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@blocksincoming

Pierogi Nazi. Glonzo did nothing wrong. Not really Giancarlo Esposito.

1.024 Folgt509 Follower4.116 Posts

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blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 22d

It's interesting that Democrats, at least some of them, once understood the importance of using the media to shape public opinion. It reminded me of Senator Paul Simon who borrowed $3,600 in 1948 to buy a newspaper and parlayed it into a 40 year career in elected office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Simon_(politician)

Simon attended Concordia University, a Lutheran
school in Portland.[3] He later attended the University
of Oregon and Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, but
never graduated. After meeting with local Lions Club
members, he borrowed $3,600 to take over the defunct
Troy Call newspaper in 1948, becoming the nation's
youngest editor-publisher, of the renamed Troy Tribune
in Troy, Illinois, and eventually built a chain of 14
weekly newspapers. His activism against gambling,
prostitution, and government corruption while at the
Troy Tribune influenced the newly elected governor,
Adlai Stevenson II, to take a stand on these issues,
creating national exposure for Simon that later resulted
in his testifying before the Kefauver Commission.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 22d

Chinboy? Gotta be Blood Axis.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 23d

This album cover always makes me laugh. For the longest time I thought the man on the left was drinking a comically large cafe au lait. Nope. It's a chamber pot but he does have a comically large saucer. But I'm sure 1960s Brazilians would have gotten the reference.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 24d

Jimothy's curse.

Simpsons, glowing figure saying "I bring you love"

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 26d

every day

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 27d

Thinking about Ernest Renan who popularized the theory. For Renan, Jesus became Aryan because he was able to purge himself of his Jewish traits. Curiously it was a repudiation of antisemitism. But to me he is just another relic of the past measuring skulls with calipers.

Renan argued Jesus was able to purify himself of "Jewish traits" and that he became an Aryan. His Life of Jesus promoted racial ideas and infused race into theology and the person of Jesus; he depicted Jesus as a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, and that Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish influences.[20] The book was based largely on the Gospel of John, and was a scholarly work.[20] It depicted Jesus as a man but not God, and rejected the miracles of the Gospel.[20] Renan believed by humanizing Jesus he was restoring to him a greater dignity.[21] The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy[22] and enraged many Christians.[23][24][25][26] It likewise provoked anger within the Jewish community due to its depiction of Judaism as foolish and absurdly illogical, and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior to Judaism.[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Renan

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 28d

If I was selecting the most perfect it would Tom Waits' Bone Machine. But as I am not, it's Juggaknots Clear Blue Skies which is back in print after being out for years.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 28d

While I don't think it's The Simpsons specifically, I do think the younger adults have been shaped by a steady diet of nihilism. A decade back I saw a video clip of politician and activist Ron Dellums and it diagnoses the effect of media cycicism perfectly.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 29d

The Odyssey has me reading about Socrates and his student, Athenian general Alcibiades. Apparently he was a distracted student and Socrates sometimes had to drag him back to class. He was a good commander and some have speculated he might have won the war against Sparta for Athens.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 29d

The sentence is correct in its original form. The comma indicates the debt is about the underwater loans and not all loans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_clause

However, if the additional information does not help to identify more narrowly the identity of the noun antecedent but rather simply provides further information about it, the adjective clause is nonrestrictive and so requires commas (or a spoken pause) to separate it from the rest of the sentence:

Broccoli, which people often leave uneaten, is very nutritious.

Depending on context, a particular noun could be modified by either a restrictive or nonrestrictive adjective clause. For example, while "broccoli" is modified nonrestrictively in the preceding sentence, it is modified restrictively in the following.

The broccoli which (or that) people leave uneaten is often nutritious.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· 29d

that passage reminds me of a favorite section of Darkness at Noon, about acting on credit.

Extract from the diary of N. S. Rubashov,
on the fifth day of imprisonment

“... The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it. “But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution “It is said that No. 1 has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history, at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country, the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it. We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason—that was our greatness, the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism. That is why we will in the end be absolved by history, but not they. ...

“Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it. We are sailing without ballast, therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.

“A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty…

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 25

wut

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 24

It seems to me that proto fascism was born in the 1890s out of failure of the predictions of Marx, and matured during a crisis of liberalism after WW1. So he seems headed on the wrong path with this:

what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the left.”

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 24

This is cat abuse.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 22

Wonderful book and the personalities of Hitler and Trump are simply uncanny. It's not a deep dive but Paxton's ability to present a clear concise summary is as good as political history gets.

