Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

No Justins, No Peace

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

This blog will pay for itself.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Motown is Joe-Town!

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Open Thread: “Do You Like Gladiator Movies, Donny?”

Open Thread: “Do You Like Gladiator Movies, Donny?”

by | 160 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,


.
Since their domestic agenda is proving as popular as a weeping chancre at a hot-tub party, the Trump BRAINZZZ trust goes back to spinning let’s-kill-us-some-dirty-furriners fanfic…

… Beginning with the account of Greek historian Herodotus, the clash, which took place in 480 B.C., has become a kind of foundation myth of Western civilization. The heroic Spartan stand — whose numbers were closer to 7,000 than 300 — in the face of the mongrel, polyglot Persian hordes is cast as a primordial act of sacrifice for the liberty of a people. The historical consensus, both among ancient chroniclers and current scholars, was that Thermopylae was a clear Greek defeat; the Persian invasion would be pushed back in later ground and naval battles. But its legacy still reverberates millennia later…

This is a powerful claim that many in the West intuitively accept: Thermopylae is the Alamo of antiquity, a doomed contest between the brave few and a gargantuan foe that stirred their compatriots to action. Had Xerxes, a Persian emperor, snuffed out all Greek resistance, then the scattered city-states on the western side of the Aegean Sea would have just become one more province of what was a vast, multi-ethnic empire…

“Ancient Sparta is proto-fascist,” Paul Cartledge, a celebrated British classicist and author of “Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World,” among numerous other works on ancient Greece, said in an interview with WorldViews.

Although the clash between Greeks and Persians may be remembered now as the battle that crystallized Western liberty, the ancient Spartans were no model democrats — even in their time. Their society was communal and militarist. It practiced early forms of eugenics and infanticide. It kept a huge slave population in thrall to its warrior elite. Some contemporary scholars even liken conditions in the city-state to a kind of apartheid…

“It’s a clash of political civilizations, it’s not a clash of religions,” Cartledge said, arguing the difference between the two sides was less cultural than it has been made out to be. “Xerxes didn’t conduct his campaign on the basis of a crusade.”

And, ultimately, for all the heroism of the Persian wars, the Greeks would turn against one another. In the wake of the Persian retreat, the rival powers of Sparta and Athens built regional alliances and mini-empires of their own and soon locked horns in three decades of ruinous conflict that spanned the Mediterranean.

“The Greeks fought each other as much they fought others,” Cartledge said…

But they looked so butch while they did!

Reader Interactions

160Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    Getting ready for Book of Mormon to start. There are dudes here who are cosplaying as missionaries.

    Either that, or some guys who are going to be in big trouble when they report in tonight. ?

  3. 3.

    Davis X. Machina

    I’ve spent hundreds of hours patiently explaining to young people that no, Sparta was’t cool, even for the Spartan men, and that anyone proposing emulating Julius Caesar, fascinating figure though he was, as the answer to anything, needs to be shunned.

    Ancient Sparta was a motorcycle gang disguised as a state, and JC was basically a maifa don scaled up to imperial size, but with excellent prose style.

  4. 4.

    Timurid

    These guys understand that Thucydides’ history is an extended exposition on what not to do, right?
    These guys understand that everybody lost the Peloponnesian war, right? Yes, Sparta too, whatever they accomplished on paper.
    These guys understand that that war and the conflicts that followed left Greece in ruins, paved the way for a successful barbarian invasion and ended democracy in the Greek-speaking worl–Oh, wait. No wonder they love this stuff…

  5. 5.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Mnemosyne: Getting ready for Book of Mormon to start. There are dudes here who are cosplaying as missionaries.

    Live thee-ayter? Is BoM the new Rocky Horror Picture Show?

  6. 6.

    pat

    as popular as a weeping chancre at a hot-tub party,

    When I read this I had to scroll up to check whether this was a Betty Cracker post.
    Well done.Anne Laurie.

  7. 7.

    Suzanne

    So the twatwaffles who are in thrall to this don’t know shit about shit. Surprise.

    They’re also into it because it’s a fabulous fantasy of toxic masculinity.

  8. 8.

    Oatler.

    There are a lot of conservatives who give themselves a classical Greek or Roman pseudonyms when contributing to blogs, as if we are dealing with disciplined, leaned minds. The Wikepedia Herodotus quotes usually give way to comic book or science fiction references, and that’s where “300” comes in.

  9. 9.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Davis X. Machina: I’ll upload a copy of my Cultural Prep on Athens and Sparta for the Thucydides lessons at USAWC at some point. Just a basic contextual primer for the students who really didn’t have a lot of background in ancient Greek history.

