The Green Boy, from Miss Piggy's Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Kermitage Collection — Michael K. Frith, 1984
Professor of Philosophy, Illustrator of Philosophers https://www.onbeyondzarathustra.com
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The Green Boy, from Miss Piggy's Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Kermitage Collection — Michael K. Frith, 1984
The indictment was handed down 2 days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US atty for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker wrote “I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I remember this one. I thought it was politically pretty interesting! Not sure about the anatomic basis of his grip on Cyclops’ throat.
Look, man, any time you want to stop running around moving the goal posts and read a book would be fine with me. But it's your life.
Do you think it's evidence of prejudice that he has written a book that argues policing needs reform? Do you think the very act of journalistically policing the police is 'policist'? Or something?
You are welcome to believe anything you want about Mamdani. You can believe he is burning up with irrational hatred for cops. Just don't ask me to agree that the burden is on me to rebut that.
Being a cop isn't an immutable characteristic like race. Mamdani, candidate, regrets regular guy Mamdani snarking about cops long ago. But you are asking me what's reasonable to infer and, honestly, American policing is a mess. So if someone snarks about it, I infer they are outraged about that.
Nansy Canyon is turning into some truly weird El Borbah something.
I don't mean to nitpick genius but somehow the Disney one doesn't have quite the energy of the others. HIs Barks is worse than his bite on p. 2.
#TilesOnTuesday Looking at the forecast for Tuesday in the UK "lovely weather for ducks" just about sums it up. So here we are! William De Morgan, Fantastic Ducks tile (1907) Lustre-Glazed Earthenware
Yes.
My point: you are asking me to agree that your presumption that Mamdani is some dangerous nut is reasonable. I'm simply too reasonable to go there. The burden of proof is still on you to show that there is some reason to fear him. Seems like a nice guy.
Yeah - maybe. It looks like maybe they rewrote it so that you have copyright rights against A.I. use only. Which is a new way to do copyright if so.
I reiterate my reasonable request that you first expose Radley Balko as a total fraud. Just take him apart, top to bottom. Show how his pro-systemic reform position is nonsense. He's got no facts, no argument. Because he's made mean tweets about cops. It's toxic empathy with criminals. Gotta be.
Interesting, so long as you didn’t just criminalise comedians doing celebrity impressions. Among other things.
Cool!
[Excuse me: Philowaldensian. We regret the error.]
The mystery is solved.
Wittgenstein.
Once, Sesame Street was a lifeline for indie animators. It offered money and incredible freedom to create. This built an indie animation boom that powered MTV, Nickelodeon and much more. We explore: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-golden...
I need to hear more about this debate.
Yeesh.
My memory is that Spinoza's name actually got mixed up in it. Like, Louis was invading to stop the scourge of Spinoza. But that seems highly unlikely on reflection. Perhaps I dreamt it?
I just browsed some overviews of that event and I'm not seeing anything about that particularly. And, on reflection, it doesn't make much sense. A Catholic monarch could not credibly pose as a tribune of Dutch Protestantism? But I have my vague memory. Anyone in a position to straighten me out?
I have a faint memory of having read in some history that one of the flimsy pretexts for Louis XIV's invasion of Holland in 1672 was that he was defending Christianity from atheism. Too many atheists were too tolerantly allowed to publish their insidious tracts!
I have no idea what you are talking about. But it's a good first sentence.
"The moon, according to all appearances, is inhabited; why then should Venus be destitute of inhabitants? But, interrupted the Marchioness, with your why nots you will put inhabitants in all the planets. Certainly, I replied, this why not has the power of peopling them all." - Fontenelle
Wrote about Comer/Mace attempting to doxx and intimidate Wikipedia editors in an effort to force their own viewpoint onto Wikipedia.
This “explicit” is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. It’s not ambiguous.
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
I haven't looked like anyone on tv or in movies since I briefly looked exactly like Peter Capaldi in "Lair of the White Worm". Which, since I was sitting in the audience for "Lair of the White Worm", was striking. Since then - squat. I don't look anything much like anyone - not even Peter Capaldi.
Yoram Hazony sure doesn't know what nationalism is. Whew.
I notice the Mediaite article didn't emphasise this side of it. But, yes, Erickson blames liberals for RFK jr.
