The Founding Fathers of the United States believed, and wrote, that the bearing of arms was essential to the character and dignity of a free people. For this reason, they wrote a Second Amendment in the Bill Of Rights which reads “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political character — an expression of republican political thought, a prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at least equal in might to the organized forces of government.
It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders regarded political character and individual ethical character as inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal virtue.
The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their liberty.
Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from aspiring to the dignity of free men.
The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery and perjury, and don’t see a contradiction.
But Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
October 30, 2024
QotD: The right to bear arms
October 29, 2024
QotD: The Roman Republic after the Social War
Mithridates’ effort against the Romans, begun in 89 relied on the assumption that the chaos of the Social War would make it possible for Mithridates to absorb Roman territory (in particular the province of Asia, which corresponds to modern western Turkey) and eventually rival Rome itself (or whatever post-Social War Italic power replaced it). That plan collapsed precisely because Rome moved so quickly to offer citizenship to their disgruntled socii; it is not hard to imagine a more stubborn Rome perhaps still winning the Social War, but at such cost that it would have had few soldiers left to send East. As it was, by 87, Mithridates was effectively doomed, poised to be assailed by one Roman army after another until his kingdom was chipped away and exhausted by Rome’s far greater resources. It was only because of Rome’s continuing domestic political dysfunction (which to be clear had been going on since at least 133 and was not a product of the expansion of citizenship) that Mithridates lasted as long as he did.
More than that, Rome’s success in this period is clearly and directly attributable to the Roman willingness to bring a wildly diverse range of Italic peoples, covering at least three religious systems, five languages and around two dozen different ethnic or tribal identities and forge that into a single cohesive military force and eventually into a single identity and citizen body. Rome’s ability to effectively manage and lead an extremely diverse coalition provided it with the resources that made the Roman Empire possible. And we should be clear here: Rome granted citizenship to the allies first; cultural assimilation only came afterwards.
Rome’s achievement in this regard stands in stark contrast to the failure of Rome’s rivals to effectively do the same. Carthage was quite good at employing large numbers of battle-hardened Iberian and Gallic mercenaries, but the speed with which Carthage’s subject states in North Africa (most notably its client kingdom, Numidia) jumped ship and joined the Romans at the first real opportunity speaks to a failure to achieve the same level of buy-in. Hannibal spent a decade and a half trying to incite a widespread revolt among Rome’s Italian allies and largely failed; the Romans managed a far more consequential revolt in Carthage’s North African territory in a single year.
And yet Carthage did still far better than Rome’s Hellenistic rivals in the East. As Taylor (op. cit.) documents, despite the vast wealth and population of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid states, they were never able to mobilize men on the scale that Rome did and whereas Rome’s allies stuck by them when the going got tough, the non-Macedonian subjects of the Ptolemies and Seleucids always had at least one eye on the door. Still worse were the Antigonids, whose core territory was larger and probably somewhat more populous than the ager Romanus (that is, the territory directly controlled by Rome), but who, despite decades of acting as the hegemon of Greece, were singularly incapable of directing the Greeks or drawing any sort of military resources or investment from them. Lest we attribute this to fractious Greeks, it seems worth noting that the Latin speaking Romans were far better at getting their Greeks (in Southern Italy and Campania) to furnish troops, ships and supplies than the Greek speaking (though ethnically Macedonian) Antigonids ever were.
In short, the Roman Republic, with its integrated communities of socii and relatively welcoming and expansionist citizenship regime (and yes, the word “relatively” there carries a lot of weight) had faced down a collection of imperial powers bent on maintaining the culture and ethnic homogeneity of their ruling class. Far from being a weakness, Rome’s opportunistic embrace of diversity had given it a decisive edge; diversity turned out to be the Romans’ “killer app”. And I should note it was not merely the Roman use of the allies as “warm bodies” or “cannon fodder” – the Romans relied on those allied communities to provide leadership (both junior officers of their own units, but also after citizenship was granted, leadership at Rome too; Gaius Marius, Cicero and Gnaeus Pompey were all from communities of former socii) and technical expertise (the Roman navy, for instance, seems to have relied quite heavily on the experienced mariners of the Greek communities in Southern Italy).
Like the famous Appian Way, Rome’s road to empire had run through not merely Romans, but Latins, Oscan-speaking Campanians, upland Samnites, Messapic-speaking Apulians and coastal Greeks. The Romans had not intended to forge a pan-Italic super-identity or to spread the Latin language or Roman culture to anyone; they had intended to set up systems to get the resources and manpower to win wars. And win wars they did. Diversity had won Rome an empire. And as we’ll see, diversity was how they would keep it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
October 28, 2024
QotD: Democracy as theatre
One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.
Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.
This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.
The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.
October 27, 2024
QotD: Puritans, predestination, and the Ranters
The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?
The extent of their membership is disputed and the fear of the Ranters was strong among the Puritans, partly, I suspect, because the logical fallacy of the original tenet is so glaringly obvious. Many of the theological arguments espoused by the men who were labelled Ranters were more textured and complicated than a license to loucheness. But the essential point remains: if you are already damned, your actions and intent are irrelevant.
The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.
Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.
October 26, 2024
QotD: Henry VIII
Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.
So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.
[…]
Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.
The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …
… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.
Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.
October 25, 2024
QotD: The treason of the music critics
Freddie deBoer, “A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-07-22.
October 24, 2024
QotD: From the OG Pontifex Maximus to the Pope
The Protestants might be happy to hear Misanthrope claim this would make you sick, because they’d correctly state that absolutely none of this is in the Bible. The entire liturgical structure of the Catholic Church is pagan, an inherited but corrupted structure from classical antiquity. Thus, a great majority of historic Christianity is syncretic. You might even say haphazardly pagan. The very idea of a high priest who would oversee the spiritual and religious duties is copped by the Pope’s role in Catholicism. The vestments worn by Catholic clergy, the use of incense (especially frankincense, the main herb used by invocations in Hellenism), chants, the sanctification of holy spaces, and the very architecture of Catholic cathedrals are derived from religious practices of pagan Rome. Let’s not get into art. The processions, the veneration of saints (akin to the Roman household gods or Lares), ancestor worship (which Catholics pretend they don’t do), and the hierarchical structure all reflect a continuity from Rome’s Hellenic pagan past. The Catholic Church’s liturgy, with its detailed rituals and sacraments is a direct continuation of the Greco-Roman pagan way of embedding religious practice into every aspect of public and private life. The transformation of its pantheon of gods into a multitude of saints, each with specific roles and domains is indistinguishable from how they interacted with their deities.
Fortissax, “Spiteful Mutant Christians”, Fortissax is Typing, 2024-07-19.
[NR: Glossary links added.]
October 23, 2024
QotD: Sheep shearing in the ancient and medieval world
The availability of iron for tools represented a fairly major change. Iron, unlike bronze or copper, is springy which makes the standard design of sheep shears (two blades, connected by a u-shaped or w-shaped metal span called a “bow”) and the spring action (the bending and springing back into place of the metal span) possible. The basic design of these blade shears has remained almost entirely unchanged since at least the 8th century BC, with the only major difference I’ve seen being that modern blade shears tend to favor a “w-shape” to the hinge, while ancient shears are made with a simpler u-shape. Ancient iron shears generally varied between 10 to 15cm in length (generally closer to 15 than to 10) and modern shears … generally vary between 10cm and 18.5cm in length; roughly the same size. Sometimes – more often than you might think – the ideal form of an unpowered tool was developed fairly early and then subsequently changed very little.
Modern shearing, either bladed or mechanical, is likely to be done by a specialized sheep shearer, but the overall impression from my reading is that pre-modern sheep shearing was generally done by the shepherds themselves and so was often less of a specialized task with a pastoral community. There are interesting variations in what the evidence implies for the gender of those shearing sheep; shears for sheep are common burial goods in Iron Age Italy, but their gender associations vary by place. In the culturally Gallic regions of North Italy, it seems that shears were assumed to belong to men (based on associated grave goods; that’s a method with some pitfalls, but the consistency of the correlation is still striking), while in Sicily, shears were found in both male and female burials and more often in the latter (but again, based on associated grave goods). Shears also show up in the excavation of settlements in wool-producing regions in Italy.
That said, the process of shearing sheep in the ancient world wasn’t much different from blade shearing still occasionally performed today on modern sheep. Typically before shearing, the sheep are washed to try to get the wool as clean as possible (though further post-shearing cleaning is almost always done); typically this was done using natural bodies of moving water (like a stream or shallow river). The sheep’s legs are then restrained either by hand or being tied and the fleece is cut off; I can find, in looking at depictions of blade shearing in various periods, no consistency in terms of what is sheared first or in what order (save that – as well known to anyone familiar with sheep – that a sheep’s face and rear end are often sheared more often; this is because modern breeds of sheep have been selectively bred to produce so much wool that these areas must be cleared regularly to keep the fleece clean and to keep the sheep from being “wigged” – that is, having its wool block its eyes). Nevertheless, a skilled shearer can shear sheep extremely fast; individuals shearing 100-200 sheep a day is not an uncommon report for modern commercial shearers working with tools that, as noted, are not much different from ancient tools. That speed was important; sheep were generally sheared just once a year and usually in a fairly narrow time window (spring or very early summer; in medieval England this was generally in June and was often accompanied by a rural festival) so getting them all sheared and ready to go before they went up the mountain towards the summer pasture probably did need to be done in fairly short order.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
October 22, 2024
QotD: Antisemitism
Doesn’t matter that one side is a liberal democracy that grants rights to women and non-Jews, and the other side has thugs and assassins for rulers and sends its kids to summer camps where they learn the joys of good ol’ fashioned Jew-killin’; doesn’t matter at all. According to the script of the hard left, Israel was created when some Europeans (hisssss) invaded the sovereign nation of Palestine, even though we all know the Jewish homeland is somewhere outside of Passaic. Then for no reason Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza — which for some reason had not been set up as New Palestine by the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but never mind — and made everyone stand in line and get frisked. Those who joined the line in ’67 are just getting through now. Evil Zionists.
