Bryan Pickel

My basic mental model for this now is: the US is at war with Syracuse in addition to its other commitments.

The Trump administration keeps comparing themselves to the Athenians in the Peloponnesian war, the weak suffer what they must and all. If only there were an example from that war of an Athenian war of choice on a power halfway across the world so that we could learn from that experience.

I would just take Box A, because $1,000,000 is too much.

Wars should be entered into only at last resort, only with a just cause, and only with as clear an objective as can be formulated at the time.

bsky.app/profile/brya...

Effectively, saying: "It's not an immigration enforcement agency. It's a private militia." is pretty effective messaging.

'And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks:
They say "America First," but they mean "America Next!"'.

I've been thinking that the next democratic administration should treat all of this ("minting bitcoins and selling them", etc) as state actions and of any accounts with money earned as state money and simply confiscate it.

This morning I had a student I taught 17 years ago email to ask me a logic question and a student I taught last semester email me that they liked my courses and want to pursue philosophy of language further.

It's already really weird to me morally that realists parrot the Athenian speeches to the Melians and on the Mytilenean debate in Thucydides. But, have they not read the rest of the book? Do they think the war and their conduct in it works out well for the Athenians?

So based on the DOJ’s recent record with regard to political prosecutions, what happens when Maduro is acquitted?

I was wrong.

I thought at least some of the lessons of the Iraq war had been learned.

Some searches are starting to display AI summaries in lieu of abstracts. To even find the relevant *abstracts* to identify which papers might be relevant you might have to first skim the summaries.

I googled "turn off Acrobat AI Assistant" and Google AI Assistant told me how, although there was an article just below telling me how.

What fraction of the rest of my life will be spent turning off AI Assistants? (I'm not even a person who thinks these are utterly useless.)

The Americans have no neighbors, and consequently they have no great wars, or financial crises, or inroads, or conquest to dread; they require neither great taxes, nor great armies, nor great generals; and they have nothing to fear from a scourge which is more formidable to republics than all these evils combined, namely, military glory. It is impossible to deny the inconceivable influence which military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation. General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to the head of their Government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people, and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been opposed to him. But he was raised to the Presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained twenty years ago under the walls of New Orleans, a victory which was, however, a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare. Now the people which is thus carried away by the illusions of glory is unquestionably the most cold and calculating, the most unmilitary (if I may use the expression), and the most prosaic of all the peoples of the earth.

Alexis de Tocqueville just absolutely rinses Andrew Jackson.

Old-fashioned predictive text on your phone needs lots of correcting, but people regularly and predictably don't. (I have signed off emails as "Brynas" because the phone thinks that's my name.) Uncorrected AI use has far worse consequences, but is predicable going to become just as regular.

One aspect of this: Very often all of the shortlisted candidates and a good many more are hireable and would do a good job. Most of the considerations in favor of each candidate are apples to oranges when you try to make comparisons.

The alternative is a public option!

You’re not of the opinion that every single course should prepare students for the competitive job market of prompt engineering?

Students using contemporary Scots poetry to illustrate principles of Classical Indian Philosophy of Language in their essays is an interesting cross-pollination.

Serious question: is this guy's problem even that he works in military history? Or, might it be just that he is "oblivious" about what everyone else is doing and seemingly writes it off as "academic orthodoxies"?

“We can’t end austerity until the economy starts growing again.” “So what are you doing to grow the economy?” “Oh, you know, we’re taking £40 billion from businesses without any compensatory economic benefit (as you might have with taxes).”

Similarly, he notes that the senate is a dangerous mess but that nothing bad has happened because less populous states hadn’t ganged up.

Tocqueville points out how dangerous it is to have a president who can stay in office without an effective majority in the legislature, but the notes that it’s not a big deal there wasn’t much for the president to do at the time.

Is the meaning of ‘brunch’ compositionality determined?

Is my image in the mirror another person? He seems to be left-handed whereas I am right-handed.