Does anyone remember when @DavidCornDC and I wrote about the #Groundswell group led by Ginni Thomas and organized by Cleta Mitchell?

The organizer of yesterday’s insurrection is one of the top influencers in that group — JennyBeth Martin, formerly of Tea Party Patriots.

Because no one calls them out, and because the IRS granted this group of orgs their coveted nonprofit status and further loosened restrictions and disclosures for them, they’ve been allowed to grow a seditious, criminal enterprise, led by the spouse of a sitting SCOTUS justice.

In the spring of 2001, I was going to a meeting at the place where I worked then and still work now. Another of the people at the meeting was an academic dean of our school. She was perhaps the purest expression of academia *at* that school.

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That day she was literally wearing a tweed blazer. Before she'd become a dean she'd been an English teacher. Now, the epitome of English Teachers, in my brain, was and remains my father. That day she was a close second.

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That day I said hello and asked how she was or somesuch.

She gave me a slightly wry smile. "Oh, you know. Measuring my life in coffee spoons," she said. I chuckled, and we may have traded a couple more lines of 'Prufrock.' I'm not sure.

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And I've always been a fan of T.S. Eliot, so it felt natural enough to come to and fro, talking of Michelangelo, and otherwise it seemed a clever turn of phrase just before a meeting about school management systems and database development.

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It is a couple of days before 2021, and I am 20 years older, and that memory has taken on a very different shade and tenor. We have all seen too much since then, over and over again.

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I've lately seen folks on here say they've felt guilty for getting books (mine and other authors) from the library, or people insinuating some authors might be against libraries. This is nonsense, and here's a thread on how using your local library supports authors.

It's easy to see why people would think, at first glance, that getting books from the library is depriving a writer of their dues. It's free, after all! You're not paying anything, so how would the author be getting paid anything for your reading? This is a misconception.

While it IS true that, in the US, authors are not directly paid each time someone checks out a book, they DO benefit, in multiple concrete ways.

The first, and most direct, being that libraries and library systems BUY the books for their collection. If a book looks to be popular, they buy in bulk! If a book *becomes* popular (i.e. lots of people checking it out), they will continue to buy more copies of that book.

If the library subscribes to a curation service (like the Junior Library Guild), a book is bought for a library system in large quantities before the book is even released. This is a big deal, especially for new and unknown authors (it's why we get excited when we're JLG picks)

1/18 Looking back at some of the most notable books I've read in 2020. It's a pretty eclectic mix!
I don't keep track so I am sure I forgetting something, especially if it was in deadtree form. Also, omitting the ones I started and abandoned.

2/18 The Supernova Era

I am a big, big fan of Cixin Liu- love his fiercely imaginative prose in the 3-body series and short stories... but I was bummed by this book.
The plot unfolds so preposterously that the large scale backdrops are grotesque. Pity.

3/18 How the Internet Happened

Beautifully written chronicle describing key actors & events that led to the internet as we know it today (almost).
I was a freshman in computer science in '92, saw a lot of that 1sthand, yet there was so much I didn't know!

4/18 Agency

A @GreatDismal in great shape. Getting back to that universe was fascinating, tho remembering all the characters frm th 1st book was hard.
His view of the Jackpot is disturbingly plausible, I am sure every reader wondered whether we are in

5/18 The Case Against Reality

Fantastic book. Evolution optimizes for fitness, not truth (whatever that is), and this book does a much better job explaining it than I ever could, to myself and others.
Skip the last chapter,

I've been reflecting some on Anatolios' book and wanted to put some thoughts down about doctrinal development, specifically re the Trinity.

The first thing that we have to say is that all Christians, irrespective of which tradition we are from, have to reckon with doctrinal development. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, we need to understand that doctrines do historically develop as the church reflects on Scripture.

Crucially, as Protestants, what distinguishes our mode of development from others is that our development absolutely must be regulated by Scripture. We are captives to the word of God. Therefore, as we develop doctrine it is crucial that it is developed biblically.

Both of these things being the case, we need a model of explaining doctrinal development that can account for the fact of development and the fact that it must be truly biblical development. Though Anatolios is a Malkite, I think the model he presents is workable.

By which, I mean that his model, which is original to the French Catholic Gabriel Marcel, explains doctrinal development in ways that 1) account for how development actually occurs historically, and 2) leaves the conclusion of development open to analysis on Scriptural terms.

End of the year scorecard: 2020 has been a difficult, dangerous and depressing year. Like last year, I again read 41 books this year- it was reading which kept me going through these gloomy times. I also reviewed 4 books, which are mentioned on the top of this list of 41 books

1) Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East
2) Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison by Ahmet Kuru
3) The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation by Declan Walsh

4) Pakistan: A Kaleidoscope of Islam by Mariam Abou Zahab
5) On the Meaning of Life by Will Durant
6) Pakistan- The Politics of the misgoverned by Azhar Hassan Nadeem
7) Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan by Shandana Khan Mohmand

8) The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan by Owen Bennett-Jones
9) The battle for Pakistan by Shuja Nawaz
10) Pakistan's Political Parties by Nahid Siddiqui, Mariam Mufti, and Sahar Shafqat
11) Pakistan at Seventy by Shahid Javed Burki

12) New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy: State, Class and Social Change by Akbar Zaidi and Mathew MacCartney
13) Aap Beeti Jug Beeti by Saad Khairi
14) Fading Memories of Islamabad by Saud Mukhtar

A lot of folks are grappling with, "What comes next? How do we atone for our part in what happened?"

