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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch

@troynovaunt.bsky.social

3.4K followers 1.8K following 5K posts

she/her. English literature, medievalist, singer in the band, recovering indoor cat. In both research and life, resisting being reductive about religion. I don’t speak for my institution, and it doesn’t speak for me. Expect posts about academic freedom.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · May 22

Immigration is good, actually.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 2h

I mean I just feel on quite intimate terms with the absurdity of the human condition since half the things that are supposedly normal don’t make much sense to me

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 2h

Or I guess, technically Caitlin Flanagan, whatever

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 2h

“Bari Weiss girlbossed too close to the sun” by Sally Jenkins

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 2h

Endorsed

Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 2h

2nd this; Orwell’s essays are fantastic, Politics and the English Language is a must-read imo

Stone Cold Jane Austen @grayathena.bsky.social · 2h

It's a shame Orwell is so often reduced to 1984 and Animal Farm, which are so commonly abused to have become worthless cliches, when his non-fiction is so interesting and still relevant today. His obsession with language and politics is particularly interesting to think about now

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 2h

My existentialism actually is downstream of my neurodivergence in this essay I will

disc horse bot @horsedisc.bsky.social · 2h

I'm begging for existentialists to add an ounce of neurodiversity to their politics.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 5h

Seriously! There is an almost pathological thing on the lefter end of the spectrum where all wins, once achieved, immediately get called losses, because if it REALLY was a win you’d never have been “allowed” to have it. Do not do this! It is kryptonite for organizing!

Sara Silverstein @sarasilverstein.bsky.social · 10h

Trump govt did not reverse these firings out of goodness or self-owning a "mistake." They would have been happy to get away with it. This reversal is the result of strong opposition. We undercut our own power when we give them the credit. Resistance matters. And remaining cuts are still devastating.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 20h

TRUMP CDC REVERSAL: Trump administration racing to reverse some CDC layoffs. Disease detectives, measles responders, MMWR staff RIF’s are revoked. DC office still shuttered. w/ @apoorvanyt.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/h...

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 5h

For truth, absolutely not. Seriously, as views that are wielding power right now. If someone is holding a gun on me, I better understand why they’re doing it.

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 5h

a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man in an elevator and says `` not great , bob '' .

Alt: a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man in an elevator and says `` not great , bob '' . (Mad Men gif)

media.tenor.com

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 5h

This is why so many people in the understanding-things business right now are not ok, fwiw.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 6h

Dear all the people telling me I don’t have to:

You should always take seriously the opinions of people who wield enormous amounts of power. Feel free to ignore them for your mental health, but if you’re in the understanding-things business, as I am, you do have to take them seriously.

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

I DEEPLY resent that I have to take seriously the stunted, juvenile political and theological opinions of Peter Thiel

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 6h

Also to be fair, First Things really used to be a much better and more serious publication that wasn’t so frequently engaged in apocalypticism or anti-pluralism.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 8h

“Your disembodied cultural aggregation machine is the symptom”

is VERY important

Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein.bsky.social · 8h

I hate to ever hand it to AI, but in scenarios like "My disembodied cultural aggregation machine will tell me how to handle the most basic social niceties after I've given a woman a chance to peruse my social media," your disembodied cultural aggregation machine is the symptom, not the problem

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Reposted by Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch

Andy Famiglietti @afamiglietti.bsky.social · 9h

I think it's basically true that what AI does to language/meaning (especially written language) provides us an opportunity to rethink how we study and teach language/meaning in our fields. It reopens central questions.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Exactly, strongly agree.

Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Well put. Maybe I just need to try some things in my community though and see how far I get. Sometimes interest and urgency can be turned into time and funding…sometimes less so…won’t know till I try.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Familiar with Montas, yes! Was a bit underwhelmed, and have been struck by seeing him invoked by people in the midst of hollowing out education, but probably need to read him more carefully. Will look forward to seeing your publication on this too.

Reposted by Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch

RiotGrlErin @riotgrlerin.bsky.social · 10h

book covers featuring the muppets: thread

Elmo on the cover of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Real question: do we have a movement yet? Is there an articulated and organized case for great books from the left or do we need to make it?

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Reposted by Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 23h

It's been really, really nice seeing the Catholic social justice tradition in the US feel like it's empowered to spread its wings again without risking censure after a long time of being suppressed by US Catholic leadership, and it's exactly what I was hoping for from Pope Bob.

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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 23h

Denying entrance to a Eucharistic Procession is to Catholicism kinda like what desecrating the flag is to the American civic religion, except with even more weight of history and tradition behind it!

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Oh look, of course First Things is boosting this rather than telling him to go outside and mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn

bsky.app/profile/shar...

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 10h

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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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

Essentially the musings of a disaffected fourteen-year-old boy

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

I DEEPLY resent that I have to take seriously the stunted, juvenile political and theological opinions of Peter Thiel

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Reposted by Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 9h

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 10h

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Orddu, Orwen, or Orgoch @troynovaunt.bsky.social · 9h

🧵

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 10h

The soft opening for this was telling teachers to necromance chatbots out of Anne Frank. There’s a historical parallel to this I’ve been chewing on, a bit of gristle stuck in my teeth since I wrote this footnote about a public debate in Weimar Germany on the educative potential of replicas. 🧵

The use of copies to fill lacunae in collections was by no means always hitched to a progressive cause, as it was in this debate. For example, the Nazi-sponsored traveling exhibition Deutsche Größe of the early 1940s comprised replicas entirely. See Diebold
2015•