T. Greer

Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, and books I find interesting

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

From my copybook.

1. Paradise Lost, Book IX, lines 120-130:

"By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts."

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@monte_cuccoli_ See I think I have the opposite view—Stalin was more important both historically, ideologically, and in terms of the ultimate institutional legacy, which lives on (see China) whereas Hitler and his experiment could not last more than ten years.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Well if I had to choose one book for “totalitarianism” in our hypothetical great books course it is, without question, Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE. Manages to get both communism *and* WW2.

[IRETOMIWA @ireoluwa_e02]

Slavery is a footnote, totalitarianism specifically communism is important but no mention of WW2. Lmao I know exactly the kind of person you are 🤣

[Alex Priou @alexpriou]

Hello all,

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🥂

https://t.co/ombLvXjdsj

[Shyam Sankar @ssankar]

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[Alec Muffett @AlecMuffett]

@ZackKorman @halvarflake Every generation that doesn't learn about covert channels in school/college (I read about them in a puzzle book in my teens) is going to be surprised by this and then they will think it is shocking and revolutionary because:

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@chrisnyeeee What is your measure of influence?

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Senator Blackburn, do the nation a service and remove this man from
the Pentagon.

[Nick Field @nick_field90]

Pete Hegseth is trying to convince Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat after she wins the Tennessee Governorship (from Leigh Ann Caldwell's Puck newsletter)

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist

oh yeah and we use this primarily for email

[Jonathon P Sine @JonathonPSine]

One of the many potential biases in Song dynastic history: the court diarists were stationed too far away and, during audiences, often couldn’t actually hear the emperor, so would just report that he said nothing.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@monte_cuccoli_ Hard to say. We still live in the intellectual paradigm the war created so that seems most relevant to us—but will that always be so?

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@vpostrel @RuxandraTeslo @SCP_Hughes I don’t think this is true. Horace Mann was a Yankee, not a German or a southerner.

[Cleo Paskal @CleoPaskal]

FINALLY! @DHSgov just suspended the program that let Chinese enter the US territory of Northern Mariana Islands (next to Guam) VISA FREE.

Thank you to those who worked for this.🙏

Now for the corruption investigations asked for by the late Gov Palacios.
https://t.co/OEqXhaukRv

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@sadarlo1 @DGoweyAuthor In any case, the starting category for the course is “western civilization.” Perhaps a global one should be taught instead (in which case consider this stab https://t.co/BHItXOYyJK ) buy my suggestions and critique were bounded and prompted by the format of Columbia’s program.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@sadarlo1 @DGoweyAuthor That take is not spicy or especially original. It may well prove true, though we will need another century to test it.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@wearydetective0 I don’t think it is exactly the right syllabus but I think it is a fun exercise

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Fun thread

[Levi Canuleio @LeviCanuleio]

Rise of Modern Bureaucracy
- Kafka, The Trial
- Caro, The Power Broker
- Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
- Beniger, The Control Revolution
- Wilson, Bureaucracy
- Scott, Seeing Like a State

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@TheLincoln @sadarlo1 @BobAllen2020 the reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and so forth, changed the terms of western (for the first) and human (for the second) civilization writ large.

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

IMHO, when humans looks back at developments in the western world during the 20th c a few centuries from now, American racism and its consequences will be a historical footnote.

The big stories will be:

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@dennismhogan Am I supposed to believe that in this epoch, one of the most consequential in humanity’s long history, the most important developments circled around anti-colonialism and conceptions of race in the United States?

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@TheLincoln @sadarlo1 @BobAllen2020 More pertinently still, many of the “great books” were written in response to the intellectual problems posed by those events. Empires rise and fall in cycles;

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@sadarlo1 @BobAllen2020 Mongol empire is a very good analogy—and the longest Mongol successor states lasted longer than western imperial control of any African country. Yet Who describes the collapse of the empire as the most significant event in med. history—much less the biggest intellectual event?

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

@sadarlo1 @BobAllen2020 I think in five hundred years time we will weight it with the same historical significance that we give to the collapse of the Spanish empire, or the Ottoman, or the Mongol, or Alexander’s, and so forth.