Aidan Bricks

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. - Tacitus, Agricola 30

@vashikoo Just by the way, the movie, and the book it is adapted from, are based on the author's experiences at the Kent School in Kent, CT.

OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE (1999) The "Drugs Delaney" letter scene, as read by the Dean of Cornwall Academy, is comedy executed at the highest level. The writing, performances and editing are perfect. Absolutely love this film!

@sentantiq Where Antigone seeks to mobilize classics for the right, you seek to mobilize classics for the left.

The "canon" can function in two ways: 1. A measure of limits to make sure nothing changes 2. A gauge to show how far we have come and a reference for how far we need to go. THIS (1) classics is used to preserve the status quo and make participants comfortable in complicity

@jonathanbfine Never yours, though

so many tweets lack intellectual rigor and that concerns me greatly

@ajplus This video perpetuates the common misinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as a simple act of US imperialism. Many new countries in Central and South America were attempting to break out of the Spanish Empire and the MD was the American assist against Spanish intervention.

Why does the U.S. military have so many bases abroad?

@PAHoyeck @shainreads That was so embarrassing.

@shainreads Reminds me of when that one journalist called a stylistic choice by Cormac McCarthy a mistake a few weeks ago.

Novels should have PROPER speech marks and PROPER sentences that are not DIFFICULT and they should never have sentences with MULTIPLE clauses and CHAPTERS need to be NORMAL with 5-15 pages and all characters need to be MORALLY UNAMBIGUOUS and the story should NEVER challenge me.

@ThatMoviePage It's because movie audiences now have too much "battle experience" - now we know what weapons really sound like. Just as, after 9/11, explosions and fireballs in the movies suddenly looked more realistic - because now we all knew what they really look like.

Something 80s/90s action movies are unbeaten at is how good the gunshot sound effects are, so chunky sounding.

@saintsoftness If I'm reading this right, then we should disregard this woman's essay because of who she married, and also because she disagrees that the proper role of the classicist is to advocate for palestinian militancy. The author's greatest sin seems to be, failing to hate Israel.

I recommend professors not sleeping with their undergrads, who then use the field as an explicitly right wing mouthpiece for conservative think tanks rather than doing scholarship. This is not a defence of classics; it’s a defence of Gold and Antigone instrumentalizing it.

Currently reading this very interesting book on Stalin As Military Commander. Not too surprisingly, Stalin was a military dilettante with little concept of strategy beyond “counter attack with whatever you’ve got”.

@visegrad24 If we were at war with a peer competitor, say China, and the report was that two KC-135s and an E-3 Sentry were taken out in an enemy raid, it would be considered a significant tactical victory for the bad guys

Air & Space Forces that yesterday’s Iranian ballistic missile strike on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base damaged a U.S. E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft along as well as several refueling aircraft 🇺🇸🇸🇦

@morallawwithin Kant's concept of duty ought to be the organizing principle for all of human life.

I don’t like this discourse anymore, can we move on to something else. What have people been thinking about Kant lately

@PAHoyeck Instead, retire to your study every afternoon for a nap with your best friend.

@MartinSkold2 We also had a precise goal - make Iraqi forces leave Kuwaiti territory - the achievement of which could be objectively verified.

We also won the Gulf War, because we put a giant field army on the ground and overran southern Iraq, wrecking Saddam’s army in the process. And we weren’t facing down China at the time, and we didn’t have to count bombs because we still had a fair bit of industry.

@BretVDB Prescient

“Overpopulation in literature has gone beyond Malthusian dimensions, and soon the world’s computers will enhance a Noah’s flood of productivity. If I live long enough, I fully expect individual computers themselves to declare their possession of personality and genius, and to bombard me with the epics and romances of artificial intelligence.” —Harold Bloom, “Foreword: Northrop Frye in Retrospect”

@ShoahUkraine What fools they were to turn down that golden opportunity to have the entire Red Army keep right on marching through the whole of Western Europe

I should mention this here that after Germany surrendered, Stalin offered to commit the entire Red Army to continue the war and overthrow Franco in Spain because of his collaboration with Hitler . He even offered not to support a communist state there, and said Spain could become part of the postwar Western bloc like Greece . However, the United States and Britain opposed the idea and preferred to keep Franco in power.

@GaryIvory @PAHoyeck

@AidanBricks @PAHoyeck I might have forgotten the exact quote, but Rorty wrote something like, "Habermas is a liberal who refuses to be a criticalist. Foucault is a criticalist who refuses to be a liberal."

Please take a moment to pray for my students. They're reading Foucault today.

@CheeseForEvery1 We do hate them and we did used to

Gen X: “WE HATE THE STAR WARS PREQUELS AND WE USED TO PLAY OUTSIDE AND DRINK FROM HOSES AS KIDS.” Millennials: “WE LIKE THE STAR WARS PREQUELS AND ARE ON SEVERAL ANTIDEPRESSANTS.” Gen Z: “Skibidi rizz bibbidy bop”

@SandyofCthulhu In truth there was a one-two punch to public support for the war. The first hit was Tet, and the second was the succeeding twelve months of fighting which saw the heaviest monthly casualties of the war as the siege of Khe Sanh ground on and the PAVN moved big units south.

I’m not defending Cronkite, but much of the reason for the impact of the Tet Offensive was our own military’s fault. We had been told for a couple of years that the communists were on their last legs. Almost defeated and just dribbling out a few last gasps. It would soon be over. Basically MacNamara and Westmoreland had fed what we wanted to hear. Perhaps they believed it. Then in 1968 the whole South erupted in flames. We saw proof in living color that the Communists were not on their last legs and that they could launch a gigantic assault. Westmoreland gave a speech in Saigon on the US Embassy grounds, with dead Cong and Marines laying around. He tried again to say this was no big deal. We stared in disbelief as the head of our forces made it obvious he couldn’t recognized a massive offensive when it literally hit his own front yard. The shock wasn’t so much that “we were losing!” We knew we weren’t losing. But if after 5 years of American intervention the enemy could still field such an attack, then it was obvious that they had a LOT of fight left in them. So the question among those supporting the war, like my parents, was “How much longer?” “Won’t they ever give up?” “What is Johnson’s strategy?” We got tired of fighting forever with literally no plan to win. Just keep killing enemy Vietnamese until … what? They ran out of 18 years olds? There are two big lies to come out of the war. The better-known lie was that we were losing, spread by left-wing agotators. Few believed this, at least outside of universities. The second lie was that our media convinced us we were losing. I hear this a lot nowadays. Sure, they tried to do that. But most people knew we hadn’t lost. We were perfectly able to look on the map and see that every objective of the Tet Offensive had failed. They didn’t capture a single town. The Communists just lost a huge amount of supplies and troops for almost no gains. The point for the American people was that the Communists COULD launch that attack. And at that point we understood that we’d been diddled by Johnson’s administration. He had no plan to win. He thought the North and the Cong would give up. That’s when Congress and the voters turned against Johnson. Look at how right-wing media portrayed the war after that. The claim was that we were handicapped, fighting with one hand tied behind out back. Our military had its teeth pulled, our morale destroyed. And it’s true. The US Army post 1968 was a wreck. It took us until the 80s to recover our self-confidence. And we all know it wasn’t the Communists who beat us. It was our own leaders. Not just Cronkite & Rather, but Westmoreland, MacNamara, and Johnson filling the airwaves with lies. Then when the lies were exposed they had nothing to offer.

@PAHoyeck Any chance we can see some of the mistranslations & corrections you consider most important?

And actually, I ended up having to correct the translation of every single passage I put on my slides. Correction were usually fairly minimal, but sometimes there were errors I thought distorted the meaning a bit. 2/2

@BretVDB "all you who are numbered for God"

“Remember, all you who are numbered for God, In every moment of time you live where two worlds cross, In every moment you live at a point of intersection, Remember, living in time, you must live also now in Eternity.” —T.S. Eliot, The Rock