I believe this is more than all US fatalities in the entire War on Terror

Why have standards when the only way you address being flagrantly wrong and sloppy on basic facts is to offer a debate on your podcast

b) Simon Bolivar was visiting/living in Paris during the transition from the Consulate to the First Empire. An initial admirer of Bonaparte, he angrily shut himself off from Paris the day of Bonaparte's coronation. (2/2)

My favorite two anecdotes about Napoleon Bonaparte: a) Ludwig van Beethoven had initially composed his third symphony in honor of Napoleon. Upon hearing the news that Bonaparte had crowned himself emperor, he immediately crossed out the dedication. (1/2)

Also, Washington lucked into one of the greatest administrative weirdos of all time with Hamilton and forced him to work with James Madison long enough to create and popularize a federal state.

A scary thing to think about when we have President Wilhelm II over here throwing matches into a gasoline-soaked tinderbox.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

Napoleon is the platonic ideal of getting lost in the sauce

"What's the point of standards?" is the question our era is destined to answer. Thoroughly. From Dear Leader all the way down to beat cops and schoolteachers; from internet-poisoned billionaires' Very Online pet hack journos, down to rando shitpoasters.

Can everyone stop pretending that the new CBS is in the news business, and admit that it’s a post-truth propagandistic organization, now that they openly admit it?

Yikes. So much for the special relationship.

"an unusual mass deportation to a country with a poor human rights record that the United States had bombed earlier this year in an effort to set back its nuclear program" but we're sending them back dissidents "who repeatedly told American authorities that Iran would persecute them"

Mike Duncan’s podcast series on the Haitian Revolution was both good and clear eyed about the Revolution, its driving factors, key players, and the complex legacy of it. Would recommend.

'Woke' Napoleon never becomes dictator, let alone emperor, and probably remakes Europe far more thoroughly as a result. On top of everything else, he completely shat on what could've been an *amazing*, legendary legacy continuing his earlier career. All he had to do was preserve the Republic.

The impossible search for a woke Napoleon: bsky.app/profile/zas....

To anyone who doesn't already know: His fellow revolutionaries literally arranged for their self-proclaimed 'Emperor' to be ripped limb from limb by an angry mob.

I have only seen the edges of this and it is very bizarre, cos, like, the actual people involved in fighting the Haitian revolution plainly did not themselves see Dessalines as an unproblematically great guy to whom they owed fealty and honour! This is not, like, a subtle feature of their evaluation

Napoleon Bonaparte model of leadership goes to bad places

as i said earlier, the problem with calling someone "the black Napoleon" is the "Napoleon" part

This is another reason local police forces should be centralized at the state level. While in a crisis ppl may be reassigned to non-specialized jobs, in normal times the traffic cops should be entirely separate from the SWAT team, who are entirely separate from the suicide prevention team, etc...

And it isn't just escalation of force, it's different jobs with different training. Like, the National Guard doesn't do hostage rescues because they don't know how. Every level is a specialized job with different skills.

My take as well: We need everything from "social worker who can dodge a punch" to "SWAT team" because sometimes someone's having a psychotic break in public and sometimes someone has a gun and hostages. The police being our one-size-fits-all solution is pretty stupid in that light.

my controversial opinion that nobody likes is basically that we have no escalation ladder, both here and for incarceration. there are a lot of people who should not be, properly speaking, free, but unfortunately we have basically one level of restricted freedom and it's "torture pit"

its also,,,, the resources other than police for a suicidal person at risk are ____________ Other than a few cities there aren’t other response teams “Just talk the person down, try a crisis line“ Ok bud sure thing

"would a mostly-random guy with a gun improve this" most of the time, no. on occasion, yes. send in the random guy with a gun. we are so far below chance that almost no matter how you bias it, it will probably be a net improvement

this is fundamentally accurate but it is actually kind of easy to meet this bar

I think this is tied into the romanticization of the Haitian Revolution as the pure, good, unproblematic revolution.

Dessalines? People are trying to rehabilitate Dessalines? Dessalines of all people?

Toussaint Louverture is right there, he didn’t start what every scholar agrees was a genocide.

Oh yes completely! The way this simplistic binary operates though is that if you acknowledge the evil or faults of one side you are then mechanistically saying the other side must have been "good" and because the colonial French couldn't have been good Dessaline must have been, etc.

The attempts to rehabilitate Dessalines are bad, and very much of a kind with trying to rehabilitate the likes of Marat & Robespierre (also in fashion, for a time). This is a guy who mass-murdered real or imagined enemies, be they White or Black, reintroduced forced labor, and made himself Emperor.

Writers, tread carefully.😂🤣 #Booksky #WritingCommunity #ReadingCommunity

“I spent the money that I stole, and cannot give it back. It’s gone.”

The actual amount of #IEEFA tariffs likely to be refunded, in the event of a full reversal: $115b to $145b, says a Goldman estimate.

this is why I think threats to your beloved local sportsplaying public university is a space where academics should/could get writing. explain why the Indiana whose football team is now weirdly good is under real threat.

should people be most upset about DOGE ICE MURDER CORRUPTION? Yes. But if they are activated by the ballroom price of pasta/booze whatever, then fine. So long as they get active.

Trump makes things worse in a fractal way. The same patterns but from tiny things to the biggest worst things. Just keep telling the story each time it happens.

It’s insane to treat the filibuster as the most sacrosanct. Article 1 power of the purse, oversight, and war? Nah. Emoluments clauses? Bribery prohibition? Meh. Criminal law? 14A? Doesn’t count. But maybe the Senate changes a rule it has multiple times before? Gasp! Not that. Anything but that.

We finally found the thing that would make regular Dem voters reliably as angry as the most divorced car dealer in rural Alabama. Sadly, that thing was actual fascism (or an attempt to create it, anyway--that attempt is going rather poorly right now).

Its uncanny how much this feels like the 2010-2014 GOP

I'm almost relieved a master poaster of this magnitude remains off of Bluesky. (almost, it'd be too much fun to have her here to wish otherwise)

Elon thinks empathy is a weakness, but here JCO demonstrates that by understanding your foe and feeling his emptiness you can verbally eviscerate him and consume his shriveled, still quivering heart.

The Dem Establishment's problem is that they can't stop having these moments. This comes right after refusing to side with Mamdani against Cuomo until the last moment (or never, even after the Trump endorsement, if you're Schumer!), which comes after voting en masse for all sorts of horrid noms...

Extremely tangential, but the Jan 6th - Jan 20th triumvirate is one of those things that is unknown to most of the population. It has had no effects, and I thought it would.

Anyway, it’s good to remember this when people tell you Musk had a grand plan for Twitter the whole time. Like, it’s possible some of his cohorts/enablers did; however, Musk basically bought Twitter because he went on a bender after getting dumped and made some bad decisions.

Deeply weird thing about British politics is whenever I look closely at any of the political parties I go “well, you’re gonna lose”.

The 8 Democrats in the Senate defending their actions remind me of this scene from Office Space

On the plus side, this is going to be a big structural disadvantage for aging or mentally unstable tyrants going forward. It makes it much easier for their corrupt advisors to lie to them, and for those advisors to lie to each other, and for their minions to lie to them; and it was already huge!

I genuinely miss the drop down menus. They were highly ergonomic, when properly employed.

The distance in time between now and when Microsoft Office replaced drop down menus with the ribbon bar at the top is the same as the distance between then and the fall of the Berlin Wall