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gabrielbaker.bsky.social
Ancient History PhD. Teacher. H-War Network Editor. Author of Spare No One: Mass Violence in Roman Warfare. Views/opinions are my own.
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The game was on easy mode, too.

Now when someone says our universities and economy are the envy of world, it reads like an act of political defiance. What a stupid, stupid crisis we've inflicted on ourselves.

Shout out to @bretdevereaux.bsky.social for consistently being super generous.

Is anyone else randomly getting a bunch of new followers? Not complaining, but, um, I'm super boring, barely post, and when i do it's basically me talking to myself. Like right now, 95% chance no one sees this. So. I don't get it! New followers, are you real? You won't see this, so we'll never know.

Loving how the budget bill goes all in for oligarchic techno dystopia.

This story has repeated every year since the 90s: “At a conference last year, Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, …”

I hate that this isn't surprising.

1. The DOJ has sent threatening letters to several medical journals, focused around whether these journals are spreading misinformation that harms the American people and suppressing alternative viewpoints. I study how the norms and institutions of science facilitate discovery and self-correction.

🧵About that article in @nytimes.com about teachers using AI to give writing feedback to students: Giving good writing feedback is incredibly time consuming and can bring the best teacher to tears. There is definitely a problem with what teachers who have 150 students are being asked to do. /1

New Mexico made child care free for most families. Believe it or not, the good thing is good. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Wow who could’ve guessed that this would happen It’s almost as if USAID was a pillar of American soft power and influence in the world It’s almost as if it was entirely predictable that America’s adversaries would work to fill the void left by USAID’s destruction

Cory Booker: "I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America." Historians, crawling back into daylight from the depths of despair: "Did somebody somewhere ask for some wretched truth?"

Yes x 1000

AGAIN: morally abhorrent, strategically stupid.

Since writing this article, I have received messages from federal civil servants who tell me it is accurate, and that they are frightened. Please share this with anyone who doesn't understand the scale of the transformation. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

That was not the appropriate reaction to a man telling you that he is about to conquer the soil of another nation, citizens of another free republic.

This amounts to purposefully killing more civilians, which is morally abhorrent. If morality doesn't persuade you (i.e. if you're a monster), then I'll add that indiscriminate violence is *also* bad strategy. This decision by our secdef demonstrates extraordinary ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty.

What are some things about the United States that are actually pretty exceptional? - university system - research output - alliances - economy Oh, okay, we're trashing all of those on purpose now.

Maybe it's obvious, but I still can't understand the motives of this admin and its repeated attempts to make us: - less safe - less wealthy - less healthy - less influential - less innovative - less informed - less educated Why? To what end? Cui bono (aside from our adversaries)?

"I think it's one of the most important moments since 1945... For the first time since 1941, we have a US government which is not allied with Europe." www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

The Kyiv Independent Editorial: "It’s time to say it plainly. America’s leadership has switched sides in the war. The American people have not, and they should speak up." kyivindependent.com/editorial-a-...

i firmly believe one of the main messages we should be telling our students about this whole thing is that generative ‘AI’ by definition will *never* have an original idea, and if you use it, neither will *you*

granting the premise of this, how would you know what questions to ask?

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions theonion.com/historians-p...

More headlines like this please and thank you.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I worry about the potential danger arising from such a massive disruption of federal law enforcement. And equally (moreso?), I fear a national security crisis that gives the administration an excuse to claim sweeping emergency powers.

"It is not clear what would happen if one Nato member attacked another." Can't say I ever expected to see those words in print.

I hope I'm wrong, that Pete Hegseth rises to the level of mediocre and the U.S. muddles through his tenure as SecDef. But the Senate confirmed an unserious man to hold one of the most serious jobs on the planet, and I am hard-pressed to see how this ends well.

There’s a lot of quiet but load-bearing stuff the federal government does, and everything covered by the aid pause Trump just ordered is a part of that. It’s easy to dismiss it as not a big deal, especially if the money gets turned back on quickly, but the people and places affected won’t forget.