James Lileks, “The most important story in the world last Sunday”, Screedblog, 2005-08-11.
October 21, 2024
QotD: Libertarianism
The reason that the state/individual relationship is concentrated upon is that the state has a monopoly on coercive force. Only the state is allowed to kill you. In the twentieth century, of the half billion or so people who have been killed outside of war, almost all have been killed by the state. Maybe 30 people have been killed by intermediate organizations. Labor unions got a couple. John Gotti got a couple. But basically it’s the state that endangers people.
P.J. O’Rourke, interviewed by Scott Walter, “The 60’s Return”, The American Enterprise, May/June 1997.
October 20, 2024
QotD: The “Spirit of the Sixties”
Not to get all Classical Rhetoric up in here, but for prior generations, things like “The Beatles” are synecdoche. They’ll go to their graves insisting that The Beatles were “the greatest band ever”, but if you press them on it, most of them are honest enough to admit that Ringo et al weren’t such great shakes, musically. At their best, The Beatles’ songs are musically simplistic and lyrically gibberish; at their worst, they’re “Rocky Raccoon”. The Beatles are “great” because they were innovators, not so much musically but because they were so goddamn pretentious. They wanted to be not mere entertainers, but artistes, and we indulged them, and that combo — pretentiousness and indulgence — became The Spirit of the Sixties.
Thus if you answer “The Beatles” to the question “What’s so great about The Sixties?”, it’s a synechdoche for “the spirit of the age”.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
October 19, 2024
QotD: From blackberry picking to Bible verses
It’s pretty trite by now to point out that Biblical metaphors that would have made perfect sense for an agricultural society are opaque to a modern audience for whom vineyards are about the tasting room and trimming your wick extends the burn time of your favorite scented candle. There’s probably whole books out there exploring the material culture of first century Judaea to provide context to the New Testament.1 But at least pruning is a “known unknown”: John 15:2 jumps out as confusing, and anyone who does a little gardening can figure out the answer. Plenty of things aren’t like that at all. Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. Are they any good? Should I read them? I’ve mentally plotted out a structure for one of my own, where each chapter is themed around the main image of one of the parables — oil, wine, seeds, fish, sheep, cloth, salt — and explores all the practicalities: the wine chapter would cover viticulture techniques but also land ownership (were the vintners usually tenants? what did their workforce look like?), seeds would cover how grain was planted, harvested, milled, and cooked, etc. The only problem is that I don’t actually know anything about any of this.
October 18, 2024
QotD: Californian wine
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, 2004.
October 17, 2024
QotD: Soldiers and warriors
[…]
But why? The etymologies of the words can actually help push us a bit in the right direction. Warrior has a fairly obvious etymology, being related to war (itself a derivative of French guerre); as guerre becomes war, so Old French guerreieor became Middle English werreior and because that is obnoxious to say, modern English “warrior” (which is why it is warrior and not “warrer” as we might expect if it was regularly constructed). By contrast, soldier comes – it has a tortured journey which I am simplifying – from the sold/sould French root meaning “pay” which in turn comes from Latin solidus, a standard Late Roman coin. So there is clearly something about pay, or the lack of pay involved in this distinction, but clearly it isn’t just pay or the word mercenary would suit just as well.
So here is the difference: a warrior is an individual who wars, because it is their foundational vocation, an irremovable part of their identity and social position, pursued for those private ends (status, wealth, place in society). So the core of what it is to be a warrior is that it is an element of personal identity and also fundamentally individualistic (in motivation, to be clear, not in fighting style – many warriors fought with collective tactics, although I think it fair to say that operation in units is much more central to soldiering than the role of a warrior, who may well fight alone). A warrior remains a warrior when the war ends. A warrior remains a warrior whether fighting alone or for themselves.