A major problem for intentionalists was Hitler’s personal style of
rule. While Mussolini toiled long hours at his desk, Hitler continued to
indulge in the lazy bohemian dilettantism of his art-student days. When
aides sought his attention for urgent matters, Hitler was often inaccessi
ble. He spent much time at his Bavarian retreat; even in Berlin he often
neglected pressing business. He subjected his dinner guests to midnight
monologues, rose at midday, and devoted his afternoons to personal pas
sions such as plans by his young protégé Albert Speer to reconstruct his
hometown of Linz and the center of Berlin in a monumental style befit
ting the Thousand-Year Reich. After February 1938 the cabinet ceased to
meet; some cabinet ministers never managed to see the Führer at all.
Hans Mommsen went so far as to call him a “weak dictator.” Mommsen
never meant to deny the unlimited nature of Hitler’s vaguely defined and
haphazardly exercised power, but he observed that the Nazi regime was
not organized on rational principles of bureaucratic efficiency, and that
127
127
the anatomy of fasci sm
its astonishing burst of murderous energy was not produced by Hitler’s
diligence.49 I will consider further the mystery of fascist radicalization in
chapter 6

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 22

These people are idiots.

"The Scientific Machine Is Getting Bogged Down"

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 21

I feel like Trump chose to beseige the walled city. But I know that wasn't the question - just what the strategy reminds me of.

https://www.academia.edu/41372918/Sun_Tzu_The_Art_of_War_Verse_3_03_

Thus, the best military method [to preserve one's own strength and prevent the enemy
from consolidating his forces at the operational and tactical level] is to:
- Ideally, attack the enemy's stratagem (伐๵);
- As the next option, attack his allies (伐交);
- Next, attack his main army (伐ฎ);
- As the least preferred option, attack his fortified positions (攻城)

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 21

https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/

Regardless of its original intentions, the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed.

“Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy,” Alsup wrote in his ruling. “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the compan

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 21

Definitely Nicholas.

gothic dandy holding a single red flower.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 19

One I ran into in the news is that this guy was a Trump voter he voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because he thought the president would send voters another stimulus check... He now says his support for Trump was “a mistake.”

https://atlanta.capitalbnews.org/shawn-harris-georgia-14-runoff-black-voters/

Rome resident Christopher Darden is a former Trump voter who said he plans to support Shawn Harris in an April 7 runoff race to fill former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat in Congress. (Chauncey Alcorn/Capital B)

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 19

Since I haven't seen it mentioned here, on a happier note, Siavash Amini is fortunately alive and well and just released a new track.

https://siavashamini.bandcamp.com/community announces a new release with Eugene Thacker.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 19

This is amazing.

https://medium.com/@zehraanjum210/how-a-10-year-old-boys-butterfly-experiment-silently-rewrote-what-we-know-about-memory-1c1b18af9fe1

This wasn’t just idle curiosity. Jo had heard about a famous study by biologist Martha Weiss, who had shown that hawkmoth caterpillars could learn to avoid certain smells even after turning into moths. But that was with moths. What about butterflies? And could those memories pass on even further?

At just 10 years old, Jo did what few adults would dare: He wrote a detailed letter to Dr. Martha Weiss herself. Inside were his observations, his data, and a polite but confident proposal to adapt her experiment for swallowtail butterflies.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 18

I don't have many spicy music "hot takes" except maybe this: Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is flabby romantic jazz rock. The closest thing to a masterpiece he has is 1973's Veedon Fleece, a taut album that anticipates artists like Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. Listen to that instead.

Album cover of Van Morrison's "Veedon Fleece"

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 12

Reversing the fall in the teen birth rate may not solve the problem that they want to solve.

https://opa.hhs.gov/adolescent-health/adolescent-sexual-and-reproductive-health/data-and-statistics-on-adolescent-sexual-and-reproductive-health

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 12

Lincoln could be very conciliatory. He won the Republican nomination because of fears the frontrunner, William Seward, would lead the nation to civil war. But on the road to the nomination at Cooper Union, Lincoln calls for harmony, but sounds more like a man preparing the nation for war.