We Jews have a ~700 page book you can turn to, The Gateway to Repentance. It painstakingly catalogues what true atonement requires.

But I want to tell you WHY we have this book.

Have you heard of Maimonides, aka The Rambam, aka Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon?

He was a Torah scholar, Saladin's doctor, wrote widely on mysticism and rationalism, and was super controversial.

He lived in Spain. Here's a common rendering:

He was born in 1138. He wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. In the late 1100s, controversy erupted over the fact that he had the gall to suggest that Torah scholars should work rather than live off of benefactors, and that his Mishneh Torah was more helpful than many rabbis.

The Guide for the Perplexed attempts to reconcile science and philosophy with rabbinic Judaism. This is no small thing! Assimilation in Spain and France was rampant among Jews, and many were not happy about this work, to put it lightly.

So the author of the book I posted, Shaarei Teshuvah, is Rabbi Yonah of Gerona. He is born in 1180. Unlike Maimonides, he spent all day learning Torah. He is related (by blood and marriage) to the Ramban, aka, Nachmanides, aka Rabbi Moses ben Nahman.

(Maimonides dies in 1204.)

Last night, I was reading part of a thread where @liminal_warmth was putting together a new clan // guild // whatever on classic WoW. I almost jumped on it, but then I remembered my previous WoW experience.

I started playing during Lich King, because the people I knew started playing then. They played on a heavy RP server. I spun up an undead rogue named Qaddafi. And off I went into the world.

At this time, I played through all the story stuff. The world was amazing, and I applaud the writers for building it. However, since everyone else was already an 80, I didn't get to do dungeons. They only had the rando dungeons once you hit a high enough level.

As such, I was always woefully undergeared. By the time I hit 80, My primary weapon was a decent off hand weapon, and there weren't opportunities to upgrade. As I was gear light, my DPS was below average, and I'd get kicked. A lot.

The culture dictated you needed to be a spreadsheet king, or have been part of a raiding guild since the beginning. I was low on DPS, so I got kicked before completing the dungeon, and the rogue gear was always at the end.

no gear > kicked > missed gear > cycle repeats

PUB DAY! My book, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, is officially out with @UCpress. Can I tell you a little bit about it? Thread:

The book argues that 20th century Mexican economists, diplomats, and political figures had a surprising influence on the design and reform of a whole host of multilateral institutions and agreements meant to govern international trade and finance from the 1920s to the 1980s.

Mexican postrevolutionary state officials argued for representation in international organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. From the 1920s to the 1940s, they effectively conceptualized and advocated for the apparatus of international development.

The book shows how, working in collaboration & contention with other Latin American and Third World representatives, Mexican officials demanded reforms to the global economic system that would channel the surplus capital of the Global North to productive use in the Global South.

But then something funny happened on the way to the developmental state: once capital began to flow from multilateral institutions like the World Bank, and Mexico reentered the international financial system, it abandoned its role as a reform champion in the 1950s and 1960s.

I’m feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of the sheer number of people who still have no idea my book exists and the degree to which I feel like I can’t just keep shouting “hey my book!” over and over again without alienating the entire world. Thoughts?

I want to start a thread of 90s rap records that aren't often discussed here.

I'll focus on singles that were dope/ringing off at the time because rap discussions on Twitter tend to focus on the same 15-20 "big ticket" classic albums, and this way, we can flesh things out a bit:

..and this isn't a "definitive" or authoritative anything. I'm just killing time until my mom finishes Christmas breakfast. Lol

Thread: I don't know about you, but staying sane recently hasn't been that easy. I've found it particularly hard to read novels - something that is usually my go-to therapy.

BUT I've always loved radio, and especially radio drama, and...

I was giving someone a few recommendations for things to listen to on BBC Sounds and realised I was getting carried away. I've heard tons of really good stuff in the past year and a lot of it is still online.

So here are some links! (stay tuned - this will take a while).

Firstly, there's Primo Levi's 'The Periodic Table' - unutterably brilliant. If you haven't heard this you've just got to stop what you're doing and do so.

Then there's Big Girl, Small Town by @michellegallen

Brilliant - probably the best thing I've heard on radio on a long time. A dark secret gradually gets revealed (or not) in small town near the British border in Ireland.

For a bit of fun there are two Charles Paris Mysteries - A Doubtful Death / The Cinderella Killer. Bill Nighy plays a slightly louche thespian with a bent for amateur sleuthing. Funny dramas based on old radio plays by Simon Brett updated by Jeremy Front.

Joyce's great story, "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, feast of the Epiphany. I look forward to discussing it this evening @IrlEmbRome. An endlessly rich story for our times, it turns the comforting Christmas tale of new life into a meditation on death, memory, loss. Thread

It corrects or seems to correct some of the bleakness of the earlier stories. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe".

It offers a wonderful evocation of hospitality and a luscious description of the laden Christmas table "A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin ...

Joyce wrote this extraordinarily mature story when he was just 25 years of age. Part of its inspiration came from a tough Christmas he and Nora spent in Rome in 1906. Christmas dinner, he complained, was just an uninspiring plate of pasta.

The Dead is also a fitting story for #NollaignamBan as Gabriel is made aware of his failure to see and properly hear the three women who challenge him: Lily, the caretaker's daughter, Miss Ivors, and of course his wife, Gretta.