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Reposted by Adam Pontius

Vienna Dialogues - Coffee and International Relations @viennadialogues.bsky.social · 13h

What can Ottoman-themed Turkish TV dramas teach us about IR? How do cultural producers shape national identity and foreign policymaking? Ceren Çetinkaya-Mullin joined Vienna Dialogues to talk about her PhD research on transnational cultural production and circulation: 👉 tinyurl.com/y6asnted

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 12h

if companies see that republicans will punish them unless they pony up bribes AND democrats will punish them for ponying up bribes, they will see there is no way to avoid punishment in a system that demands bribes

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Clearly he should run for Senate next, he'll fit right in.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The Danish don't seem too upset about it.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

What a strange way of putting things. If Canada is a 'vassal state'- as you say (I certainly don't)- why would it make a difference to you when and how they re-evaluate their relationship with the United States? Is evaluating choices something 'vassal states' do regularly?

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Hilde Eliassen Restad @herestad.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Great thread:-) I would also add that if people are interested in updated work examining how the narraof American exceptionalism has influenced US foreign policy, there is a new edited volume coming out with Georgetown University Press next year co-edited by myself & @richardmaass.bsky.social 🥳

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

By virtue of that fact: a country becoming disrespectful of their neighbors’ sovereignty and interests becomes a regional problem that hurts everyone, abusive country and neighbors alike. Canada has options (and I’m glad y’all do), those options are also more costly than trading with the U.S.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Entirely true. There are pragmatic reasons why Canada would decide to be less cooperative right now. I more meant the consequences of whatever happens in the United States politically is going to always affect Canada and Mexico (and vice versa). Countries can’t move.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

. @herestad.bsky.social ‘s essay on this on @warontherocks.bsky.social published in the aftermath of January 6th, is a more up-to-date (and shorter) thinking through of the same problem from the outside perspective. warontherocks.com/the-burning-...

warontherocks.com

The Burning City Upon a Hill

On Jan. 8, 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted, “Being the greatest country on earth is not just about our incredible economy & our

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Is that Stancil’s insanity? Not entirely, but it plays a role. It also has a different texture than the types of delusions of being an ‘Atlas’ of world order that you get out of Moscow. press.umich.edu/Books/C/Chas...

press.umich.edu

Chasing Greatness | Anatoly Reshetnikov

Over the last two decades, it has become clear that Russia insists on its great power status, even at considerable cost. Chasing Greatness provides an interpretive explanation of the tacit rules that ...

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The pain and embarrassment of that awareness drives a lot of the ‘tankie’ aspects of left in the U.S. Swapping out ‘America the hero’ for ‘America the villain’ doesn’t really change the plot all that much though when the problem is more akin to what ‘kids these days’ call ‘main character syndrome.’

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Because of that history, even those of us who spend a long time abroad (I’ve lived in Hungary, Austria, and N. Ireland for something like 5 years) lose that insulation slowly, even as we are painfully aware of it.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is because exceptionalism simply means believing in being the exception to the rule, and if a community believes they are exceptions to world politics (“new world”) the result is a culture that doesn’t track the rest of the world closely in any respect.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

American exceptionalism is one of those myths that tends to recreate itself even in attempts to untie itself, Chomsky and Zinn are as much products of American exceptionalism in that respect as Aaron Sorkin or Timothy Snyder.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Unfortunately I don’t think geography gives Canada and Mexico much of a choice. But the insularity Stancil points out here is a structural, long running, endemic problem, part of the wages of American exceptionalism.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Entirely legit, you're not eavesdropping, they're choosing to engage in a public exchange. You could always give them the chance to elaborate their thoughts but I don't think its necessary. And the article sounds really interesting!

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Comparing translations also becomes very possible and really interesting.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

TBC part of what I find annoying here is the laziness that text-as-data here enables. A more sophisticated method looking at clustering around specific non-technical words and benchmarking before and after wide adoption would be interesting, this clearly isn't that.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

So: the method that's being applied to determining LLM authorship is putting together a dictionary of frequently used words by models that are constructed from patterns in language like the frequency with which words are used? Can't think of any reasons why that would go wrong...

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Which would seem to suggest that the issue is pattern storage, patterns from a transporter are more or less immediately reproduced while replicator patterns need to be compressed, stores, and schematizef. Or that the writers who came up with *doors to swoosh* cut some corners on details!

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Interesting point, there IS an episode where Riker gets split, raising philosophical questions about the tech. Replicators seem to be more straight forward, they are reproducing matter from a necessarily simplified model, while transporters are replicating directly from the original…

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Used this way, the LLM basically turns into advanced spell check + whatever commentary on your writing you prompt. I make sure that I disclose this to my diss panel, and I haven’t received any complaints about my writing being ‘Claude-ish’ (plenty of other complaints though!)

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It’s pretty easy to put in place hard limits through settings, projects, and prompt language on the extent to which LLMs actually reproduce YOUR versus their own version. The rules do need to be in place at all levels. You have to respect the rules yourself, asking for exceptions confuses things.