It was a mistake to take the pent up aggression men healthily feel towards fictional snakes and direct it instead against real cancer research and treatment.
THEN, when it has all-too-undeniably spiralled off into conspiracy nonsense, you can only spin yet MORE conspiracy theories to fix THAT. What insidious thing did liberals do that EXPLAINS why your side got hideously wound around the axle of paranoid-style thinking? www.mediaite.com/media/news/c...
So you get Stephen Miller saying - and probably believing! or at least believing he believes - not that having a center for disease control is a bad idea (too modern! Make America Medieval Again.) But that we need to let RFK wreck it to restore normal confidence in it. bsky.app/profile/josi...
You can't say 'the CDC is good but here's how they could have handled Covid better.' You have to say 'the CDC would be good were it not exclusively staffed by sinister enemies of public health.' But now your rhetoric locks you into being a wrecker, since no other policy fits the paranoid picture.
But there is no way to make out that the left never does anything but betray its values, requiring the right to step in and save them, without backstopping that with elaborate conspiracy theorising as to why this is so. But that paranoia then always needs ever MORE paranoia to backstop it in turn.
Rhetoric of reaction -> paranoid-style. Why? The rhetoric or reaction (perversity, futility, jeopardy) amounts to the stance that, ironically, those on the right are always the true tribunes of the humane values (reason, liberty, equality, etc.) those on the left purport to stand for but don't.
Conservative politics -> rhetoric of reaction -> paranoid-style politics -> paranoid-style everything.
This is good: With Trump/RFK destroying CDC, JB Pritzker's officials are exploring the possibility of buying Covid vaccines from manufacturers and distributing them in-state themselves, source tells me. Dem govs must step up and fill the void. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
I suppose you've figured this out but the tip is someone's neck. We are witness to a bit of chin, leading up to a face concealed by the shorts.
I just searched for Kevin Kruse and … I can’t see his account. I think I could still see him a few days ago. Did he block me? I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with him. Darn.
one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
Unless this court recognises broad executive immunity from 'finding out' ...
Wait, where is this feature? I often get in over-extended exchanges in replies, for my own amusement, that I wouldn't want to inflict on innocent bystanders who yet might want to see posts involving no sea lions. Can I spare them? I see 'allow replies' not 'hide replies'.
Fuck around and hope the Supreme Court finds that you immune from finding out.
Cops get qualified immunity - we know this, even though it isn't in the Constitution - and the President is basically a cop. (But seriously, what's with the 4 dissents?)
So all that's left is this: open confession by the state that racism was the reason for the map would suffice to make the map impermissible under VRA §2. But, then again, you wouldn't even need the VRA for that. Just the 15th and the 14th would do. So VRA §2 has no possible use.
The Democracy Docket extraction of the argument is clearer than just the bits I just quoted actually. Any attempts to mandate maps to hit a 'good' target are going to amount to impermissible 'affirmative action' for elections, in effect. You can't ever say what 'good' would be in such cases.
Here you go. Maybe I'm missing something. www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/u...
I guess the exception would be if a state announced new maps with 'we did a proud racism.' But no more inferences to that conclusion are permissible.
To put it another way, all factors Congress said should be considered, in considering cases, are constitutionally impermissible to consider. These are just so many incitements to violate the 14A. www.justice.gov/crt/section-...
You clearly weren't colour-blind if you thought you saw a problem.
It is unconstitutional to address the problem §2 of VRA solves, because doing so requires prohibitively race-based thinking; therefore no solution can be constitutional (because any proposed solution is going to be smoking gun-grade evidence you were impermissibly attentive to the supposed problem.)
because any enforcement under the act will be unconstitutional under the 14th or else under the terms of the VRA itself. The Gingles test is unconstitutional & nothing like Gingles can ever hope to pass muster. Am I missing something?
I would like a longer legal explainer of this case, if anyone could point to one - with attention to actual details about the different possible proposed maps. I've read the LA filing and it basically, flat-out argues that §2 of the VRA is and has always been, not unconstitutional but toothless,
Here's the 40 minute version. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxQ3...
Just listened to the Bari Weiss/Rod Dreher interview. It's like if that four-second clip from "Casablanca" went on for 40 minutes only there are two Claude Rains and Claude Rains actually IS shocked. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMIy...
