Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Davis X. Machina

@ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social

640 followers 380 following 4.9K posts

Curmudgeon. Retired pedagogue. Lapsed philologist. Maneiac. Likes: Sparrows. bridges, cardboard boxes, curtain rods Dislikes: Most everything else. All power to the soviets of car dealers and regional vice presidents!

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · May 25

Decoration Day tomorrow.

Remember the reason for the season...

Detail of Augustus St. Gaudens memorial for Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment on Beacon Hill in Boston.
Bronze relief of Black infantrymen on the march. One of the figures has had someone place a bouquet in the crook of the elbow of an infantyrman with a shouldered musket.

4 17

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 6h

In a *narrative* way the consultants did tell him, and that's all that matters now.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

I'm still trying to think of a problem we face that doesn't have a huge Congress-shaped hole in the middle of it.

1 45

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

(lyrics are James Russel Lowell, "The Present Crisis", written WRT the Mexican War. FWIW can be sung to the tune known as the Austrian Hymn, better known to us as the melody used for "Deutschland Über Alles")

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

"Once to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide,
in the strife of truth with falsehood,
for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
off'ring each the bloom or blight,
and the choice goes by forever
'twixt that darkness and that light."

is right there in the hymnal

1 1 6

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

bsky.app/profile/coll...

collin cornell @collincornell.bsky.social · 2d

“One of the chants that has become ubiquitous at these protests at Broadview is, ‘Love your neighbor, love your God, save your soul and quit your job,’” said Black, who pastors at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. “Everybody chants that.”

RNS @rns.org · 3d

The pastors’ efforts are part of rising faith-based pushback to the Trump administration as the president seeks to implement plans for mass deportation of immigrants.
religionnews.com/2025/10/07/i...

1 12

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

Poaster's Madness is just Cabin Fever, is what I'm saying

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 7h

The "Make all this politics go away!" people always a factor. Especially after a.lot of flipping.

Hemostatic politics, not thermostatic .

Maybe bigger than any one actual faction with an ideology.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 8h

The English Church got some of its recusants that way, at the time of the Reformation.. cf Eamonn Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars"

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 8h

In the middle ages and Renaissance you sometimes read about clerics, appointed for political or nepotistic reasons, who after a lifetime in the business suddenly decide to take it all seriously.... or more accurately discover that it was serious all along, and they were the problem.

4 1 22

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 8h

The consensus omnium fidelium v. the Curia.

Is constitutional conciliarism emerging?

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 8h

If there is no society you don't need social provision.

If the word 'public' points to no actually-existing thing, there are no public goods.

Atomistic individualism.

Which you, paradoxically, can also practice in groups - then you get the Volk.

1 3

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 8h

"But it might work for us!"

(Counselling meme from Arrested Development goes here with Isaiah Berlin's head Photoshopped in..

Should be a doddle. He's also bald.)

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 9h

This should - should - be a scandal and a rebuke.

Feels way too much like the Stolpersteine...

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 9h

Consensus omnium fidelium v Curia fights aren't new, exactly.

A constitutional conciliarism is stirring.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 9h

Ed: For 'people' read 'proposition'.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 9h

But he's not within the Democratic Party....
And that's been his unique selling people for 40 years.

1 1

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 10h

It's not impossible to win.

It's impossible to beat the spread.

Stupid doesn't always win but it always covers.

Take stupid and the points.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

Their vision remains "Tariffs fund everything. You don't need an IRS, just customs and excise, and not much excise".

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

He will be immediate savaged for attempting to commit the only unforgivable sin - "Clearing the Field".

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

Autarky, and a King.

When your theory of the state and the economy is that if King Friday the Thirteenth.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

People living under the thumb of an elected sheriff and amateurish or worse county government may have it even worse.

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

A lot of "Get the parties out of politics! Get the politicians out of poltics! Get the politics out of politics!" going around out there.

There's always some - ¡Ross Perot, presente! - but like the flu, some years are worse than others...

1 8

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 11h

Fig, if a lifetime of reading sports pages taught me anything, it's that the team that wants it more always wins.

2 3

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 1d

And so we say “In every generation, each person must see themselves, personally, as if they were an inflatable frog in Portland.”

Davis X. Machina @ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social · 1d

The consensus omnium fidelium v. the Curia is an ancient conflict.