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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I see a lot of people on Bluesky, the app that tells you to use alt text, saying that people using Claude to correct grammar should just learn to do it themselves and I'd like to introduce you to the idea of non-English speakers

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

That’s a really interesting observation, I’d love to read more about that. It does seem to me that there is a broad shift towards the allegorical and away from modern realist narrative. It’s had me marking up my copies of Walter Benjamin’s essays quite a bit!

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Not in a position to dodge the paywall and read the whole article, but if Bible Belt attempts to resocialize their states Christian offers a subversive path towards real, broad, cultural education I’m more inclined to the opportunity than hypocrisy charges which won’t register with them anyways.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I get the rhetorical point you’re making here, but yeah that would be a pretty cool article and a pretty cool approach to cultural education.

static.klipy.com

Porque No Los Dos - Meme de la Niña

ALT: Porque No Los Dos - Meme de la Niña

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Well it points towards the allegorical nature of quotes for us I suppose, unless you’re socialized into a particular tradition of knowledge is there any reason to expect that the ‘metadata’ of the quote is as important as the message it’s imagined to contain?

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Does ^ mean that religious studies is relatively trivial then, or that the project with which it is involved (the cultural legacy of ‘America’ as a spiritual project) is too sunk to salvage?

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

As for culture wars, Arday was already caste as a 'bette noir' over our objections. We are party to such wars whether we like it or not. The question is how we protect our own, especially from our most disenchanted selves. Informality in that context seems more like a problem than a solution.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Sure, the theoretical discussion is absolutely where it should start. Practices have to be imaginable before they can be practicable. An official transdisciplinary ban list would be a start, some type of commitment to more effective representation in politics and media gives that teeth.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I suppose what I'm arguing is that this simply isn't good enough. Scholars still have some measure of governance control over who gets to publish, who gets consideration from funding bodies, and who gets to attend conferences. Why not at least start the conversation about broader sanctions?

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yes, and oxbridge often falls far short of that line, allowing offenders to quietly leave for other institutions where the cycles repeat (of both harassment and violations of research ethics would do seem to hang together).

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I'm not saying that any of us these models could be adopted by scholars overnight (and I do use scholars over academia purposefully there), but I think it does raise immediate questions over whether institutions are kicking these folks out as a mode of accountability or as a mode of risk reduction.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Is exile really a form of accountability in the 21st century? Kicking these people out of research communities doesn't do much unless the media decides to latch on to it. Compare that to misconduct in medical or legal professions where licenses to practice at all can be stripped.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I do think healthier for LLM companies themselves to be providing services of identifying text an LLM has touched rather than sketchy third party venders. But this IS NOT a test that will distinguish 'authentic authorship' from 'inauthentic authorship.' Nor will it magically transform into that.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I'm noticing a certain amount of magical thinking about Anthropic's watermark. It sounds like an interesting institution, but it is just that: an institution Anthropic will need to maintain. It's not a technology that will magically make all of the challenges LLMs pose for higher ed disappear.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I wish it weren’t so, many of us in the democratic reform community have spent decades trying to court Republicans, any of the ones who have been receptive have left or gone very very quiet.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Having worked for and left the GOP, I have a hard time imagining how that would happen. The only insurrections against party leadership that have occurred in several generations were all from the right, and there simply isn’t anyone left to rally against the anti-democratic elements.

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Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 02/08/2026

It's a very simple equation. The alternative requires that the GOP either implodes or reverses the trajectory that it's been on for like three decades. So the choice is basically "risky electoral reform" or the status quo, and the status quo is "continued collapse of the constitutional republic"

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Well I'm not a classicist so its not up to me, but in my experience the history of academic fields is a history of them exceeding beyond their definition at any one point, this is our notion of progress. I find the argument that the field should be understood as wide compelling.

bu.edu

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

It's certainly classical to the English, etymologically classics means of 'of the highest example,' it doesn't specify Greece or Rome anywhere, although there is a strong tradition of Greek and Roman culture from certain periods being understood as classical. Then there is the aesthetic definition

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

... in a global world I think it's increasingly difficult to separate the Greeks out as exceptional historically in anything other than being framed as classical. I like Hayden White on this point especially (although he's generally controversial).

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Historically yes, as I've read things it seems like there is more consensus that really serious work on the Greek subject matter was done in Hebrew and Arabic as well (Straussian approaches for instance). And there is the question what to make of the distinction between ancient and classics...

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Perhaps the professional reality in the academy, I study classicism from a pol theory perspective and I run across plenty of folks who call themselves classicists or philologists but don't focus on Greek. Seamus Heaney and J. R. R. Tolkien were aware of Greek for example, but it wasn't their focus.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Pretty sure Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic at a minimum would also count from a modern interpretation of the field? And translation is only one aspect of classicism. But I'm happily an amateur when it comes to the field!

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

(for the record I also liked the movie, but have only ever read any Greek or Latin sources in English translation)

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I'm actually really curious about this aspect, does there end up being a major split between the classicists who read in ancient Greek and those who don't? Wilson mentioned something related to this in her NPR interview (and it being related to her dislike for the movie) and its stuck in my mind.

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Adam Pontius @ampontius.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Come on Will, you usually cherry pick your stats better than this. BLS weekly income average only accounts for full-time wages, which BLS reported at 121 million. All ~342 million Americans eat. Who is paying for their groceries and how?

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