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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 7h

My apologies! I had forgotten you had made your way Over Here, but of course I ought to have remembered.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 7h

Anyway, I suppose later this year I'm going to try to set out my own summary state-of-the-debate and my own view of what a synthesis might look like on the blog, so when I do that you can tell me where I've gotten off the rails!

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 7h

And just as an arms and armor guy - it's just not a good sign that his one-paragraph description of the hoplite panoply misstates the most likely material of the tube-and-yoke cuirass (linen, not leather).

But I'm not shocked - it's all 'technological determinism' anyway, right?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 7h

I will not claim an encyclopedic knowledge of Echeverria's entire work, but he strikes me as maybe an odd choice for the only 'how did the phalanx work in battle' chapter given that his work always felt anywhere from disinterested to allergic to that sort of approach.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 7h

I would be *fascinated* to hear or read your critique of the volume. I confess I have not deeply read it, because its engagement with the Hellenistic felt desultory.

I will admit that Echeverria's 'lets move beyond hoplites' chapter did not strike me as likely to win many adherents.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 11h

Heavens, those messages. I knew a decent number of College Republicans (which, I guess is a different org but I'd assume lots of overlap) back in my undergrad and they weren't perfect, but they weren't Like This.

It will be a long time to get this poison out of the right. A very long time.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

Yeah, that's part of the problem with the lack of a clear synthesis - one book non-specialists can read to get a handle on the current state of the topic.

Because if you work on, say, Pindar, you're probably only gonna read one book - if any - about hoplites, but you might have to teach the polis.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

There's a real sense where the fact that some of the major orthodox voices either 1) quit the field to become pundits or 2) are acerbic and write (angry) reviews but not their own books leaves the heterodox squad in a bind: with a point, but not a good-faith interlocutor.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

To be clear, that 'working synthesis' needn't be 50/50; it can be 90/10. But it has to incorporate some answer to the objections and that hasn't, to my mind, happened here yet and might not for a while.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

My sense remains that 1) you can't teach Western Way of War without reservations but 2) a lot of ancient military historians till have a lot of reservations about Myths and Realities. These sorts of debates tend to resolve when someone presents a working synthesis and that hasn't happened yet.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

Sorta? It's become a lopsided debate, because the 'orthodox' side largely quit the field to go become hate-pundits or whatever, leaving the 'heterodox' folks like @roelkonijn.bsky.social with no one to debate, but also - at least to me - without a *resolution,* a compelling consensus synthesis.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

We're not attached to any of it (the old finished ships long ago spoken for) but I imagine some small part of the collection might be useful to someone who does the hobby and I'd hate to just junk it all if someone could use any of it.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 14h

Alright bluesky let's see if we know someone with the right hobby.

I've got some wooden model shipbuilding stuff - passed down - tools, lots of small pieces and parts, guidebooks, a half-built ship, etc.

Is there a forum or such where I could find someone in the area who might want them?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

And not even how my career would be different - just how conversations and relationships would be different.

I have to explain so much of the basics of what I do, how the job market works and so on. It's an alien world to my family - and they all went to college!

I can only imagine for first-gens!

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

(To be clear, I make no claim to having a hard time here. Neither of my parents were academics or had PhDs, but my father has a Masters and I grew up in an affluent, upper-middle-class household. I do not claim to have walked a hard road in life.)

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

No, entirely fair.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

Academic hiring really only stalled out in the humanities in 2009 or so and academics on realized it wasn't going to 'bounce back' (the way it had every other time) by around 2016-2018.

So today's tenured faculty were mostly going to grad school and getting hired before that collapse.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2...

which is citing

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

22% of Tenure-Track Professors Have a Parent With a Ph.D.

Current tenure-track faculty members are up to 25 more times likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population, according to a new study in Nature: Human Behavior. This rate nearly doub...

www.insidehighered.com

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

It's always striking seeing other academics talk about their academic parents and be reminded that close to a quarter of all tenure-line academics have at least one PhD parent.

That's not a critique, but I always wonder how different it would be to have a parent who already understood academia.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 16h

What would we have to see for us to not take the "soaring cost" of higher ed talking point at face value? How many data points do we need? How many years of tuition freezes at UW? We could have a sensible discussion about college costs around levels, but we can't even get the delta stuff right.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16h

Gonna write a blog post about it later this year.

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Reposted by "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 20h

one response to this (correct) observation is to say “well, the cops will attack you no matter how you dress and behave.” that’s right. images of cops and ICE beating grandmas and kids in inflatable frog costumes is a win for the opposition.

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 21h

one of the reasons they're so mad at "no kings" is that they thought they were going to get a different kind of protest. they *want* the black bloc to be out there fighting with the cops. those are the images they've been trying to generate from "go." instead--

newrepublic.com/article/2016...

MAGA Rage at “No Kings” Boils Over—and It Quickly Backfires on Trump

As Trump allies smear the coming protests, a good writer on MAGA skewers the absurdity of these attacks on large swaths of Americans—and explains why our best recourse will be to turn out in force.

newrepublic.com

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

They certainly can. You'd rather they didn't though.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

I don't have it to hand, but I've seen arguments that labor-saving advances in male-coded fields tend to be used to create more leisure time, whereas advances in female-coded household activities tend to just raise 'standards' - the new time is consumed by a higher bar of 'respectable.'

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

Most modern workers today have no such excuse, but lingering social norms leave men working fewer hours on household tasks, though my understanding is that gap closes a little with each generation.

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