I think it's a bit of both/and. The Samson story within the context of Judges is about people doing what "that which was right in [their] own eyes," and the people of Israel devolving into madness and dumbness because of their rejection of Yahweh and his law.
I think he's purposefully supposed to come off as a buffoon, but maybe a relatable one?
The New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible is by far the worst translation on almost any metric you can think of, except maybe understanding how evangelical Christians read the Bible in the 90s and 2000s.
The NIV has so many inexcusable translations that reinforce a theological worldview that matched the conversation on atonement and justification that was happening in the 90s and 2000s. There's a great catalog out there of the most egregious translations in the NIV [1]. One such example:
> Romans 7:18 — The NIV here translates σάρξ (sarx) as “sinful nature” even though this implies later Augustinian doctrine on original sin that is not intended by the original writer. In contrast, the NRSV correctly chooses to translate this tricky Pauline term more literally as “flesh”.
Are you interested in a readable Bible that flows well to modern English ears? The New Living Translation (NLT) is fantastic and very underrated. I recommend reading the Psalms in the NLT since much of the language of the Psalms being in a higher register in the NIV and other translations doesn't land as well, but reading the Psalms in NLT makes it much more relatable and human. I find the way it reads refreshing, and it's based on more modern scholarship.
Are you interested in latest scholarly understanding of the Bible? The NRSV is the consensus version (as much as there could be one).
Are you interested in understanding the Bible as American Evangelical Christians read it today? That's currently the English Standard Version (ESV), which many churches have switched to as the NIV has lost favor in Reformed circles.
It's been eye opening to read books from the Old Testament in the word-by-word translation of ancient Hebrew. A lot of the semantic accretion over the millennia comes off and you get a more raw iron age tribal wisdom glowing through.
One example is that often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations. It happens that words interpreted as names of people are also abstract nouns and these passages can also be read as aphorisms. I haven't looked deep into that but it makes way more sense to me that narrative is punctuated by such reflections on "Wisdom unites with Patience and beget Lasting Wealth than breaking into describing marriages and lineages then going back to the story...
Yes! In that vein, The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter[1] is great for folks who want to get a better sense of what the original Hebrew might feel like rendered in English.
I've become intensely interested in the meanings of Biblical names. Of course, names are the words least likely to be translated into a plain meaning, and knowing a name's translation and connotations gives the opportunity to pierce the veil on some very important meanings, meanings that were patently obvious to anyone who actually spoke those languages.
Discovering that "Jonah" can mean "dove" was certainly eye-opening. And re-reading that book in light of knowing this, quite interesting!
In fact, the OT and NT alike sometimes even drop in-line translation/explanation of a name that they really want us to know. In that case, why not know all of them?
> often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations
I think you were emphasizing something beside this, but if you want to know _why_ the five Books of Moses often jump suddenly into genealogy or minutiae of interest only to priests, you might be interested in the Documentary Hypothesis. Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?" is an approachable introduction to it.
Ancient history scholarship is very accessible, most of it is published on periodicals that offer free download of articles.
I recommend searching books and articles about 'canaanite religion' - the cult of El, Baal and Yaveh have a lot in common. You need to understand the context of Israelite religion to realize that modern monotheism wasn't created in a vacuum, it matured out of a deep tradition of local cults. I'd also recommend looking into Mesopotamian religions. Egyptian religion is not as fundamental but it provides a lot of perspective. Once you see the influence, it sheds light on a lot of things. The relationship between the cults of Set and the conflicting beliefs of followers of El and Baal is a fascinating rabbit hole.
Greek mythology also acquires a whole new depth to it when you realize that Baal (a canaanite deity), El (an israelite deity that eventually merges with some others into the monotheistic god) and Zeus: all were storm gods. There's a lot more to it all I'm saying, again, look into that. Fascinating stuff.
I'd say go on Semantic Scholar, Academia.edu, or some other academic search tool and start digging! Bible authorship is a minor branch of a deep well of scholarship that is the study of ancient history and ancient religion.