  14. 14.

    Brachiator

    @Davis X. Machina:

    The weird thing is that the Spartans believed their own bullshit, even after they became historically and politically irrelevant. The supposed fate of Sparta is suitably ironic:

    During the Roman conquest, Spartans continued their way of life, and the city became a tourist attraction for the Roman elite who came to observe exotic Spartan customs.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jeffro: Two very different things. What I was basically doing was using the analytical cultural framework I had inherited as a heuristic tool as a way to provide context for the resident course students about the Athenian and Spartan identities, political structures and institutions, and resilience and the differences between the two. I have several paragraphs dealing with the Lycurgun reforms, specifically the requirements of the agoge. Try explaining to several hundred, predominantly politically and socially conservative colonels and lieutenant colonels how Sparta mandated and enforced bisexuality among the Spartiates, especially between what would in modern America be adult men and boys, in such a way as to make them stop reading.

  17. 17.

    jl

    First, someone should explain to Bannon that boozy moobs are not the same as swole warrior pecs of steel. He needs to keep his shirt on.

    Second, ease them in slowly. I think the following are famous Thucydides quotes, or close paraphrases
    ” To Greeks, freedom means the power to make others do what you want them to do. ”
    ” The poor suffer what they must, while the powerful do what they wish. ”
    Bannon and Trump will be all ears after they hear those two.

    Third, no use trying to explain to them that many aspects of Spartan society were very ugly, and led to self-extinction. They’ll never believe it.

    Finally, if Trump gets bored, slip in some dick and pussy jokes from Aristonphanes and tell him the other guy wrote them.

  19. 19.

    jl

    In moderation. I may have used naughty words. I’ll try again.

    First, someone should explain to Bannon that boozy moobs are not the same as swole warrior pecs of steel. He needs to keep his shirt on.

    Second, ease them in slowly. I think the following are famous Thucydides quotes, or close paraphrases
    ” To Greeks, freedom means the power to make others do what you want them to do. ”
    ” The poor suffer what they must, while the powerful do what they wish. ”
    Bannon and Trump will be all ears after they hear those two.

    Third, no use trying to explain to them that many aspects of Spartan society were very ugly, and led to self-extinction. They’ll never believe it.

    Finally, if Trump gets bored, slip in some d _ _ k and p _ _ _ y jokes from Aristonphanes and tell him the other guy wrote them.

    Edit: hard to believe those two words are considered naughty in a family blog like this. I mean, that is where families come from, right? Or is it really storks and cabbage patches?

  20. 20.

    sharl

    Ah, bringing back memories of once-respectable historian Victor Davis Hanson, who sold out for the cheers of neocon morons and (I assume) some bonus income in the form of wingnut welfare. That in turn brought back lovely memories of some brutal take-downs of VDH by John Dolan (whose identiy was at the time concealed behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, “The War Nerd”). There was this one, where “Gary Brecher” of Fresno dissects VDH’s hackery and while doing so, claimed to be tempted to set VDH’s orchards on fire, which brought on some most excellent e-mail exchanges between VDH and Dolan/Brecher’s editor. Some time later, Dolan reviewed VDH’s review of the film “300”, with an analysis that one would expect at this point, if you were already aware of the Dolan-VDH thing.

    Rollicking wacky times…

  21. 21.

    GregB

    Euclid!

    You what?

    Pretty much the only thing I remember from Mrs. Pierce’s Ancient European History class.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @Brachiator:

    ” During the Roman conquest, Spartans continued their way of life, and the city became a tourist attraction for the Roman elite who came to observe exotic Spartan customs ”

    I didn’t know that.
    Did that include shows where they beat the crap out of helots every autumn. Or were the pretend Spartans really surviving helots and mongrel offspring of helots and real Spartan citizens. I think at one point there were only a couple of thousand (total, man woman and children) real pure blood Spartans left. But my memory is hazy.

    Edit: probably did include hot Spartan babes dancing buck nekkid. I do remember Alcman

  24. 24.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @jl: ” To Greeks, freedom means the power to make others do what you want them to do. ”

    so they were into Religious Freedom?

  25. 25.

    divF

    @Omnes Omnibus: Just as an exemplar of a “profound” science-fiction quote that could be used by a conservative blogger. Although I do find it germane when applied to going to the gym every day.

  30. 30.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: I was never all that impressed with Essence of Decision. It is hard to read. He really has to force the actual history into his three models, which makes it even harder to follow along. And the more recent editions, with Zelikow, we they added several new explanatory models of decision making is just confusing.

