what comes after america

any specialists know the reputation of Syme's _The Roman Revolution_? couldn't fall asleep last night and got about 20 pages in, it's maybe my favorite book about Rome very hard-nosed, political science/sociology flavored reevaluation of the end of the Republic

anyone else have the sense that no one is particularly trying to be smart or broadly convincing online anymore retrospectively it feels like there was a shift from a high classical spirit in the blog era to romantic tweeting during the calamity epoch and now it's just--inert?

young sir, age 1 is a very different creature than my 4yo very little interest in stories. no stuffed animals: he wants devices. he'll sit at a keyboard and experiment pushing buttons while he holds the mouse to his ear like a phone. loves objects with lids to remove.

do i trust HHS reports? i mean no, frankly, even where they seem to confirm my priors this is a curious sample. why were they authorized but not completed? does this imply the authorization was flawed? what fraction of total cases was this?

The fact is, who employers are _permitted_ to fire and who they _must_ fire and who must _not_ be fired is totally unprincipled in any conventional sense of that term. Empirically, it's a matter of pure power by interest groups and public sentiment, and through these things on laws imposed on businesses, and on liabilities generated; and so directly, a matter of the costs incurred on businesses through these and other avenues when they find themselves employing a given person. People who identify as "communists" and "fascists" are both incredibly tiresome but in the current world communists are politically powerful enough to live openly and impose costs on businesses that employ fascists, and fascists are not powerful enough to respond in kind. There's no way in which this can be reasonably construed as just. The question is, which is to be master--that's all. One might have expected a self-identified fascist to understand this.

i see right through your ruse

not to respond to the other post going around but so far parenting isn't intrinsically super hard i mean, it can be lot especially when they're infants but much of the difficulty is contextual, and if you marry well and your kids are well adjusted, that makes the load sit light

the green wood hoopoe of uganda is a highly social species during hierarchical negotiations, dominant females will force-feed subordinates as an act of ritualized dominance, forcing them to choke down regurgitated bugs as the flock awkwardly watches their humiliation

idk who needs to hear this but a certain sociology professor is a generational troll and when you angrily QT his droll little post he's won like so many times before and you're just another statistic he's not even monetized. man's in it just for the love of the game 🥲