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Bailey Poletti

@baileypoletti.bsky.social

1.7K followers 130 following 1.4K posts

PhD in medieval apocalyptic history, esp. 900-1100, but I try to read broadly. Trying my hand at fiction. All prophecies my own (and most likely wrong). He/him.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 15d

Medieval Authors: "Do you think the Greeks might have been the baddies?"

Roman Authors: "Do you think the Greeks might have been the baddies?"

Greek Authors (including Homer): "Do you think the Greeks might have been the baddies?"

Americans: "Look at me: I'm sacking Troy!"

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 1d

Specifically, I argue that Adso of Montier-en-Der's tract on the Antichrist is extremely tied in with the life of Queen Gerberga, whose questions to Adso prompted the essay.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 1d

Apotheosis ruins characters.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social · 1d

Books aren't just what the writer puts in. They're what the reader puts in, too. And some readers are assholes.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 1d

The "run the government like a business" guys think the government being run like a business has been bad and so want businesses to run the government.

Beth Loves to Travel @skywalkerbeth.bsky.social · 1d

@hcrichardson.bsky.social

Right on cue

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 1d

[Glances over at my dissertation]

Damn. That would have been a great way to summarize chapter 4.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 1d

Fun little 🧵

Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

One of my favorite medieval dudes is a guy named Sir Hugh Eland, a knight who started his career by pillaging his neighbors and ended it as a noble advocate for prison reform (from behind the bars of Nottingham jail).

Medieval story time!

onion person @junlper.beer · 2d

just found out that about a week ago, while george santos has been in solitary confinement, that he wrote that due to the inhuman conditions he is facing he is now pro prison reform. just unreal stuff honestly

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 2d

As someone raised in an intense apocalyptic tradition and someone with a phd in historical apocalypticism, I can firmly declared that Thiel is out of his mind.

Also, I know little about One Piece, but everyone who knows anything knows that to date there is no "end of the story."

Layers of BS here.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 3d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 4d

Loved Lincoln, but ever since Air Force One, Gary's the guy.

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 4d

"The frogs will go up on you and your people and all your officials."
-Exodus 8:4

Reverend Jesus "Ł" Christ @reverendjesus.com · 5d

Blessed are the frogs, for they keep making authoritarians look incredibly stupid

Three persons in inflatable frog costumes. One of them is holding a nicely painted sign with two little cartoon frogs holding hands, below the text "FROGS TOGETHER STRONG"

Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Nash @radiodeadair.com · 4d

If you have Twitch Prime, they're giving away XCOM 2 for free this week. It's a code for GOG.

If you already have XCOM 2, grab the code and give it to someone else who doesn't. It's a super great game and people need happy-making things now.

SHARE THE THINGS.

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 5d

It seems the OG thread has a decent point about show-don't-tell. But talking to the reader/audience and talking to other characters are not the same, and one can still be *wrong* about one's motivations.

Questioning yourself as a writer is certainly good. I think they overstate their point a bit.

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 5d

Hamlet's "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space were it not that I had bad dreams" sounds exactly like what the OG post is arguing against.

But sometimes characters are self-aware of their own motivations, ya know?

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 5d

Whenever people say, "I'm not a nazi, but if you keep calling me that, *you* are responsible for if I become a nazi"

...Remember...

When Portland was called a warzone, the residents showed up in self-inflating animal costumes.

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 5d

This is the genius of the Portland protests - they make the claims of lawlessness look not just wrong, but comical

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 5d

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 5d

Frog Knight. An hand-drawn anthropomorphic frog, wearing beastplate, pants, boots, gloves, and cape. He has a shield and sheathed sword. From the SNES game Chrono Trigger.

Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 5d

if there isn't a statue to the Fuck ICE Frog when this is over then we've failed as a society

Danny K @dannykpolitics.bsky.social · 9d

WATCH: ‘Portland Frog’ pepper balled by ICE agents

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Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Danny K @dannykpolitics.bsky.social · 9d

WATCH: ‘Portland Frog’ pepper balled by ICE agents

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 5d

G. K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy" (1908)

But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest —if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this—that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

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Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Karen Graubart @kbgraubart.bsky.social · 5d

Writing is literally finding these transitions, thinking through the big picture and the little, making sense of the events. The idea of handing off this process to AI is just shocking, and the fact that AI guys don't understand that suggests they do not understand much about art or writing.

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 6d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 14d

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵

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Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 6d

This also indicates the essential dishonesty of saying “it’s just a tool.” A hammer is a tool. Nobody writes about the “inevitability” of hammers. Nobody has ever studied the harmful effects of hammers on learning and concluded that teachers must all hit their students with hammers “responsibly.”

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 6d

"the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa"

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 7d

Some on BlueSky debate whether to say "Christofascists aren't true Christians" and others who say "They aren't the Christians you like, but it's a part of Christian history."

Importantly, I want to point out:

Christofascists don't think other Christians count as Christians. They're merely targets.

Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 7d

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

(RNS) — Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.

“I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire.

“We could hear them laughing,” Black said.

Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 7d

I've known people who hear or read words like "everyone," "anyone," or "all," and think, "That means just a couple people like me. A handful at most."

One person legit stared at me in confusion when I suggested "the world" meant something extremely inclusive. In the end, he remained unconvinced.

Joanne Freeman @jbf1755.bsky.social · 7d

For a real president, "our people" means "Americans."

Every day, in every way, he's telling millions of Americans that they don't count.

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 7d

“.. we’re going to take care of our people,” Trump added. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of. And we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

@thehill.com
thehill.com/homenews/adm...

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Bailey Poletti @baileypoletti.bsky.social · 7d

Lots of 2nd A'ers who claimed kids had to die in order to ensure the government didn't turn tyrannical being very quiet lately.

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 7d

as a kid growing up right-wing i regularly heard people express their desire for "a government so small I can drown it in the bathtub". imagine my surprise growing up to realize i was the only one who actually believed that.

Reposted by Bailey Poletti

Will Kunkel @whatwilliplay.bsky.social · 7d

Oy! You there! With the face and the brain full of seasonal depression! Your brain is lying to you! You are a sparkly wonderful gift to the world and a joy to the people who love you. The lumpy lightning bacon is confused by the seasons changing. Be kind to yourself, you're worth it.

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