    ETA: The above makes them hard to teach. I’ve had civilian undergads, civilian grad students, and senior military personnel grad students at USAWC all have the exact same problems trying to make it through and understand what Allison is talking about.

  32. 32.

    Timurid

    The funniest thing is the breathless speculation about all of the horrible things the Persians would have done to Greece if they had won… all of which the Greeks ended up doing to each other. Yes, the fate of Western Civilization was at stake, but the Greeks came closer to extinguishing it than the Persians ever did…

  33. 33.

    Redshift

    Best response to this idiocy was my friend who quoted A Fish Called Wanda:

    “Apes don’t read philosophy.”

    “Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.”

  36. 36.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Timurid: The Greeks are better represented by what they wrote than what they did. Kind of like the US founding fathers.

  37. 37.

    jl

    Thing is Bannon is so loopy, he’d get any history lesson, no matter how sound the lesson, totally mixed up in his head anyway. He’s the guy who bragged that Trump’s infrastructure plan would ‘jack up the shipyards and ironworks’ and it would be most exciting era since the 1930s.

    Maybe read Aristophanes’ The Knights to the both of them. Trump would be fascinated by Cleon (edit: sorry, I meant the sausage seller, not Clean), and he might get some cool new ideas for tweets.. Bannon will babble to reporters about the infrastructure program to bring back the sausage mills and anchovy fisheries. That would be fun.

  38. 38.

    RandomMonster

    I always found the 300 film to be just too fascist in its aesthetics for my taste,

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: As far as I can tell he’s done that in everything he’s ever written. He creates a highly detailed and hard to comprehend model and then tortures his historical examples to get them to fit into those models. Sparta’s decline and Athen’s rise wasn’t quick. It took several hundred years. And it occurred when even the limited distance of the Peloponnese was a large distance. But he’s Graham Allison. So he could sneeze onto a napkin and someone would publish it without serious review.

  40. 40.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Brachiator:

    The weird thing is that the Spartans believed their own bullshit, even after they became historically and politically irrelevant.

    Wolverines!

    Too meta?

  42. 42.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: Graham Allison, the guy the Trumplings are depending on for guidance about Thucydides’ supposed message, could have used a decent primer on Greek history. His book is full of historical howlers and inexplicable gaps (like pretending the “First Peloponnesian War” kind of barely occurred). Then there’s the fact that he barely reads Greek and never discusses what Thucydides’ actual words mean.

    In other words, exactly the kind of faux expert you’d expect to see in the Trump White House.

  45. 45.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: Doesn’t surprise me at all. As I just wrote in reply to Cheryl:

    As far as I can tell he’s done that in everything he’s ever written. He creates a highly detailed and hard to comprehend model and then tortures his historical examples to get them to fit into those models. Sparta’s decline and Athen’s rise wasn’t quick. It took several hundred years. And it occurred when even the limited distance of the Peloponnese was a large distance. But he’s Graham Allison. So he could sneeze onto a napkin and someone would publish it without serious review.

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @RandomMonster: I also always saw the “So we will fight in the dark” as black humor not as some kind of boast. Then again, I was a soldier in my distant past.

  50. 50.

    Steeplejack

    “The Weeping Chancres” is one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes. Yes, it was controversial, and not to everyone’s taste, but they really explored the Whovian narrative space in that one.

  51. 51.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: I didn’t know about the goofy adaptations of Julius Ceaser to include Obama (several years ago) or Trump as the contemporary gimmick. Seems kind of clunky to me.

    But I think a few of Aristophanes plays could be adapted to Trumpworld, no problem. Tell Cole we have a plan to make this blog pay for itself. Put up a gofundme thing or whatever its called. And I’ll produce and direct the Trumpstophanes Festival. I have no clue how to do that, but few people have minds like I do. I’ll find the best most top and terrific people to put it on, and I’ll learn on the job. I’m pretty sure I can learn everything there is know about producing and directing plays in a hour or two, tops. Believe me.

    The whole project should done in the spirit of Trump. It will be a tribute. We can invite the whole WH.

    You are welcome.

  54. 54.

