Aggie History PhD, MA from Fudan U., co-host @thejointgeeks, science fiction fan, historian of military technology. I study SDI.
Bastrop, TX
Joined January 2015
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Maybe someone will take it and use it to fix the godawful mess Perlstein made of the Reagan literature…
The challenge is that hum/soc sci academics don't really believe in the adversarial method--standard law-firm or govt editing/behavior would get you branded impossible to work with. When critiques come, they don't know how to respond. (This is due to tenure and gen. nerdiness.)
So, my colleague @RickKahlenberg has been in a fight with the entire academic field of American Studies, which feels relevant to all the recent discussions about why academia has lost the public's trust. 🧵
Hey look--it's @AggieFootball
If you’re making this about race, I have news for you: dogs have less agency and ability to control their behavior than people. If you want it to be about your dog, watch this video and ask what makes you confident your dog will ignore their breed traits. reddit.com/r/interestingasfu…
It’s almost like a well-designed BMD network can hold up against a poorly designed offense. But no, that’s crazy—offensive missiles always work and are always used to their maximum advantage. It is known.
These are good questions. 2 thoughts: 1. SDI’s experience showed the need for a direct report to POTUS/SecDef to wrangle the services via reflected power—think political ambs. vs. FSO ambs. 2. Everything important gets a czar these days. It’s part signaling part routine.
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Ian Boley retweeted
RAFFLE 🏆 Like, retweet, and follow by Feb 25 (midnight EST) and you can win a signed copy of my Littoral Commander #wargame. May the odds be ever in your favor. 😉🎲
This is common among alums of rigorous higher education programs, who drastically underestimate the rigor of an ed BA/MA (most of which are diploma mills). Kids love to learn things; you can teach most of it with <undergrad knowledge. “Pedagogy” is for 10+ students, not your kid.
It is so much worse in east TN than south GA it’s not funny. My family there isn’t sure if the roads are safe or in danger of collapse. Help your neighbors, sure, but please don’t drive across the state and make yourself someone else’s problem by getting into trouble.
If it were not for me and three other men with trucks, chains, and chainsaws, my elderly neighbor in south central GA would still be trapped at the end of a dirt road.
The guvmunt of the "Volunteer State" telling people not to volunteer is, just, next level.
Waiting for guvmunt to save you is a great way to get dead.
The Ming had a totally different concept of what a navy was for. They built the Zheng He fleet to legitimize the Yongle emperor *at home*, because he had usurped the throne and needed to get external approval to quiet the bureaucracy’s qualms. The actual force was a side effect.
What our government is doing right now is roughly the modern version of the Ming Dynasty burning its world-beating navy in the 1400s.
Someone will lead human beings becoming a planetary species. Those early adopters will bring their culture and view of governance with them.
That will set the foundation for the future of man.
100% agree. Single-party rule is ruinous, even in America. We need good parties with good people at the helms who represent the best of their ideologies.
There’s a difference between “conservative” and “reactionary”, and this is it. You didn’t see Reagan call for a Mao-scale purge to improve the government. He fixed the things he could (ATC union) and worked with the bureaucracy to advance small steps elsewhere (SDI, NSDD-75, etc)
I will repeat, with emphasis, that one of the first acts of the next (R) administration must be a root-and-branch defenestration/reform at State in parallel with Congressional action starting with civil service reform at State that will enable the Executive Branch action.
Then the CIA.
Then the FBI.
…and that needs to be in parallel with DOD reform starting with replacement of the obsolete Goldwater-Nichols, restructuring of COCOMS, the entire Joint requirements bureaucracy, and throw in JCS reform for good measure.
Previous Congressional generations did nothing and with each year the problem gets worse. You can fix it the hard way now, or you can wait for an existential collapse to be forced to act. Your choice.
Ian Boley retweeted
The profession never really came to terms for *why* Arming America received its *most prestigious* book prize.
One of the particularly dumb parts of this is that the Google traffic meter measures people *at the location*. So by this guy’s logic, everyone is leaving the Pentagon to go south of Crystal City to pick up Dominos in the middle of a crisis. (And skipping We The Pizza en route.)
So, I’ve watched Star Wars fans melt down over first Andor, then Ahsoka, and now the Acolyte on here. I can definitively say that Star Trek fans weren’t paying attention to the lesson, i.e. “don’t assume canon is broken because you saw a 5-minute preview”.
folks who knew what they were talking about. The administration said, repeatedly, that SDI was what they needed to enact serious arms reduction—that they couldn’t trust the Soviets and vice versa, but RR wanted to get rid of nukes. And meanwhile political scientists had moved
from saying that missile defense could sometimes be a good thing in the late 1970s to “all missile defenses are bad all the time and will lead to destabilization” in the early 1990s. Why? Because they were writing to influence policy (don’t believe me? tnsr.org/2019/01/rethinking-…).
This is the kind of collaboration I am 100% in favor of.
I wrote a thing! I'm in @thedispatch putting the Heritage Foundation and its 'Index of US Military Strength' on blast for its deceptive framing, inconsistent analysis and overall agenda of politicizing national security, weaponizing it for the culture war:
thedispatch.com/article/poli…
Anyone who’s talked to me about SDI has probably heard me make this statement about the existinglit—and for the fear that something like this will come to pass. The popularity of an idea is no measure of its quality, and a bad idea in the wrong hands can be devastating.
I hope this is trolling. Those sanctions on Japan were because of their horrific invasion of China—they were the response, not the provocation. I’m not even remotely going to touch the Nazi leadup to the invasion of Poland (Austria, Sudetenland, etc.) My God.
