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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃

@alanallport.bsky.social

6.2K followers 2.1K following 13K posts

Professor, historian, husband, dad, scouser, gobby. Author of Demobbed (2009), Browned Off & Bloody-Minded (2015), Britain at Bay (2020), Advance Britannia (2025). “Awesome but a bit boring” (RMP). Personal account.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 6d

Excerpt from #AdvanceBritannia which is released in the UK on 6 November, preorders appreciated! uk.bookshop.org/p/books/brit...

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Anthony Ryan @anthonyryan.bsky.social · 4h

Only when a robot can walk into a room, forget what it went in there for then leave looking befuddled and grumpy will they have achieved true sentience.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 3h

It’s not heroic to have terrible opinions.

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 3h

Personally I prefer a society whose members feel some pressure to signal virtue over one where vice is continually rewarded

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 3h

It also employs Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova who argued recently that some Gazan children who starved to death didn’t really count because (checks notes) they were already ill anyway.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 5h

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

Image: A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” engraving, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. Each segment of the snake has the name of a university sent Trump’s “compact”: Texas, AZ, Vanderbilt, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Brown, Penn, MIT.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 4h

Livia #Girlboss

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 4h

This is really smart. Amazed at the hysteria over the ascendance of a woman entrepreneur who clearly knows how to organize a hereditary system and who's not afraid to take on a mob.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 4h

LOL. Circling the wagons

Sally Jenkins @sallyjenx.bsky.social · 5h

This is really smart. Amazed at the hysteria over the ascendance of a woman entrepreneur who clearly knows how to cover and sell news and who's not afraid to take on a mob. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss

The new editor in chief of CBS News triumphs over her critics.

www.theatlantic.com

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 4h

They need wiggle room to change their opinion 180 degrees when a Democratic POTUS is in office

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h

Amy Coney Barrett defends heavy use of the shadow docket: "If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue."

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 9h

“Who was president in 2020?” remains one of the most pertinent questions in American politics—absurd, yes, but here we are—and that extends to “who was president January 1 - 19, 2021?”

Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 9h

That’s a nice trick, since Biden wasn’t the president on Jan 6.

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Tom Joscelyn @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social · 9h

“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason.

Jailed for three days without an explanation or ability to notify anyone, George Retes argues the only path to healing starts with the government taking accountability for its actions.

newsletter.ofthebrave.org

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

It is objectively funny that they gave the Peace Prize to someone demographically calculated to infuriate Trump (Latina) while the particular Latina they picked is objectively a pretty bad choice.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

Have you read Sid Meier’s memoir? He talks about some of the design choices that went into Civ and those discarded along the way - the tech tree was a grudging compromise because nothing else worked iirc. Also talks about how he’s never been able to get a dinosaur game to work.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

The board game Puerto Rico has similar overtones. Technically it’s excellent. Its treatment of the historical period is gross.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

This was an amazing game with terrible politics.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

Understanding World History through Sid Meier’s Civilization is on my bucket list for courses to teach one day.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

On brand for Noem

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 2d

EL PASO — a family says ICE showed up at their house looking for migrants and shot and KILLED THEIR DOG, then didn’t help them as the agent ran away and was not identified.

kfoxtv.com/news/local/e...

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

Academia has a certain amount of this going on too.

Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh.bsky.social · 1d

there's a years ago tweet that basically said that anyone writing TV or movies by definition managed to land their extremely-hard-to-get dream job and it colors how they think about work and jobs and wish fulfillment in the stuff they write, and i think about it a lot

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Matthew Stiegler @matthewstiegler.bsky.social · 1d

Roberts is presiding over, and driving, a stunning collapse in faith in the U.S. Supreme Court, not just among the public, but among federal judges.

What a failure. The Titanic captain of chief justices.

Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 1d

“More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.”

Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders

www.nytimes.com

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Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social · 1d

Reminder: Antifa membership cards are being mailed out next week, please be sure that you have paid your annual dues.

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Jason "Red5" Lyall @jaylyall.bsky.social · 1d

Kid Rock looks like an extra in a RoboCop commercial

Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 1d

Kid Rock: Do you know what is stupid… these chicks running around on campuses with blue hair, five nose rings.

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Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

18 year olds famously care very much what boring old dudes think of them

Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 1d

She’s going to feed it all into AI.

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Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 8d

Every legal story now is either

Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach

or

In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 1d

I, for one am shocked - <shocked> - that American financial institutions stand to benefit from bailouts to other countries

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