> El (an israelite deity that eventually merges with some others into the monotheistic god)
It's my understanding that both Baal and El were Canaanite deities and that the Israelite cults brought their storm god Yahweh with them to Canaan and eventually he absorbed features of the Canaanite gods.
We don't really know much about these entities. There are fragments of inscriptions that could be read as 'lord of the city' for example just as easily as naming some deity.
Israel means roughly 'lords' struggle': Isra El.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, we know very little and what evidence we have is fragmentary. Thinking about possible interpretations of and links among what evidence we have is fascinating and every so often we might see a constellation of data points shedding light on events of 2500 years ago or so, but it's important to realize that the gaps in our knowledge of what happened in the iron age are much, much bigger than what we actually know.
That in itself would still make a lot of sense to me though; as far as I know, property and power was mainly transfered through the lines of first born males (so a patriarchy, in the literal sense). If that, social status and so on hinges on who your father, grandfather etc. was, then I think it makes sense for geneology trees to be something important enough to write down, especially in literature that was partially written to capture/produce a peoples cultural identity (i.e. parts of the creation story where written while the jews where forcibly integrated into the babylonian empire, and struggling to keep their own cultural identity. That's another good "use case" for genealogy, I would say.)
That's a bit of an oversimplification. I understand the historical value of genealogy but don't assume all past societies were uniformly practicing some form of entail and primogeniture.
There is no definitive reading of scripture, there is no definitive version of any of the texts, and I enjoy finding new aspects of their history and interpretation. Realizing that some of the texts that read as genealogy might have been originally a form of poetic aphorism is something I wouldn't affirm to a bible scholar but I enjoy thinking about it.
Someone else said a lot of scripture was written as poetry. Imagine people in the year 4500 trying to figure out some fourth hand translation of clippings taken from books by Neruda, Chaucer and Hobsbawm.
Nono, I was refering specifically to the culture and time period in which the old testament was composed, not other cultures or time periods - those were clearly patriarchical, it would be a mistake to dismiss that when interpreting the old testament. Considering the culture in which a written artifact was composed is one of the main pilars that hermeneutics relies on (but obviously not the only one)
Let's start with "time period in which the old testament was composed"
When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.
Different books or even different parts of a book (even what constitutes a 'book' in the old or new testament is not well defined for any given time period before a certain point from when we have some evidence of a certain standardization at a certain place - which doesn't even mean all traditions everywhere using these books follow that same standard from that point onward) might have been written at times centuries apart and might have originated in different cultures.
My point is, sweeping statements about customs and practices of specific societies as they were between one and three millennia ago is very hard to make. Even something like "the people who wrote this book clearly practiced primogeniture" is packed with lots of assumptions. And if we could know that a certain part of some scripture was from a definite time period and originally written in a certain language... who wrote it? Where? What was the legal system there?
Take another example, a period and people we have a lot of data about: in XVII century England, for example, primogeniture and entail were standard... for the elite. Not for the middle class. You see what I'm getting at?
Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.
> "which we think they might have been originally written"
please don't assume about me, almost all of what you wrote was known to me prior before reading your comment. That information regarding XVII century England for example is something I would have supposed, but did not know for sure; I just knew the equivalent for German society at that time.
> When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.
Yeah, 300 AD would be a sensible starting point. I am strictly talking about ancient Israel, during the time where the old testament was composed, where the exact point in time does not even matter for my claim, because my claim is: "The society that composed the OT was primarily patriarchical during most of the perioud where the OT was written, edited, read, to such a degree that it would be a mistake to pretend it was not." Nobody claims to have a time machine, of course.
