Social page for the American Civil War podcast, located at: https://uscivilwar.substack.com/ Get in, loser. We're damning torpedoes!
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It is honestly bizarre to me that Americans in the media, basically treat Trump's pronouncements as either sane-washable, or simply ignore them entirely as background noise. It's like we've been forced to collectively adopted him as a racist, demented uncle who cannot control his inchoate speech.
This is more or less literally the Know-Nothing platform! uscivilwar.substack.com/p/episode-17...
And, to that point, this narrowing of American identity is not an idolization of our history, but a distinct perversion of it. In reality, America was pretty open to settlement far beyond English & Scottish and a few grudgingly-accepted Europeans. He can't even accept the actual Irish.
"Autistic Dog" Autistic Dog! That's my comment in its entirety. Autistic Dog.
I argue they may not "win", but they certainly feel "safe". It's the psychologically easy route. Heavily-protected industries often wind up being inefficient, or even lose money, but the barriers keep them alive. Unless, of course, they need components or materials only available overseas...
In this specific case, I suggest the killer's self-identification was both erratic and not the real problem. I think he was just miserable, at times tried identities to feel better, but finally wanted to make it everyone else's problem in any way possible.
The missing article there is, "An". "An" Anti-Christ. One among others. Christ is THE defined and irreplaceable being. But there is no one Anti-Christ, no singular figure who is the Son of Satan. But any human can become, a vile being spreading sin. There have been, and will be, others.
I couldn't even support a blanket designation for Savannah (there are a few buildings that frankly need to be demolished) and it's historical enough to choke an Oxford don.
One idea I consider off-and-on is that Unions may be much more functional if they are company-specific. Perhaps buying stock collectively. And if they aren't pan-industry, they can focus on that single company, and act as a second line of communication identifying problems or mismanagement.
I'm not saying it's comedic that the French Revolution got started because of what was, in effect, 18th century shitposting. But I am saying I find it hilarious the Revolutionaries "rescued" a bunch of people from the Bastille who probably would have preferred to stay inside and nap.
Ten "Oofs" in a row. Deca-Oof.
One area where I might expand the overall point, is that this is an era when extended family contacts were very important. Commonly, one branch of a family might have slaves even when others did not. This tended to bind entire kin groups to the slave system.
Also, this is an excellent video to understanding how slavery dominated Southern thinking. There are a handful of points I could quibble with, but still among the best ways to communicate what slavery meant to people.
Today we approach a question regarding the slave economy. Was it profitable? Was it economically efficient? How did slavery affect the US economy? And if slavery wasn’t good for the country, why did slaveholders keep it?
New podcast: Bonus Episode 11: Did Slavery Help America Develop? *Free Markets vs. Slavery in the Clash of Economies* uscivilwar.substack.com
I agree, but no other administration in national history would have allowed this monstrosity in office.
My response is: "EEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" I do not like this.
Tough competition between him and Stephen Miller.
That is the sickest burn one could ever deliver.
WW2 would have been more interesting with titanic cats batting at Maus tanks.
I'm a little confused. This is a prequel? I feel like the TTL wasn't half bad as a single season, but part of its appeal was seeing the main character dealing with mental problems and uncertainty over what was real. I'm not sure what the point of this is.
Good God. I'm now wondering if I'll need to travel to another state, or potentially even fly to another country, just to get a vaccine.
I'm hoping to get an invitation to party in his backyard. I understand that's how nerds find spouses these days. Do you think ICE will attack before or after Peter Suderman makes cocktails?
Q "How did the negotiation go?" A "Well, we don't know what we want, what they offered, or what we agreed to, or how we would get at it if we did agree, or why anyone else would respect our agreement. But other than that it went fantastic!"
In a just world, Hirohito (for example) was horribly guilty. But would it have done the living any good to punish him? If Japan doesn't atone in some grand public way for our notice, but does consciously rejected the policies of militarism, maybe that's good enough. It's a muddled compromise.
I'm not 100% certain of your stance. I have read (and admire) the book. I kinda disagree with Mr. Gurri here. The war-crimes trials in japan were if anything considerably more thorough than post-war Germany. But at the end of the day, there were far too few people with clean hands left.
