Strategic decision-making in a global framework is tough, especially when any decision you make is going to hurt someone, somewhere.

But I'd argue less difficult is the suggestion that the the USA, that we have an obligation to help as many Afghans get out as we can.
After the Fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (the 'boat people') fled the new regime. We resettled 402,382 of them; there are now 2.2 million Vietnamese Americans, some from that wave of refugees, some not.

And Vietnamese-Americans are great!
I don't see our responsibility vanishing after the last plane lifts off from the soon-to-be-renamed Hamid Karzai Airport. If the Taliban are half as bad as I think it is reasonable to expect, there will be waves of Afghan refugees. Many of them will be people that helped us.
People with too much education, with the wrong sort of education, people who opposed the Taliban, who helped us.

I think they should come here. I don't know that America has a responsibility to all of the oppressed of the world, but we do have a responsibility to *these* people.
'But what about the Taliban slipping in' - do you really think the Taliban guys are going to bail after fighting for 20 years to get the chance to build their (almost certainly horrifying) ideal religious state...before they even try to do it?
'But do you really want them in your town?' - You know what...yes? Pretty much everyone I know whose been over there has been saying yes, has been pushing ways to help get people out, resettle, etc.

I figure they know these folks better than me.
There are so many things in the world we cannot do. We can't make China stop oppressing the Uighyrs, we can't get the Russians out of eastern Ukraine, and we couldn't make democracy work in Afghanistan.

But we *can* do this. We've done this before.

We should do this.

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More from @BretDevereaux

12 Sep
Just finished playing an odd little computer wargame, "Highfleet" (it's on Steam because of course it is).

Pretty sure I'll end up talking about it on ACOUP because it is different from most commercial wargames in interesting ways.

Mostly, it forces you to play w/ uncertainty.
So the briefest background is that you play as the commander of a retro-futuristic fleet of air-battleships. Your ships can engage with cruise missiles and aircraft outside of visual range or with traditional artillery or short-range missiles in close combat.
Honestly, don't think real hard about the technology here; it isn't supposed to make hard-sci-fi sense.

The thing is, you generally both trying to find and defeat enemy groups but also avoid detection, because the enemy overall is much stronger than you.
Read 16 tweets
10 Sep
This week on the blog @DrMichaelJTayl1 presents a Defense of the Classics, setting out a number of reasons why we need to work to save Classics (the study of the ancient world) as an academic discipline and the clear benefits for doing so.

acoup.blog/2021/09/10/mee…
This is a perspective I'm very eager to present. Classics has been under a lot of pressure for years now, with funding cuts and shrinking or even disbanded departments at major universities.

It is a discipline that needs to grapple with the real danger of fading away.
That pressure has prompted a lot of classicists to think and argue really hard about what Classics needs to be in a modern university. Those discussions are fair and good.

But debates about what Classics should be won't matter if we don't have a field by the time we decide.
Read 6 tweets
8 Sep
So there's been a bit of cross-talk about the shape of the current academic jobs market on this here birdsite today I think a lot of it was very anecdotal and experiential and so a lot of people talked past each other.

I like data, so let's focus on some, with this chart: 1/25
It is a chart of the number of jobs posted to the AHA per year as compared to number of PhDs graduated (from their job report: historians.org/ahajobsreport2…)

I'm focused on history because that was the argument this week, but most humanities look like this; many look worse. 2/25
What we can see pretty clearly is that from 1978 to 2008, the number of job postings and the number of PhDs graduating is fairly well correlated. Economic contractions (e.g. '82-'87 or '02-'04) do cause lower hiring (often on a short delay)... 3/25
Read 25 tweets
22 Aug
Hey this is a great question about what we're able to know about the sarisa, the Macedonian pike - the key weapon of the infantry under Alexander the Great but also the Hellenistic successors states (the Seleucids, Ptolemies, Antigonids, etc).

So let's talk about it! 1/lots
Let's start with the archaeology. Reconstructing the sarisa really hinges on a handful of artifacts from a single site - in particular just six damaged metal objects from the Macedonian royal tombs at Aigai.

Here they are (image from Connolly (2000):
2/xx
These were recovered and published by a Greek archaeologist, M. Andronicos; they were recovered outside the tomb, perhaps looted and then discarded; so probably not in their original location of deposition which leaves their relationships to each other unclear. 3/xx
Read 41 tweets
20 Aug
This week on the blog: More Victoria II! We're continuing our look at @PdxInteractive 's industrial revolution Grand Strategy game by asking how it handles war in the period and why - in a game about WWI - the best move is not to fight at all.

acoup.blog/2021/08/20/col…
This is the post in this series I've most wanted to write, because I think this is perhaps the best example of the promise of a simulation approach to historical gaming...and consequently, despite Vicky2's well established jank, the crowning triumph of Paradox design.
The genius here is that for all of the simplification and abstraction, the game systems do a good enough job of simulating both rising productivity and the rising destructiveness of war to create the same effect we view historically where after a point war doesn't 'pay.'
Read 4 tweets
5 Aug
Apparently in a recent podcast a pair of fairly influential thinkers on what may be fairly called the far-right mulled over the idea that the USA might need an 'American Caesar.'

This is a stunningly awful idea and betrays tremendous ignorance of, y'know - actual Caesar? 1/x
I'm not going to delve into the aboslutely nutty politics of this (for that, see the excellent work of my friend and intellectual historian of American conservatism, @Joshua_A_Tait , e.g.: thebulwark.com/anti-democrati…).

But I do think it is worth discussing Caesar. 2/x
Julius Caesar tends to get a bit of a soft glow in popular memory, in part because it was *profoundly* impolitic for later ancient writers to criticize Caesar strongly when living under the regime set up by his nephew.

But ho boy, the 'age of Caesar' suuuucked. 3/xx
Read 26 tweets

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