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WASHINGTON Russias war in Ukraine is making clear to the U.S. Department of Defense that it must get logistics and sustainment right in the Pacific theater, the Pentagons No. 2 civilian said Monday.

Russias logistics and sustainment failures during its three-month-old invasion of Ukraine are a very hard lesson for Moscow, and the U.S. as well, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said at a DefenseOne event.

The Russians are operating on their own border, and yet we saw [their] substantial logistics challenges. For the United States to be effective in the Pacific, we already have a significant logistics challenge [to overcome], worsened by the reliance that we have on fuel, Hicks said. Making sure we understand how to go after that logistics challenge is one lesson that we can extrapolate, if you will, from what we see today.

Russias invasion of Ukraine almost immediately faced challenges with logistics and difficulties getting food, water and supplies to troops. It failed in its early objective of taking Kyiv and occupying a large swath of Ukraine, and has now concentrated most its forces in eastern Ukraine.

Hicks on Monday praised U.S. logistics and information sharing in coordinating allies to arm and equip Ukrainian forces. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is set this week to convene a third meeting of the U.S.-led Ukraine contact group, which has more than 40 member nations.

Beyond concerns about contested logistics, Hicks theres a strong business case for the Pentagons efforts to adopt electric vehicles as the car industry moves in that direction. While not an overnight issue, DoD is motivated at a strategic level to free that tether to fossil fuel.

I think theres a lot we can do to move the system, and when we do that were going to help ourselves with that combat credibility, particularly in places like the Pacific where the logistics lines are very long, Hicks said.

U.S. President Joe Biden signaled during a visit to Japan last month he would use military force to defend Taiwan if it were ever attacked by China, only to clarify later that strategic ambiguity remains American policy. China, meanwhile, has stepped up its military provocations against democratic Taiwan in recent years, aimed at intimidating it into accepting Beijings demands to unify with the communist mainland.

Islands in the Pacific including Guam, Hawaii and Kwajalein have virtually no local fossil fuel resources and their energy needs, including those of U.S. military installations they host, are met by imported petroleum, Hicks has said previously.

U.S. military commanders in the Pacific have warned they lack the capacity to rearm and refuel in the event of a conflict.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has proposed $1.02 billion in funding through 2027 to improve logistics, maintenance and prepositioning equipment for its China-focused Pacific Deterrence Initiative. The request came in April as part of the commands share of the fiscal 2023 budget request, which projected $27.1 billion for PDI overall through 2027.

Current theater logistics posture and capability to sustain the force are inadequate to support operations specifically in a contested environment, the request reads.

The Pentagons decision in March to shut down its massive Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, over water contamination problems, without a clear plan in place to fund and reconstitute this capacity, has only magnified existing logistics challenges, said Eric Sayers, a former senior adviser to U.S. Pacific Command who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Ukraine reminds us that without a robust combat logistics fleet for the Navy, aerial refueling, and heavy lift, we just flat out wont be able to sustain and shift combat power around the theater in the ways that will be required before and during an intense military operation, Sayers said. In short, the Congress should be devoting the same level of oversight to Indo-Pacific Command fuel requirements as it does to Navy fleet size or Air Force fighter procurement.

With reporting by the Associated Press.

Joe Gould is senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry.

Original post:
Russia-Ukraine war is teaching the Pentagon a lesson about the Pacific - DefenseNews.com

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2016 saw the completion of a significant milestone for humanity: artificial intelligence (AI) beat the world champion in the Go game. For context, Go is a board game previously thought to require too much human intuition for a computer to succeed in, and as a result, it was a North Star for AI.

For years, researchers tried and failed to create an AI system that could beat humans in the game. Until AlphaGo.

In 2016, AlphaGo, an AI system created by Googles DeepMind, not only beat its champion human counterpart (Lee Sedol); it demonstrated that machines could find playing strategies that no human would come up with. AlphaGo shocked the world when it performed its unimaginable move #37. It was a move so counterintuitive and strange to human experts that after AlphaGo played it, it stunned and perplexed Lee and all the onlookers and world experts. It ultimately led to the technologys triumph during that game.

Beyond exemplifying AIs potential in this context, the Go game demonstrated that AI could and should help humanity come up with the Move 37 for significant, real-world problems. Among these include fighting cancer.

Like board games, there is a particular element of a game in the proverbial contest between the human immune system and cancer. If the immune system is the policeman guarding the health of the body, cancer is like a mobster that is trying to elude capture. While the immune system police search for harmful cancer cells, viruses, infections and any disorders, cancer is busy coming up with various tactics of subversion, deceit and destruction.

Centuries ago, scientists and doctors operated largely in the dark when attempting to cure diseases and had to rely solely on their intuition. Today, however, humanity is uniquely positioned to fully utilize available resources with advancements in high throughput and measurement of biological data. We can now create AI models and use every bit of available data to allow these AIs to augment our innate intuition.

To illustrate this concept more clearly, consider the case of CAR-T cells edited with CRISPR (a genetic editing technology) to create a promising therapeutic option in treating cancer. Many current and past approaches in the field relied on a single researcher or academic groups intuition for prioritizing which genes to test edit. For example, some of the worlds experts in genetically engineered T cells came up with the idea of trying to knock out the PD1, which did not play out to improve patient outcomes. In this case, genes were not compared head-to-head, and a lot of human intuition was required to decide how to best proceed.

Recently, with advances in high-throughput single-cell CRISPR sequencing methods, we are nearing the possibility of simply testing all genes simultaneously on equal footing and in various experimental scenarios. This makes the data a better fit for AI and, in this case, we have the opportunity of letting AI help us decide on which genes look most promising to modify in patients to fight their cancer.

The ability to run extensive AI experiments and generate data for fighting cancer is a game-changer. Biology and disease are so complex that it is improbable that current and past strategies, driven largely by human intuition, are the best approaches. In fact, we predict that in the next 10 years, we will have an equivalent of a Move 37 against cancer: a therapy that at first may seem counterintuitive (and at which human intuition alone would not arrive) but that in the end, shocks us all and wins the game for patients.

Luis Voloch is CTO and cofounder of Immunai.

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Odds and Evens: Split.

Hard to go past progressive three-year-old 3. Mojo Classic who roared home from the back to claim his maiden fourth-up and four weeks between runs. Races like he will eat up the extra trip, especially sticking to a big track, and hes bred to thrive on rain-affected ground.Dangers: Stablemate filly 4. Stella Glow is also on the rise having notched her maiden win in similar ground third-up as a well backed favourite, and comes through some handy form lines. Keep safe 2. Duble Memory who surged home from a wide draw to win a class 1 in heavy ground third-up, while 1. Leica Bita Fun fourth-up and honest 5. Thailand, who draws inside, are both capable of running into the minor end of the money.How to play it: Mojo Classic win; quinella 3 and 4.Odds and Evens: Split.

The girls lock horns in a tricky sprint, with several first-starters who are likely to have a big impact on the market. One of them, home-track Teofilo three-year-old 4. Mirrie Dancer, can make an instant statement. Liked the way she worked home strong from a mile back in heavy ground in the latest of two trials, and she looks well prepared for this distance. Drawn wide, but that might be too her pattern advantage.Dangers: Provincial three-year-old 5. Oakfield Redgum returns for only a second start behind a steady trial, and draws to get cover. Big watch on debutant Nicconi three-year-old 3. Golden Gate who has been taken along slowly at the trials. Liked the way hes performed in two hit-outs, the latest slow to begin and not settling early before working home well in open company, and is bred to handle the conditions.

How to play it: Mirrie Dancer each way.

Odds and Evens: Split.

Loading

Like provincial seven-year-old 4. Emperor Harada on suitable heavy ground.Dangers: Metro six-year-old 1. Skyray with multiple gear changes third-up is the clear threat in what is now a very thin affair.How to play it: Emperor Harada win; quinella 1 and 4.

Odds and Evens: Split.

Lonhro three-year-old 3. Hotstep debuts behind two forward trials on rain-affected ground. Trial jockey sticks for the real thing, and significantly he wears blinkers in a race thats down to four runners.Dangers: Another first starter in blinkers, 2. Beer Palace has had three recent trials and is the clear threat.