Hmm... I should sell courses for $60,000 a year. I could go down to $50,000 but don't want to look desperate.
But I do want to emphasize this is different from the point that even acknowledged, capable professionals can screw up epically. Light-hearted example: Apple has released several epically bad concepts over the years, despite being one of the absolutely best companies for user-based design.
How reliable are they? Are their writings riddled with obvious, or not-so-obvious errors? Can they defend their work honestly? Is their real expertise actually relevant to this topic? And so, ad infinitum. Any commonplace idiot can shove (or be shoved) forward under the banner of 'Expert'.
First, that means being suspicious of experts, instead of reflexively denying them. A little questioning of received wisdom goes a very long way. But anyway, reasons for suspicion and general "alertness": Who named this person an 'expert' and why? What are their credentials and experience?
I do not mean this always happens. And certainly communities (including academic, legal, cultural economic etc.) will form assumptions or ideologies that will affect errors, too. But at the most basic level, people make mistakes. We have additional reason to be suspicious of experts as a rule:
With respect to Mr. Yglesias, the first, second and third reason to listen to non-experts is not that the experts are stupid, or short-sighted, or insular. It's because they're quite frequently wrong. Even well-meaning professionals with years of experience and strong incentives fail horribly.
That is among the worst abuses of pseudo-math I've ever seen. One can, and should, make a good case for transportation alternatives without tortured statistics.
For reference: this is where I've seen the character. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddpx...
Very specifically, they will happily promise maybe-someday free money to others in exchange for getting all the free money right now.
It carries the horrendous taint of human thought, blanketing the entire planet in an unending yet silent scream of unmet needs: attention, belonging, humour, lust or even pain. It is our most glorious and terrible achievement. The cosmos shudders. (Also good for finding dank memes.)
All the glory of the Republic, her grand ideals and monumental achievements and the vastness of her citizens and the nobility of her laws, and even her faults and failings, are to be trampled by muddy pigs for the sake of the rotting ego of a narcissistic pedophile and his pack of cranks and madmen.
it is strange if I read this to mean he either didn't know, or his brain is sufficiently cooked not to remember? Also he's taking delight in breaking the law to punish people, and should be immediately impeached by any Congress not completely lost in corruption and cowardice.
Bolton may be wrong, but if wrong he is within the bounds of liberal society. He does not demonstrate malice in his public service. We might disagree with Bolton about diplomacy or our military stance, but I don't fear he's going to send troops into Chicago while screaming about fake crime stats.
Multiple things can be true at once. For example: *That's not a very good corporate logo (whether or not the old logo was especially good). *It's insipid to pretend Cracker Barrel is anything more than a decent chain. *Chris Rufo is just an awful excuse for a human being.
LOL I looked it up and you're right. I've seen people make silly videos using that character but I had no idea it was from a vampire-themed fighting game.
I want to propose a political truce. Every ICE agent arrests Mr. Abrego (they'll have to form an orderly queue) and immediately releases him for later appearance. Each pays him 20 bucks in passing. He gets a decent living, they can boast huge arrest numbers, and we end the ICE dumpster fire.
What is that from?
Assessing his life through the lens of Privilege (as the poster on the preceding thread does) is an odd choice, forcing a modern frame, hardly universal today, where it does not fit at all. Chesterton had quirks and failings, not always above his time, but that is genuinely universal, and human.
I think the context was a woman asking him, "Why aren't you out at the Front?" The matter of 'privilege' is both interesting and complex. Catholics in Britain then still faced some level of social dis-approbation, but he likely had more from being a gadfly on the government's tender rump.
I'm not against buybacks; they just one way for companies to return cash to investors. (Buybacks off borrowed cash is Another Thing Entirely.) In context this is communicating that shareholders don't believe companies can do better with AI than the market average, which is a huge swing.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=had1...
Just relabel them as extra-extra-EXTRA spicy. What's the problem?
Well, once you adjust for cosmology, theology, the purpose of living, morality, the organizational structure of religion, the actual lived experience of religious practice, its influence on daily life, and the nature of religious art there's a vague similarity if you squint.
