Article

Italian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 07, 2022 and August 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “honoring an Italian who killed lots of Native Americans”; “founded by an Italian immigrant trying to create food like his mother made back in Sicily”. It most often appears alongside America, Adraste, Agnostic Democrat.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 07, 2022
  • Last seen: August 24, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Columbian Exchange
October 07, 2022 · Original source
Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups; President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history” count as one of the usual beats by this point?
Beroe: There’s a saying “the sovereign is he who sets the null hypothesis”. But I would add that “the sovereign is he who decides which arguments are too galaxy-brained and annoying to take seriously”. A hundred years ago, when everyone wanted to honor the Italians, it would have been galaxy-brained and annoying to object to Columbus Day. People would have accused you of just wanting an excuse for your anti-Italian bigotry. It’s not like it’s going to normalize the youth taking over the West Indies and enslaving the local population!
Adraste: Maybe those people would have been right! Maybe the point of holidays is to teach people lessons, and which holidays are good or bad depends on what lessons need to be taught. If the big conflict in society is about whether or not to accept Italians, and nobody is thinking about Native Americans either way, then maybe it’s correct to honor a famous Italian, so as to emphasize our support for Italians’ rights. And a hundred years later, when nobody worries about Italians anymore, but lots of people worry about Native Americans, then honoring an Italian who killed lots of Native Americans sends the wrong message, and so we deprecate the pro-Italian holiday in favor of a pro-Native-American one. In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized and there’s a debate about whether or not to accept them - then we should scrap or re-work Indigenous People’s Day to emphasize that we support the victims’ descendants. Until and unless that happens, why bother?
Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences
August 24, 2023 · Original source
Is it presumptuous of a restaurant to tell you what kind of food they serve? What their hours are? What their prices are? Where they’re located? The story of how they were founded by an Italian immigrant trying to create food like his mother made back in Sicily with ingredients from blah blah blah? “Oooh, look at this fancy pizza place, they think I care enough about them to read their menu online”. Again, why do you want to know less about the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life than about where to go for dinner?