
Did they even hang bears? - diodorus
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-shippey/did-they-even-hang-bears
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nickreese
If you dig viking history this is a worthwhile read. I almost skipped it. Glad
I didn't.

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bacon_waffle
In 1916, they hung an elephant in Erwin, Tennessee.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin,_Tennessee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin,_Tennessee)

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lvturner
"Erwin has a dark chapter in its history. A group of its white citizens
committed an extra-legal “banishment," a violent incident that took place in
1918 and involved the murder of a black man and the violent, forcible eviction
of all other black citizens from the town by a white mob."

Why does the fact that a traveling circus visiting Erwin once executed an
Elephant, get more page space than this throw away sentence at the bottom of
the introduction?

~~~
pwdisswordfish0
Because the elephant thing is unique and the racism thing is common?

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neonate
[https://archive.is/cnBqC](https://archive.is/cnBqC)

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kevin_thibedeau
"Please enable Javascript to read the full article"

No. Go learn how HTML works.

~~~
kstrauser
I was with you until about 2009, but I’d be surprised if much of the modern
web worked without Javascript anymore.

~~~
jhardy54
That's fine, but I'm not running JS unless there's a reason for the app to use
JS.

This is a document, not an application, and developers who can't do
progressive enhancement on simple HTML documents are the ones stuck in 2009.

~~~
kstrauser
They’re almost all applications now. We lost the fight. There’s zero incentive
for a develop to spend more than zero time making a website degrade gracefully
today.

I use Gemini
([https://gemini.circumlunar.space/](https://gemini.circumlunar.space/)) today
when I want to enjoy an unscripted Internet. You should check it out - it’s
fun! But the web is no longer static HTML, however much I often wish it was.

~~~
jhardy54
> They’re almost all applications now. We lost the fight.

Please reconsider! I've been using uBlock Origin to disable JavaScript by
default, opting into enabling it when I want to (just like camera and
microphone permissions). The vast majority of websites work fine, and many
work _better_ because they don't have pop-ups for cookie consent, unsolicited
chat bubbles, or "wait don't leave yet" crap.

> There’s zero incentive for a develop to spend more than zero time making a
> website degrade gracefully today.

I couldn't dksagree more. Not everyone is an able-bodied software developer
with a 2020 Macbook Pro and Google Chrome. We should continue making websites
for _everyone_.

> But the web is no longer static HTML, however much I often wish it was.

You're right, but JavaScript is still completely optional for the vast
majority of websites (and I'd argue that we should keep it that way). Just
because a few websites need camera permissions doesn't mean that we should
give every website access to our camera -- why should we have a different
stance on JavaScript that usually degrades our experience instead of improves
it?