    Kay

    They have to pretend they’re covering the health care bill, but they don’t know what it’s in it because it’s a secret. So they just quote Republicans and Republicans then get a chance to state their principled objections to what may or may not be in the secret health care bill which they wrote but can’t talk specifically about because no one can know what’s in it or they might oppose it. The Wisconsin Republican is concerned about his constituents, for example. Gravely, deeply concerned. We’re not sure why since he won’t say, but rest assured he is. Many Republicans, also, are opposed to abortion and Rand Paul is opposed to “Obamacare Lite”. Glad we got them on record. Put them in the “yes” column on constituents and the “no” column on abortion and Obamacare Lite.

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jl: (golf clap)*

    *If it works I have seen plays produced and would thus be a very good AD (for the eight price).

  60. 60.

    Mike J

    @jl:

    The whole project should done in the spirit of Trump. It will be a tribute. We can invite the whole WH.

    Mustang Bobby absolutely not allowed to participate since he knows what he’s doing. As part of “Deep Stage” he’d just undermine you.

  62. 62.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: Great. Glad you’re on board. Omnes thinks it’s a great idea. I’ll delegate all the minor details to him, such as all the work, while I come up with the great thoughts.

  64. 64.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: I scrolled down and read the rest of the thread, which is reasonably harsh toward Allison.

    The weirdest thing about his manhandling of Thucydides is that he opines, based on nothing at all, that (1) it’s curious that Pericles couldn’t restrain the Athenians from going to war against Sparta, and (2) that must have been a political compromise forced on Pericles by domestic political factions.

    Thucydides is very clear, and other contemporary sources are if anything even clearer, that Pericles was the person chiefly responsible for pushing aggressive policies that everyone could see would cause a war with Sparta. Thucydides also says repeatedly that Pericles could get virtually any policies he wanted enacted, and stop virtually anything he wanted to stop from happening. Allison appears to be unaware somehow that the Great Peloponnesian War was ginned up by one man, who happened to be Thucydides’ hero.

  67. 67.

    Major Major Major Major

    @jl:

    I didn’t know about the goofy adaptations of Julius Ceaser to include Obama (several years ago) or Trump as the contemporary gimmick. Seems kind of clunky to me.

    This all reminds me of an Onion article: Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended

    According to Hiles, everything in the production will be adapted to the unconventional setting. Swords will replace guns, ducats will be used instead of the American dollar or Japanese yen, and costumes, such as Shylock’s customary pinstripe suit, general’s uniform, or nudity, will be replaced by garb of the kind worn by Jewish moneylenders of the Italian Renaissance.

  69. 69.

    BBA

    Today in bizarre, inscrutable Albany bullshit, it looks like mayoral control of the NYC Public Schools will be allowed to expire, mostly because Cuomo hates deBlasio’s guts, but also because upstate Republicans think he wasn’t pro-charter/anti-union enough (like the old Board of Ed was any “better” on this front).

    I freely admit, I have absolutely no idea how the pre-2002 system worked, aside from “not well.”

  70. 70.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: It is a puzzlement. Honestly this stuff happens all the time. I think peer review is important and necessary, but it is also very, very broken. This is a good example of why it is broken. This should never have made it from conference paper to journal article or chapter in edited volume to book because of the blatant errors. But no editor at a journal or academic press is going to call Allison on it. I’ve seen it with other big names. I could tell you stories that would scare you to death about just how bad the manuscripts are when submitted and yet these are people cited as subject matter authorities at the highest levels of government based on their bodies of work.

  71. 71.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Mike in NC: Yes, but apparently no photos are allowed after the fiasco with preppy jackets under flack jackets. Or whatever those little things were. Also no photos or recording devices at tomorrow’s press briefing.

  74. 74.

    jl

    @Major Major Major Major: Outlandish idea. But Shakes is lefty DemocRAT subversive stuff now, so we need to be careful. Let’s use some random code name for Shakespeare, like, say, Marlowe, to avoid controversy.

  75. 75.

    Kay

    Paul Ryan must be kicking himself. He could have done the House bill secretly too. Let that be a lesson to him. If you don’t tell them what’s in it they can’t object.

    This really opens up a new world of possibilities. If there’s ever a Democratic majority again they could nationalize the health care system and no one would be the wiser. We just tell them after it passes. Political opposition problem solved.

  76. 76.

    Aleta

    Max Boot‏ @MaxBoot
    Thucydides is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.

  79. 79.

    Felonius Monk

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Ron Johnson’s issue, from my calls to his people, is the process.

    I take it you mean Ron Johnson’s mental process. That has always seemed to me to be Ron’s largest and most troubling issue.

  80. 80.

    jl

    @Kay: I read someplace, maybe a link from a commenter on this blog, that they are thinking about trying the secret legislation approach out again for the tax slash, er, I mean, reform bill.

