Sometimes I wish I could have been a Boomer who spent a year in Japan after getting out, then returned to the States to claim that he'd been initiated into an ancient martial arts tradition and start his own dojo and sell utterly fanciful books by the truckload.

There was a great Duffelblog post on the history of the battleship a while back that pointed out that battleships were best at getting blown up in the harbor to galvanize Americans to go to war.

Worrying about a 1933-style loyalty oath scenario and instead getting a The Angry Veteran Facebook Page copypasta pasta. Obviously better the latter than the former, but still, [chain of profanities].

This is one of those things where when you're trying to explain the intellectual milieu of Celtic Studies Enthusiasts of the 1990s and early aughts and it really is a, "you had to be there" thing.

As someone who in most of the BHO years was very much in favor of People Versus the Powerful language, I've watched in real time as this language caught on--to get used to mean, "It's the Democrats' fault that it's expensive to gas up my F-250."

Stross' law as a companion to Moore's law: the time horizon to an imagined science fiction future halves every 18 months, especially if it's Charlie's.

I'm definitely the person on the left whenever people bring up "Celtic Christianity." Although as someone who'd like to be young but isn't, I should also emphsasize that the Celtic thing is less Boomer than it is Xers who grew up on Mists of Avalon-type stuff.

As I continually say, the collapse of the Dispensationalist Consensus among Stand With Israel Conservatives is an absolute effing Monkey's Paw.

Very pleased with this freehand.

Why can't these people fill their leisure time with something normal like mini painting?

There's a certain class of centrist (or "centrist") journalist On Here that Bluesky puts in the category of Guy You're Not Supposed to Talk To. Problem is that snubbing only works when it's coordinated. Is it bad that these people would talk to skull caliper types? Yes. But the snubbing failed.

The "great" thing about this admin is that it could be anything from one of the dumbass hobbyhorses of the right-wing NatSec people to the functional end of America as a liberal-democratic republic. Whee.

One reason I love being the faculty adviser to my school's gaming club is that it gets young people interacting face to face, making friends, and the like.

CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right? IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If— CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother? IKARI: Look, let me answer the question. CHOTINER: Sure.

Chuck Jones's birthday. I like to post this extract from "Chuck Amuck" most years, because it's one of my favourite bits of writing. Please join me in revelling in Chuck's tale of "Johnson", the grapefruit loving cat who for a while, shared his childhood.

Another good example is theorizing whiteness. It absolutely makes sense to talk about whiteness as a function of power in the seminar room. But when you talk about "multiracial whiteness" to the general public, it sounds bizarre and incoherent.

So apparently rapid onset gout is a Thing. This is some bullshit.

[Thinks] Unfortunately, I must endorse this position 110%.

The current moment is very, very bad, but this website can also time its Doom Spiraling by when the orning coffee has people with highest adrenaline in the morning, and then in the evening when the gummy has hit and kicked off the paranoia, and you can calculate this by EST.

Can you guys please stop shitting yourselves? Okay, fine, we're all doomed. Now we're doomed and smell like poop. Really not helping the situation here at all.

*Is* there any sort of policy solution for things like, e.g., weed or gambling that some people can do responsibly, but cause other people to wreck their lives?

Being 49: >Wake up two days after upper body workout, rotator cuff inflamed >Pop a Meloxicam, does no good >Wait a few more days, still inflamed >Fearing a tear, call sports medicine clinic, set an appointment >Inflammation clears up two days after setting the appointment

I was idly scrolling Reddit and the algorithm shoved this into my face, and I both sort of want to understand it,but also get angered by it.

I love my Senator.

I wonder if he's going to have alchemists concoct mercury-based immortality elixirs for him...

Seriously, we're going to get a "consultant's idea of a Regular Joe" (to quote I believe @edburmila.bsky.social) who's going to raise All the Money nationally, whose YouTube ads will go viral among left-liberals nothing like his constituents, and who'll lose handily in 2026.

"Man, check out Mary Hegar's viral ad! We should definitely give her money!" "Amy McGrath could finally unseat Mitch McConnell! Love this viral YouTube ad, and I can't wait to give her money!" "I'm going to donate to Flowers to stick it to MTG!" So no, not feeling the Graham Planter enthusaism.