Here are some well-reputated sources that strengthen my claim, and are congruent with what I rememember from my own readings of the Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament way back:
- "Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (Brill, 2003)". Massive comparative study of the ANE, her conclusion: [AI/]She concludes that while women had more rights than often assumed (they could sometimes buy land or engage in trade), the societies were undeniably patriarchal in their legal architecture. High priesthoods, kingships, and tribal elderships were exclusively male domains.[/AI]
- "Hans Jochem Boecker, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East (1980)", summary: [AI/]Analyzing the biblical Covenant Code, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, and Middle Assyrian Laws, Boecker points out that women were legally disadvantaged. For instance, in many ANE legal codes, a woman's sexuality was treated as the property of her father or husband. Boecker writes regarding ANE legal codes: "There cannot either, of course, be any question of the legal equality of men and women"[/AI]
"Ancient Near Eastern societies have traditionally been described as patriarchal, and the Bible, as a document written by men, has traditionally been interpreted as patriarchal in its overall views of women.[1]: 9 [2]: 166–167 [3] Marital and inheritance laws in the Bible favor men, and women in the Bible exist under much stricter laws of sexual behavior than men. In ancient biblical times, women were subject to strict laws of purity, both ritual and moral.
Recent scholarship accepts the presence of patriarchy in the Bible, but shows that heterarchy is also present: heterarchy acknowledges that different power structures between people can exist at the same time, that each power structure has its own hierarchical arrangements, and that women had some spheres of power of their own separate from men.[1]: 27 There is evidence of gender balance in the Bible, and there is no attempt in the Bible to portray women as deserving of less because of their "naturally evil" natures."
Heterarchy being present would not render the society non-patriarchical, especially when it comes to matter like the one that started this subthread, in that geneology trees should be viewed through a patriarchical lens, and that it is more likely that those elements are something familiar to the intended audience (which is not some small religious elite, mind you, the opposite, those narratives were written for a deeply religious society, with a scripture-based religion).
> Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.
Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.
Scholars have to make and do make educated guesses though, which forms a consensus if enough do agree, and the current consensus is still that ancient israel had a patriarchical legal framework, and for example also that women were economically dependent over large amounts of time. Which is also reflect in a lot of books in the OT, which makes sense if 1) the stories where intended to be relatable and 2) the authors used what they observed around them to describe it. That depends on the genre of course, for prophetic books or lyricals books, there are different rules, but when it comes to the stories that have a narrative core, then this absolutely is something that historians consider when it comes to how the intended audience of the literarical work is structured. Constistently so, across regions and times.
The position that "many instances of primogeniture in the old testament would have been something not deeply known and likely experienced first hand by the typical reader" is pretty hard to defend, as I argued above. That is as close to knowing as we can get without a time machine - but if one does not make such (well-founded) assumptions, then much of the humanities, including hermeneutics, stands on shaky grounds.
If whoever wrote the stretches of the Exodus that might read as genealogies in current translations, in a jarring discontinuity between fluent narrative just before and after them actually meant them as genealogies, I have my doubts.
Did these authors write genealogies because they were practicing primogeniture? Unclear. Were they? To answer that we'd have to figure out who wrote these excerpts, when, where did they live, what was the legal system then and there and did these exact rules apply to them? Short answer is we don't know.
We know very little of history prior to a few hundred years ago. We know a lot of well documented episodes but to do social history even of the renaissance is a serious undertaking and shouldn't be trivialized in terms of "surely it was like so back then". Even the early medieval period has a lot of blanks. Did you know a homossexual bishop called "Flora" lived in first millennium France?
Early iron age? Attributing authorship and writing sociological analysis when we don't even know in which century exactly they lived is far fetched to say the least.
Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously, and to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions.
> Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.
This to me indicates this is something else than a friendly exchange between history nerds so I'll drop the issue.
> Even the early medieval period has a lot of blanks. Did you know a homossexual bishop called "Flora" lived in first millennium France?
I did not, but like all the facts you mentioned so far, this is not a surprise at all for me (if that was the intention), since it does not contradict any belief I had about first millenium france. It is an interesting fact, though!
> Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously
That's not the case, and I am sorry if I came over as such; I would not have tried to argue my points if I would not have taken you seriously. English is also not my native language, which might contribute to more subtle points being missed/misscommunicated.
> to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions
You see, that's the issue; your nudge would only be helpful if I indeed did not dig appropriately deep yet already; which may or may not be, but instead of verifying it first, you told me things that I either knew already, or that did not address my point at all, which was irritating. I am all for infodumps, everytime, everywhere, love 'em. What I took issue with was that you seemed to assume a lack of knowledge, and decided to nudge, seemingly not considering the possibility that you might have completely missed my point.
Which is, succinctly stated: "Surely we should be able and are able to make educated assumptions about all aspects about anytimeanywhere of human history; with the strong assumption that we do not have time machines and are therefore are limitited to guessing (or theorising, if one wants to use the fancy word), not measuring or anything or anything of that sort. It is perfectly understood that it's all guesswork, that might be mightly off regarding how it really was - and if we are lucky, the theory is not totally off".
You seemed to take this as a much stronger claim, as is evidenced by you bringing up exceptions to the "rule" more than once; that would only make sense if you literaly believe that statements such as "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was meant in its absolutes (or with absolute certainty), which it was not. Anectodes, counterexamples and so on are meaningless when it comes to statements of bigger trends. They would only be relevant if they would turn out to be a common occurance, or when the source mentions the homosexuality of a monk in passing, without making a big fuzz about it for example - a possible indication that non-hidden homosexuality amongst monks might have been at least tolerated, and maybe even not-rare in first millenium france in at least that monstery. Or was not an issue to the person who reported that. Or it was a smear campain (not all sources are reliable). And so on and so on... (Note: I don't doubt that a homosexual monk named Flora existed back than, it might be well established that he did. I am just using that fact as an example)
---
To wrap up: Infodumps/facts? Heck yeah! Exchange? Yes please. The two of us talking past each other? That's not an exchange, yes. Simply assuming I do not know something instead of verifying it? Heck no, I firmly reject that. If you would have shown me where I was wrong, a nudge would have been appreciated, but as I read it, even now, you simply misunderstood my claims - then, the nudge was missplaced, and came over as patronizing to me.
I think I understood now where it went wrong and what you tried to bring across. Appreciate the facts you droped; I am more the top-down than bottom-up type, but facts like those are interesting to me nonetheless.
I will also stop this thread; in case it helps resolving open ends: "most of the books in the old testament were written/edited/composed for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was and is my intended claim; independent of who the individuals where that wrote these books, of periods where social hierarchies within the intended audiences at time of writting/editing/composition changed, and so on and so for. Yes, that audience encompasses a bit amount of time and space. Still, people who are paid to think and write about this seem to majorily agree with "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition", if I did not wildly misread the current consensus of academic research. Again, this is a big picture claim; no singular counterexamples or short time periods can change the assumed validity of that statement, only once new sources or new interpretations of old sources indicate a different quantitative historic reality than previously assumed.
It is still the most popular English-language version according to https://christianbookexpo.com/bestseller/translations.php?id..., so for his goal ("there is no way to understand 21st-century America without understanding the Bible") I think it's the right choice.
I've only ever read KJV and haven't heard of the others. Is the downside that KJV is 1600s English? That particular line:
KJV: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
NRSV: For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
NIV: For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
Also there are things that are just bad translations even for the era -- the KJV mentions unicorns 9 times, often in weird comparisons like "the strength of a unicorn" -- whatever the Hebrew original meant (many scholars think it was referring to wild cattle known as aurochs), it certainly didn't mean a unicorn out of Western mythology.
One potential issue is that some English words have changed meaning since it was written, and sometimes in extremely confusing or misleading ways. For instance 'convenient' and 'prevent' used to have radically different meanings.
The NIV has as a stated goal to preserve the "infallibility" of the Bible, which means their translation opts for internal consistency over accuracy. I personally think it's the least trustworthy translation, a product specifically of the American evangelical movement in the Boomer heyday. The generation that really hates. The one that supercharged the anti-abortion movement as a direct response to the Supreme Court striking down racial discrimination in (private) schools that receive taxpayer monies.