How to play it: Hotstep win; quinella 2 and 3.

Best Bets: Race 4 (3) Mojo Classic, Race 7 (3) Hotstep.Best Value: Race 5 (4) Mirrie Dancer.

Tips supplied by Racing NSWFull form and race replays available at racingnsw.com.au.

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Race-by-race tips and preview for Newcastle on Monday - Sydney Morning Herald

The factions of far-right militants in America can seem a jumble of militiamen and revolutionaries, neo-fascists and white supremacists. While they all share a love of guns and a loathing of liberalism, not all militant groups share the same tactics, aims, or trigger points. How do you differentiate an Oath Keeper militant from a Proud Boy brawler or a Boogaloo Boi from the Patriot Front? Weve got you covered.

Below, a survey of some of the most dangerous groups on the right, the objectives they pursue, what makes them unique and why they fight. The best way to distinguish between these groups, says Matt Kriner, a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, is looking at their narratives of justified violence.

Founded: In 2016 by Gavin McInnes, who previously helped launch Vice Media. Proud Boys started as a street-fighter group that wanted to be real-life shitposters, says Kriner. They wanted to be those edgelords on the street.

Core beliefs: The Proud Boys declare themselves to be Western chauvinists, which is a fancy way of saying white supremacists or white nationalists, Kriner argues. Despite surface denials of bigotry, the Proud Boys have acted as a gateway to the alt-right. Kriner describes them as a vessel to deepen the red redpilling of disaffected men. They have a hipster aesthetic, testosterone-fetishizing mores (eschewing masturbation, for example), and initiation rituals that make light of violence e.g., enduring punches until initiates can name five sugar cereals.

The Proud Boys rage against the left, which they blame for undermining Western society. The Proud Boys take metaphorical culture wars and make them literal: They are street brawlers, often showing up to clash with anti-fascist counterprotesters particularly in cities in the Pacific Northwest. Differing from militia movements, says Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism, theyre more focused on opposing the left than the federal government.

Approach to violence: Unlike the Oath Keepers and other militias, the Proud Boys dont tie themselves in knots looking for moral or legalistic justifications of violence. Theyre fascists, says Kriner. Theyre not adhering to a constitutional structure. Theyre saying, Were here to fuck shit up.

Key moments: Top Proud Boys face federal charges for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Earlier, a prominent Proud Boy, Jason Kessler, helped organize the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (Kessler was belatedly kicked out of the Proud Boys.) In a 2020 debate, then-President Trump was asked by Joe Biden to disown the Proud Boys. Trump instead told the Proud Boys to Stand back and stand by, because somebodys gotta do something about antifa and the left.

Men belonging to the Oathkeepers wearing military tactical gear attend the Stop the Steal rally on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Founded: In 2009 by StewartRhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law-educated attorney, who lost his eye in a handgun accident. Through the Obama years, the groups membership grew into the tens of thousands.

Core beliefs: The Oath Keepers tout themselves as guardians of the constitutional order against what they perceive as encroaching federal tyranny. They recruit heavily among veterans and law-enforcement personnel, appealing to their vow to protect the country against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The organization is very conspiratorial in their outlook, says Kriner. Its multipart oath includes fever-dream promises to defend cities from being turned into interment camps. We will not obey any order to detain American citizens as unlawful enemy combatants, reads another, or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

Approach to violence: On a surface level, the Oath Keepers orientation is defensive, even as many members spoil for a fight. Theyre going to try to look for moral high ground, Kriner says, and say We were pushed to a point that we no longer could avoid violence.

Prominent adherents: A leaked roster of 38,000 Oath Keepers revealed that many sheriffs, police officers, and even some elected officials signed up for the group.

Key moments: Oath Keepers showed up in force at the 2014 standoff at Bundy Ranch in southern Nevada, in defense of a notorious anti-government cattleman who refused to pay federal grazing fees. They also manned rooftops during the Ferguson uprising in Missouri in 2014, purporting to protect property owners from looters.

