It's only going to get worse. I don't see how CAST won't have our fragility index in the high 50s to 60s by the end of the year.

Butler didn't do translations of Thucydides (Lattimore did, though), but if you ever see an Ancient Greek translation with Butler's name, just toss it into a fire. Crawley is iffy, but not Butler-bad.

Lattimore has some of the best translations for all the Greek classics.

Anything that's not Butler is defensible at this point, tbh (I prefer Lattimore, but that might not be too surprising).

Wait until you see the one where they canceled Bethesda for their game advertisement with Indiana Jones calling a Nazi a "fascist." They tried to say it was glorifying the killing that happened that day....

A lot of people are all three, and apparently haven't seen Indiana Jones, either.

Also, On Operations was on my abridged reading list to mil-connected parents this year, so double thank you for the good read I could pass on.

As a teacher... thank you all for helping spread the word on this.

I was delighted to find out I'm a Cat 3 under HAct, nor am I subject to Article 88... so I reserve my right to also call him a fucking idiot.

History doing its weird thing, as usual.

I'm desperately worried about Pennsylvania, though. Public safety looks increasingly vulnerable as winter approaches.

Allll that being said... I will still say we *could* learn so much more about war and society if we studied beyond those closed circles. I hope there's a lot of scholars and practitioners diving into the Theban Cycle and tertiary Chinese texts to interrogate their personal beliefs on their own.

Alas, I am just a physics teacher doing too much reading, and not enough sleeping, so my critique is limited to my own skepticism (though, they're giving me a lot of reasons to just leave my station and get that dissertation over with).

No one in policy wants to (or can afford to) say they can't do something or don't know something, and when we force those people to even tacitly acknowledge it, they usually take those grandeose claims into the thing we needed them to intimately critique and mutilate it to fit an agenda.

But it comes at a cost of having to admit things like *we don't know what it really means to "learn" yet* and *we don't know where "war" begins and ends yet*. I'm totally fine with saying, "I don't know," but I am also increasingly wanting to say to others, "You shouldn't pretend you know, either."

Unless there's drastic changes in how research in these policy-connected professions is conducted, I don't know if I would *want* PME to touch it beyond your wise advice to view what we have with severe skepticism. I've found my admiration for Feynman's sentiments only to grow with age...

And ultimately I think professions in general are falling on their faces too much these days. Education and defense both have policy pressures urging them to solve their problems NOW, and both professions have claimed to have THE answers for a century, yet grades and wars have little to show for it

There is also a fundamental barrier that separates East Asian epistemology from its European counterparts, especially when Confucian artifacts remain in many of today's writings (even entertainment!). So, a group largely conditioned to the Fichtian and Kantian schools is going to struggle.

Strategic studies literature on this side of the globe is just so culturally and linguistically dense that I don't think natsec or PME spaces could properly handle them, anyway. With the amount I see even Greek literature get butchered, I can't imagine East Asian literature fairing remotely better.

There's a couple things here I really want to highlight, because these are all on point. I think an obstacle is that the translations are not as simple as say, Clausewitz, either. I can comb through 1834 Bom Kriege and still translate with sufficient tools, but I can't do that with these--