Meh, the text isn't setting the attitude -hence, people railing against homosexuality while wearing polycotton slacks. The issue is susceptibility to dogma, which is an attack vector. An attacker uses this to gain root, then they can pivot by editing the creed.
I swapped from the NIV to the NLT many years ago. My father’s uncle, J.A. Thompson, was a translator for the NLT and worked on Deuteronomy and Ecclesiastes. I really appreciate the way it flows too and it is my daily reading Bible. My wife and I read through the “Daily Bible” by F Lagard Smith (NIV). Now there is an NLT version in paperback. I would love a bonded version, however. Recommended for daily reading in chronological order so you can feel the arc of the story.
What happened was Barry McCarthy, who was CFO at Netflix till 2010, left Netflix. Barry was an exceedingly creative and forward thinking CFO. He was the CFO responsible for taking Spotify public via direct listing in 2018, which was an incredibly bold move at the time. Definitely creative as far as CFOs go.
Adobe used to do these designy annual reports as well [1], and it looks like they stopped in 2003. I wonder if something in that era encouraged them to knock it off.
Edit: for Adobe, it may have coincided with significantly cutting back their Marketing/Communications department, which had a huge staff of really great artists in the 90's. I believe this became viewed as an extravagance to have a stable of really talented and creative artists and designers on staff when you can hire this stuff out and get "reasonable" results.
What is impressive to me is, it still shows there is demand from accountants/investors and offer from authors for artistically pleasing documents.
It dwindled out, but it is similar to corporate websites like SAP which were boring to death and made life in corporate a bane (we should study suicide and boredom-from-boring-documents in corporates), until all layers of management were naturally attracted to software created by little startups, even if it didn’t track time correctly, but it was cuter and nicer and didn’t require IE7.
Boredom-from-documents-and-websites is a key factor for people’s choice of employment...
Ah yes this is exactly what I needed. I was recently trying to start a CL project but I had trouble wading through all the outdated material, especially with regards to including external packages. Thanks for putting this together!
I'm going through a similar process. My caution is that 'package' has a very technical meaning in Common Lisp that is at odds with how 'package' is used in other languages (and a bit at odds with how the author uses it in their tutorial).
A package in Common Lisp is a set of interned symbols. In Common Lisp, systems are more in keeping with an ordinary understanding of packages...but combined with the idea of a build system just for fun.
ASDF is a way for managing systems (but it is worth keeping in mind that Common Lisp does not have any 'official' understanding of systems). ASDF is pretty much a de facto standard by consensus.
Quicklisp is a 'package manager' in the sense that it will go out and fetch a dependency from a repository. But what it fetches is a system: it is usually not a package in Common Lisp's technical sense.
From the Quicklisp FAQ:
How is Quicklisp related to ASDF?
Quicklisp has an archive of project files and metadata about project relationships. It can download a project and its dependencies. ASDF is used to actually compile and load the project and its dependencies.
ASDF is a little like make and Quicklisp is a little like a Linux package manager.
On the other hand, Common Lisp is very stable around ASDF and SLIME and QuickLisp. ASDF was started in 2002. Quicklisp in 2005. SLIME in 2003.
0. It's a hard problem. I have a deep respect for your trying to tackle it.
1. The hard part is that it all matters on day one and everyone will get a lot of stuff wrong for a long while and some stuff wrong always when attempting non-trivial projects. This is the rule whether it's Python or Common Lisp or Racket.
2. I'm a fan of polyglotting languages in general and Lisp's in particular. For a person really just starting out, I'd point them at the Racket ecosystem because it is designed to be newbie friendly with student languages and Common Lisp is designed for production programming on hard problems.
2. For people with some programming experience and simple curiosity, I'd just advise them to install SBCL and play around in the REPL. With an exercise of adding a script to wrap it in readline. And some exercises using the text editor of their choice to load and read and write files and such.
3. I don't think that there's a way to add training wheels to SLIME and Quicklisp and ASDF as the development environment. It just won't ever be DrRacket. At best it produces something like Aphyr's Clojure from the Ground Up...which uses Emacs; is more like a book; and definitely a labor of love. It also dives into the details at day one.