Jan. 6 connection: Many Oath Keepers have been charged for storming the Capitol in tactical gear to disrupt the count by the Electoral College. Rhodes and nearly a dozen other Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy to block the peaceful transfer of power by force. These Oath Keepers allegedly stockpiled weapons across the river in Virginia on Jan. 6 eager for Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call them into a bloody battle against the presidents enemies.

GA, a member of the Boogaloo Boys, stands with his assault rifle in front of the Arizona State Capitol building on January 17, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

Founded: The Boogaloo movement formed in far-right online platforms like 4chan over the past decade spreading through memes and shitposting before spilling into real-life protests and acts of violence, beginning around 2020.

Core beliefs: The Boogaloo name derives from a much-memed movie sequel Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo. The militants seek their own sequel, a new civil war, short-handed as the Boogaloo, which is seen as both imminent and necessary.

The Boogaloo Bois are decentralized and leaderless, and the ideology while centered on violent revolution is not fixed. Some Bois are avowed white supremacists seeking to build a white ethnostate. Others are more anarchic in their orientation, wanting to distribute power to a heavily armed populace.

The Boogaloo arose, in part, as a reaction to traditional militias aligning themselves with the Trump administration a place for purists who think the militia movement sold out, says Friedfeld. Boogaloo Bois win converts with irony and dark humor. But the goofy iconography a revolutionary flag with a big igloo and the movements de facto uniform, Hawaiian shirts, obscure their violent agenda. Unlike the Oath Keepers, who revere law enforcement, Boogaloo Bois are hostile to police: Boogaloo culture refers to a Big Luau (a rough homonym for Boogaloo) that unmistakably includes roasting pigs.

Approach to violence: Unabashedly offensive. They believe the threshold of violence has already been crossed, says Kriner. Violence underpins everything that they do, adds Friedfeld. The concept is literally based around a future civil war. Individual Boogaloo Bois have been linked to a raft of violent plots, including allegedly scheming to firebomb a power station, incite riots, possess machine guns, and toss Molotov cocktails at cops.

Key moments: A militant who pleaded guilty to federal charges in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imagined that the act would jump-start the Boogaloo. One self-styled Boojahideen was sentenced to 36 months in prison in March for conspiring to provide material support to the militant group Hamas.

Members of the right-wing group, the Patriot Front, as they prepare to march with anti-abortion activists during the 49th annual March for Life along Constitution Ave. on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Founded: By Thomas Rousseau,a former Boy Scout and Trump superfan, in 2017, after he attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Core beliefs: Patriot Front is a hate group that revives Italian fascist symbols and Nazi slogans like blood and soil, but it projects itself under a red-white-and-blue banner of extreme patriotism, says Friedfeld. Where the Proud Boys target men in their twenties and thirties, Patriot Front recruits disaffected teenagers. Its recruits dress like preppy storm troopers, in khakis, blue windbreakers, baseball caps, and white neck gaiters pulled up to their sunglasses. They show up in flash mobs and use graffiti, defacing public murals celebrating diversity or LGBTQ pride.

The group taps into the America First imagery of the modern right, but Kriner insists that just below the surface, its deeply fascistic, deeply anti-Semitic, very racist, and they dont hide it. (The groups website venerates racist and bigoted Americans like Robert E. Lee, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Andrew Jackson.) Yet the overly patriotic trappings give people a comfortable platform from which to then jump into the broader pool of extremity, Kriner says.

Approach to violence: Lots of bark, little bite. Patriot Fronts direct actions and propaganda are designed to intimidate, but the group is not known for overt violence. Here are a bunch of teenagers whove had pretty easy lives, Kriner says. The moment theyre confronted, they tend to run away.

Key moments: In June, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was arrested for conspiracy to riot at a LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur dAlene, Idaho. In July 2021, Patriot Front defaced a Portland, Oregon, mural honoring George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. It was far from an isolated incident. Of nearly 5,000 public hate markings cataloged by the ADL in 2021, Patriot Front was responsible for 82 percent. Theyre incredibly active in plastering towns with posters and graffiti that lean into the patriot side of the ideology but direct interested parties to their white-supremacy resources, Friedfeld says. If youre not repelled and they have your attention, thats where they can start to peel people off into their ranks.

