Not to be contrary but I think that's the same America or at least the same Disney. They were eager to jump in the direction they thought power was going 2019-23 in order to make profit and now in 2025 they think power is going the other way, they jump the other way. There was never a spine there.

As an aside, if you're not tuning into @sarahtaber.bsky.social 's videos and posts, you're missing out, I think. Her insights on who actually lives in rural America (American farmers are mostly not poor!) and why the think what they do are really valuable.

My phone pushed a Bloodlines 2 impression that was, essentially, "the writing is good, the atmosphere is impeccable, but the gameplay isn't actually very fun" and my first thought was, 'oh, good, so exactly like the first one?' Like, do these folks remember VTM:Bloodlines', uh, let's say 'combat'

I re-read Letter from a Birmingham Jail the other day and I was struck by just how stunningly brilliant it was not just in writing but strategic thinking. Like, not news, it's a modern classic for a reason. It's just a remarkably clear vision of a strategy to achieve change.

I cancelled my WaPo sub, so I can't read the editorial where they try to explain why retaking Bagram is a good idea. But I am struggling to imagine the depth of the abyss that must exist where one is supposed to have self-respect to pen an editorial saying it's a good idea to retake Bagram.

Finally watching The Last Kingdom and have encountered one of my historical/fantasy writing pet peeves, which is having just one or two 'old-timey' ways to say something like 'money' and then using them over and over again almost like proper nouns. In tLK, 'silver' and 'wealth;' like 'coin' Skyrim.

September 21: A young boy of 8 years, 9 months, and 13 days [annis VIII, m(ensibus) VIIII, d(iebus) XIII] dies in Rome. His name was Pupus Torquatianus. His brother died 8 days later at the age of 5 years, 6 months, & 6 days (CIL VI, 27556). Their parents commemorate them gams.uni-graz.at/o:epsg.276

You know, I was wondering the other day, with the academic job market being so bad, where would I draw the line where I wouldn't apply. Certain states? Institutions? And then I saw that Hillsdale (from which Lippincott) had two openings in classics and I thought, "Oh, there's the line. Clearly."

One thing that is fascinating about EVE Online (which I played years back, but have not for a long time) is that the experience of the game is very different depending on if you're in a major 0.0 alliance or not and where in the structure of the 0.0 alliance you are.

You know, I'm going to say it - Latin can be a lovely language, but every form of eo, ire is the most hideous form of eo, ire. eunt? imus? ierant? ierint? iens? euntis? Then you've got choices: iit (awful) or ivit (still bad)? do you want ierunt, iverunt or iere? All terrible. Just the worst.

Perhaps someone with more economics training than I - I had some coursework, but not a lot - could explain what the hell he's thinking? Dramatically shrinking the labor force ought to raise costs in any enterprise which is sensitive to labor costs, which is...um...all of them?

again, as somebody who has actually lived in a dictatorship and worked with dissidents from across the world, this kind of whiny cosplaying by academics pretending they have some secret knowledge of resistance is very annoying.

You'd still see movement to higher incomes across the board.

One of the other great advantages of liberalism is that we're able to read graphs and so can notice that the share of humanity in extreme poverty has declined massively over the last 200 years.

Pardon me, but while MAGA and Trump may want to use it that way, we don't need to let them. I think it is absolutely the case that Trump aspires to be something like a fascist dictator, I said so last October. But we are not powerless and they have not won yet.

'Liberalism is always doomed to failure' is just a very odd thing to say after roughly 250 years of liberalism being on the march. In 1750 there were between 0 and 1 liberal countries on Earth, depending on the line you want to cut the line on the Dutch Republic. Today there are ~80 of them.

A free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.

I would like to see the 'liberal center' as it were be a bit more aware that there is a distinction between 'doing debate' and defending the concept of debating. Liberalism isn't a call to intellectual neutrality, but an active commitment to specific principles of liberty, pluralism and rights.

So what's striking to me is that this is basically the Orban/Modi playbook but also that it is hard to say that it is working. In approval terms, Modi is actually popular in India and until very recently in Hungary Fidesz had a hard lock on 55% of the electorate. MAGA has never polled so high.

This might be the dumbest fucking sentence I’ve ever seen

This is honestly not very far off, with a few more percents to be gained in traditional political history, history of technology and economic-but-not-labor history. But to be clear, staffing up those fields means bringing departments back to c. 2010 levels, which would be +25% or more of current.

So, hot take but actually the solution is not quotas (obviously) but just more jobs in the academic humanities. Part of the problem with the humanities jobs crisis is you get hired basically sight unseen (straight from PhD) or not at all and I'd buy that process is more ideological.

Universities already have professors who think woke on campus went too far, the gender stuff is a little weird, free market economics are good, etc. What Republicans actually want are people who will inform Tayshaun his inferior skull shape makes him subhuman filth, then fail him for complaining.

