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patrickwyman.bsky.social
Pod: Tides of History, currently covering the Iron Age. Book: "The Verge," on the world around 1500. Coming soon: “Lost Worlds,” on prehistory. pwymanusc at gmail.
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Obama and Biden are not responsible for the actions of the GOP or outbursts of right-wing violence. They are, however, fully implicated in the failure to understand what the American right was becoming and accepting the consequences for addressing it honestly and forcefully.

submitted 2 hours ago • 15 comments

Being a historian doesn’t give me the mantle of authority to say definitively what’s happening here or how anyone should respond, but I feel qualified to say this: If you were writing an account of how the United States devolved into violence and fragmentation, all this would be chapter 1 or 2.

submitted 2 hours ago • 25 comments

This is bad, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

submitted 2 hours ago • 15 comments

We know kingship is stupid, but going back and listening to @patrickwyman.bsky.social older episodes on medieval state formation also helps me understand in what ways *kingship is functional* and hence why it keeps re-emerging even today.

submitted 7 hours ago • 2 comments

i have a huge soft spot for steven spielberg's Lincoln for a hundred reasons and one of the biggest is that lincoln is constantly doing little bits. he's got voices, he's got stories he's told a thousand times, he's got jokes no one else gets, and he just can't stop himself. he was such a poster

submitted 3 days ago • 35 comments

It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence. They are in charge.

submitted 3 days ago • 504 comments

Because if you don’t understand what your enemies want and believe, you can’t fight them. You’ll make bad reads of their intentions and come up with the wrong solutions to problems that don’t matter.

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

I'm reading @drjoannepaul.bsky.social's new book on Thomas More and I was really struck by this line: "Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will...rule today as they did 500 years ago...The unconstrained power of petty, insecure men remains deeply dangerous."

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

I headed over to Twitter to check on the vibes and it's impossible to overstate how radicalized a wide segment of its userbase has become for straight-up fascism and ethnic cleansing. Miller and Vance are both shaping and being shaped by these sentiments. They're dead fucking serious.

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

It's essential to understand the deeper historical, cultural, and economic roots of political alignment, what and why these people believe what they do. But at the end of the day a lot of the MAGA stuff is just shitty people having free rein to indulge the worst parts of themselves.

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

He's been bottom-feeding scum for 15 years. The number of people he's screwed over, exploited, and actively harmed is enormous. Everybody working in sports media during that time has known this - if they've worked with him, they're aware on some level that they've made a deal with the devil.

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

This is in no way a defense of Rohm - he was a really, really bad guy - but Rohm was a decorated veteran of the First World War and one of the few people to ever tell Hitler to kick rocks. Homan, like Himmler, is fundamentally a cruel, weak man cosplaying as something tougher.

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

They’ve found their Himmler

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

LA is America they invented fast food and mass produced video pornography we are nothing as a culture without these things

submitted 5 days ago • 21 comments

Been working on this for a while & happy to introduce: 'Beautiful Losers of History,' a narrative history podcast that examines people and movements that fought for a righteous cause but ultimately lost. But just because they lost doesn't mean they're not worth celebrating. rss.com/podcasts/bea...

submitted 10 days ago • 8 comments

Other people have said this much more eloquently than me, but your average active-duty US servicemember is a reasonably ambitious young adult who couldn't afford to go to college, not a hardened SpecOps psycho who's been itching for an excuse to gun down the libs.

submitted 5 days ago • 21 comments

There have been some interesting studies done over the last 20 years wargaming what an urban fight in mega metros, LA, NYC, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, etc…you can guess what they found out (u need many many many people and things that blow things up)

submitted 5 days ago • 21 comments

It's worthwhile to pause for a moment and think about what a military operation to establish control over a major American city - let's say Los Angeles - would actually look like. The city of LA, which excludes most of the metro area, has nearly 4 million inhabitants. LA county has 10 million.

submitted 5 days ago • 52 comments