Founded: Atomwaffen Division, also known as the Nationalist Socialist Order, announced its launch in 2015 on a then-prominent neo-Nazi website called Iron March. The group pledged to move beyond keyboard warriorism in pursuit of ultimate uncompromising victory. The name Atomwaffen is German for atomic weapons, and also a play on words; the Waffen were a feared division of Hitlers SS. Atomwaffen is small but has spread internationally.

Core beliefs: These are literal Nazis, declaring: National Socialism is the only solution to reclaim dominion over what belongs to us. Many white-supremacist groups attempt to sugarcoat their noxious beliefs to redpill new recruits, but Atomwaffen is for hardened haters. (Theyre also trolls, known for plastering campuses with stickers like Join Your Local Nazis.)

Members of Atomwaffen are students of American neo-Nazi James Mason, who was a follower of Charles Manson, who touted a white-on-Black race war (and whom Mason wanted to make the American Hitler). They believe that democratic society is irredeemable and a race war should be accelerated to destroy the Jewish oligarchies and the globalist bankers responsible for what they call the racial displacement...of the white race.

Approach to violence: Terroristic. Atomwaffen idolizes mass murderers like Manson, Dylann Roof, and Timothy McVeigh, and models itself after Al Qaeda. The group seeks to operate in small cells and has been tied to murders, bomb plots, and other conspiracies.

Prominent adherents: Rolling Stone profiled 21-year-old founder Brandon Russell and fellow Atomwaffen member Devon Arthurs after Arthurs allegedly murdered the duos other two roommates. Russell was sentenced to five years on federal charges for possessing bomb-making equipment. Arthurs, in and out of mental hospitals, was only recently judged fit for trial.

Key moments: The Atomwaffen have a knack for getting arrested. In March 2020, shortly after the feds arrested five Atomwaffen on conspiracy charges, Mason declared that the group had disbanded. But it seems to have merely splintered, with many cells going underground.

Read more:
Your Handy Guide to the Absolute Worst People in American Politics - Rolling Stone

The last few years have been very weird for the academic humanities. Last month, for instance, a controversy erupted among Twitter-using Medieval historians surrounding a review of a recent work of popular history, The Bright Ages (HarperCollins), by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. The review, which Eleanor Janega wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Gabriele and Perrys book as necessary a joyful work, even that does the hard work of introducing audiences to a world that we too often overlook for expressly political reasons. Precisely the kind of glowing words one hopes to receive from a fellow scholar.

The subsequent controversy, however, had little to do with Janegas assessment; rather, it centered on the fact that her review appeared in the first place. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, took to Twitter to denounce LARB for torpedoing a review of the book she had written for the publication some weeks before one that chastised Gabriele and Perry for their white-centrism and Christocentrism and for rely[ing] on their whiteness for authority. Rambaram-Olm asserted that because the LARB editors are friendly with the books authors, they wanted to whitewash her negative assessment (pun, I suspect, intended). Denunciations, angry tweet threads, and Twitter account deletions followed while leagues of outsiders, like rubberneckers passing a flaming car crash, looked on and thought: What in the world is going on here?

This wasnt the first time a political controversy launched the otherwise sleepy world of medieval studies into the public eye. In 2017 the University of Chicago historian Rachel Fulton Brown incurred the ire of her colleagues in medieval studies by writing a blog post called 3 Cheers For White Men and promoting the alt-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos and his extravagant contrarian junket through Americas universities, the Dangerous Faggot tour. The Brandeis medievalist Dorothy Kim penned a few lengthy blog posts about Fulton Browns problematic opinions, Fulton Brown responded on her own blog, and Kim followed with an article for Inside Higher Ed accusing her adversary of intimidation, harassment, manipulat[ing] the concept of free speech to operate as a dog whistle, and leaving her open to deadly violence akin to the murder of Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

Of course, a historian of the Middle Ages shouldnt look to a right-wing provocateur and media personality for a model of intellectual openness and argumentative rigor. And a university professor blogging her opinions, however caustically, does not constitute violence against a colleague. Such dust-ups are just examples of a more general sad truth about the academic humanities: that over the last decade, the same clownish, philistine attitude of partisan mob-formation and paranoid enemy-detection found everywhere else in American society has compromised the last institutional holdouts of humanistic inquiry.