Happy Birthday to us!! So grateful to be part of this team and to work alongside such amazing people ☺️

At long last, we are going to do a Sicario from the hit movie Don’t do Sicario

they are profoundly unpopular and they are raising the volume and the threats because they know they are profoundly unpopular

YouTube served me up a video asking "is mathematics invented or discovered?" and as someone who knows the etymology of the word 'invent' that is kind of a funny question to ask.

Oof. acoup.blog/2019/08/16/c...

I think I'd put "crazy thing Herotodus wrote being true" at maybe closer to 50/50, but that's still turned out to be *much* higher than we would have credited him pre-archaeology. The value of archaeology (and sources in languages not Latin/Greek) to confirm/disconfirm our sources is significant!

This week on the blog: more peasants! We take our model of peasant farming from last week and factor in land scarcity, tenancy and exploitation and hopefully clear up at last that you do not, in fact, work harder than a pre-modern peasant! acoup.blog/2025/09/12/c...

The thing to understand about the language policing of the MAGA folks declaring angrily that (accurately) calling Trump a fascist is incitement is that this standard only goes one way. Their violent rhetoric is 'legitimate,' after all, because they don't view you as fully human anyway.

Indeed. Both basic human rights and the rights of citizens are terribly weakened if they can be denied to one group or another, if they can be made contingent on some arbitrary standard. If they can take the unalienable rights of trans folks, they can do the same to your unalienable rights too.

Wild and depressing narrative, but of course we've had our own equivalent of this in the United States - quite a few figures in MAGA are pretty openly 'pro-war criminal,' and Trump/Hegseth have reversed actions against American war-crimes-perpetrators on that basis.

it is so weird that he comes here with these little taunts, as if users on this website think we are engaged in a great game of discourse. like yeah dude, nothing here matters. when i want my thoughts to be widely read, i post them in the new york times.

One of the things I have come to appreciate is that a good deal of Rome's success came from the fact that, as rapacious and opportunistic and bellicose as they could be, they mostly avoided giving unnecessary insult to their allies. A virtue rare in antiquity as today; we used to be good at it.

This week on the blog: more peasants! We take our model of peasant farming from last week and factor in land scarcity, tenancy and exploitation and hopefully clear up at last that you do not, in fact, work harder than a pre-modern peasant! acoup.blog/2025/09/12/c...

At the historical fashion forum in Historic Deerfield today and tomorrow! Not doing the full liveblogging thing, but I will be popping in to share stuff from time to time.

It is bad that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.That does not make him a good man. You don’t have to make him into a martyr just because he was a victim.Painting Kirk as a role model for political discourse requires either a staggering ignorance or intentional neglect ofwhat he actually stood for.

Graphic summary of the "tyranny of the wagon equation" for a Civil War army of 100,000 men + 20,000 cavalry & artillery horses + X wagon mules as a function of days' march from a base. The equine supply factor is total daily forage ÷ food (for humans). By day 4 or 5 it's out of control.

I don't know what language training TCW has but this strikes me as an effort to imitate the baroque sentence structure of classically trained authors imitating Latin literary sentence structure, but without the underlying grasp of Latin.

apropos of this, people who want to sound smart are like "READ THE ART OF WAR BRO ITS SO IMPORTANT BRO" and if you actually read it Sun Tzu is like "do not rely on your army stealing food from the locals. there won't be enough and they will revolt on you. bring your own food. this is important"

It means "if we said "speech that advocates for inciting violence," our lawyers said we'd get hosed in a lawsuit, so we're pretending we're disciplining conduct, but the conduct in question is speech, so we're still probably hosed when the lawsuit comes."

stray question. This actor is performing in front of a shelter it seems. Is it part of the stage design or is he acting in a different setting outside of a traditional theater? From Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos in Cordoba, Spain.

Unsurprisingly, the thing Noah Smith is saying is obviously not true. Look at reports on the reaction to the assassination of MLK... "glee, satisfaction and weeping in equal parts" (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/r...) as the Smithsonian notes "some actually celebrated" (nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stor...).

Having a hard time imagining what was said could justify a firing through tenure. Given that the university has made explicit that the firing was for speech, if the speech is even remotely political, the first amendment claim - it's a public university - would, I assume, be very strong.

Political violence is bad because civil conflict is absolutely fucking terrible for everyone. It empowers the worst people within a society and feeds into endless cycles of escalating violence that get harder and harder to stop.

Rising political violence is bad, even when it happens to someone I do not like, whose views I find reprehensible. The road of endless escalation leads nowhere good for society.

It is a testament to white nationalist/"nat. con." stupidity to insist, when there is one 'immigration nation' on earth and it is also the richest and most powerful country to have ever existed, that immigration and diversity makes us weaker. Like asking "what makes Usain Bolt so slow?"

This is absolutely true and absolutely needs to happen and also I am completely certain it will not happen. The petty status hierarchies nonsense of department politics will keep it from happening because it will make the tenured feel slightly better about themselves moments before they are fired.