Andrew Reeves

Why is it so hard to say that DJT's preferences are weird and idiosyncratic and that Hegseth's are just a bunch of Angry Facebook Veteran rants. Why this need to turn this, of all administrations, into something ideologically coherent?

I feel called out by this post in particular...

Sometimes I wish I could have been a Boomer who spent a year in Japan after getting out, then returned to the States to claim that he'd been initiated into an ancient martial arts tradition and start his own dojo and sell utterly fanciful books by the truckload.

Yeah, that's why I like it when near-future SF really grapples with it as opposed to, "Um, yeah, it's totally a continuous you because I *want* to have religious faith but can't so I'll try to just say that it's computer magic."

Having a SecDef that's a swarming collection of Angry Veteran Facebook Memes in a trenchcoat is bad in a way that I really wasn't anticipating, if that makes sense.

I mean, it's the same as the idea in near future SF that you'll upload yourself, but actually, you're just getting killed, coming to an end, and a copy of your engrams getting made on a computer.

There was a great Duffelblog post on the history of the battleship a while back that pointed out that battleships were best at getting blown up in the harbor to galvanize Americans to go to war.

Counterpoint: they are also really cool.

I remember that back when I was in high school there was a joke among athletes that ice cures everything and it's going to cure AIDS someday. But... it's seriouly really, really effective!

Remember our mutual friend referring to Milosevic as "Boss Tweed With an Army?" That's the general vibe of this whole crew.

And see, the reason I think people taking the AP Euro to this approach to the current administration get it wrong because it's not stupid enough.

Worrying about a 1933-style loyalty oath scenario and instead getting a The Angry Veteran Facebook Page copypasta pasta. Obviously better the latter than the former, but still, [chain of profanities].

Yeah, the North American feel was that the whole druid feminist thing was a 90s and early aughts phenomenon (at least in my experience).

And yet you left that all behind to go into the private sector...

Kinda true of a lot of bio-essentialist feminism of the back half of the twentieth century?

Yeah, North American reading of All Things Celtic has this characteristic of being extremely hippified and also, being something that's not actually spatially part of our past, sort of a fantasy world, especially as the Irish diaspora has by this point almost entirely assimilated.

This is honestly the most on-point description of... a lot of the people I went to grad school with.

This is one of those things where when you're trying to explain the intellectual milieu of Celtic Studies Enthusiasts of the 1990s and early aughts and it really is a, "you had to be there" thing.

I'm teaching US History this term, and so I'm working with a lot of US History textbooks--and one thing you see very quickly is the built-up layers in editions of responses to current events. So there's these awkward sentences about how, um, Hiss was guilty and union members were actually racist.

The Breen thing was... particularly repulsive.

It really was just absolutely pervasive in the Zeitgeist, especially in nerd culture.

As someone who in most of the BHO years was very much in favor of People Versus the Powerful language, I've watched in real time as this language caught on--to get used to mean, "It's the Democrats' fault that it's expensive to gas up my F-250."

Few things make you realize how quickly the culture is slipping away from you than teaching 18-23-year-olds. Being the faculty adviser of the Student Tabletop Gaming Club means the even more distressing experience of watching nerd culture gradually slip away from you.

It's funny. Early in my teaching career (the early 2010s), I sort of felt the need to lead up to Whitby by explaining what Irish Christianity was and wasn't (and even then, it was vestigial), but by the mid-2020s, Mists of Avalon stuff is as dated as Master of Puppets, especially to undergrads.

Stross' law as a companion to Moore's law: the time horizon to an imagined science fiction future halves every 18 months, especially if it's Charlie's.

Being a Gen X medievalist means having had the experience of watching in real time as your LGBTQ Celticist colleagues in grad school came to the realization that early medieval Ireland was neither particularly queer nor particularly feminist.

I'm definitely the person on the left whenever people bring up "Celtic Christianity." Although as someone who'd like to be young but isn't, I should also emphsasize that the Celtic thing is less Boomer than it is Xers who grew up on Mists of Avalon-type stuff.

As I continually say, the collapse of the Dispensationalist Consensus among Stand With Israel Conservatives is an absolute effing Monkey's Paw.

I've literally watched it happen in a guy I served with many years ago. It's very Bad!

A Deathwatch Space Marine with a freehand of a Minotaur chapter heraldry

Very pleased with this freehand.