PicoBlog

I really like the word “prestige.” I find it extraordinarily helpful when it comes to organizing my own thoughts, but sometimes that causes hiccups in communication with others who use it differently than I do. Oxford defines prestige as “widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements and quality,” which sounds more positive than the way I usually mean it. “Widespread perception” is something I’m fundamentally wary of, so the word “prestige” always reads like a warning to me.

While it’s true the internet subjects us to an endless array of previously unrealised horrors, we also sometimes come across Good Shit™. Like r/PrisonHooch. And, my lord, I’ve become obsessed with this subreddit. So what is the prison hooch subreddit all about? Well, it’s a place where people brew homemade alcohol using whatever the hell they can get their hands on. It’s named as such because the process is similar to how, you guessed it, folks make booze in prison.

I admit to being unschooled in academic international relations theory, but from what I can tell, there are as many different versions of Realism as there are people who purport to understand Clausewitz or took an undergraduate political science class. I’d like to offer my own idiosyncratic version of Realism, one grounded not in the canon current among today’s international relations scholastics but rather my own reading of history (I am a historian by training, after all), philosophy, and perhaps even a little theology.

If you go to a teaching on shunyata by a Tibetan Buddhist lama, you will often be told that it is a profound subject with many complex implications. That it can be a slippery concept - now you have it, now you don’t. And that it can take some people years to form a resolved understanding of the subject. All this is true. At the same time, the basic idea of shunyata is not too hard for us Westerners to understand, given that we have been taught how to think at school.

In 2011, we started a collection drive. It was the result of a nudge from a few middle school students. After learning that a concerning number of our local population were living on the streets or hopping from shelter to shelter, these kids were eager to help. While I appreciated their hearts for wanting to do good, I also felt anxious about the whole thing. This was a big and complex challenge they wanted to address.

Never in my life have I heard “Sir” and “Ma’am” used more than in any conversation in Texas. Deli counters as far as the eye can see filled with…beef jerky. Various types of jerkey. I asked the man at the deli counter at the famed Bucee’s truck stops and he said with a smile “Yeah, we like beef here in Texas…cattle grow well here.” Every yard is adorned with one if not two barbeque pits.

When a priest is ordained to the episcopate, he must make several promises before the ordaining bishops impose their hands on his head and call down the Holy Spirit. The principal consecrating bishop says to the man about to be consecrated: “The ancient rule of the holy Fathers decrees that the one to be ordained Bishop should be questioned in the presence of the people concerning his resolve to guard the faith and to discharge this office.

EDIT 1/13/2024: On twitter, Tom Loveless pointed me towards this survey that more carefully does what I try to do here. The relevant table is this one: I’m sure that every educational publisher has a secret list of how popular everybody’s curriculum is. They probably pay a guy to go around and figure out what most districts are buying. But as far as I can tell, there is next to no public information about this.

The liberal media and political classes dragging Biden to the nomination predictably destroyed whatever cohesion there was of the broad coalition of Bernie Sanders supporters. One dominant and seemingly new tendency to emerge from this shattering of Sandersism into a thousand pieces has been something that has been called the post-left, or sometimes the anti-left. This refers to self-described Marxists who are basically hopeless about the future of the left, and disgusted with all its current, failed forms, but who still are concerned enough about the future of the left to sloganize themselves in relation to it.