UN Peacekeepers? Mercenaries? Black water? USO tour with Kid Rock? Reality TV show? Oversized victory arch?

I'm being completely earnest: who is actually stupid enough to believe these guys are taken seriously in their capacity as mediators in this conflict. The IRGC has to be having the time of their lives right now. The USA is pawing, cooing, and pleading over and over again between death threats.

again just want to point out that Tasnim does not work for Araghchi

Coming up on the two-month anniversary of Stupid Suez. What do you get a war that has everything?

I’m no Trump defender and I’m unsympathetic to them but Trump’s Canadian annexation movement came *after* the election. The Iran war came as a big surprise to everyone as well. Greenland, yeah, well, we all knew

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Tiny devil on shoulder: you should refresh your BlueSky feed, something big may have happened since you looked at your phone 38 seconds ago

Why I'm on Bluesky, the alternatives: * I'm writing * I'm procrastinating from writing * I'm grading * I'm procrastinating from grading

My very unfair belief is that textual criticism is what happens when Christians discovery commentary after an interruption of 1,800 years

and it turns out, no! not at all! successfully attaining the PhD is mostly about having enough "fuck you" energy to wade through the drudgery, but having the life circumstances in place such that you don't get stuck in that drudgery for too long, however long "too long" is for you personally

I have to thread a fine needle here, because anti-intellectualism is one of the great poisons of our age: speaking as a master's degree-haver, and who did all of a PhD but the diss: advanced degree holders can be profoundly stupid, and i didn't really understand that until i was in the thick of it

Why is this not a national scandal? If 1000+ jobs were lost overnight in carmaking or steel it would be pure shock.

Likeliest conclusion: THE THREE BODY PROBLEM

In general I find “the Machine Stops” to be far too optimistic about humanity’s relation to tech

This point is actually pretty well taken. It was hilarious reading personal finance advice to start saving for retirement early!

Why tf is Gemini giving me summaries of one line emails

>start a war without telling anyone >immediately face plant >piss off the entire world by spiking energy prices >start screaming at our allies that we’re going to kick them out of NATO

I’m a sufficiently self aware knuckledragger to know that literary criticism consists of books I can’t understand about books I won’t read

these people don't think Texas Tech is a real university that matters.

Everyone wants to skip to what's the "right" one instead of weighing every one and finding out what they most agree with, for fear of getting it wrong.

I think the biggest challenge in undergraduate education (other than "do the reading") is getting students to understand that there are multiple contending *arguments* rather than one true and many false arguments

If you are a professor students have all sorts of reactions to you, ranging from passionate dislike, through intense crushes, utter indifference, idolising admiration, and into contemptuous disdain. What I think students rarely appreciate though is how asymmetric this is.

They're welcome to take microblogging super seriously but I have enough serious stuff going on day to day, this is my place to unleash my batty brain and chat with the other benevolent weirdos.

A key disconnect in how I use social media and how others seem to: I'm here to CHAT, not argue.

Agreed. There’s a lot of people desperate for rewarding work.

My attention has been drawn to this delightful image.

we should all be advising the heirs of the mandate of heaven 9-9-6 suggests they don't want to hear

status: explaining to undergrads that this unit must "sleep" between 10 pm and 6 am, rendering it impossible to answer emails

so uh slazac is exploring generating tumblr style infographics for political propaganda and

Is there talk therapy for geopolitical analysts?

The market is smart in the stupidest way possible is a good way to think about this. I think the macro guys really oversell their hand on how markets have been rational etc. Markets are rational in the sense that they’re driving a car that is liable to explode but it’s also too dangerous to stop.

No, because the primary direction of resource flows is still to Asia regardless of season. There is no time this could have been done that wouldn't primarily be endangering already impoverished people across developing states, because those are the primary countries buying Hormuz transiting fuels.

i think a very big indicator is that everyone has forgotten that it started in late february and its almost may

Israel knowers: help me decode this sentence from Haaretz: “Israel's Independence Day seeks to conceal the country's best-kept secret: the Nakba” Is the idea that Israelis don’t know about the displacement?

i spent my whole life believing the president didn't actually have a big ECONOMY BAD/GOOD lever on the resolute desk but then this group of yahoos went and built one and then broke the lever off

An entire generation of pundits and contrarians made this their pet issue and now that it is happening at a level never seen before, it’s just:

My forthcoming book is (in part) on denaturalization and I want to really emphasize that this is NOT A NORMAL THING. The US govt, historically speaking, has actively avoided denaturalizations because they were previously a giant pain in the ass and seen as embarrassing!

"so a potus starts a war with iran, iran grabs control of the strait of hormuz, how do you think the stock market does" there's a point in time, i'm not 100% certain where it is exactly, but the market is cut in half as a response.

and oped is just professionalized pancakewaffle discourse

This seems plausible and sad

Today in hire more people over 40 to work in journalism.

Enemies list? Enemies database!

All orange men are bad, but not all bad men are orange

with zero sarcasm this is good government and we should do this immediately

Climate change denial takes many forms. The demand for state subsidized home insurance in wildfire, hurricane, and flood risk areas is one of them.

As you know, Hampshire College is closing, and hundreds of our wonderful staff & faculty colleagues are facing sudden job loss without severance. Hampshire staff & faculty have launched an Emergency Relief Fund—if you’re able, please donate or share! www.helphampshireworkers.com

I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

I forget the post that was like "Americans treat Trump like he's an inconvenience and the rest of the world treats him like the President of the United States"

This was semi-amusing at the time