itinfer.bsky.social
192 posts
16 followers
79 following
Discussion Master
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[2/2] ... but now, 0% chance of that (and by the supposed defenders of Western Civilization, no less). You'll be lucky to have it remotely accurately parsed by xAI's Grok, let alone have your career's execution tasked to someone who would actually be remotely hireable in any other Administration. :(
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[1/2] Jeez. At least historically, formal entreaties mandated by the Powers that Be behind the Throne might be willfully misinterpreted *classily*, e.g., Cardinal Richilieu "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."...
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P.S. But don't get me wrong! (1) this was the Obama era not our current fallen era, (2) both the highly gerrymandered House and the highly polarize-the-national-electorate POTUS allow more ideological overreach, and (3) rural state overrepresentation in the Senate has gotten worse since 2010-12. 😟
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[2/2] ... and in 2012 MO with Todd "Legitimate Rape = The Body Has Ways of Shutting Down [Pregnancy]" Akin. (DE 2010 Christine "I Am Not A Witch" McDonnell is also often cited, but I feel the "I Am Not A Witch" weirdness was more important than any backlash to her actual right views).
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[1/2] To be "fair" (oy!), I think maybe the best potentially empirically supportable notion is that the GOP in Obama's 1st term / early-Tea-Party-era were electorally punished by overplaying their hand in *Senate* races, losing winnable races in AZ 2010 with Sharron "2nd Amendment Remedies" Angle...
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Yeah, and in the case of _Reacher_, you don't even have the excuse present in other genre fiction of, say, "The guy's elderly and *BLIND*. Sure, he cut down the first 3 guys in one smooth motion with a sword he drew from his cane, but come on! That's just beginner's luck. He's elderly and blind!"
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[6/6... I'm done... sorry to blather on] ... an conception that, in a Puritan-filtered-way, has been in the US since before it was even the US. Look at inscriptions on New England courthouses, perhaps the most blatant being that of my mom's birthplace Worcester, MA www.telegram.com/story/lifest...
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[5/5] ... which focuses on Fichte, Carlyle (hey, Curtis Yarvin's fave 🙄), Mazzini, and Nietzsche, plus how Russell in his _History of Western Philosophy_ contemptuously summarizes Rousseau & Hegel's conception of the proper polity & "freedom" (free version: www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/... ) ...
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[4/oh, ok will be 5] ... role of government or even Freedom is to accord oneself with that True Spirit of the polity or Natural Law, and not any individual conception of freedom. I'm thinking here of Russell's 1935 "Ancestry of Fascism" (free version www.spokesmanbooks.com/Spokesman/PD... ) ...
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[3/3ish] ... Bertrand Russell and Isiah Berlin leveled in the 1930s and 40s against not just the obvious Germans like Hegel and Nietzche as laying the philosophical groundwork for fascism, but *all* who argued that the People (or smaller polity) or Nature can evince their True Spirit & the proper...
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[2/3ish] ... broadly than the blatantly fash-y "thinkers" that, say, Steve Bannon has helped reintroduce to the American far right like Julius Evola and Charles Maurras. Instead, I imagine you are meaning something like the very broad critique that quite a few major British philosophers like...
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[1/n = 3ish] Echoing @laurentguy.bsky.social, I ask: is there a reading list on this topic as you see it? More specifically, since you wrote "almost the entirety of the American right", I imagine you are meaning "early 20th century continental philosophy tied up with the origins of fascism" more...
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And they interact with the human characters a la Roger Rabbit? Everyone's penguins? Or, no... almost everyone is human, EXCEPT for the uppermost rungs of the Catholic hierarchy!! It's a great stub of an idea, but I feel it needs fleshing out. ;)
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For a minute, I was hoping you might know some *other* Stathis Kalyvas who's coincidentally also a political science scholar but *not* the author of _The Logic of Violence in Civil War_. But no, such hopes are evidently doomed to be dashed these days.😬😟
www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...
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[2/2] ... and, in mild gallows humor comic relief, since I spent all my formative years watching and re-watching _The Simpsons_:
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[1/2] Isn't it much more a kickback, given the stories that the US military will purchase $400 million in "armored electric vehicles"? (Admittedly, now the announcement no longer explicitly says "Tesla" but it used to and probably in the end will too, e.g., www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g...) ...
