… to be addicted to the melangephone…

It’s not a wrong thing…

The concept of “after that” is unimaginable. None of us has ever lived in that world. (Of course, it might not last more than a few hours).

This should be our 24/7 focus.

There’s literally nothing to stop it (as far as we know). And we’re supposed to just … get on with our work day.

bsky.app/profile/dith...

The murder half of the proposition would be so awful on its own, it’s hard to imagine what might come after.

I mean that a US strike would carry the risk of immediate global escalation involving other nuclear powers.

“Surely that can’t happen.”

Why not? The path seems pretty clear…

The odds of a US murder-suicide nuclear strike against Iran as things get worse has to be >0.

A malignant narcissist wants to be at the center of all human history, and he actually has the material means to make it happen.

How high are the odds? We have to consider this as a real possibility.

Though Locke’s (Lockes’?) ‘do is a bit more generous here.

National media coverage of “what diversity and demographic change do to a neighborhood” is generally empirically false.

Can very much confirm. NE Columbia is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Its social and economic diversity was a strength 15 yrs ago and in-migration (mostly domestic) has only deepened that diversity. As a result, it’s a great place to live.

Finally, @michaelhobbes.bsky.social is being recognized as part of the “Western canon.” Frankly, it’s his due.

Ha, typo!

Cuti saw the Malvinas discourse on Bluesky today and decided, in the shirt of Villa and Ardiles … no màs

That looks great! Thank you.

I’m beginning to think we may not be very good.

To revisit the political theory ‘canon’ after immersing oneself in scholarship in history (esp. economic history), comparative politics, sociology, archaeology, and other fields is to see *everything* with new eyes.

So much of the excellent work that people in my field have done in recent years to expand our geographic horizons has been heavily dependent on scholarship in other fields that began this work much earlier.

Interdisciplinary research and even simply reading are truly transformative.

Greek & Roman historian here. Fact check: true. Ancient Mediterranean historians worth our salt don’t just read about Greeks and Romans.

Thank goodness for that! One thing I really should have mentioned is that much of the excellent work that people in my field have done in recent years to expand our geographic horizons has been heavily dependent on scholarship in other fields that began this work much earlier.

One person's rule of law is another person's lawfare. Impossible to adjudicate between these perceptions. Damn all these radical postmodernists and their post-truth moral relativism!

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

... until we bring in data from other regions of Afro-Eurasia that were in close trade contact with W. Europe and then compare and draw connections between them to test whether W. Europe really was the sole origin of every aspect of the concept.

Spoiler alert: it wasn't (paper in process...) (fin)

An example: every political theorist *knows* that the origins of "the modern state" lie in Europe. But how can we *know* this if we *only* look for those origins in Europe? The answer is, of course, that we cannot actually know this in that way. This remains an untested hypothesis in the field...

Simply reading non-European sources is not enough. We also have to understand how ideas from different regions relate to each other and fit together--through cross-regional *comparison* and by reconstructing direct lines of interregional *connection* in the form of past learning across distance...

... even if these data are wildly unrepresentative of the phenomena under investigation. Which in my field they very often were.

Trying to overcome the deeply distorted picture of the history of political thought that this arbitrary sample enabled is *incredibly* difficult...

This was a *tiny*, wholly arbitrary sample of globally available texts, a result of pure custom and professional path dependence.

The field was a walking embodiment of the ‘streetlight effect’—a form of observational bias where the researcher only considers data that are ready to hand…

… (2) late republican/early imperial Rome (again, about a century); (3) a handful of societies that developed in the wake of the Western Empire’s collapse (almost all a millennium later, after 1500 CE); and (4) the modern settler colonial societies of North America (not S. America, Oceania, Africa)…

Until recently, my academic field—political theory/history of ideas—had a ‘canon’ that cut out the *entire* first half of the record of human political thought.

This ‘canon’ was arbitrarily drawn from 4 times and places *only*: (1) a single century in the ancient Aegean, almost all from Athens…