A lot of the Ivy grad pmc centrists don’t know shit about shit, they just know the style choices, catchphrases, and speaking cadences that will get them clocked as thoughtful and competent by the layperson, while letting them ward off questions from smart people that actually probe their depth of knowledge.

See: Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt

leonard leo fuming rn

I hope you can find this clip you mentioned. Norwich was an early gateway for me as a teenager. It didn’t hurt that people are always impressed for some reason when they see you reading about Byzantium. Norwich is a good writer but not the best historian. I also read and enjoyed his histories of Venice and the Normans. Obolensky I’ve read a little of. The one I was really avidly consuming while writing this trilogy was Anthony Kaldellis, who has a fantastic podcast about everything Byzantium. He also just released a new one-volume history of Byzantium maybe six months ago. I exchanged a few emails with him and learned so much from his research and the people he interviewed. However, I have my criticisms. The guy is not a Marxist, and if any mention of class struggle comes up in his work, he invariably attacks it. I read maybe ten or twenty percent of his newest book (I’ve read similar portions of his other books, all of which are interesting), and discovered, much to my horror, that he had adopted Ezra Klein’s theory of history: namely, that people just sort of attach themselves to identities for some reason (don’t ask why), and then proceed to mindlessly fight over these identities for centuries. It’s depressing for me to see this kind of reactionary and superficial viewpoint, one pushed by an Iraq War supporter, especially because Kaldellis has specifically complained about how neoliberalism is destroying his entire field (Byzantium doesn’t really fit into STEM). You hate neoliberalism, yet you deploy neoliberal methods to explain the rise and fall of your beloved Byzantium. Hmm, interesting.

Thank you, I hope you like it! Yeah, I got into Byzantium thanks to Medieval: Total War when it first came out. It was just this huge thing that no one had ever told me about, and I wondered (ignorant liberal that I was) how it was possible that an entire civilization could just be totally ignored in the American public school curriculum. Another obvious question is: why was/is it ignored? (The short answer I would venture is that Byzantium, like the medieval Muslim world, medieval China, and plenty of other medieval places, complicates the liberal view of the medieval world as a time of backwardness and barbarism (as well as the fascist idea that medieval Europe was racially “pure”), and therefore calls a lot into question about Western civilization’s supposed progress.) Unfortunately, asking these sorts of questions and researching Byzantium isn’t a guaranteed path toward communism; plenty of reactionary people are obsessed with Byzantium, and so far as I know, Marxist historians haven’t really paid it much attention for decades, since they tend to have bigger fish to fry.

This election will probably be similar to the last ones. IIRC, virtually the same number of people always vote for the Republican presidential candidate. It’s just the number of people voting for Democrats that fluctuates. My guess is that Biden will once again win the popular vote, but that he has a 50-50 chance of losing enough swing states to lose to Trump.

Anecdotally, almost no one is enthusiastic about either candidate. I live in a low-population (irrelevant) rural swing state, and I’ve seen a few Trump flags and stickers, and exactly one car with Biden stickers, and only one Biden yard sign. (I also spend several hours driving around every workday, FML, so I’ve had a decent look at a rural purple county, as well as a small city that is packed with young white libs and pride flags.) A few months ago I found myself taking a class with a bunch of chuds, and I was shocked at how they were just not that into Trump. Like, the older ones were going to vote for him—one said that he did “an awesome job” as president and that the president “should be a businessman”—but when he got indicted a few months ago (or whatever the fuck happened), they were concerned. “If only he would keep his mouth shut!” It’s similar IMO to Democrats being unenthusiastic about Biden yet still showing up to vote for him in droves. The younger dudes I was with were definitely reactionary but I can’t recall them expressing any support for Trump of any kind.

Biden got a lot of votes from young folks in the last election, but they/we mostly live in cities and blue states and therefore do not matter. I do think that foreign disasters matter and that “the economy” is only working for people who own a lot of stocks / houses, and that younger folks who express any enthusiasm for Biden risk losing friends. We still have over five months left until election day, and basically every day of Biden’s presidency (like Trump’s) has been a catastrophe, so we have to see. My theory is that the funniest realistic result is usually what happens in these elections, even if both Biden and Trump are genocidal fascists (redundant) and not funny to the millions who have died because of them. The funniest result would be…I don’t know. Trump winning? Trump losing? Both of them dying during a debate (godwilling)?

For a lot of fun, google “covid” + “[virtually any disease]” in order to find out how covid is basically airborne any disease:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10047479/

At the risk of tooting my own horn, my novel Space Corps is about what if a global communist revolution succeeded and began exploring nearby stars with FTL ships? I also have a new fantasy series being released chapter-by-chapter about a slave / worker / peasant uprising in Byzantium. Both the links I provided there are free.

Hi, thanks so much for the questions.

Is this your first novel?

Nope. I think this is around my fifteenth? I’m not sure, I’ve lost count because I’ve been cranking these fuckers out for twenty years. I had to unpublish a bunch that I had written before my radicalization because they were too liberal / racist / sexist etc. You can find a communist SF series I wrote here.

What inspired you to write it?

I first found out about Byzantium when I was a teenager playing Medieval: Total War, and I was amazed that I had never heard of this vast empire before. I read the John Julius Norwich history books about it, and was always kind of interested and appreciative of Byzantium, while also being mindful of its mysterious, near total lack of presence in Western culture. Then, a couple of years ago, I finished that last series I just linked you to, and needed a new project to work on. I actually had a few ideas and asked hexbear which one they liked the most. Somebody said Byzantium (one of the ideas), and here I am. The series is a trilogy, and it’s complete. The first two books are finished, the third book is in its second draft form and will be completely done in a couple of months. If I post three chapters a week, it will take two years to post everything, at which point I will publish the books in their complete form on amazon. I also really enjoyed researching the fuck out of Byzantium and learning a lot more about it, and wrote this series because I thought Byzantium deserves more attention (with a communist twist, of course). I also wanted to write a fantasy series in which anyone can have magical powers (rather than just the specials versus the poo people), and where you can’t really do anything cool unless you work as a team with workers / peasants / slaves / women / colonized people etc. in the name of universal human liberation.

Have you find found it easy to write?

Writing is easy. Making money from writing? That’s hard.