Tweets of the Week: 24 April 2024

I saw this sequence and thought it was time to log off Twitter, that I had seen the day’s best post:

Then, minutes later, this spectacular banger showed up:

Here’s a memorable line from a great scholar and fine poet:

Avery Edison says what we’ve all been thinking:

Vinney Szopa contemplates what we’ve lost:

Samuel Biagetti sympathizes with a kind of poster that has been prominent lately:

Pinboard brings common sense to bear on some ideas about sending people into outer space:

dril pretends he isn’t already on Twitter:

Sheena Liam does nifty things with embroidery:

I promote a side project of mine:

Tweets of the Week: 12 February 2024

Ken Layne is impressed by the British monarch:

The most important news story of the last several years:

A conversation between Otto von Bismarck and U. S. Grant:

T Greer on the Iliad as post-apocalyptic literature:

Tom Hamilton’s wife gave their child some shocking news about herself:

Ready for duty, and they couldn’t be happier about it:

Paul Schofield proves that some people will get mad at you for saying the most anodyne things possible:

deepfates says something obvious but odd about videogames:

harleyskooky tells us about one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of the movies:

The Weekly Retro shares the greatest single work of portraiture produced in North America in the 1970s:

A tremendously sweet story from Dr Dave Thompson:
From Latif Nasser, another story that begins within the family circle, this time ending very far away:
Staroxvia is assembling a periodic table of national flags:

William B. Fuckley on one of the ways in which inclusion policies ensure that the same people get included generation after generation:

Classical Memes For Hellenistic Teens has a motivational poster to share:

No Jesuit Tricks shares the greatest moment in the history of Kingsland, Arkansas:

Cranky Federalist tells the truth:

Tweets of the Week: 5 August 2023

Even when you know that Helga Stentzel did this on purpose, it is as striking as if it had occurred naturally:

Bradley Birzer says something about World War Two:

Sir Geechie may be the Afro-Fogey, but he would have you know that he is also a wild man:

I read these four Luwian words aloud and found that, quite without intending to do so, I was singing them. I found it through Shadi Bartsch, and she says she had the same experience:

A. Z. Foreman starts a thread that includes some gems.

Abby Denton has a great idea for a novel:

Ken Layne tells us that the theme song to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was sung by Cyndi Lauper. I’d always assumed it was Mae Questel, the original voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, who was indeed still working when the song was recorded. Instead, it was an outstanding imitation of and tribute to Questel.

Andrea More gives voice to the real victims:


William Gerrard (alias “Bill Gerrard”) has insight into the motives of historical figures:

Frank Whitehouse lays out some facts about something Elon Musk is doing that doesn’t even have the saving grace of making him a laughingstock:

And a few of my own-

My Warren G. Harding-themed tweets never get the love they deserve, not even this one I put up on the centenary of his death:

I told Twitter something I tell my students:

Tweets of the Week: 20 May 2023

Lane Moore on longevity:

Brian Gaar on happiness:

A thread in which Cranky Federalist takes apart the stories of the USA’s alleged founders:

A classic from Swear Trek:
Eric Adler notices something odd about his academic colleagues:
MatCro writes dialogue:

Sam Haselby has had it with our current crop of “public intellectuals”:

Mister Bossy speaks up for the literary canon:

The Sunny Side of Franz Kafka presents a shadow of Franz Kafka:

Buddyhead puts some numbers together:

Christopher Rees reminisces about a ceremonial occasion that went well:

A classic from Murrman5 about what happens when you give advice:

Adam Cerious asks for a price check:

Law Boy learns about a criminal defense:

Tweets of the Week: Swear Trek Edition

I’m often impressed at how well the captions sync with the lip movements on Swear Trek gifs derived from the original Star Trek. Especially so for the ones featuring James Doohan or DeForest Kelley, those guys just looked like great cussers.

I can hardly remember that this wasn’t the actual line:

All three of these look convincing:

There are also some good ones with Captain Kirk:

And notable guest stars have their moments as well. Here’s Number One:

And Captain Pike:

Abraham Lincoln:

And my overall favorite, Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney:

Tweets of the Week: Holy Saturday Edition

The Rev’d Mr Ben Meyer on one of those odd passages in the Gospels:

The Rev’d Mr Chris Corbin on some stuff that goes around the internet this time of year:

What Mr C would prefer:

The Rev’d Dr Dr Kara Slade cites the Book of The Boss:

Rachel of “Underthenettle” reminisces about tumblr:

In response to which James MacKinnon shares an old post by Sean Collins:

“Old Hollow Tree” shares a picture of Michelangelo’s Pieta:

Eleanor Parker shares a thread of Maundy Thursday images:

Tweets of the Week: 26 March- 1 April 2023

Cranky Federalist reminds us of the Golden Rule:

Mind of Marisa tells a sad story:

Alice from Queens links to an old piece by Matt Bruenig (who is not the son of Matt Groening, very confusing):

Rabbi Ari Lamm reads the Bible in Hebrew, as for example in this thread about the Serpent in the Garden:

Abby Denton shares an insight into the worldview of English speakers:

Monica Hesse measures the passing of the years:

A courtroom exchange:

Tweets of the Week: 19-25 March 2023

These have been in my Bookmarks for a while.