I.e., if you get rid of the Jedi, what does one add that's cooler or more interesting than Jedi and still gives the story the greater meaning than Lazers In Space? I'm not claiming it can't be done. I am saying it's a lot easier to get rid of the Jedi than to deal with the narrative hole.
That goes into the Mystery Box style of film-making ; a promise to do something meaningful later. But you then have to pay off that promise. Given how iconic Jedi are, I question whether anyone could pay that narrative debt. (Mystery Boxes are not bad; they are a tool.)
Or in a meta-narrative sense, "What are you going to fill the gap in the story with?" The Jedi serve purposes of the plot and narrative, and getting rid of them doesn't eliminate the need for that. Then the story becomes a packet of idiots shooting lazers at each other over trade rights in space.
I hear this from Star Wars fans, and not totally unreasonably. But if an institution stays intact for a "thousand generations" it probably has some merit. The problem of TLJ, and fan opposition to the Jedi, is that getting rid of Jedi does not solve the problem of Sith.
You can see the massive ramp-up in purchases ahead of tariffs as a literal ramp. My worry is that we haven't even finished the overhang, let alone the real slow-down.
Mr. Bouie, come now! It's not like there's a simple and nearly flawless method of decontaminating milk without destroying its nutrition and flavor that we've known about for 150 years, and which is so ubiquitous as to be available in any corner store in the country.
So, uh, who were these women who wanted to talk about the Peloponessian War? I'm asking for a friend. Do... do any of them like analyzing Burnside's tactical dispositions at Fredericksburg?
I know everyone talks about the main cast - but don't forget basically all the secondary characters were absolutely on point, too. Shia LeBeouf is actually endearing in this, I think this was the first time I saw Djimon Honsou (as Papa Midnite), Gavin Rossdale's creepy Balthasar, and more.
I considered taking a vacation to see D.C., including its exceptional array of museums. I am definitely not going to do that for the foreseeable future. I don't have a joke. This is just awful.
Can we still include completely insane Bollywood fight scenes?
Yes, but you have to let him blatantly cheat the whole time.
Even better, we're back to effectively Nintendo DS cartridges.
Classics $200,000 History $150,000 English $800K STEM $3,600,000,000 Languages $150,000 Someone who is good at the economy plase halp my university is dying
I feel that any human being who unironically wrote the word "re-warriorize" should be sent to his or her room, because that person has not mentally aged past 14.
Thank you!
When reading that, I immediately thought of the OceanGate Titan implosion and Stockton Rush. Rush similarly thought he was smarter than everyone and cut every corner to achieve his desires. He also badly mistreated others and discarded good people.
It amuses me is that Trump is the only person on Planet Earth who can make Newsom look Presidential, which is honestly amazing. Newsom trying and failed to look Statemanlike for a couple decades, but when you put him and Trump side-by-side, suddenly he's the protege of Reagan and Obama together.
Wait, Trump famously hates vegetables... I knew, it's McDonald's master plan to destroy Big Veggie!
I'm blocked ; what was the comment?
The tiny Battle of McDowell represented only a skirmish in the larger Civil War, but it represented a key step in allowing General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to unite all the Confederate forces in the region.
New podcast! Episode 92: In the Valley, Part 3 The Battle of McDowell, May 8th, 1862 uscivilwar.substack.com
Look, we all know Andrew Jackson was a 9th-level Barbarian. That's just history. Is ChatGPT smart enough to realize that despite his Strength of 18, Lincoln was actually a Bard, HUH?!
And of course, the notion that events in the Nixon admin, largely irrelevant trivia by the end of Reagan's term, are now controlling SCOTUS in 2025 is, uh, highly questionable.
I don't think it holds water. Bork could even have protected his reputation by acceding to Nixon (since the demand was maybe lawful if not moral), and resigning in protest afterward. He didn't. Good or bad, Bork made his own bed on this.
Even better: It's an exchange. He gets paid to sell, not to own. Whether anyone else wins or loses, the exchanges take their cut.
When the police came, did he leap dramatically into a go-kart and yell, "You'll never take me alive, coppas!" as he zoomed away at a blistering 17 MPH?
