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Nathan Tankus

@nathantankus.bsky.social

34K followers 750 following 4.1K posts

President of @crisesnotes.bsky.social (crisesnotes.com) Book: [About Undetermined], under contract with Viking Books email: crisesnotes@gmail(dot)com Signal: NathanTankus.01 (only for reporting... Okay on weekends you can confess crushes)

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 18d

NEW PIECE: I'm very excited to bring the first part of a three part series digging deeper into my "Conventional Wisdom Processor" coinage. This was inspired by @pkrugman.bsky.social's generous discussion of the phrase last month.

www.crisesnotes.com/what-connect...

What Connects Conventional Wisdom Processors, AI and The Second Trump Administration’s Constitutional Crisis? Part One

This is a premium piece of Notes on the Crises. Become a Paid Subscriber to read this piece and support Notes on the Crises Subscribe & Read This year I coined the phrase conve...

www.crisesnotes.com

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 9m

I don't think this is really a helpful intervention. Of course would be happy to have your opinion of the Beyond Germs edited collection.

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 9m

Obviously this work can be challenged and criticized, but simply reasserting conventional wisdom when someone brings up recent scholarship is not doing that. I particularly recommend the Beyond Germs edited collection because it tackles many different angles to this question.

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 11m

? When did I do this?

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 14m

a) Historian, not anthropologist

b) you missed one of the books

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 21m

I don't see what the point of reasserting the conventional narrative in response to someone bringing up the more recent scholarship is. It just reduces to "I believe what I already believe and don't feel like absorbing new information"

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 22m

There is also the question of population recovery. Pandemics regularly led to large mortality and population decline in the rest of the world but it didn't eliminate the populations themselves because they existed in conditions where the populations could recover. Not so under expanding colonization

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 24m

Again, the recent literature heavily disputes this narrative.

Also relevant that"direct contact"is doing a lot of misleading rhetorical work because it denies European roles in epidemics caused by increasingly dense living situations from refugees fleeing settler violence.

bsky.app/profile/nath...

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

Circling back here, you should read this 2020 Coauthored Paul Kelton paper.

"Germs, Genocides, and America's Indigenous Peoples"
academic.oup.com/jah/article-...

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academic.oup.com

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

every single reply from you, from the first reply, has been you being condescending and you've now pivoted to being condescending about my supposed condescension. Truly remarkable.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

I think you should reread your tweets in this thread to identify who was being condescending to whom.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

A) no one said that it should be
B) you should actually read the book if you want to attempt to critically assess the Book's contents and its relevance to the discussion at hand.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

Circling back here, you should read this 2020 Coauthored Paul Kelton paper.

"Germs, Genocides, and America's Indigenous Peoples"
academic.oup.com/jah/article-...

Validate User

academic.oup.com

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 1h

Have you read Direct Action: An Ethnography?

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 6h

Note that the people who typically participate in Black blocs know this. Contrary to the impression of tons of liberals,people generally do Black blocs strategically. David Graeber discusses this quite a lot in "Direct Action An Ethnography". There is a direct line to inflatable frogs from Ya Basta!

THIRD EXAMPLE: STREET PARTY
Direct action aims to confront what it sees as an unjust or illegitimate form of
authority in a way that, in its very internal structure, suggests a viable alternative
to it. Actually, the same is probably true, in some sense, of protest in generaL The
result, as we've seen, is that it's often difficult to determine how much any given
action should be seen as primarily a performance meant to make an impression
on an outside audience, and how much it is better seen as a collective ritual meant
to educate, inspire, entertain, and transform the sense of possibilities of the participants themselves. Certainly, there is always a little of both. But some types of
action lean much more heavily towards one than towards the other.
If picket lines lean very much in the first direction-they are primarily about
communicating a message of defiance to specific opponents, and convincing a
broader audience to act in solidarity-street parties might be said to represent
the opposite extreme. While they are certainly intended to make a political statement or achieve a political end, they are also designed to afford participants every
possible opportunity to enjoy themselves. lhat element of pleasure-above all,
of collective, social pleasure-is really the main point. Even insofar as those taking part in a street party are trying to impress an audience, they are doing so in
such a way as to blur the boundaries, not to draw lines in the sand. Onlookers are
offered a show, with music and jugglers and clowns. The ideal is for the pleasure
of the experience to become infectious, so that the audience spontaneously finds
itself drawn in, to either mentally or, better, physically enter the festivaL
This element of pleasure is considered a crucial to what makes new forms of
protest new-almost as much as principles of self-organization and autonomy.

In activist circles that year, Ya Basta! had something of the quality ofa Next
Big Thing. Probably, this was most of all for their spectacularly innovative tactics:
members of the group were famous for covering themselves in all sorts of elaborate padding, made from everything from foam rubber sheeting to rubber ducky
flotation devices, combining it with helmets and plastic shields, so one looked
like some kind of futuristic Greek hoplite, then topping the whole thing with gas
masks and white chemical protective suits. The idea is that, so suited up, there's
relatively little the cops can do that will actually hurt you. Of course, you are rendered so clumsy there's probably not that much you could do to hurt anyone else;
but that's kind of the point. Its exponents claim the tactic is rooted in a new philosophy of civil disobedience. Where the old-fashioned, masochistic, Gandhian
approach encourages activists to hold out their willingness to let the police beat
them up as a sign of moral superiority, the "white overalls" proposed an ethos of
protection: as long as you refuse to harm others, it is completely legitimate to take
whatever measures necessary to avoid harm to yourself The costume also makes
one look rather ridiculous, but that's kind of the point too. Ya Basta! columns would often play on it by, for instance, attacking police lines with balloons or water pistols. What really impressed a lot of activists in America, though, was that
such groups had a real social base.

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Reposted by Nathan Tankus

Assistant Marshallian Spillover Spookinator 👻 @stevenlandgraf.com · 6h

Even though Kelton's work often focuses on the southeast or the Cherokee more specifically, it should cast doubt on almost everything else us non-experts have accepted as "common knowledge" about epidemics in the Americas more broadly.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 6h

Worth reading his work :)

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 7h

The disease deaths were primarily driven by the social conditions European colonization created and not simply an inevitable result of lack of immunity.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 8h

This is not true and the latest scholarship has overturned such ideas. Actually, as it happens, @stephaniekelton.bsky.social's husband Paul Kelton is a prominent and important scholar in this area. Highly recommend his work.

Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715

Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America

Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518–182

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

I think its important to separate one's legal analysis from that kind of game theory. It inevitably leads to a legal analysis of hard constraints which militates to the Yoo position i referenced above.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

I don't think this is right. Its basically saying individual appropriations bills don't happen in the context of any existing statutory framework. So e.g. if the civil rights act of 1964 isn't explicitly referenced, it doesn't apply to a more recent appropriations bill.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

Do you just not read? This was literally my initial tweet that started all this

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

Yeah typo *issued

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

People treat the waiver thing as "oh well so this is a minor detail" but the gigantic impact the presidency has on this country (including legislators) understanding of reality makes all such law breaking matter for the information environment.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 16h

Important to point out that as a factual matter, the biden admin issues no waivers. One could argue that following the conflicting statutes would have meant making a determination than issuing a waiver, but we all know why this wasn't done.

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 17h

Was just bringing that up bsky.app/profile/nath...

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 17h

Important to comment that Leahy law is a shorthand here in that there are other provisions restricting military aid for human rights abuses of various kinds. But yes, i am happy to talk about priority of when statutes pass but the most basic facts could not be established so we didn't get there.

Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 17h