Remember how Solzhenitsyn got arrested by SMERSH, right off the front line, where he was directing fire against German artillery batteries?
'Horton Hears A Who' but if Horton was Jack D. Ripper.
remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature
Well done!
Would that such a list existed!
Reading old "Pogo". Mole MacCarony was a parody of Senator Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada. Who deserves to be better remembered as a villain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McC...
We need a new logo that is a huge splash page depicting all the major and minor characters from the whole crackerverse.
I get it. Like, if you quit "2001" after the first 10 minutes it's just a bunch of monkey-men in the desert.
I watched the first 10 minutes of "KPOP Demon Hunters" and didn't think that it was all that funny. So I went and did something else. Did I do wrong? Like, it was alright. I had something else to do.
It’s always worth reading @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social I’d say today’s post is an urgent read. open.substack.com/pub/goodpoli...
MAGA is Oppositional Defiant Disorder as ideology. Also known as: toddler-by-proxy syndrome.
Chotiner isn’t even like, some kind of gotcha attack guy, his interview subjects are just a bunch of guys who have been told their whole lives that they’re the brightest boys who can do no wrong
We're getting to 'three stooges syndrome' level where the only hope for the republic is the constitutional crises end up all getting stuck in the door together.
It was a goofy time to celebrate 200 years of freedom.
There are a variety of explanations for why Trump is doing what he is doing, all of them grounds for impeachment or removal. He might be preparing to rig '26 elections and/or trying to distract from the Epstein files and/or lying to his base about crime. He might be genuinely delusional about crime.
“S&s ethos” fails to distinguish from older ‘sword&sandals’ ethos. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword-a...
Good point.
I guess Leo Strauss' spirit hasn't faded after all. [I laugh to keep from crying. My poor old school.]
this point—that this era is not forever and accountability can come in many forms—has for some reason proved bizarrely elusive for democrats
Reading an article titled "Why didn't Brazilian democracy die?" and a key part of the story is a Supreme Court that actually did its job
Yeah I was shifting to absurd table top game prize categories.
'Best rule', 'best turn phase'.
It is genuinely remarkable how well the ancients writing on demagogue tyrants did have Trump pegged, speaks to a certain constancy in human nature. There's apparently just a recognisable trick for subverting highly unequal democracies and it worked in Hellas back in the day and still works now.
But here we are. Right. Mamdani made a mean tweet about cops years ago so probably he means all slogans absurdly literally so probably he is a suicidal psychopath. Sorry, no. It is so far-fetched to suppose this is going anywhere worth going that I'm putting a fork in it. This thread is done.
Also, you've just spent hundreds of comments emitting a steady stream of arguments, ranging from bad to really bad, against Mamdani - and NOW you want to shift gears and intelligently criticise him? And you want to be credited as someone who is likely to do so? That is sanewashing yourself, surely.
You've only known for, like, 5 minutes that it's potentially reasonable to want to systemically reform the police. You can't possibly be prepared for a debate on the subject, lecturing others about going about it wrong. Take a breath. Touch grass. Read a book on the subject you want to discuss.
the crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/
Edgar Allan Poe Walking High Bridge — Bernard Jacob Rosenmeyer, 1930
Obviously you have no reason to think so. If you did, you would have given it already.
The thing to do at this point would be to admit you were just making stuff up. You dislike him. So your brain confabulated up some nonsense to support that. But NOW you want to go back and try it again. SURELY he wants to systematically reform the police the wrong WAY.
For the record here was the structure of it: Initially you deduced that Mamdani hates America from the fact that he wants to systemically reform the police. In the end you were forced to concede that wanting to systemically reform the police can be perfectly reasonable.
To be a bit more specific, the reason why the topic shifted was because your intuition caused you to talk a lot of nonsense. At a certain point even you weren't able to keep that up. I have low confidence that, if you express your intuition again, it will manifest as anything but more bad arguments.
Well, at least you are no longer claiming you have arguments. My intuition is that your intuition is wrong.
Admiring these early sketches & studies by Gustav Klimt ~ Study for Romeo in ‘Shakespeare’s Theatre’ + Head in Profile / Study of child / Study of a woman
I thought about adding a Cracker Barrel but - no, it's perfect.
But does anyone listen to me? No.
