The Haiti story might be the most powerful way to drive the point home about what anti-blackness means and how deeply and powerfully it has disfigured the life of the entire modern world--and how big and comprehensive the lies told to conceal it have been. 1/ It starts with the beginning: a people fighting for their freedom not just from an empire but from the most catastrophically awful of all the awful slave regimes of the plantation complex. 2/

There used to be this thought among climate change skeptics: if you really believe climate change is coming, why aren't you changing your investing behavior accordingly? Bet on the long term you say you believe in. It was a fair point, sort of. 1/ Meaning, if you think something is really really really true, it really ought to condition your own economic behavior that is about prediction. I'm not sure that's an even remotely accurate decision of how investors behave now but ok. 2/

If you want an example of how intellectually incoherent and easily manipulated the institutional culture of major American newspapers can be, check out the Washington Post's coverage of Afghanistan over the last week. 1/ Here's the three prongs of the coverage, based both on news reports about events in Afghanistan and excerpts from an upcoming book about the long American-led war in Afghanistan. 2/

This is the horrible cycle we're trapped in now. The press cannot kick its habit of just transcribing public debates as if that is "balanced" and "objective", which makes them a platform for disseminating and amplifying lies and delusions. 1/

https://twitter.com/CThomasJAMH/status/1362068832676937728

And then we get anxious think-pieces by news analysts where they wring their hands and worry about disinformation and popular delusions as if they themselves have nothing to do with any of that. When instead they're one of the primary vectors of info-pollution. 2/

It takes a lot of digging through repetitive prose to unpack what this college and university ranking system from Academic Influence @AcademicInflux is all about. 1/ @AcademicInflux The basic explanation of "concentrated influence" more or less boils down to a per capita metric so that large universities don't inevitably dominate the ranking, which is based on influence. 2/

These kinds of interpretations offend first because they're uncontainable in their redirection of responsibility from an action to a precondition. Historians know that you can endlessly multiply the causes of an event and quickly arrive at a vast emptiness. 1/

https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1309107756897574918

A vast emptiness that explains nothing. Blame her parents! Blame the boyfriend! Blame the friends! Blame the door manufacturer! Blame the judge! Blame drug trafficking! Blame drug users! You can do all day long and tendentiously pretend you're serious about it. 2/

You know, on some of the worst-case attacks/complaints by students on faculty and staff (re: the USC case) about pedagogy or speech, I think three things primarily. 1/ First that it's important to note that in many cases these attacks are simply factually wrong as well as disproportionate--and that administrations that throw faculty immediately under the bus are abrogating their responsibility to say that clearly. 2/

I'll confess that a relatively long time ago, I really found the ability to search for anything I wanted on Amazon to be a serious advantage that drew me to use its services even when I objected a lot to other aspects of the company. 1/ But just to show you how thoroughly most digitally-based companies inevitably foul their own nests, Amazon isn't even good for searching for what you want any more. In fact, it's a terrible environment either for browsing or for finding something you absolutely know you want. 2/

As a historian who has studied hygiene, I am deeply fascinated that there's been an endless running argument on Twitter over whether Europeans in the medieval period and late antiquity did not bathe much. 1/ It's one of those arguments that when you see who is actually in the argument and why you hesitate--e.g., some of the people eager to prove that medieval Europeans and Europeans beyond the Roman frontier bathed a lot are white supremacists or ethnonationalists. 2/

The real downside of the comparison of the US right now with Weimar is that that ended badly. The analogy eases us into a tragic and resigned vision of the present. 1/ Maybe we should stick to comparing this moment to 1928-1932 in the US itself. White supremacy was at a high-water mark, capitalism was in one of its cruelest moments, ecological disaster was destroying lives. 2/

There is this strange thing among a certain kind of conservative thinker desperately trying to pretend they still think. The standard is "something is really happening". That people are really feeling something. That a social fact is meaningful. 1/ And they say this as if they imagine a swarming legion of conventional-wisdom pundits and leftists saying "No! No! A social fact is not meaningful!" or "What you say is a social fact is not!" 2/

The famous punchline "must be a pony in there somewhere" (on sight of a ton of manure) seems to me kind of applicable at this point about the modern GOP and its base. /1 After earnest ethnographies and man-in-the-street "Trump base safaris" by reporters, after endless parsing of data by political scientists and pundits, I don't think those of us horrified by the contemporary GOP are closer to a serious answer to a pressing question. 2/

Since a business owner in Swarthmore spoke last night at the Democratic convention, I've been watching social media responses. 1/ There's a few of the usual: Delco people who are still salty about the Blue Route only having four lanes south of Route 1, who respond to any mention of Swarthmore by bringing this up. (Makes me wish they'd chosen the Red Route instead.) 2/

The Nixon tapes turn out to have been fascinating in part because they let us see into what was said in the "quiet part", behind the closed doors of power, especially in terms of routine frames of social reference. 1/ So overall, those tapes show what you'd expect about Nixon and his aides' perceptions of race and ethnicity, about the calculatedness of their approach to partisan politics and the ways that they meant for executive policies to feed into all of that. 2/

Right now, for the campuses that are still planning to have some significant group of students on campus, here are the things that I'm not feeling very confident that anyone has a handle on: 1/ #1. Testing. I just don't understand how higher ed institutions think there is sufficient supply of testing materials and sufficient expertise for testing available for widespread use everywhere within 3 weeks or so. 2/

Oh, don't stop there, Tom Cotton. If you're going to call slavery a "necessary evil" that gave rise to American liberties, why not call the Holocaust a necessary evil that gave rise to post-1945 human rights? And so on. 1/ Yes, you can say: the past is filled with terrible crimes and suffering, and we cannot erase that, and despite all that, history does not reduce only to those terrible crimes. An adult has to face what they've done to others and try for redemption. 2/

Another thought on the historical work of the last fifty years and why conservative inability to acknowledge its numerous truths and come to grips with them is so bad even for conservatism--is in fact a sign of its descent into madness and overt fascism. 1/ It is in fact possible to continue to believe in the possibilities and achievements of liberalism, Enlightenment thought, American democracy. Heck, I'll be generous for a moment, free-market capitalism and modern Christianity. 2/

Tom Cotton going after the 1619 Project without engaging its basic historical truths is a very old tendency among Anglo-American conservatives. 1/ Since the 1970s, conservatives have rubbished new historical writing about workers, women, people of color, gays and lesbians--or really any historical research that was not focused on the narrow band of subjects they viewed as important with the tonality they demanded. 2/

Watched "The Old Guard". Much as I appreciate the moves made with the characters, it was possibly one of the most predictable genre stories I've seen in years. 1/ I didn't know anything about the Rucka comic that's the source and hadn't read any advance reviews. But within fifteen minutes, my daughter and I both had called everything that was going to happen from that point on. 2/

I keep an eye on right-wing bots that constantly circle around colleges, universities and degrees as signifiers of anti-American subversion, cosmopolitan elitism, etc. in their efforts to make it look like there is a vast heartland of real Americans who hate education. 1/ Over the last 5 years, their fake biographies have gotten more textured and varied--real effort is going into making them look as if they are actual people. Somewhat like the fake person the Washington Post uncovered behind the bogus "antifa flag burning at Gettsyburg" event. 2/

I first wrote about the debate over syllabus sharing on my blog back in 2006 (!) and periodically after that. Here's some of what I found over the years about anti-sharing. /1 blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/200… First, as @SumitaPahwa notes, some people fear colleagues or competitors for positions taking a highly original syllabus and claiming as their own. I think that's a bit akin to the fear of chefs having recipes swiped. I get it. 2/