  81. 81.

    Peale

    @jl: could we focus on the lost plays first? We won’t do any reasearch on them, but guess what they would have been like based on their titles and episodes of I Dream of Genie and Star Trek that had people in togas in them. We will put on the least learned recreations in the history of theater.

  82. 82.

    El Caganer

    So….American foreign policy is now based on the work of an obscurantist historian as filtered through a bunch of wingnuts’ moist homoerotic fantasies? I’m not at all sure this is the direction we should be headed, but, hey, I’m willing to be proved wrong.

  83. 83.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: I am aware of the differences. But had this manuscript been submitted by someone not named Graham Allison and without Allison’s reputation it would not have been published.

  84. 84.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Felonius Monk: No. It is the response that I get when I call one of my Senators. When I call the Tammy’s offices, I have nothing but “Keep on, keeping on. I got your back.” In case you care.

  85. 85.

    Peale

    @jl: I really am looking forward to the middle class being hit with health insurance disarray and the end of the mortgage and property tax deductions at the same time.

  86. 86.

    Kay

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    He should tell his constituents in Wisconsin what’s in it then. They met with insurers and they’re happy to express their grave concerns to the NYTimes. Everyone knows Republicans are opposed to abortion. The price for publicity on their serious concern should be revealing what parts of the bill they just drafted they’re so concerned about.

    They designed this so there wouldn’t be organized or concerted public opposition to their bill. They chose to do this in the dark – it was to benefit them, and only them. Anyone could do this. Anyone could draft unpopular legislation and reveal it only when they’re ready to vote. And everyone from here on out will, because the secrecy worked.

  87. 87.

    Adam L Silverman

    @El Caganer: Allison is a former senior US governmental official. He wrote what is considered to be a seminal work on governmental, in general, and US governmental, in specific, decision making processes using the Cuban missile crisis as his exemplar. This is Essence of Decision, which as I’ve written up top is hard to read and even harder to understand. Including for advanced national security professionals and practitioners. Now whether his reputation is deserved or not is another story, but he is certainly not obscure.

  88. 88.

    Timurid

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I visualize it as “the World of No” and the “World of Yes.”

    Most academics (like me) live in the World of No. Everything we do is scrutinized, every mistake has serious consequences. The default answer to everything we want… from job applications to manuscript submissions… is “no,” and it takes tremendous effort to change that, if it can be changed at all. Almost every time it can’t.

    For a few people something clicks… the right publication, the right connection.. and they enter the World of Yes, where the default answer to every question is “Sure, why not?” That’s where people like Allison live, where they turn their trash into treasure and get things handed to them that mere mortals would have to jump through hoops of molten lava to even touch…

  89. 89.

    Felonius Monk

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    In case you care.

    I do care and would expect no less from Tammy. Me, I’ve got Schumer and Gillibrand. While not exactly senatorial heaven, it is a hell of a lot better than what many others have.

  90. 90.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: Oh I agree. Ancient history is especially subject of abuse by every non-expert with any sort of agenda. Been true since long before I was born. People treat ancient history almost as if it’s mythology, and as we all know everybody understands those myths as well as the next person. Back in the day, every Cold Warrior in America had a super special understanding of Thucydides. I remember distinctly a time when my dimbulb conservative History Dept. chairman at a military academy once admonished that Thucydides’ message was that the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War because they didn’t bother to try hard enough to win it.

  92. 92.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I notice that the trolls have taken a night off for the most part. Interesting. I am still going to make calls. Everyone else should too.

  94. 94.

    Kay

    @jl:

    that they are thinking about trying the secret legislation approach out again for the tax slash, er, I mean, reform bill.

    Of course they are. It worked like a charm. They’re probably pissed they didn’t use it sooner. ENDLESS possibilities with this approach. 3/4’s of their constituents will never know what they voted for, and that’s the way they like it.

  96. 96.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: Is the email you use here an actual email? I want to ping you offline to see if I know that department chair. Now you’ve got me curious.

  100. 100.

    Brachiator

    @jl:

    .. ..Did that include shows where they beat the crap out of helots every autumn.

    Zeus only knows. But I imagine the whole thing as a kind of Disneyland theme attraction. And Spartan women were possibly held up as some kind of wild, cautionary warning for genteel Roman matrons.

  103. 103.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: Gold bugs and finance quacks know the hourly details and Big Government mistakes of all the ancient Roman and Greek financial panics and asset bubbles. and the lessons they hold for the Federal Reserve and Social Security. Probably working groups on those in WH right now, but too boring to rate a magazine article. Hard to work in pics of swole warrior pecs of steel and swords and other cool dude stuff.

