Preparing a presentation on Ottoman Turkish today, I decided to Google "features of Ottoman Turkish" and this is what Google's AI summary gives me.

The ruthlessness and bluntness of some in the Trump administration reminds me of the taskmasters of the Umayyads. Here is the Umayyad governor and "sedition"-crusher and--also the eloquent--Hajjaj b. Yusuf vs Kristi Noem's ICE in Chicago. Parallels are, what's the word, uncanny.

My tell-tale word of ChatGPT writing of the day: "interplay" E.g. "The interplay of religion, politics, and military is ..."

Pretty happy not to be an American at this moment. Not a particularly proud time for Americans to be honest.

ChatGPT is useful. I asked if it thought Donald Trump was a LLM. Here is the answer.

The other way around is also true: Ottoman history from late medieval to modern period is an ocean of history-making in politics, society, arts and culture. Truly amazing feat of human civilization that deserves more attention for better reasons.

The second Trump “era” has so far been a blessing to historians (of the Ottoman Empire for ex.) looking for ways to teach students how history is relevant to us. From authoritarianism to sultanic law and from loyalty to meritocracy, the new admin keeps delivering cases upon cases for parallelisms.

Historians have taught us that we cannot predict the future, worse neither can we infer laws of society from history. We should teach history and teach it not as the knowledge of the past but as the science of human society (cf. Ibn Khaldun's "ilm al-umran") in progress.

See Biden's and Trump's shameless pardons; the way news media (WaPo and X/Twitter) owners and Cook (the gay CEO of the culturally most progressive tech company) all line up behind Trump and a famous trans celebrity (K. Jenner) applauds a president who says there are only two genders. +

Can we say that no constitution seems to prevent a government of the people, for the people, by the people to decline to a modern form of "sultanism"? +

It may be that the US, being the epitome of Enlightenment morals, open society, and capitalism (think the lady liberty atop the hill in the White Man's Burden cartoon), can fall prey to absolutism. +

Back to the inauguration: the musings about the "golden age" and "manifest destiny" (add to this the laughable ADL statement on Musk's Nazi salute) all seem to betray the assumption that through reason, science, and open society, we can overcome bigotry and poverty, and establish a healthy society.+

And what does it mean when American leaders refer to a period of "golden age" and lament an "American decline"? Again drawing parallels to Ottoman history: the authors of reform treatises in the 17th century attacked corruption and maladministration and urged a return to the Suleymanic golden age. +

How to interpret the irrational reverence for the "framers" of the Constitution? Is the US Constitution a sacralized law code, similar to how "yasa" or "qanun" was treated? (Cf. the Ottoman use of "qanun-i sharif," i.e. the noble constitution.) +

Talking about cyclical history, anthropomorphism, and romanticizing the past as some of the problems studying history. Trump's inauguration is history in the making. From the invoking of a "golden age" to the "manifest destiny" of the US, there is much to discuss. I have some questions: +

MS Word when kerning is not enabled (default behavior):