When Kim sought examples of others who found themselves in a similar position to herself standing before a mob hurling approbation and accusation she turned not to the sweep of history she had devoted her life to studying, but to a far more recent precedent: Gamergate, an explosive and largely internet-based controversy about ethics in gaming journalism that raged in 2014 and left an indelible mark on the cultural politics of the internet. Because the alt-right broadcast my office location, she lamented, I had to lock down my digital presence and decide whether to do as Zoe Quinn did Quinn being a video-game designer at the center of the Gamergate controversy and file a police report. In other words, the roots of the supposed politicization of the academic humanities in our age are shallow, reaching only as far back as the mid-2010s era of hashtag activism and pre-Trump right-wing trolling. It is midday television drama, the stuff of talk shows and pundit media, playing out on campuses increasingly drained of money. Academic protest culture today has more in common with online flash mobs than with the rifle-toting and Maoism of the late 60s.

This politicization is also an epiphenomenon of the slow slide of academe into oblivion, in the face of which scholars desperately grasp for relevance. As academic humanities departments shed undergraduates and lose both prestige and funding, professors sensing their own obsolescence seek different venues for recognition and regard. The professors of academic Twitter have by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media.

Perhaps the most prominent representative of this tendency today is one Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Jason Stanley. Trained in epistemology and the philosophy of language, Stanley turned to politics in 2015 with his book How Propaganda Works. He completed his metamorphosis into a political theorist in 2018 with the best-selling follow-up, How Fascism Works. His books were perfectly of the age: American liberals, horrified by the Trump revolt and desperate to find a definitive tie between Trumpism and the kind of movements that installed Hitler and Mussolini, devoured them. There are fascists on the prowl, and theyre all the people Jason Stanley doesnt like.

Stanley claims that the goal of his book was not to describe fascist regimes, but rather to delimit the essential characteristics of fascist politics distilled into a checklist of 10 essential qualities which may or may not congeal into a regime down the line. This distinction allows him to avoid any mention whatever of Spains Franco, Austrias Dollfuss, Romanias Antonescu, or Portugals Salazar, while every single chapter contains at least one instance of the word Trump. But as Samuel Moyn observed in an essay for The New York Review of Books, If Stanley is right, most of modern political history is fascist, latently or openly. His definition is gravely overbroad. A vast majority of politics as such for decades if not centuries, whether left- or right-coded, in America or beyond contains most if not all of what Stanley believes to be characteristic of fascism.

However famous Stanleys books have made him, he is possibly better-known (at 127,000 followers and rising) for his Twitter account, where he delivers unusually earnest reflections on his academic career while sorting, according to his schema, the fascist from the non-fascist. Indeed, his definition of what counts as fascism is heavily influenced by Twitter-induced presentism: His political orientation, like so many other academics captured by the media complex, comes primarily from what falls into his sight on his timeline. Breaking news supplies the most urgent objects of attention and analysis. He spends his days sharing articles about and delivering sage-like edicts upon the various people and events of the day: critical race theory, the 1619 Project, Russia, QAnon, Trump, Elon Musk. (In a fit of rage, he recently blamed the essayist-turned-Substacker and cultural critic Wesley Yang for the past two years of right-wing agitation on nearly all of these matters a strange accusation for a self-described propaganda expert.) For academics like Stanley, shackled to the media machine, the past is not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

Education is, as the philosopher Henry Bugbee tells it, more fundamentally the task of placement within the fullness of historical time so that it may become the time of our lives than it is in adjustment simply in contemporaneous relationship to the things around us. That is, reading, thinking, and studying are not simply in the service of conforming to the current arrangement of the world, but of developing a long view of human nature that allows us to consider more seriously what might be good as such for human beings, both individually and in community, thereby deepening our sense of what we might mean, for instance, by words like justice. This should be especially true for those devoted to the study of human things: philosophy, literature, history, languages, and so on.