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[2/2] ... _apologia_ for football fanaticism:"Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important"? Sure, your po' po' lil' brain may have temporarily forgotten the key word *unimportant*, but IMHO you've clearly identified a mentally healthy "core belief" for football fandom. 👍⚽😍😘
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[1/2] You're too hard on yourself! First, you're in the middle of a book tour for <checks notes> *EVERYTHING* is Tuberculosis </checks notes>. You clearly have a worthy interest beyond 4th tier English football. Second, wasn't it you yourself that coined what IMHO is the definitive one-liner...
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That said, my po' po' lil' aging brain is slow enough these days it took like like 5 full seconds after Samuel L. Jackson told us "It's your Uncle Sam" for my brain to go "OH! It works on multiple levels!! He's not just playing 'Uncle Sam' the symbol of America, his name is actually 'Sam'!!!"
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I, however, have my finger on the pulse of pop culture and realize 1996 was like 20 years ago... wait, what's that?... you say simple arithmetic shows 1996 is very nearly *30* years ago?! That can't be right. I need to go to bed, but I'll re-ponder the problem with more advanced math in the morning.
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Ah, the Crazification Factor! I remember reading that as a young grad student when it was hot off the presses... by which I mean it coming out on John Rogers's _Kung Fu Monkey_ blog back in - oh, hey Oct 7, 200*5* - its 20th anniversary is this year. Good times. kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunc...
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[2/2] ... about how to deal with the precociously monsterous...
<Alien Hybrid version of Maggie *eats* Dr. Hibbert's tongue depressor >
HOMER: Is there anything you can prescribe, Doctor?
DR. HIBBERT: Fire! And lots of it!!
frinkiac.com/video/S10E04...
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[1/2] And, I imagine, there's a reason that some seek to circumvent such checks: not merely they'd fail the check, but they'd risk summary arrest during the check. Indeed, this case seems to merit more than summary arrest but something more like this classic _Simpsons_ "Treehouse of Horror" joke...
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OMG! Suddenly, the seemingly-just-teenaged-heartbroken angst Olivia Rodrigo shared in "Driver's License" is potentially something SOOOOO much deeper than behind-the-scenes love triangles on Disney shows!! Something so deep it's possibly violating the very laws of physics as we know them!!!
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[2/2] ...bought yourself some time. Yes, pointing & laughing "Oh these CEOs, how stupid are they?!" is both true & fun. However, IMHO at this point it distracts from how much s#!t has truly changed in America that this is routinely seen as just a "cost of doing business" among our business elite.
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[1/2] A Different Alternate Theory: They're only as stupid as people who pay protection money to mobsters are stupid. Sure, mobsters can change the protection racket's terms at any time, because -- yeah! -- they're mobsters. But there's the hope that by not angering the mobster now, you've...
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[2/2]
=Quote Concluded=
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/f...
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[1/2] I'm old enough to remember (I admit I'm 49 but FFS people the following was 2010... hardly ancient history!) Zuckerberg sharing _bon mots_ like:
=Begin Quote=
“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.”...
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I already lost it, but one post in my feed earlier this morning made the excellent-and-would-be-funny-were-it-not-tragic point that went (in a semi-close paraphrase IIRC):
"Hey, I'm not doomscrolling. I'm just scrolling. Not my fault the world's making all that doom be there." 😬🙄😑
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Oh! I just remembered I can use a perhaps unseemly amount of water & electricity along with my Microsoft Office 365 complementary Copilot membership to make a bespoke meme! And wow, the AI adds the angle that the microbes also understand masking more than human reactionaries. What an age we live in!
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I find it troubling that microbial pathogens understand Nietzsche all too well (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_do...) yet influential human reactionary figures don't. (Yes, I'm resorting to hackish -- if overeducated -- humor and cute memes to deal with the nuttiness. Hopefully they help you too! 🙄🤔😉)
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"One example will be enough"?! I know that since history is replete with prolonged cycles of civil strife where attack and reprisal repeat _ad nauseum_, it must sadly be the case that people are perennially prone to delusions of "easy-peasy, one and done!". BUT COME ON!!