Question for Americanists: why *do* historians of labor and the Gilded Age have such a soft spot for the anarchists? Is this one of those weird founder effect thing where there was one New Left guy who advised, like, fifty PhD students?

I love this. He's also going to lose.

The absolute state of right-wing brainrot about Covid is nuts. There's a whole set of grievances, retcons, and utter nonsense even by right-wingers who believe that modern medicine is real.

One issue where right-wing critiques of "liberal bias" actually do hit home is that survey US History books tend to have these fossilized lefty grievances (e.g., the Rosenberg trial) that by the eleventh edition will have a grudglingly inserted sentence that yeah Hiss was guilty.

The Paper of Record is doing a write-up of all the ways the current administration is very bad for science. But of course they're using a Neil deGrasse Tyson 2012-Reddit I Fucking Love Science Struggle Between Science and Religion Framework. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/s...

The role of exvangelicals in the intellectual history of the 2010s and early 2020s is pretty significant, but I'm not sure how.

Tomorrow is the last Sunday of our summer break! Lots to look forward to next month: Sept 7: Ariane Schneck on Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia Sept 14: Polarities in Daoism Sept 21: Early Cartesianism Sept 28: Femininity in Daoism All on www.historyofphilosophy.net! #philsky #podcasts

Also, the presence of a lot of enlisted personnel with... low cognitive capacity.

👇👇👇

I'm genuinely excited that this semester's Imperium Maledictum game is starting on a combo of paradise and agri-world and is going to end up dragging players into politicking in both The Inquisition and Commorragh.

The chief issue w/ that Fascism is Never Stopped Electorally piece is that like many American left-liberals, the writer has AP Euro brain. The Central European example is the one we always think of, but we've got caudillismo in this hemisphere (and honestly Jacksonianism) that's closer to the mark.

You know what's weird to me about the Indian Wars? It's not the brutal atrocities or broken treaties, it's how twice, with the Nez Percé and Navajo, the feds brutally relocate a people, that people complains to the feds, and the feds say, "Sorry about that, sure you can go back home."

The "SAHMing is easy if you simply make More Virtuous Financial Decisions." to "hey mom friends 👋 so I started this side hustle for a little extra spending 💵 and now I make $1000/mo from my own home and you can too 👊 if you sign up for a starter kit with referral code REVITALIZE30xRqVpt 👯‍♂️" pipeline

I am at my most absolute weeb when watching a samurai flick and seeing the thumb at the katana handle and realizing that it's the same as the gunslinger going to the gun.

This is why it's easier to be a progressive medievalist than to be a progressive Americanist.

Last point on why the invisibility of everything that's not NYC, LA, or the Bay Area is a problem. I'm Texan and for years, I was telling people online that, um, guys, Mexicans are socially conservative, and people just blithely dismissed it *even after the 2020 elections.*

I'm calling it. America is gonna have a larger population than China by 2125.

[first day of work in Gondor] Beregond: Welcome! I'm here to give you the tour, teach you the passwords, etc. Any questions before we get started? Pippin: Burning questions! What about breakfast? What are the meal-times? Where's the dinning room? Have you people discovered second breakfast yet?

Georgia is a swing state and Atlanta's metropolitan area is one of the largest in the US. It even has a decent (for North America) subway system. So why must our republic be subjected to All NYC Mayoral Race All The Time?

Also: too many people are looking at The Current Unpleasantness through an AP Euro frame, whereas the villains occupying DC are much more in the mold of Latin America or, let us be honest, America at its worst.

Seriously, every range war is basically Grasping Corporation, Republican versus Small Farmers and Cattlemen, Democrat, and on both sides of the fight you'll have gunfighters who are Latino, Black, and Eye-Poppingly Racist By The Standards of the Late 1800s Whites.

I'm reading up on range wars of the 19th c. for my teaching US History and, man, the Western could seriously make a comeback if you emphasized the extremely noir or indeed cyberpunk characteristics. Corporations with their own paramilitaries, both sides are some flavor of evil, etc.

Innocence proves nothing.