  104. 104.

    Timurid

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I’m gonna get that PME Golden Ticket one day…
    Or not. It’s still academics hiring for those jobs, and my PhD is staler than Spartan K-Rations (graduated 7 years ago this month).

  105. 105.

    Kay

    @jl:

    I thought school superintendents did a clever thing. They don’t know what’s in it either but they know how much funding they get from Medicaid, so they wrote letters just assuming all that funding would go. “our district will lose 89 million dollars for disabled children”. Everyone should do that. If they won’t say what’s in it just portray it as the the absolute worst case because we’re not obligated to assume some middle or best case and Republicans won’t say. Worst case is the best guess.

  108. 108.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Kay: No shit. I know this. I make calls to this asshole. You aimed the comment at me. There are people fighting him. I will stop now, because I saw what you were saying as an insult to my area. I know you don’t mean that. So I will leave it.

  111. 111.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: OMFG, the guy created an elaborate Wikipedia page for himself. One of the stupidest academics I’ve ever encountered; a Civil War historian who once insisted (in my class, when he was supposed to be observing my teaching) that the Civil War was *not* about slavery. Then again, he was deeply dishonest as well so it is hard to say whether he actually believed that.

  112. 112.

    jl

    @Brachiator:

    ” And Spartan women were possibly held up as some kind of wild, cautionary warning for genteel Roman matrons. ”

    Maybe a show for gaping middle age male bureaucrats who needed a thrill. The poet Alcman wrote about nubile buck nekkid Spartan women dancing in front of a fire, with supple lush loins and erotically swaying breasts. Those are about the only lines of Greek poetry I remember for college, for some strange reason. Can’t imagine why.

    I also remember vaguely that Horace wrote some dumb poem about jacking off under a tree. Other than that, I don’t remember anything about Greek and Roman poetry.

  113. 113.

    hitless

    Alright, let’s full Thucydides – the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian war because of the plague. So, clearly, the lesson to be learned is that we need robust universal healthcare.

  116. 116.

    Brachiator

    @Peale:

    I really am looking forward to the middle class being hit with health insurance disarray and the end of the mortgage and property tax deductions at the same time.

    Ah, but they will have a decrease in their tax rate. Of course it will be miniscule compared to the cut that Trump and his fellow plutocrats will get, but hey, that’s just a little detail.

  117. 117.

    Peale

    I actually listened awhile to Allison being interviewed last weekend on Bloomberg Radio. I thought he said he used 16 examples of empires falling while others rose in the book. 12 of 16 times ended in war. I wondered why only 16. And why one would pick them. But it figures they would pick Greece and discus it to death and skip the rest of the examples.

  118. 118.

    hitless

    Also, I’m unaware that Athens and Sparta were enmeshed in a $200B per year trade relationship. They weren’t you say? Maybe the framing doesn’t fit so well, then?

  119. 119.

    jl

    @hitless:

    ” the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian war because of the plague. ”

    That’s no fun. No one wants low energy loser history like that. Must be fake news.

  120. 120.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Timurid: It is a strange hiring process. My appointment was the result of vetting by a TRADOC program and then being detailed to USAWC. USAWC also did their own vetting of my packet. So I had to be vetted twice for the spot. But I was hired by TRADOC, not through the normal faculty search process at USAWC. I can honestly say I have never successfully made it through the normal search process at a PME institution. And I have some really whacky stories to tell about some of those searches.

  121. 121.

    hitless

    @Peale: Saying that “war” ended 3/4 of the empires surveyed is facile. It may be the proximate cause, but surely there were underlying factors (I’ll take resource scarcity) that could have driven conflict.

    It annoys me that someone can say “Thucydides” and suddenly they must be regarded as having deep thoughts. Our media is the suck.

  122. 122.

    Peale

    @hitless: they got the plague because they had these Symposia, which were a lot like chat rooms and blog comments sections and somehow the idea spread that the Areopagus weren’t doing the right sacrifices and so apollo cursed the vaccines to cause autism.

  123. 123.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: Don’t know him. My former boss at TRADOC was a retired Navy captain – a former CAG. Neither he, nor his deputy – a retired US Army SF colonel, think very highly of the uniformed personnel that become faculty at our PME schools. There are a couple they think highly of, but they’re few and far between. And both of these guys are senior leader college (war college) grads, highly educated on the civilian side too. I have a more generous take than they do, but some of the retirees that fill up the civilian faculty slots are problematic. Of course they think I’m problematic too. So we’re even.