Abraham Lincoln, speech at Cooper Union, 27 February 1860

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone - have never disturbed them - so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 12

it's interesting that Lincoln won the nomination because he was viewed as more likely to compromise with slave states than Seward. It's interesting to read his speech at Cooper Union, one of the finest political speeches in US history. He came off as pragmatic but clearly morally opposed to slavery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Republican_National_Convention

The Republican National Convention met in mid-May 1860, after the Democrats had been forced to adjourn their convention in Charleston, South Carolina. With the Democrats in disarray and a sweep of the Northern states possible, the Republicans felt confident going into their convention in Chicago. William H. Seward from New York was considered the front-runner, followed Salmon P. Chase from Ohio, and Missouri's Edward Bates. Abraham Lincoln from Illinois, was lesser known, and was not considered to have a good chance against Seward. Seward had been governor and senator of New York, was from firm Whig backgrounds, and was a very able politician. Also running were John C. Frémont, William L. Dayton, Cassius M. Clay, and Benjamin Wade, who might be able to win if the convention deadlocked.[9]

As the convention developed, however, it was revealed that frontrunners Seward, Chase, and Bates had each alienated factions of the Republican Party. Seward had been painted as a radical, and his speeches on slavery predicted inevitable conflict, which spooked moderate delegates. He also was firmly opposed to nativism, which further weakened his position. He had also been abandoned by his longtime friend and political ally Horace Greeley, publisher of the influential New-York Tribune.[9]

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 11

If we think about what is happening now in the US about Haitians and others it would be good to understand both how and why it happened. Here is Robert Paxton summarizing some of the challenges. How top down/bottom up feedback worked to generate radicalization seems very important right now.

Robert Paxton "The Anatomy of Fascism"

Seen from this perspective, the famous meeting of high-level Nazi leaders under the chairmanship of Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich on January 20, 1942 (the Wannsee Conference), looks more like further state coordination of local extermination initiatives than the initiation of a new policy from above.

Exactly when and why the old policy of expulsion, punctuated by the murder of many Jewish men for “security” reasons, gave way in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe to a new policy of total extermination of all Jews, including women and children, remains one of the most hotly debated issues in interpreting the Holocaust. It is not even certain whether we should focus on Hitler or on his underlings in the field. If we focus on Hitler, the absence of any trace of an explicit Führer order for the final stage of annihilation has caused trouble to the “intentionalists,” probably unnecessarily. No serious scholar doubts Hitler’s central responsibility.⁴⁴ The Führer’s unswerving hatred of Jews was known to all, and he

160

Robert Paxton "The Anatomy of Fascism"

The Long Term: Radicalization or Entropy?

was briefed regularly on what was going on.⁴⁵ Local administrators knew he would “cover” their most extreme actions. It is likely that he issued some kind of verbal order in fall 1941 in response to the ongoing campaign against Soviet Russia: either in the euphoria of the first advance,⁴⁶ or, more likely, in rage as he failed to take Moscow before winter and achieve the Blitzkrieg victory upon which the whole operation depended.⁴⁷ A recent plausible theory locates Hitler’s order in a secret speech to high party officials on December 12, 1941, in reaction to the entry of the United States into the war and its transformation into a truly worldwide conflict. Hitler would thus be fulfilling the threat he made in a speech on January 30, 1939—that if the war became worldwide, the Jews were to blame and would pay (Hitler believed Jews controlled American policy).⁴⁸

If we shift our focus to the administrators in the field, we have seen how some of them had already crossed the line in late summer 1941 between the selective killing of adult males and the total extermination of the whole Jewish population. This would not have been possible without widespread, murderous Jew-hatred, one point on which Daniel Goldhagen’s celebrated and controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners is right. But the existence of widespread, murderous Jew-hatred does not tell us why the line was crossed in certain places at certain times, and not others. The most convincing studies present a dynamic process of “cumulative radicalization” in which problems magnify, pressures build, inhibitions fall away, and legitimating arguments are found.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 10

The steelmanning of Graham Platner

three panel meme.

Doc Sportello, looking at man with swastika face tattoo: Is that a swastika on that man's face?
Doctor Threeply: It's an ancient Hindu symbol
Doctor Threeply: It means all is well

from the film Inherent Vice

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 8

The concerted right wing social media push in favor of a US conquest of North America began even before Trump's inauguration. And you can rely on it lasting long after Trump is gone. The good news is that it has gone nowhere, but that is no reason for complacency.

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1870634358169555455

Tweet where the US map has expanded to include all of Canada, Greenland, northern Mexico, Cuba and parts of Central America.

The text reads "We have 2 years left to bring this map to life in time for our 250th birthday:

blocksincoming@blocksincoming· Jul 6

Glengarry Glen Ross energy