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T. Greer Profile picture
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, and books I find interesting
21 subscribers
Aug 25 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
How the Chinese consulate in New York has unseated multiple city and state level politicians they do not like Image @PekingMike et al. in the New York Times: nytimes.com/2025/08/25/nyr…
Aug 24 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
These are extremely good textbooks.

Pedagogically unique--very different from most mathematics texts.

If you come from a humanist background or otherwise worry that you don't "get" math, I strongly recommend these. Image
Image I also recommend them if you passed through these classes without ever feeling like you understood, at a deeper level, why you were doing the manipulations you were doing. Braver will fix that.
Aug 22 • 45 tweets • 9 min read
To be fair my thread does not engage with the new piece so much as with Kang's broader ouvre.

The two connect in the new piece's implicit answer to a key question: If China is stronger than the United States how do you expect it will behave? Implicit in the piece is that the best model for this future China is either periods of Chinese weakness in more recent history or to its relationship with other neoconfucian powers when itself was a strong neoconfucian empire.
Aug 21 • 81 tweets • 13 min read
I think the time has come for me to write my take on @daveckang's entire research ouvre--its strengths and the limitations I find in its central arguments.

I do think that his new piece in IO really rests on ideas and assumptions of this earlier work, even if they are not cited. Essentially I think all of these books, and the many articles that precede them, are variations on a central theme -- a thesis about Chinese statecraft that extends back several thousand years but is rooted in concerns about the present. Image
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Aug 19 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Tell me if I read this paper wrong. It does not disprove the claim that industrialization depended on cotton grown by slaves.

Rather, advances the claim that there would have been even *greater* economic growth had it depended on free labor instead of slave labor for cotton. It seems like the claim "absent slavery industrialization and capitalism would have gone chugging along just fine, thank you, and probably would have grown faster" seems different to me than "slavery did not play a decisive role in American/British industrialization."
Aug 16 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I have a very different and somewhat romantic take on this question.

First though a map that shows you just how close to the border and far away from everything else Beijing was. Image One of the takeaways from this book’s section of the Ming Dyansty was just, for lack of a better term, how hard core the Ming officialdom could be. Image
Aug 16 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
NEW ESSAY: Did Taiwan "Lose Trump?" Image Two weeks ago Christian Whiton, who served in the first Trump admin State Department, published an essay for @DominoTheoryMag that went viral in Taiwan.

Its title: "How Taiwan Lost Trump." Image
Aug 2 • 54 tweets • 9 min read
I have asked this question on this platform several times over the last two years—usually not in reference to vibes but hard statistics, which support the idea that women have become the main (American) world travelers.

I am dissatisfied with the Twitterati answers.

Thread. Before I get into these answers a preliminary note. This topic makes many men defensive. It probably should. Decline in willingness to travel is a decline in appetite for adventure. I think that’s bad. We can do better.
Jul 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
IMHO they already know this -- moves over the last year can be seen as "lets try and wipe the slate clean while we still have the option; if we do not come up with a lasting reshaping of our security environment now, we will not be able to anything about it in a decades time." Or to put this another way: one major driver of conflict is the perception among one of the players that their position will diminish in the future. "We will never have more relative strength than we do, so we must act before the balance of forces is less favorable."
Jul 28 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
This is a really valuable piece.

A few of you might have remembered the rumors and reactions a month back arguing that Xi is losing his grip on power.

This piece lays out a framework for analyzing Xi's hold on power and then applies it to the current moment.

Few notes: The piece describes five fields of power within the PRC:

1) "The gun" (PLA)
2) "The knife" (domestic security services)
3) "The pen" (propaganda system)
4) "The paper" (Secretariat, CC Gen Office, CCDI, Org Dep)
5) "The blood" (the princeling families and social networks)
Jul 17 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
Several years ago I wrote an essay reviewing big synthetic histories of antebellum America published over the last few decades. One of my conclusions: “ One can follow the mood of America’s liberal intelligentsia decade by decade through these volumes. ” Image Three of the four were very good books. One —Daniel Walker Howe’s—ranks among my absolute favorite books. Image
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Jul 17 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Been reading Reddit threads about Edward Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL.

It is full of folks who read excerpts/ a few chapters in a historiography class, now lecturing on how “outdated” it is, “historically inaccurate,” and “useful only for understanding the Enlightenment.” Bah! There is an astounding arrogance in these comments I find infuriating.
Jul 6 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
I was pondering the other day what would be required to make an English major as rigorous as possible (i.e. comparable to a hard science degree).

A few tentative thoughts.

1. The major in English should be first and foremost a major in English philology. Every student takes the basic linguistics core courses (phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax). A semester survey on English grammar caps that section off.

Every student takes 2 courses on old english, 1 on middle English, 1 one Early modern English, and then something on modern English varieties or modern English socio-linguistics.

You probably also want to include 3 years of Latin or French, or a passing test grade in either.

This is probably sufficient to give the student foundational knowledge in English *as a language.*

2. You would want a core set of courses that require technical mastery in interpreting texts. This means a poetry class that requires you to memorize poetic forms and scan hundreds of poems. It means memorizing and reciting poetry and other passages for credit. It means a prose class where people are taking big blocks of Faulkner or Conrad and diagramming the sentences and passages. It means diagramming famous essays and the structures of novels.

