Sam Ulmschneider

Goodness, that sent me down a rabbit hole. I didn't realize she had such a tragic arc, and I kinda want to add that 'Churchill Girls' book to my summer reading list now.

I assume you are being sarcastic but the internet sucks for this stuff, so I dunno, seems like asking Sweden or Greece to put their people crewing those ships at risk to sweep the straits will be a big ask…but they do also want oil flows restored, so maybe.

I am as far from a military policy specialist as you can get, so I could be wrong, mine is like, Wikipedia+ knowledge, charitably. Since I last looked two of the four might have been scrapped in favor of the LCS program.

a realistic answer is that the US navy only has fourish dedicated mine warfare ships right now, and they're all 50 years old. the plan was to replace them with modular components on LCS program vessels but that has been oddly hard to implement. So mine clearance is REALLY a hard mission right now.

that's (fortunately) not part of the conventional ladder of escalation, nuclear weapons and suchlike are by definition non-conventional.

What is left on the conventional escalation ladder at this point besides boots on the ground seizing and holding territory?

I read it in the same class with Saul Cornell's Partisan Republic, a great pairing, but Gienapp's book was probably more readable despite its greater length. Gienapp has a great ear for how to quote a debate or a broadside.

Aspirational is perhaps the wrong word, but character limits, man.

There's also a great chapter in the book on the attempt to undermine the Jay Treaty by stealing its funding, and on the Neutrality Proclamation, all of which bolster Gienapp's point that the 1790s had to work their way up to understanding the Constitution as a "fixed text" rather than aspirational.

yes-this is memorably exemplified by the fact that Madison at first thought the Bill of Rights and other amendments should simply directly edit the text of the document, not be appended as mere additions referring to the body of the document. It took quite the fight to shift him from that position.

(2/2) as I remember it (I read it like....four years ago?....a big part of the central assertion is that deciding we could fight over the meanings and applications of certain constitutional provisions but not the constitution itself or its underpinnings was itself a hotly contested step.

tl;dr that the Constitution was not understood to be a text w much fixity in 1788-90, but a series of debates in Congress & re-alignments resulted in mutual concession that the Constitution should be treated as a singular, fixed text with strong meanings - an endpoint that was contingent, not clear.

Gienapp's Fixing the Constitution is probably the book I read which revolutionized my understanding of the early republic's constitutional malleability the most, everyone who calls themselves an originalists should be required to read it. Also Balkin's Original Meanings, but that's less seismic.

I just re-read Paxton, bunch of Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini for a two week unit on Fascist political thought this week and one thing that's striking is how obsessed fascists are w articulating the moving forces of the nation-in-itself that they have little room to really grasp their putative foes.

Right! They've proven up to some VERY challenging material, like Hobbes, in the raw. But Hegel (and some other German thinkers) are....uniquely challenging. And I've been very reluctant to assign them for that reason.

C. Vann Woodward encouraged students to avoid “gerontophagy,” writing history by regurgitating one’s elders. It is plain that A.I. is capable only of this derivative regurgitation, wholly inadequate for the writing of history.

teaching political philosophy while avoiding actually asking my students (who are very capable high schoolers but nonetheless high schoolers) to actually read of understand any Hegel has been a really difficult acrobatics trick this year, need to re-evaluate it for next time I think.

Tapping the sign

Last repost of this for the year - only two days where I'm so crass and unprofessional asking for money. But seriously, We The People is the best form of civic+constitutional education imaginable, teaching reason, research and cooperation not mere debate. Kids shouldn't have to pay so much for it.

There is a pretty big “maybe spend a little less somehow?” zone between “anti-militarist isolationist” and “current military spending levels are totally reasonable” where I (and I hope many people) can sit. I’d be willing to listen to arguments about that from people more expert than me, of course!

fr though Marx would have been impressed as hell by Starbucks ability to cultivate new demand to satisfy where none previously existed in order to keep capitalism vital and thriving. Also would have immediately used custom coffee orders ppl have in common to explain commodity fetishism, I think.

I may not be down w the Institute for Justice on all their policy preferences or ideological turns but boy do they produce outstanding resources that help me, a non-specialist, keep abreast of interesting developments in circuit courts and big ideas in parts of the law and constitutional liberties.

Fair, thanks! I’ve only read 3-4 articles about those systems myself and so am very unsure what to think.

Do you think the lay trials they use in Japan and much of Europe betray/undermine the spirit of jury trial or an innovation which can help improve that venerable and important institution and thus keep it strong? I’ve always been unsure leaning towards the second.

Probably the Stones. It’s also worth pointing out that history curricula in schools rarely even nod in the direction of cultural history, so non-English-class-worthy artistic movements and their virtuosos, whether we’re talking about jazz or early rock n roll or pulp magazines, never get class time.

whatever the AI companies are doing, it's working on basically everyone and I (not a neo-luddite! I admit it might have many good applications!) am left feeling like a character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers while students, colleagues, and friends use it in lieu of their minds more and more.

I dislike the whole premise of the clever little quiz here. People don't think or reason, nor does the poverty or wealth of a written passage emerge, from sub-paragraph level pull quotes like the ones the Times used to this piece. Can AI pull off a deceptively effective paragraph? I guess?

Yeah, that the legislation was complicated, got amended, and a bunch of lawmakers were equilibrating their positions on various votes as the legislation changed throughout the crisis. Madison always thought SOME departments needed Presidential removal, but his view changed during the bill's passage.

Sai Prakash's old old article on this is where I source my own filmsy grasp of it from, and he tracked Madison and allies in the Daily Advertiser as their views evolved week to week. Which to me just causes me to throw up my hands and despair about the originalist project a bit.