By contrast, a soldier is an individual who soldiers (notably a different verb, which includes a sense of drudgery in war-related jobs that aren’t warring per se) as a job which they may one day leave behind, under the authority of and pursued for a larger community which directs their actions, typically through a system of regular discipline. So the core of what it is to be a soldier is that it is a not-necessarily-permanent employment and fundamentally about being both in and in service to a group. A soldier, when the war or their term of service ends, becomes a civilian (something a warrior generally does not do!). A soldier without a community stops being a soldier and starts being a mercenary.
Incidentally, this distinction is not unique to English. Speaking of the two languages I have the most experience in, both Greek and Latin have this distinction. Greek has machetes (μαχητής, lit: “battler”, a mache being a battle) and polemistes (πολεμιστής, lit: “warrior”, a polemos being a war); both are more common in poetry than prose, often used to describe mythical heroes. Interestingly the word for an individual that fights out of battle order (when there is a battle order) is a promachos (πρόμαχος, lit: “fore-fighter”), a frequent word in Homer. But the standard Greek soldier wasn’t generally called any of these things, he was either a hoplite (ὁπλίτης, “full-equipped man”, named after his equipment) or more generally a stratiotes (στρατιώτης, lit: “army-man” but properly “soldier”). That general word, stratiotes is striking, but its root is stratos (στρατός, “army”); a stratiotes, a soldier, for the ancient Greeks was defined by his membership in that larger unit, the army. One could be a machetes or a polemistes alone, but only a stratiotes in an army (stratos), commanded, presumably, by a general (strategos) in service to a community.
Latin has the same division, with similar shades of meaning. Latin has bellator (“warrior”) from bellum (“war”), but Roman soldiers are not generally bellatores (except in a poetic sense and even then only rarely), even when they are actively waging war. Instead, the soldiers of Rome are milites (sing. miles). The word is related to the Latin mille (“thousand”) from the root “mil-” which indicates a collection or combination of things. Milites are thus – like stratiotes, men put together, defined by their collective action for the community (strikingly, groups acting for individual aims in Latin are not milites but latrones, bandits – a word Roman authors also use very freely for enemy irregular fighters, much like the pejorative use of “terrorist” and “insurgent” today) Likewise, the word for groups of armed private citizens unauthorized by the state is not “militia”, but “gang”. The repeated misuse by journalists of “militia” which ought only refer to citizens-in-arms under recognized authority, drives me to madness).
(I actually think these Greek and Latin words are important for understanding the modern use of “warrior” and “soldier” even though they don’t give us either. Post-industrial militaries – of the sort most countries have – are patterned on the modern European military model, which in turn has its foundations in the Early Modern period which in turn (again) was heavily influenced by how thinkers of that period understood Greek and Roman antiquity (which was a core part of their education; this is not to say they were always good at understanding classical antiquity, mind). Consequently, the Greek and Roman understanding of the distinction probably has significant influence on our understanding, though I also suspect that we’d find distinctions in many languages along much the same lines.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and …”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-29.
October 16, 2024
QotD: Technical differences between ground-attack and air-defence missiles
To help everybody not get fooled again, I’m going to explain some basic differences between ground-attack and air-defense missiles, and why nobody should have been fooled by this propaganda for a second.
The top-line thing here is that ground attack missiles can be large and have heavy warheads, while air defense missiles have to be smaller and have lighter warheads.
Air defense missiles have to intercept a target traveling at high speed. They have to be as fast and agile as possible in order to do that; every gram of weight is a penalty. That means you’re going to make the warhead no heavier than you have to in order to kill a plane. And it doesn’t take much kaboom to kill a plane.
Even if we didn’t have footage of the missile and wreckage to examine, it would be obvious that the damage to that hospital wasn’t done by an air defense missile because there’s too much of it. You can’t get that much blast shock out of the smallish warheads they put in those things.
The weight penalty for a big warhead is much less in something like a KH-101. It’s not designed to be agile, it’s designed to get from point A to point B on a least-time course and then blow up real good.
You can use an air defense missile for ground attack with some hacking of the guidance software, but you can’t use a ground-attack missile for air defense; the physics are against you.
The problem with using an AD missile for ground attack is it it won’t give you much of a kaboom when it gets there. They’re just not very effective.
Nevertheless, the Russians have actually been doing this in Ukraine, throwing S-300s and S-400s at ground targets. Only because they were short on ground attack missiles to start with, and their capacity to manufacture them is limited by Western sanctions on the electronics they need.
So the next time the Russians try to deflect blame for one of their missile strikes on civilian cities by claiming the explosion was from a failed Ukrainian intercept, treat the assertion with the contempt it deserves. If whatever went boom actually was an air defense missile, it was almost certainly a repurposed Russian one.
Eric S. Raymond, X(the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-11.