None of which means I might not submit a pull request. But I take what Norvig says seriously -- http://norvig.com/21-days.html
The niche of "welcome to Lisp, here's how to code" has been super well filled over the years. And regularly people write sort of intros to SBCL, CCL, etc. articulate-lisp isn't intended to do that - there are a few notes in that regard, just to whet your thoughts - and because I was bored - but it's not a thing there really.
But what is typically lacking is how you go from just a Lisp environment to a development environment that lets you operate at a professional level. Articulate-lisp is intended to deliver the thumbnail of how to get that put together, along with assorted references to further study.
At the time I created it, there was nothing really suitable for pro development out there. I guess roswell and portacle are things now.
Training wheels aren't really my bag of things. I'm notorious for preferring to read the O.G. paper on subjects rather than work through tutorials and simplified whatsits. But giving all the data at once doesn't provide the map of the territory that newbies crave.
There's no Royal Road to Lisp... or geometry. But a map to get you to where you're going does exist for geometry, and Lisp, I think deserves one too.
I think a resource for "leveling up" is probably better if it is opinionated. I mean, there are reasons a person might not want to use Emacs for Common Lisp development (aside from using a product with a built in IDE), but there's no reason to handle edge cases which have little to do with "leveling up" on Common Lisp...there may be a SLIME mode for Atom, but someone who chooses it is swimming upstream in terms of Common Lisp.
The situation is similar in regard to Lisp installations. There are good reasons not to use SBCL, but they probably don't have that much to do with "leveling up" (again outside the commercial IDE world) and trying to cater to those non-leveling up reasons is a distraction.
To put it another way, a person who is just starting out is not in a position to make decisions based on experience. A year later, they may have the experience to make informed decisions because they have learned what matters and what does not.
I hopeful for Roswell and Portacle, but not terribly optimistic in ways that are similar to when I hear about a new Linux distro. The hard work is not the exciting honeymoon period. It's grinding out maintenance over the years without getting paid. It's designing good features for other people without getting paid. Most projects cannot do it.
Part of the problem is that leveling up on Common Lisp is mostly a matter of will to RTFM. Sure a site can have a great article explaining Common Lisp packages, but to understand packages, readers will need to understand symbols and so the options are:
1. Expect the reader to already understand symbols.
2. Describe all of Common Lisp.
3. Accept that the reader will still have a lot of work to do after reading the article.
1 and 3 collapse into similar requirements for an author. 2 works if the author writing a book and really knows their stuff.
I think you're a bit misinformed. Chicago has two large keystone industries that serve the global economy: (1) Industrial large scale manufacturing (Boeing, John Deere, Caterpillar), (2) Insurance (all of them); not to mention a ton of Food and Agriculture HQs are based there as well.
Slightly less so nowadays. I left that area and moved to a megacity so I could get into software dev without having to work at an insurance company (or ESPN). But there's a little bit more going on with CT nowadays, and I think the insurance companies are starting to spread out. They had a ton of leverage in the area and got away with a lot (not paying taxes, etc) but the well started to run dry and people started to push back. Before I left, the mere suggestion that we demand more from these huge companies always turned into highly publicized threats to take XX,000 jobs elsewhere.
The whole situation is dumb, overall I'd avoid living in CT for a ton of reasons. CT had a lot of industry going for it (Stanley Tools in New Britain, for example, and Hartford was the center of the gun industry 100 years ago) but those of course moved overseas. The insurance industry provided a safety net so it didn't go the way of the rust belt but, late capitalism y'know, so that was just a band-aid that's being slowly ripped off. This is happening everywhere but the systematic denial isn't as ingrained as in CT, it's weird.
No they did not leave Washington, that's ridiculous. Their executive HQ is in Chicago but that doesn't mean much. Many executive HQ are in Chicago but that's not many jobs.
I think he's purposefully supposed to come off as a buffoon, but maybe a relatable one?