Joseph MacKay
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lefteleven.bsky.social
Joseph MacKay
@lefteleven.bsky.social
2.4K followers 3.2K following 490 posts
Canadian in Oz. IR academic. History of international ordering, history of international thought. He/him. Book, "The Counterinsurgent Imagination." https://bit.ly/3h86v4Y
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lefteleven.bsky.social
The new Office for Mac icons are a special kind of early 00's ugly.
The new puffy, gauzy, generally unpleasant MS Office icons
October 27, 2025 at 3:22 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Say what you will about these folks, they’re considerably more interesting than Thiel is.
A trio of self-described "satanists" dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. "Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby's blood?" they asked. Then they performed what they called a "dark ritual", dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart's Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: "Take us to your personal hell... Thank you for being our dark lord."
October 11, 2025 at 8:20 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
BBC just casually going full, cartoon doomer here.
BBC News alert: Rats are overrunning our cities - can we stop them or is it too late?
September 26, 2025 at 7:11 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Belatedly
Rotten Tomatoes page for Michael Mann’s unsung masterpiece Blackhat (2915).
September 19, 2025 at 9:09 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Official word, in case anyone’s looking. #ANU
Message from the Chancellor Dear Staff and Students I am writing today to notify you that Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell is tendering her resignation from her role as Vice-Chancellor and President of the Australian National University. Distinguished Professor Bell will be undertaking a period of leave, and will return to the ANU School of Cybernetics in due course. On behalf of the ANU Council, I thank Distinguished Professor Bell for her service as Vice-Chancellor and President of our University. Distinguished Professor Bell'. s statement 1s below. Kind regards Julie Bishop Chancellor Hi everyone, I am officially tendering my resignation as Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University, which will be accepted by the Chancellor and Council. This was not an easy decision. As many of you know, the ANU has been a special place for me, ever since I was a child. And being its 13th Vice Chancellor has been an extraordinary privilege and also a heavy responsibility. Like the rest of our community, I believe firmly in our delivering on our national mission - to create and transmit knowledge through research and teaching of the highest quality. And know that doing this requires a solid financial, cultural and operational foundation. Achieving such a foundation has been difficult and this has been a very hard time for our community. I am grateful for all the ways that people have shown up and for all the work that has been done and the progress we have made. Like the rest of our community, I know there is still more work to do so. I very much want to see the ANU thrive into the future and for it to continue to be a remarkable place and I don't want to stand in the way of that. So I am stepping down from my role as Vice Chancellor. My plan is to take time off, including a period of study leave, and then return to the School of Cybernetics as a Distinguished Professor where I hope to continue to contribute to our community. Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell
September 11, 2025 at 1:40 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Louder for the folks in back
"The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering. To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology." Barrington Moore, 1966:486
September 8, 2025 at 4:11 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
A smiling Willem Dafoe, in Shadow of the Vampire
September 6, 2025 at 12:08 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
If you see this, repost with a vampire that is not Dracula
Still, with teeth, from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
September 6, 2025 at 11:38 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Two or more cheers for intentional imprecision.
The utopian thinker starts with the proposition, by no means limited to the utopian thinker, that things (no more exact word is useful here) are bad; next, things must become better.. here on earth and soon; things will not improve to this degree by themselves, by a 'natural' growth or development of things-as-they-are; a plan must be developed and put into execution... (Brinton 1973: 50)“
September 5, 2025 at 2:14 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
IT’S BACK.
Photo of the ANU Ger, recently reinstalled on campus.
September 4, 2025 at 11:56 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
New office, new view.
Photo from my office window of two birds in a tree.
September 3, 2025 at 2:37 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
From the OED definition of “familiar.” I keep thinking, somewhat intrusively, of AIs this way.
