Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 1d

BREAKING: Shabana Mahmood announces that immigrants will have to come up with five unique ideas for repurposing red telephone boxes before being allowed entry to the U.K.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 2d

Except I don't know what that means or how to do it, and I'll never learn - neither will most humanities folks. I'd simply give up all social media first. We need the managed platform, and we need it to be run on our behalf.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 2d

But BlueSky won't keep them if it doesn't provide a safe space for their freedom of expression. There are already worrying indications that it won't. The growth of the site will level off, then reverse, if it pivots to X's moderation and algorithm models.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 2d

"Better a pig than a fascist."

(We painted rocks with the kids today.)

Painting on a rock of the anime character Porco Rosso. The rock is sitting in the palm of a hand for size comparison.

Painting of the Studio Ghibli character Porco Rosso, done on a 2-inch rock.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

I still have only the slightest idea who she is, which I think is an underrated metric for determining someone's seriousness. My historian radar says this is not a person we'll ever need to know about for the test. She's no Al Smith.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

I'm still mad that she was popularly portrayed as somehow less reliably or authentically progressive than Bernie in 2020. It was never true.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

Could the scale go lower than F-, for example to reflect someone like Fetterman who for all relevant purposes caucuses with Republicans? There is a large practical gulf between Fetterman and Schumer even though the ideological gulf is fairly small.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

This reflects the qualitative historical reality that he's always been only half an entity. He's very strong in his comfort area, but badly myopic. A classic Marxist in both the useful sense and the disappointing sense.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

I'm really surprised it's that high. She plays a very outdated, very shallow game and has one move.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

He's always been a bend-with-the-wind guy. Very pleasant, very unreliable.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 3d

It all has the virtue of being exactly what I'd expect. (I'm not surprised at all by Newsom, for example, who's all media and no substance.)

I think this is really important and should be an evolving project. I hope it catches on. In the UK too, where it could be quite important after the collapse.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 5d

Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Imperialism, who believed war was a positive good, won it.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 5d

They absolutely would conceive of that, did conceive of that, warned about that, feared that, essentially did do that to each other and wanted to do that and worse to each other. But yes, it's still a bad thing to do. The judge isn't much of a historian, is all.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 5d

You could try to be as nightmarishly wrong as AI-generated alt text, and you would fail.

A screenshot of the rape scene in Rashomon (1950), featuring a bandit pulling a woman's kimono menacingly as she tries to pull away, has an AI-generated alt text that reads, "A person holding a person's shoulder."

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 6d

I always like to show people Shel Silverstein's amazing song, relevant to interests: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUr1...

A Front Row Seat to Hear Ole Johnny Sing

YouTube video by Shel Silverstein - Topic

www.youtube.com

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 9d

I'm still skeptical, for two reasons:

1) Surely by this time everyone on Tr*mp's team recognizes that anything in the files has no power to harm Tr*mp's popularity with his base. A few MTG-like defectors won't move the needle.
2) We know he wants to do these things anyway and would do them anyway.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 11d

And talk about soft power. The British public, obsessed with supposed decline, don't understand how much soft power they have had, and still have.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 11d

I admit, I didn't know Patricia Routledge was alive, let alone the last member of that cast. But I thought about that show just the other day. I was a Texan kid in the 90s who stayed up late to watch the British classics on PBS - Python, AYBS?, Red Dwarf, Keeping Up Appearances. A golden era of TV.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 12d

There's no way to end the sentence "Just watched the episode of Voyager where" that isn't cringe.

David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 17d

"LLM will do a better job" - It will not.

If you can't be bothered to write a caption, you shouldn't be writing anything at all.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 18d

It's likely that for some amount of time, the percentage of people in the North American colonies who were Muslim - generally enslaved people - was higher than the percentage of people who were Irish Catholic.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 20d

It's a concept that's already haunting me!

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 22d

I just saw this post! Aah!

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 22d

I used to organically, contemporaneously listen to the Sheryl Crow album with "Every Day is a Winding Road" on it, and now every time I'm in a grocery store I have to remember driving around my hometown to my first job in my first car. It's got to be how Boomers feel every time Chicago gets played.

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David A. Conrad, Ph.D. @davidaconrad.bsky.social · 23d

Maybe you've done this, but I'd reach out to the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, TX. If they don't have a reliable source on hand, they might have an idea of a specialist who would, as they have a busy lecture series covering all things military and Pacific.

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