But too often, scholars eagerly go public only when their pedantry can either serve their favored politician or party or discredit their enemies. As Sam Fallon noted in these pages, to read the work of humanities scholars writing for a general audience is to be confronted by dull litanies of fact: a list of the years in which Romes walls were breached by invaders (take that, Trump), an exhaustive inventory of historians who have dunked on Dinesh DSouza, a bland recounting of witch-hunting in 17th-century New England.

When egregious perversions of the historical record proliferate among their own tribe for liberals, say, when the vice president and several sitting senators insisted that the Capitol riot was akin to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, or when a prominent journalist claims that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery; for conservatives, when Republican politicians or Claremont-affiliated professors breathlessly declare the impending destruction of Western civilization, or when Trump assembled a collection of partisan professors to produce the propagandistic patriotic education of the 1776 Commission public-facing scholars nod quietly in agreement and retreat into the dim light of the faculty office.

This kind of tribalism has less in common with politics properly understood involving electioneering, coalition-building, and on-the-ground action and organization in the world, motivated by a concern for justice than with far more recent social phenomena unique to the digital age. The writer and cultural critic Katherine Dee has argued persuasively that our ages political culture is more often than not a species of fandom, made in the image of postmillennial internet culture and forged in the furnaces of LiveJournal, Tumblr, and other early experiments in internet community-formation. What motivates someone to spend 10 hours a day on Twitter, Dee suggests, is similar to what motivated people to camp out in front of theaters to see the next installment of Star Wars, or dress up in costume for the release of the latest Harry Potter book. Whatever it is, it certainly isnt the fruit of serious reflection and study.

The ideological posturing, moral nitpicking, and clique formation that occur in places such as academic Twitter have more to do with crafting a scene than building a movement. And scholars, of all people, should be able to recognize these dynamics, call them into question, and make more reasonable decisions about how to engage with their colleagues, whether in agreement or debate.

So what are beleaguered and increasingly irrelevant humanities professors to do, subject as they are to a constant demand for novelty, and to ever more suffocating pressures of conformity from administrators, colleagues, and students alike? The kind of writing that has withstood the ravages of time has focused on those questions that lie at the bottom of human existence and experience: What is the good life? How should we understand human nature? What kind of political community do we want to inhabit, and how do we achieve it? These sorts of questions, of course, do not admit of final answers: No matter how close we feel weve gotten, our answers are colored by perplexity.

In a commencement speech to this years graduating class at St. Johns College, Mark Sinnett, a retired tutor, took the opportunity to remind his former students of the inescapability and the promise of perplexity. Perhaps if we were somewhat less frightened of our own perplexity, Sinnett wagered, we could show a little better respect for other peoples perplexity. Maybe we could have a humane discussion of something of importance in this society. All earnest thinking, whether alone or in community, begins in such perplexity. Scholars more than anybody should be ready to be perplexed, and to appreciate the perplexity of others. But far too often, the opposite is true.

Too few of todays academics have time for earnest questions and various attempts at answering them. The scholar is now proudly an expert, dealing in certitudes and performances of epistemic mastery. This is especially true among the extremely online academic set, where leaning on ones status or credentials for epistemic authority prefacing an opinion with as a scholar of or as an expert in, perhaps putting Dr. or Ph.D. in ones Twitter display name is de rigueur. This trend became especially noticeable, and dreadful, over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, with professors in various and sundry nonmedical fields succumbing to expertise creep, tweeting forcefully worded pronouncements on the virus as if reporting results from their own laboratories.

Which isnt to say that academics shouldnt extend their curiosity into areas outside their specialization. Quite the contrary: Epistemic trespassing is the duty of anyone who seeks to learn anything new, and even scholars of ancient history have to live in, and thus must seek to understand, the present. As Heraclitus said long ago, lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into very many things. But this inquiry should be conducted searchingly, with an openness to being bewildered, being surprised, and being wrong and with a respect for others whose earnest questioning produces different conclusions.

And of course, though it certainly wont resolve everything, they should probably log off.

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The Hysterical Style in American Academe - The Chronicle of Higher Education