I am not sure how many courses this would require, but maybe two, one focused on prosody in poetry, the other on structure in prose.

3. Something like the following progression of foundational surveys:

a) Classical antecedents: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphosis. Even better if the class also assigns poems or short stories that allude to this material so that students can see the connections over time.
b) King James Bible. (Same thing as before--but perhaps even more critical to include the poems/short stories). Make students memorize key Bible passages.
c) Shakespeare survey. At least 8 plays across genres. Make students memorize key passages.
d) English poetry to Milton + Paradise Lost. Make students memorize.
e) English poetry after Milton survey. Make students memorize.
f) 18th and 19th century novels (assign 12, unless you have a really big novel like Moby Dick, in which case you can shorten a bit; at least half of the novels should have been written in English).
g) Development of the essay to 1900 (Start with Montaigne and Bacon and move forward in time. Include several book length works)
g) The modern essay and narrative nonfiction (include several book length works--Didion, Wolf, McPherson, that sort of thing).

There also should be at least one research based class, but I suppose they can choose can between different topics/authors there.

4. I would have previously said a series of courses on composition but given ChatGPT and the inevitability of cheating I do not really know if there is a point to this anymore. The curriculum would need to be focused on things that can be tested, things that can be recited, and class discussions and debates. Students will have to learn how to write well through reading good models.
Unfortunately, the inability to assign essays makes it difficult to reach out rigor goal but I do not have any good solutions to this. On a semester by semester basis this might look like:

SEMESTER I
-Linguistics: Intro to Linguistics and English Language
-Lit Survey: Classical Literature
-Eng Lang: Old English I
-GE credit
-GE Credit

SEMESTER II

-Linguistics: Phonology and Phoentics
-Eng Lang: Old English II
-Text Interpretation: Prosody and Form
-Lit Survey: King James Bible
-GE Credit

SEMESTER III
-Linguistics: Morphology
-Latin 101
-Eng Lang: Middle English
-Lit Survey: Poetry through Milton
-GE Credit

SEMESTER IV
-Linguistics: Syntax
-Latin 202
-Eng Lang: Early Modern English
-Lit Survey: Shakespeare
-GE Credit

SEMESTER V

-Latin 301
-Linguistics: Semantics
-Textual Interpretation: Prose and Structure
-Lit Survey: Development of the Essay
-Elective

Semester VI

-Latin 302
-Lit Survey: 17th and 19th Century Novel
-Lit Survey: English poetry after Milton
-Elective (research intensive)
-Elective

Semester VII

-Lit Survey: Narrative Nonfiction
-Eng Lang: Sociolinguistics/Modern dialects
-Elective
-Elective
-Elective

Semester VIII:

-Elective (x5)
Jul 4 • 38 tweets • 6 min read
So my basic theory for why this happened goes something like this: 1. There are intellectual reasons for the shift, but they were less important than the practical reasons.

The practical reason: a large portion of the western elite ended up with fairly good Latin right up to the 20th century, but did not have corresponding skill in Greek.
Jul 1 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
I can think of a few actually.

Here is what I can say in defense of Scheidel: there are a certain class of interesting questions that classics is not well made to handle.

[1/x "Why did the Roman empire fall?" is one of these.

"Was the Roman empire similar or different from Han China, and in what ways?" is another. (Scheidel of course has written a book on the latter).
Jun 30 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Where I think I differ from Sullivan is on how much I think this matters. He’s a bit like Dai Zhen poking at the Neoconfucian understanding of Confucius: for a thousand years we have been testing our Confucian officials on a false Confucius—the horror! IMHO whether the Neoconfucian Confucius really matched the real Confucius does not really matter—obviously the Neoconfucian Confucius was a coherent construct that upheld a thousand years of Chinese empire, and so that version of Confucius had some value.
Jun 10 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Yarvin can always outlast and out-insult others, very hard to summon the energy to debate him.

The piece is good. I'll just note four things about Yarvin and that will all I have to say on him. Image 1. Yarvin is a real intellectual and a very smart one at that. Everyone who pretends otherwise is coping. There are a reason so many of his ideas have stuck around two decades when so many other people from the NrX blogger days are forgotten.
Jun 5 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
A few notes.

1. Last year I wrote an essay on the different structures of the Democratic Party and the GOP. With the Democrats, power flows from the bottom up; with the GOP, from the top down.

The one major exception to this pattern is... you guessed it, Elon Musk. You can find that essay here scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-c…
Jun 4 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Let’s take that question seriously. If you were to design the education of the future FSO, CIA officer, NSC staffer, etc from scratch, what would it look like? What experiences do they need to have? What competencies most critical to gain? I am having fun imagining a college that sort of combines the Thucydides course from Naval War College with required language immersion housing /dining with forced summers in developing countries with practicums in nat/sec law
Jun 3 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
There should be more universities like St. John's. I do not mean their specific great books curriculum so much as their commitment to a completely distinct curriculum that bares no resemblance to the standard American university model. The program is taught in a unique way. There are no "professors." Instead, there are "tutors." And so on. St. John's does not give the students a lot of choice in what or how they study--everybody goes through the same program.
May 13 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There are lessons for Taiwan here. Be like the Houthis.

No, but the problem isn’t just American “commitment” to the campaign. You cannot read that NYT article and not have a half dozen operational lessons jump out at you, come on guys…