  124. 124.

    Timurid

    @Adam L Silverman:

    At a conference this spring I ran into some guy from the Air Force Command and Staff College in the hotel bar and he said, “Oh, yeah, I remember you… you were the fifth ranked guy in our search.” I wasn’t sure whether to shake his hand or throw my drink in his face…

  126. 126.

    Kay

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I don’t think he should be able to rely on the “I’m doing a bad thing but I feel bad about it so it’s okay and I’ll keep doing it” excuse. They’ve been giving him a forum to air his grave process concerns for a month. The price for their promotion of his hand-wringing over process should be that he has to stop doing the bad thing. This is literally what kids do, what the people quoted in that piece are doing – it’s a way to get credit without accountability. He can stop subverting process any time now. He feels so bad I think he should! :)

  127. 127.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Timurid: I was once interviewed for a position that didn’t exist at NDU. When I contacted the Dean, who’d been interested in me coming aboard, he explained the person that was supposed to leave didn’t, so the vacancy didn’t occur. He also told me he recommended they not bring me in, just tell me what was up. Instead they brought me in because they had two openings even though they’d already decided on who to hire for the other opening. He apologized and thanked me for reaching out to him rather than 1) contacting the head of NDU (my former boss) and/or 2) contacting the IG.

  128. 128.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: When I was teaching at the academy, the officers in the department rarely knew much history and we spent a lot of time training them up so they could teach introductory courses. But most of them were open minded and worked hard to learn the subject matter. The worst faculty by far were civilian retired military; they had agendas, were always playing mind games and fighting turf wars, and often were more than satisfied with learning nothing and knowing even less. The Chairman I mentioned was one of them.

    Your email never came through. I think that account of mine now exists in theory only.

  130. 130.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: People do really bizarre things when interviewing. I was once flown in for a college interview and then told that they’d already given the job to the first candidate to arrive on campus. But since they’d already arranged for me to come, they figured why not go ahead with it.

    And there were lots of other, even more bizarre interviewing experiences I had to endure.

  131. 131.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: No worries on the email.

    As for the rest: concur completely. The retired guys are largely problematic. And they form a clique or clack or mafia to enforce how they think things should be. Including hiring. My biggest issue now is that I’m a practitioner, not a traditional academic. So what you would think would make me appealing – I can do academic, but I’m basically a civilian national security professional/practitioner often means I’m viewed as neither fish nor fowl. And that confuses the people on the search committees. I’ve also been told that I professionally scare the faculty on search committees – by the actual hiring official as to why I’m his/her first choice, but can’t be hired because the faculty is intimidated by me experience.

    I’m past the “you can’t get the job without the experience and you can’t get the experience without the job” to “I can’t get the job because I’ve got so much experience”. Not that civilian academic searches are any better.

  134. 134.

    smintheus

    @joel hanes: Unfortunately none of the translations discussed are very good, or even comprehensible as English. Thucydides is quite difficult to translate.

  136. 136.

    smintheus

    @Timurid: Oh, that was very far from the worst treatment I received on the job market. In fact, those people seemed to like me and seemed to hope to hire me eventually for another job.

    I went to other colleges where people were deliberately rude to me because they wanted to provoke a reaction, or make sure I wasn’t hired or, if offered the job, would turn it down because of the interview experience. I once had to console an administrative staff member who was near tears because she’d seen a dean making a big show of being nasty to me. And then there were blatant charade interviews, where they’d decided to hire a certain candidate but needed to pretend to be considering other candidates. And so forth…

  139. 139.

    efgoldman

    @smintheus:

    And then there were blatant charade interviews, where they’d decided to hire a certain candidate but needed to pretend to be considering other candidates.

    If it’s any consolation (it probably isn’t) the same shit goes on in business.

  140. 140.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The retired guys are largely problematic. And they form a clique or clack or mafia to enforce how they think things should be.

    Yep, that was the mafia in our department. One of them, a retired general, appears to have decided that he could recruit me into an intelligence agency, or lord knows what he was grooming me for. When I made it clear through an anecdote that I had zero interest in getting involved with anybody’s spooks, he turned against me and hard.

    I eventually found myself in the too-experienced-to-hire bin as well. There’s no reasoning your way out of it either, once you get deposited there. Sometimes found myself being interviewed by people significantly less experienced and less knowledgeable than I was; awkward.

  141. 141.

