Andrew Reeves
@andrewsshi.bsky.social
I'm a history professor at Middle Georgia State University. I hold a PhD in medieval studies and post entirely too much about my cats and hobbies. All opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
Less non-stop left of center politics posting after November, but... I want to find the journalists and consultants who put Hasan Piker forward as The Progressive Answer to The YouTubers and do things to them that Bluesky terms of service forbid me from specifying.
This whole thread is a great answer to, "If Big Oil hadn't killed public transportation, we could have been Like Europe" commonplace that absolutely sets my teeth on edge.
Jake Berman@lostsubways.com · 4d agothis is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?
I really hate Big Oil low-trust crankery b/cit takes real harm that the petrochemical industry does (lobbying against environmental protection, being in bed with blood-soaked dictators, warlords, and potentates, etc.) and replaces it with a bunch of baby-brain comic book-level complexity thought.
Andrew Reeves@andrewsshi.bsky.social · 3d agoIt's much less sexy to say that policymakers and public alike were on board with a move to becoming more car-centric, no Big Oil, GM conpsiracy needed. (I'm a regular on r/electricvehicles where the modal poster is *convinced* that US EV uptake is slow because of a Big Oil misinformation campaign.)
There is so, so much of Homer that makes sense when you think of it first as oral poetry.
Independent Republic of JS Thrill@jsthrill.modphi.com · 4d ago
so as somebody else mentioned this is Tolkien's WW1 experience showing through in his understanding of wartime rumor, but I also think there's a little bit of the arrival of the Americans into the war in all this.
Constant Fractal@nfb42.bsky.social · 5d agoThere's a scene in the books before the siege of Minas Tirith where there's a rumor among the Gondorians that when the Rohirrim arrive there'll be a hobbit archer riding along with every horseman. I always thought that was a big tease cuss it'd have been SO COOL.
Honestly, this is Exhibits A, B, and C as to why the US doesn't have working class socialism, not really. Add the typical adjunct professor pay scale, and much falls into place.
Heart of Darkness is surprisingly flexible and lends itself really well to adaptation: a man, a river, a jungle, and spiritual decay works in The Vietnam War, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and even the Warhammer 40k setting.
How on earth does not just a lit prof, but a Lacanian at that manage to sell himself to The Atlantic as The Working Class Whisperer? (I'm not super jealous, because the need to be a constant part of the Take Machine would be soul-destroying, but still...)
Or they'll force you to at pike point
Doctor Charlton Cussans PhD@charltoncussans.bsky.social · 6d agoGotta love the Swedes.
I mean, this goes all the way back to Jefferson, a planter, dreaming of the independent yeoman farmer as the backbone of the Republic.
Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 6d ago"The people who work on farms often don't own them" is something that would have been completely intuitive to 99% of people for 99% of human history but is completely unintelligible to the people who make US public policy.
My paternal grandfather was a rural mail carrier, my maternal, a career army officer. Both were dead by the time I was born. Also: I turn 50 in two weeks, and this is the sort of fact that makes me actuarially nervous.
Revan@revan.eurosky.social · last wk.Enough “what would you do on the commune questions” If you got sent back 100 years and were given your grandparent’s job, what are you doing?
So rather than talk about NYC, I'm going to throw out a question to you folks: in spite of everything, the UK manages to have groceries that are substantially cheaper than in North America. What set of policies makes the Tesco register price-point lower than its NorAm counterparts?
If you ever want to see something truly bleak, go to YouTube, log out, and watch something. The ads are almost all AI slop about how "the government will give you fat stacks" and how if you ever got in a wreck, you can get a huge payout, and just all sorts of promises of Free Money.
You see this a lot with how right-wing types group people. I notice this especially among the sort of people who will use "The Blacks" as a locution, but also then say that he obviously doesn't mean the Black people in his life and community. Same for, e.g. "The gays" but not my cousin, etc.
Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast@irhottakes.bsky.social · last wk.Coming out as trans convinced me that both things are true because Republicans are stupid and cannot see basic connections between things. They can like every trans person they know, think trans people should be wiped out, and not understand how the trans people they know would be impacted by this.
People who know better have told me that the issue was more that nukes are super-expensive to build and that the Boomer Environmentalism was a negligible part of their decline, but I'd also suggest that the general idea of Nuclear Bad meant that the general momentum was in the wrong direction.
William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · last wk.far and away I think the single most consequential failures of the 20th/21st century environmental movement was going anti-nuclear. to a great extent we literally chose climate change.
Buy Nothing Day is similar. In my particular fandom, from time to time people solemnly declare they are Boycotting Games Workshop, but it's usually people who've never so much as bought a single Citadel paint pot.
Lemon-Stealing Whore@micolithe.us · last wk.Begging people to understand if you set an end date to your boycott before you've even started, let alone before you've achieved your goal *it will not fucking work*
"So, lol, obviously you need to have a burner email and phone number to make donations" is a good piece of advice, but something's probably gone at least a little bit wrong when donating to the candidate that you're donating to *specifically to make society better* has to be treated like this.
@doughoff.bsky.social · last wk.Everyone tells me to donate using a spamdump email and phone number. Something about treating a candidate I would prefer for public office like a guy selling grey market adderall on the darkweb just doesn't do it for me.
Next poem movie? The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (Iron Maiden soundtrack optional).
Wrapping up the proctored online final, and it makes me really angry to miss a student SMS asking about the proctor being buggy and it's buried between five other iterations of, "Andrew, if you could rush $25, $100, or even $500 today, we can stop Trump's reign of terror..."
Very mild Hobby Drama: So when 11e rules rolled out, Agents players were weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth: "These rules are a slap in the face!" "It's like GW actually hates us," and the like. But it turned out that 11e rules were actually really good for Agents. Anyway...
Superheroes are dead now, so Hollywood has no choice but to stage incredibly elaborate adaptations of unfilmable science fiction classics. The masses need The Book of the New Sun!
You know, the Next Song algorithm of YouTube Music doesn't always get it, but when I'm on the road and instruct it to play Whitesnake's "Here I go Again," for the next five hours, it absolutely *understands* the brief.
Seriously, I don't think I've ever had a movie cause me to go to Amazon, order the workbook that goes with Groton's Alpha to Omega, and pull my Smyth off the shelf after a quarter century.
"Our age of bronze is collapsing" is great because at a surface level it could be a guy looking at the camera and saying that this is the Bronze Age Collapse -- but an age of bronze collapsing into an Age of Iron is pure Hesiod!
Having a rapper play an oral-formulaic poet is absolutely *inspired* casting.
So DS9 predicted 9/11, i.e., what happens when liberal America's idealized mirror comes under genuine threat. It was a good antidote to Roddenberry's Perfect Future, but we don't need Grimdark Star Trek. We need to see that a project with fighting for can make it past it's terrible mistakes.
Jay Zedbee@jayzedbee.bsky.social · 2w ago(there is a pervasive cynicism from every modern star trek that is basically people learning the wrong lessons from ds9 and going "well obviously the federation is rubbish". NO. the point of ds9 is that the federation is flawed not that the whole thing is not a worthwhile cause)
I have a humanities PhD and don't clear six figures, i.e. precisely the demographic whose class interest the DSA represents. And I find the attempt to ventriloquize The Working Class to be really, really unsympathetic. Would I like to be an intellectual in the Acela Corridor? Sure. I'm not owed it.
Andrew Reeves@andrewsshi.bsky.social · 2w agoOkay, fine, a politics post. I think that people *know* that at the end of the day the downwardly mobile highly credentialed children of upper-middle-class professionals are pretty unsympathetic as a class interest, which is why they run around looking for guys in working man's drag.