Classics-themed tweets:

  1. Legonium shares Sasha Trubetskoy’s Metro-style map of Roman roads:

2. Cristina Procaccino shows us how a native speaker might teach first conjugation Latin verbs:

3. Bret Devereaux’ T/O of the Roman Republic:

Religion-themed tweets:

4. “Manifestly Lutheran” defends infant baptism:

5. Jack Chick lays some truth on you:

6. And asks the tough questions:

Politics-themed tweets:

7. My prediction about the 2020 US presidential campaign:

8. Josh Fruhlinger’s prediction about the 2024 US presidential campaign:

Miscellaneous tweets:

9. A map of Superman’s hometown, Metropolis:

10. Richard Nixon telling you that it’s just plain poppycock:

11. Paul A. Jones tells us what a “trinonym” is:

12. Something that makes Audrey Farnsworth happy come Halloween:

13. Matthew Goldin on the divide between straights and gays:

14. She was trying to say “contestant”:

15. Fabrizio Gilardi shares a study that calls into question the idea that anonymity is a driver of toxicity in online debates:

Tweets of the Week: 12 March 23

2. “Crazyism” in philosophy:

3. Sam Haselby on the good cop/ bad cop routine that underlies the pseudo-leftism of America’s elites:

Most people are familiar with the bad cop / good cop routine from cinema or television. America’s elite neoliberal institutions rely on it too, recognize and promote both professional types.

Think of it this way: the dogmatic neoclassical economists (in Larry Summers’s words if there is more inequality it is because people are getting more what they deserve) are the bad cops of elite neoliberalism. They frame you and beat you up, so to speak. But then their…

…colleagues come into the holding cell and say, look I want to abolish the police, return the land to the indigenous, and provide reparations. None of this is going to happen. They are the good cops of elite neoliberalism. The legitimacy and power of the system relies on both.

Another way to think of it is the bad cops have helped secure material resources of historic abundance, the good cops come in and provide the moral resources which to try to balance out the bad cop’s depredations have to be pushed to a grandiosity, a meta-historical scale.

Originally tweeted by Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) on March 17, 2023.

4. Orson Welles moaning “Mwahhh, the French”:

5. Fr Reginald Foster was a better teacher than he pretended to be:

6. Tom Holland on Saint Paul:

Here’s @holland_tom on St Paul: “You are kind of hearing him thinking aloud as he wrestles with the implications of the fact that Christ suffered this. And everything that he’s writing is an attempt to say – how this could be?

“It’s upended his expectations of God’s plan so radically that he can never arrive at, I think, a stable sense of exactly what it means. Although Paul absolutely recognizes that the fact that Jesus was crucified lies at the heart of everything that Jesus’ mission is

“and therefore how he relates to God’s plan, what is happening, the very character of the world, the very character of God, the very nature of God’s relationship to humanity – Everything has been upended by this.

“So the cross is absolutely at the heart of everything that Paul’s writing about. But at the same time, there is kind of an embarrassment about it because it is the most shocking thing imaginable, which is kind of the point.”

Originally tweeted by Susannah Black Roberts, Niece Appreciator (@suzania) on March 18, 2023.

7. Carolina Eyck plays the “Queen of the Night” aria:

8. Adult reading as a reward for adulthood:

Illuminating the Dim Enlightenment

Looking through my archives, I see that I’ve been aware of “The Dark Enlightenment” or the Neoreactionary (“NRx”) movement since at least September 2007, when I slogged through a Mencius Moldbug post and selected some key quotations from it.  I read another post by MM in February 2009 and complained about it.

The September 2007 and February 2009 posts mark the boundaries of a time when I was spending a fair bit of time trying to get a handle on NRx thought. I’d largely lost interest in it by the spring of 2009, though I did bring the movement up again in 2014 in order to mention the snappy nickname for it I’d come up with,”The Dim Enlightenment.” During last year’s US election campaign, the prominence of Peter Thiel in Donald J. Trump’s campaign and Hillary Clinton’s decision to give a speech accusing Don John of Astoria of involvement with the “Alt-Right” brought the Neoreactionaries a significant amount of public attention.  The idea that Don John himself is directly influenced by NRx writings is risible, as the Hated Steve Sailer pointed out:

Nonetheless, I have had the vague sense that I ought to take another look at that stuff.

Heaven knows I’m not going to dig my way through another 35,000 words of unedited ramblings by Mencius Moldbug.  Fortunately, I remembered that in 2013 Scott Alexander had written a summary of NRx thought. I hadn’t read it when it was new; the title, “Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell,” had turned me away, since “enormous” and “planet-sized” are two things NRx writers consistently do themselves. As it turns out, Dr Alexander’s post is actually rather concise. And it is admirable in its fair-mindedness. Dr Alexander labors mightily to present the best possible case for NRx views, especially those with which he most strenuously disagrees. I chuckled when I saw the point at which his imaginative sympathy finally broke down: “Reactionaries also seem to be really into metaphysics, especially of the scholastic variety, but I have yet to be able to understand this. Blatant racism, attempts to clone long-dead monarchs, and giving a gold-obsessed alien absolute power all seem like they could sort of make sense in the right light, but why anyone would want more metaphysics is honestly completely beyond me.”

Dr Alexander followed this post up with an “Anti-Reactionary FAQ,” which by March of 2014 he was saying he no longer fully endorsed. Still, unless you’re planning to make an academic study of the Neoreactionaries or to engage in an exhaustive public debate with them, I think Dr Alexander’s posts should tell you just about all you really need to know about them.