"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

Unsurprisingly, the thing Noah Smith is saying is obviously not true. Look at reports on the reaction to the assassination of MLK... "glee, satisfaction and weeping in equal parts" (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/r...) as the Smithsonian notes "some actually celebrated" (nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stor...).

I hope everyone will forgive the bluntness of my language, but it seems like bluntness is warranted: it now seems pretty clear that the president raped children or at least knew about and actively facilitated the rape of children. I think it is time we stopped using coded language to say that.

Hegseth's insistence that 'Department of War' fake-name-change is about 'warriors' and 'warfighters' is the dumbest s*** I think I have ever heard. The guys that created the Department of Defense in 1947 - in NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN - had done more warfighting than Trump's entire cabinet put together.

Always fun to think, "I'll check blog comments before bed" only to realize that I hadn't hit 'publish' on the post I finished writing yesterday and so it hasn't been up all day. 🙄

Feeling this as my first book moves towards publication and I'm putting together a book proposal for a second book. I have few expectations that either book will be my ticket to a permanent posting. But they'll exist and people will hopefully read them, which matters rather more.

This is both true and without question one of the greatest things about the United States.

Not to put this one person on blast - a lot of folks say this - but you can't actually "just end the war." Iran has to agree to end the war. You can unilaterally stop bombing - we did! - and the war might not end. Iran is going to demand *payment* to end the war, in the form of concessions.

The problem isn't really siege equipment. As Kelly DeVries famously wrote, 'catapults are not atomic bombs' - they don't solve any problems on their own. The core problem wasn't 'getting catapults' but that Rome was a large, fortified city on the northern edge of Latium.

So this is getting appropriately roasted - this is not a navy problem, but a shore-based fires problem. It is also a failure to understand the situation: Trump tried to overthrow the regime and personally kill its leaders. He doesn't have a lot of 'threat' left. EU frigates won't change that.

Odd gaming thought of the evening: it strikes me that one of the definition components of what I'd call 'BethesdaGame' as a genre distinct from first-person-action-RPGs generally, is non-sequential world areas. It's a lot of what divides Avowed-likes from true Bethesda-games.

More progress on my Victoria III Austria run, we're in 1893. I decided that I've done Austria -> Greaterer Germany before (more than once, actually), so this time I've decided to go for a more 'Mediterranean great power' focus. So expand south, build a navy, etc.

I actually wonder if European nations don't actually have a stronger interest in seeing MAGA crushed as a political movement, banking on a reaction in which they both get more of a say in the geostrategic order and get the USA back on side as a partner in it.

As others ( @brasidas.bsky.social ) have pointed out, this is a bet that the price shock will be so extreme as to compel opening. The problem with that reasoning, as I see it, is that war does not obey the logic of markets. It has its own logic and there may be no peace to be had at any price.