Yeah, but isn't that just being the median director or producer? I'm not even attempting a joke with this. It seems entirely normalized in the Theater world.
Or even a realization that, "I do love this place and had a lot of fun there, but it isn't my home now. So while I do admire the six-pack abs on that hot lumberjack, I choose my office worker Short King boyfriend who stuck by me when I had the flu and vomited in his new car."
Reject Bismarck, embrace Iowa.
This is in fact my main beef with Megan McArdle. I do like seeing and understanding her analysis, but she has no shame in reposting Rufo - probably because he's about the median Twitter poster nowadays.
Complete with a guest appearances Elon Musk (who in a hilarious episode fires the national nuclear maintenance team while delivering his classic one-liner, "Oopsie!".) It's a government that deletes labor statistics, but micro-manages the Smithsonian. It's what they are: entertainers, not leaders.
I agree with both, but it's also emblematic of the un-seriousing of the Oval Office. By that I mean the admin is a clown show of incompetence, and visibly stupid incompetence at that. It's government, not by Fox News so much as Fox Entertainment, of people who cannot even pretend to be serious.
The more relevant critique is that he's not a politician, and it's not clear he has anything like the skills necessary to administer the executive. Granted, that doesn't seem to be a requirement these days. But perhaps we Americans ought to choose someone who has actually worked in government?
I want to have a ComedySoulsLike, where the first NPC says, "This is a hideous, cursed land, filled with sorrow - ha, couldn't keep a straight face. No, we're all gonna beat each up other up for fun. Wanna join in?" That's the entire plot. "Are you a bad enough dude to punch everyone?"
Even in Dark Souls (1) there's a bunch possible connections that go nowhere. E.g: "SwordMan's sword once belonged to SpearGirl! What could it mean?!" Well, what does it mean? Is he a thief, a husband, a forgotten lover, second cousins, or training partners?
I sometimes risked a rest, only to get ambushed and had to eat up even more healing potions to recover, while down to my last spells slots if any.
Baldur's Gate 1 has been mentioned, but there's an aspect in that game where resting matters in two ways. First, resting in dungeons was absolutely not safe (unless you save-scummed). And with the lower levels on your party, it was potentially risky. You could usually exit but that ate time.
The other *other* strategic problem is that Britain needed American grain, or risked enough unrest to topple the government. And also committed Britain to a proslavery course.
The net effect is that the Union may not have the armaments to go on the offensive against the Confederacy and Britain, but Britain cannot fight the Union Navy or Army in the Americas. They have immense shipping but it's still not enough. And the US can put ironclads where they are needed.
War would have been bad, but the Union would not have run out of gunpowder. The strategic problem is that the number in Britain is irrelevant. The number they can sustain in Canada is not enough. Additionally, Union ironclads put the British Navy under terrible threat.
I would also like to know this. I didn't take Latin in school on top of four other languages, and now I kinda wish I had.
I am in favor of Puerto Rico becoming a state. However, they don't require more referendums. There is the known process of sending a delegation to Congress. PR already meets the other requirements and just needs to decide if they want it, and they can do so themselves.
Leaving aside all - yes, all - the specific moral concerns around Ukraine, there is another huge reason to push Russia out and bring Ukraine in. Nuclear Proliferation. The Trump admin does not see or does not care that this ends in many more states seeking nuclear defences if that's the option.
Well, he's an idiot. But on the upside, well... mmm... huh. I guess he smiles a lot, so it appears that ignorance really is bliss.
There's also good reason to think financial firms are not extremely invested in this market. Homes are real assets (literally and legally) which require maintenance and active management. They aren't easily-tradable, generic commodities. And ultimately it's not the most profitable option.
So, I have never in my life tried even one illegal drug. (Not once!) Even I know that particular chemical does not make you better at *anything*.
I'm so sorry.
That brand of ignorance has big "The Perpetual Motion machine salesman was so convincing!" energy.
What a fantastic business! After we removed all the costs, our revenues look great!
Introduce her to Dune: Imperium!
To quote a great legal scholar, "I'll try to be nicer if you try to be smarter."