1. A rather discouraging week; I had a few very productive days, but also a number of flops and didn’t get as much done as I’d intended.

2. On Wednesday I spent about an hour working on a post, only to have WordPress’s autosave function freeze and lose the whole thing just as I was ready to post.

3. Discovered this site: https://founders.archives.gov/, which is absolutely indispensable for anyone interested in the early American republic. Though be warned: you could easily get sucked into it for hours hunting up correspondences and documents (on the other hand, Adams and Jefferson at least are such arrogant cranks at times that they provide a kind of built in handbrake).

4. By the way, this is the great thing about primary documents: I now know, for a fact, that Thomas Jefferson never read Aquinas. I know this because of a garbled quotation he gives in a letter to Adams, which he says he got out of the writings of a Cardinal, and from which he deduces an incorrect idea of Aquinas’s opinions.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone claim otherwise, but it’s one thing to read in a textbook “Thomas Jefferson never read Thomas Aquinas” and another to be able to see with my own eyes that this is so.

5. Also had an opportunity to once again discover the frustrating process of trying to convey ideas to people that they (apparently) don’t have a framework for:
Me: “I think A.”
Them: “Okay, why do you say B?”
Me: “No, not B. X is Y, and Y is A, so X is A.”
Them: “But this is the problem with B…”
Me: “WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT B!”

I notice that even very intelligent people often have a very limited set of categories in which they’ll try to frame ideas, so that even when you’re explicitly saying that A is not B, they will still assume that it is B. You try to establish one point and they are planting their flag about five steps down the logic train.

I’ll never forget one time where someone was talking about how the absurd monetary practices of modern universities falls disproportionately on minorities, and thus was a civil rights issue. I pointed out that, while I agreed about the core issue, it isn’t a civil rights issue since there are no laws or public measures involved. He absolutely did not get it and just kept repeating that it impacted minorities, when my point turned on the definition of ‘civil rights’.

The above is why I usually try to avoid getting into debates; I find it tends to only be a frustrating exercise in banging your head against a wall.

6. Okay, that’s enough grumpiness for now. I’d really like to find a good history on Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs. One of my school history books has a dramatic account of it that makes it sound like essentially a fantasy epic come to life, but I’d like to get a good primary-source based account. Problem is, of course, it’s one of those events where most histories default to an “evil European invaders” narrative. One guy with a few hundred men sets out and conquers an empire of millions, fighting battles of ten or twenty to one and coming out on top, and in the process dislodging a satanic religion based on human sacrifice. You could make an absolutely amazing film about that if you had a mind.

7. Finally, a friend posted this and I thought it was funny: