Patrick Luck

I don’t want to take any guidance at all from the secular society around us. And the reason I don’t is they killed 60 million babies. I don’t want to hear any more lectures from these people about slavery. You were better off being a Black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1850, when they had an operating slave market than being conceived as a Black baby in New York City or Baltimore today.

But you shouldn't be too surprised when they say stuff like this:

"You were better off being a Black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1850, when they had an operating slave market than being conceived as a Black baby in New York City or Baltimore today."

The fuck?

It's actually good if people do good things even if it's only for social approval.

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you:

1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and

2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

Pretty obvious that the "compact" as well as much else going on right now in higher ed is the oligarchs trying to squash one of the few areas of life that they don't have control.

This pretty much has never happened to me before, so I didn't even consider. In the future I'll likely do that.

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Maybe having three vaccines in one day wasn't the best idea.

Just cancelled today's classes!

For my book, my editor but also the reviewers. The first draft was extremely self-indulgent.

Opinion | Jack Smith’s lawfare and James Comey’s arraignment on pathetically weak charges Good people will be deterred from public service if they see a meaningful risk of winding up in jail afterward.

"Good people will be deterred from public service if they see a meaningful risk of winding up in jail afterward."

Sure, man.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Freedom in the Age of Slavery <p><b>An authoritative study of the free people of color in the largest state of the Old South</b></p><p>Virginia was the state with the most enslaved

You can use the code 10VABOOKS to receive 30% off your preorder of Freedom in the Age of Slavery: A History of Free People of Color in Virginia. www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10193/

Yes, we are in English Civil War territory.

Isn't the whole tariff thing functionally Charles I's ship money?

A conservative professor on how to fix campus culture

FINALLY

Kentucky, 1861 Kentucky, 1861 pulls students into the secession crisis following Lincoln’s 1860 election. During a special session of the Kentucky legislature, set agains...

The game:

uncpress.org/978146967071...

One thing I learned from teaching that game was how deeply baked the idea of the "right of revolution" was in mid-1800s America. Everyone agreed you had that right even if you didn't have the right to secede. One of the arguments was whether the line had been crossed to justify rebellion.

In may US History to 1877 we play a game about Kentucky Secession. I often think about what the folks we interact with in that game would think of what's going on right now, and I'm not just thinking about secessionists.

Without "silver-tongued charlatans," both native-born and immigrant, I don't know where this country would be to be honest.

Like all things social media sites die.

The craziest thing about this was when elites and media figures all said, "Whelp, I guess everyone loves him now" after the election.

It was obvious everyone was going to hate him within weeks!

the story of 2024-2025 in a nutshell:

"shit sucks, let's give this trump guy another chance"

"wait a minute, we hate donald trump!"

Why do so many students "know" that the sinking of the Lusitania caused the US to get involved in World War One?

T-34 - Wikipedia

Gosh. It's been so long since I was a World War 2 dork (almost 30 years) I have no idea! I just checked out the wikipedia article on the T-34, and it talks about this, in particular early Operation Barbarossa.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34#Op...

It has an uncomfortable kinship with lost cause nonsense.

I think the moment when students respect me the most is when it comes out that I had an unhealthy obsession with World War 2 as a teenager.

People will focus on the American superior technology, but read about what happened when the Germans first met T-34s in their shitty tanks.

I was born in 75, he looks older than I do.

It would be nice if more people really understood the Federalists and what they were up to.

Play the originalist game, and you just end up finding out that the "founders" were divided, not "modern" in their sensibilities, and not particularly useful in figuring out what should happen now.

A problem is that President Washington got a bad-faith bite at precisely this apple in 1794. Edmund Randolph, then Secretary of State, objected to the rubberstamp certification by Justice Wilson, to no avail. John Yoo and others have looked there when defending the unitary executive concept.