3.a. A spirit, often taking the form of an 1583- animal, which obeys and assists a witch or other person. Cf. earlier familiar spirit n., familiar devil n.. Familiars are particularly associated with early European witchcraft, where they were generally considered to be evil spirits. In the context of shamanism, a familiar is a spirit which assists the shaman in healing and other rituals. 1583 A Sorcerer, or a charmer, or [he] that asketh Counsell at spirites that are called familiars [Fr. esprits familiers]. A. Golding, translation of J. Calvin, Sermons on Deuteronomie cviii. 661 • 1584 A flie, otherwise called a diuell or familiar. R. Scot, Discouerie of Witchcraft ill. XV. 65 1633 You haue..a familiar That poasts i th ayre for your intelligence? J. Ford, Broken Heart ili. i. sig. F4 • 1652 Examples of demonicall familiars. J. Gaule, nus-Mavria 334 1726 | will demolish your Pantacles, your Magick Glasses, and Geomantick Figures; I will chace away your Familiars. C. Johnson, Female Fortune-teller i. 2 ... 1726 | will demolish your Pantacles, your Magick Glasses, and Geomantick Figures; I will chace away your Familiars. C. Johnson, Female Fortune-teller i. 2 1748 She paid me a visit,..to be introduced to my familiar. T. Smollett, Roderick Random vol. II. xxxviii. 17 1812 The old belief in familiars. R. Southey, Omniana vol. Il. ccxxxiv. 250 ... 1866 Our familiar is..a nimble and tricksy spirit, like Puck. W. R. Alger, Solitudes of Nature & Man iii. 152 1911 The physician asked her where her familiar was and desired to see him, upon which she brought out a dish of milk and made a chuckling noise, as toads do, at which a toad came from under the chest and drank some of the milk. W. Notestein, Hist. Witchcraft in Eng. vii. 161 1979 The shaman's flight is..facilitated by song, the birdsong of animal familiars. J. Halifax, Shamanic Voices (1980) i. 16 2002 Sometimes a drop of blood from the witch was included in the animal's food; allegedly forming a psychic bond between the witch and the familiar. N. Drury, Dictionary of Esoteric 100/2
August 20, 2025 at 6:36 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
In the same breath
Grammerly features list that includes both AI detection and obfuscation
August 19, 2025 at 6:30 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Thinking of writing honest Airbnb reviews. Like, “hangers” should not mean hanger, singular. And what the hell is this?
From an Airbnb listing, the word shampoo, crossed out.
July 1, 2025 at 3:36 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Just checking the flight path for some upcoming travel.
Screenshot of flight path options from Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul. They pass extensively over either Iran (currently barred) or Iraq (which is color coded as less than ideal).
June 23, 2025 at 1:26 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Welp
Concluding paragraph of Fukuyama’s 1989 essay: “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and ide-alism, will be replaced by economic calcula-tion, the endless solving of technical prob-lems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer de-mands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
June 22, 2025 at 2:38 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Nice portrait in the library
Full length painting of President Eisenhower in a grey suit and academic gown, photographed from below
May 1, 2025 at 9:21 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Trying to imagine explaining to someone a decade ago—hell, a couple of months—that this is an intelligible post from a faintly bland centrist pundit.
Post from Benjamin Wittes, @benjaminwittes.lawfaremedia.org “Slava Greenland Libre! Slava Denmark!”
April 23, 2025 at 11:14 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Oxford comma failure strikes again
Guardian headline and sub-headline: “Lauren Sanchez's all-female space flight is about to blast off - and will challenge Elon Musk's SpaceX Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rocket blasts off on Monday, with his fiancee, Katy Perry and three others on board. But is it more than just a stunt?”
April 13, 2025 at 7:45 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
I see there’s one (1) copy in a university library. Maybe I’m going about this wrong.
WorldCat entry for Louis Hartz’s “A synthesis of world history” with one copy listed globally (at Cornell)
April 10, 2025 at 9:28 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
That time again.
Materials for a Canadian mail-in ballot, 2025 federal election.
April 7, 2025 at 12:05 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Laser eyes Joe Clark
April 3, 2025 at 1:21 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
This, for context. A recurring cite in Huntington's Clash. It's a long shot—Private press, etc., in Switzerland no less, or so I read somewhere—but I'd be interested to see it if it's still kicking around somewhere.
"Hartz became ill in the early 1970s and resigned from Harvard. His last years were tragic. He withdrew from family and friends and traveled the world with a kind of despondent urgency, stopping in London, Zurich, and New Delhi, and eventually reaching Turkey, where he died in 1986. A few years before his death he assembled extended but wildly uneven notes for a work to be called “A Synthesis of World History” (later privately printed as a typescript by Humanities Press in Zurich). This sprawling essay, an opus of Spenglerian ambitions, concludes with a turgid and frightening chapter on a Manichean “last battle” between Jihadists and pluralists. It envisioned an “explosion of fear” associated with a “drive for a single absolute” on the part of radical Islam and related movements, against which forces of diversity would be compelled to do battle—or witness the eclipse of civilization. Seen by many at the time as an expression of Hartz’s psychological problems, this final unfinished work today seems to exhibit a kind of perverse prescience, and reminds us that even after he had ceased to function as a scholar and teacher, Hartz continued to evince an ingenious mind informed by a brilliant if perfervid imagination. It was Hartz’s pedagogical and intellectual imagination that may explain why the author of a single great book written over a half century ago can continue to excite philosophers and historians into the new millennium."
April 3, 2025 at 12:44 AM
lefteleven.bsky.social
#ISA2025
Slide at a conference panel, which reads “The event horizon is now truly global.” —Hendrick Spruyt
March 4, 2025 at 10:18 PM
lefteleven.bsky.social
Proofs!
Printout of article proofs for “Firearms analogies and settler colonialism in US nuclear deterrence strategy,” by Joseph MacKay and Jamie Levin, forthcoming in Security Dialogue.
February 26, 2025 at 12:49 AM