Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.
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The extreme degree to which Voltaire was hated by the great men of his era is surprising--hated even by the likes of Mozart, who wrote to his father after Voltaire's death, "the arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket."
The Ivy League universities happen to be good schools, but academics has nothing to do with the Ivy League: the Ivy League was founded as a football league and still today remains merely an intercollegiate athletic league.
Although the Tango greats like Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla are first rate musicians, Tango doesn't capture the "everyday man in the street, letting himself go" sentiment as well as its oft-forgotten contemporary, the Murga, does. You can still see it, with its eccentric Carneval-like costumes and dances, in the provinces of Argentina and Uruguay today.
Although Yale has a good law school, Yale itself can feel more like a retirement community for geniuses than a stimulating university: The great Yale faculty members get tenure there decades after doing their brilliant work elsewhere.
Although Hume's classic Treatise on Human Nature is a key work of political philosophy to come out of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume's forgotten masterpiece Of the Standard of Taste, in which he argues that judging art is not arbitrary, is probably the most important work in aesthetics before Kant.