    Adam L Silverman

    @joel hanes: @smintheus: We used the Landmark Thucydides at USAWC. The lesson author, who was a Thucydides specialist, thought the translation was decent and he also liked the maps.

  142. 142.

    smintheus

    @efgoldman: Yeah, I always figured that the worst abuses of academia probably eventually made their way into business as well.

  143. 143.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: It is what it is. When an appropriate position is posted I apply. Sometimes I even get an interview. So far I’ve not gotten any farther. I’d love to go back into an appropriate professional military education billet. And I keep trying when appropriate. It will either happen or it won’t. I can only control my part of the process.

  144. 144.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: And now vice versa.

    Shoot me an email to my balloon juice address. You can find it on the contact and author quick links. I only check that account every few days or so, but I’ll pull your address from there and reply and we can compare notes and horror stories if you like.

  145. 145.

    Adam L Silverman

    And now to bed!

    Everyone have a good night and see you all on the flip.

  146. 146.

    smintheus

    @Adam L Silverman: I’ve used it a few times. The maps are very useful, especially if you have students who will actually use them. It’s basically the Crawley translation, which though old and slightly stilted is still one of the best available. But I don’t like the pricetag. I try to use a bunch of ancient sources in my course, and also try to keep the total cost for textbooks under $100, so I gave up on the Landmark Thucydides. I do use the Landmark Herodotus, however, because I think it’s more successful at making that author accessible than the Thucydides volume does.

  148. 148.

    jl

    @smintheus:

    ” I always figured that the worst abuses of academia probably eventually made their way into business as well. ”

    Having endured both worlds, I think it is a two-way street in terms of bad practices.
    But you seem to inhabit a different niche of academia than I do.
    The most unpleasant experiences I have had in interviews is when I was working in financial consulting, when a few times it seemed like the point was to emphasize that the brass at the companies were batshit toxic insane.

  149. 149.

    smintheus

    @Kay: Agree. And what’s more, you don’t need to know anything further about the bill’s contents once you see that it was created in extreme secrecy. The secrecy tells you everything you need to know concerning what the bill is all about.

    It’s like my rule of thumb for evaluating the mafia: If they were up to any good, they wouldn’t be creeping around doing things in clandestine fashion.

  150. 150.

    smintheus

    @jl: Job interviewing in my field is at the more extreme end of the scale, I think, for several reasons…including the scarcity of tenure-track jobs and the lengths that American PhD programs will go to place their students in jobs. My own doctorate is from the UK, and my doctoral supervisor died suddenly just after I finished, so I’ve always been an academic orphan on the job market – which means that when interviewers feel they want to treat someone badly, they know they can do it to me without having to face any blowback for it. So I took tons of cr@p, much more than anybody else I knew on the market.

  152. 152.

    cokane

    i always think it’s weird to call something from the Bronze Age “proto-fascist”. While it’s true that Sparta was a less normative society by our current standards, especially when compared to its contemporary Athens, you can break down facets of any old civilization — from Incas to the Chinese — as being “proto-fascist”.

  156. 156.

    ThresherK

    The neo-Nazis lurve them some 300?

    I’ve been laughing at the many manly-man fans of the movie who seemed to miss the homoeroticism of a near-Spartacus (bathhouse deleted scene) level.

    But literal neo-Nazis keep this.on the shelf along with Red Dawn?

    My laughter may wake my wife up.

  157. 157.

    PPCLI

    @smintheus: Let me guess: They didn’t try hard enough because the treasonous Athenian liberal politicians and journalists tied the generals’ hands?

  159. 159.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @hitless:

    Saying that “war” ended 3/4 of the empires surveyed is facile. It may be the proximate cause, but surely there were underlying factors (I’ll take resource scarcity) that could have driven conflict.

    Empires run by looting the countries they conquer to grow the empires economy. When they empire can’t expand it’s economy goes into recession because all it’s good for is producing armies that aren’t needed, the empire weakens and then it’s payback time from the peoples the empire was exploiting.

  160. 160.

    sherparick

    @Peale: Also, none of those empires rising and falling had nuclear weapons. All the cold war war games using nuclear weapons pretty much ended the same way. The cockroaches win!!!! Meanwhile we have “Brilliant, Fearless Leader” communing with his people last night and reliving old hits “Lock her up, lock her up!” (which apparently the Leftist Bros in the Democratic Party also want to do with both Clinton and Pelosi).

    As things go wrong, the RWNJs are already figuring in their mind that they and their hero, “Fearless Leader” cannot be a fault. It is the “resistance.” This stuff is just right out 1984.

Comments are closed.