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Definite thumbs up on the phrase "nationalized pride, privatised guilt"... though speaking of nationalism: ANGLO-ENGLISH VS. AMERICAN ENGLISH, PICK ONE! "Nationali*z*ed" and "privati*s*ed" in the same dang sentence? That kind of orthographical mixing just ain't right. It ain't right, I say!🧐😉
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[2/2] ... happy with more $$$ that God, and thus is 'looking for love in all the wrong places'.🙄" And that point is: Musk effusively, directly supports European far-right parties like Germany's AfD and UK's Reform that have many members who enjoy a _Sieg Heil_ for more than the "lulz".
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[1/2] While I agree Musk is an internet troll at heart, and while I realize my following point is well-known, I think my following point still needs to be constantly emphasized lest criticism of Musk derail -- even if unintentionally -- into something like "look at the weird nerd who can't be...
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Indeed! Especially since that emotion is:
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[4/4, n was 4] Visual Aids! While they speak for themselves IMHO, I'll add explicitly that -- apropos of the original post mentioning certain right-wingers clearly wishing Jesus was a classical-Pantheon-style deity -- the design with Jesus pulling the most weight looks like a stereotypical Zeus.
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[3/n] ... Jesus deadlifting just 1 plate! Or pulling sumo!! (Though I do have faith He forgives all, including pulling sumo... I kid, I kid. 😘) But, even the ones that depict Jesus pulling a respectable weight, there's just 5 plates circa 500 lbs. Dude, the raw WR is 1,074.5 lbs (486.5kg)! ...
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[2/n] ... IMHO a lot to unpack in the images of powerlifting Jesus t-shirts. My favorite subgenre are based on the I-personally-think-kinda-amusing pun "Jesus: The Ultimate Deadlifter" (get it? get it?). Many, admittedly, are just poorly thrown together clip-art cash grabs in that they depict...
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[1/n, n < 4] "Jesus Who Is a Powerlifter with Some Rape Allegations"... wow, that is some A+ invective. If I had the power to award the "You Won the Internet for Today" awards, I'd award it to you.
Speaking of just the first part of that phrase -- i.e., "Jesus Who Is a Powerlifter" -- there's...
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I'm pretty sure that the word you're thinking of, Chris, really no longer applies under the past 10-15 years of SCOTUS jurisprudence without proof beyond even many would consider *un*reasonable doubts that the money given directly led to to the action. ☹️🙄
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[3 of 3] ... a serious --- maybe even full-on ascetic --- practice of meditation and other refinement/expurgation/sublimation/etc. of your standard emotional responses to the world... well, I worried they might be right. Now, ugh, I just worry that I won't be able to do either of those two paths. 😬
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[2 of, oops, 3 -- My serious, though I suppose also arguably gallows-humor-ish, take] I used to *worry* that the various world traditions the world holding that there's so much suffering in the world you really do need take a leap of faith to an all-merciful personal savior or devote oneself to...
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[1/2 -- My gallows humor take] I like this meme since even the snail, presumably highly sympathetic to the adage "Better Late than Never", looks pretty damn "WTF buddy?! Kinda f@$king late!!"
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Granted, this classic _Simpsons_ moment was for a tar pit, not quicksand, but since (1) Homer survived and (2) I'm pretty sure tar pits work on the same basic principles as quicksand, I'd say it's good advice, and thus y'all really should've never worried about quicksand...
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[3/3] And, ok, I hear you: "That's like Rick from _Rick and Morty_-level home hobbying!" Worry not #2! Radio-Shack-level electronics hobbying can use a thermal sensor to make a Theramin-like thingie playable by your thumb & forefinger for all your sarcasm needs! www.electromaker.io/blog/article...
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[2/3] Now, I hear you: "I'm not an academic research lab, and so many fools on the internet need to be serenaded!" Worry not! While a scanning tunneling microscope was a Nobel-worthy feat decades ago (Physics 1986, specifically), an avid hobbyist can approximate one now. dberard.com/home-built-s...
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[1/3] Making the "World's Smallest Violins" still much more a bespoke thing than a factory thing. To wit, making a resonator out of just a few *atoms* as a one-off feat with a scanning tunneling microsope would net you a research paper & some buzz like 10 years ago. physicsworld.com/a/tiny-mecha...
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