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 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".
The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those most skilled left as soon as they could. Some of these, or their children, would go on to found startups.
> The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those [..]
.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.
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.
This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew?
* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group?
* Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos
* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual
* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.
* That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse.
* Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way
* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)
* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea
* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed
* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.
Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.
There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.
The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.
Yes, while I agree with most of the criticism about the movie, that sentence has also stricken me as incorrect.
It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.
[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".
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.
That article's TL;DR is bad theories "external invasion" and "volcanoes", and sets against it the current historian consensus: "climate" and "internal instability".
I thought she would be, but apparently classicist and historian have less overlap than I'd have assumed. I don't know how else to explain this one, I was shocked when I read that line.
Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.
