Captivating obit -- Colman McCarthy "never wandered from promoting peace"
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/b...
11.03.2026 14:49
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Captivating obit -- Colman McCarthy "never wandered from promoting peace"
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/b...
In deflecting from the bombing of the school, trump oddly said he "wishes" Iran had "more" tomahawk missiles, in his stream of some variation of consciousness, and then that countries buy them "from us," this soon after wearing his disrespectful merch cap at the solemn return of slain soldiers.
More commentary on the DOJ's attempt to circumvent state bar ethics and professional conduct responsibilities, avoiding the NYLJ paywall
The Fish moniker derived from Mao Zedong, who wrote that revolutionaries "must move amongst the people as fish swim in the sea."
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/a...
In 1995 Martin Scorsese & Francis Ford Coppola collaborated on restoring Mikhail Kalatozov's masterpiece "I Am Cuba," a 1964 film whose technical advisors included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
In 1941, Lawrence Dennis, called "America's No 1 intellectual fascist," lauded the usefulness of war in bringing a nation together under a strident nationalist ethos and pitting it against others "in an orderly way."
Tomás Moro Simpson's typed letter seeking materials from Saul Kripke, and Simpson's resulting work.
A bizarre piece. "Oats are good at sopping up nitrates" and other carcinogenic chemicals (including glyphosate herbicides), thereby making oat farm water more safe, but acknowledging no contradiction in bringing millions of bushels to market as cereals, &c.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/u...
TFW you take someone's presence in the usual setting for granted, but then mutually feel and act overjoyed to run in to them unexpectedly in some other setting.
Hannah Arendt said at NYC's Riverside Church (1966), there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty.
Wolff: liberal pluralism fixes the interest groups to be tolerated, but then disregards the nonconformists;
Moore: the scientific attitude induces a conservative tolerance of the existing order;
Marcuse: tolerance becomes repressive when administered to manipulate individuals.
More Bondi ludicrosity. States license and monitor lawyers' professional conduct, and their "good standing" in the licensing state court is requisite to their federal bar membership. Taking a job with the DOJ doesn't render them immune to state bar professional oversight.
In standing by its principle fundamental equality, the law is able to rectify certain flagrant injustices without upsetting the social order that demands the continuance of injustice as a constructive element its existence.
-- Marcuse on Hegel
David Rieff: “Philip Roth told me that I come from an intellectual somewhere, but a geographic and ethnic nowhere... But I do come from an ethnic somewhere, and that’s lesbian America. I grew up surrounded largely by gay people in my childhood in New York.” www.theideasletter.org/essay/woke-o...
Perhaps oddly, Samuel Walter Dyde's 1896 translation is stylistically more congenial, less stiff and more "modern," than that of Sir Thomas Malcolm Knox in 1942/1952, 2008 ed., although the latter appears to be more denotatively precise.
The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress.
-- Rosa Luxemburg
Soviet legal theory shamefully adapts itself submissively to every change in the policy of the Soviet government.
-- Hans Kelsen (1954) @scotusblog.com
In his third definitive article for perpetual peace, Kant says that all individuals as human beings in the world community have the right to hospitality -- that if someone approaches our shores out of need, with peaceful purpose, we cannot deny access and universal hospitality.
Keiner hat das Recht zu gehorchen - no one has the right to obey
-- Hannah Arendt
To refuse to use the possible-worlds approach because of the ontological mysteries raised by possible worlds would be not that different from refusing to count one's change at the supermarket because of the ontological mysteries raised by numbers.
-- Frank Jackson
If interested in the nature of concepts, these three sources -- Christopher Peacocke, Frank Jackson, Joseph Raz -- are quite excellent . . and quite challenging. (Coincidentally, the cover photo for Jackson's book is by Joseph Raz.)
Here's a nice translation by John Davie (2017) of Cicero's original rendition of the "sword of Damocles" tale, Dionysius II of Syracuse trying to give Damocles a taste of power's hazards.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
...
-- W.H. Auden. September 1, 1939
Hegel’s anxious preference for the prevailing order over threatened subversion of the existing society rendered his later work reactionary in so far as the social order is so, progressive in so far as it's that.
Rep Jason Crow (D-CO): “I went to war three times for this country and learned that when elites in Washington bang the war drums, working class folks pay the price. The tough talk of a five-time draft dodger falls flat for Americans tired of military adventurism”
Gertrude Stein wasn't gaining traction with the Tolstoy crowd
Amartya Sen rode his bicycle from 1945 to 1998 to collect data on local wages and prices, to transport a scale for weighing boys and girls in various villages to suss out gender-based deprivation, to run a night school, and so on.
Wars of choice kill those who have no choice. "Mistakes" like the reported strike on a girls' school that killed forty civilians are the predictable result of poor planning and execution.
For more on "Mistakes" in War, read this by me and @azmatzahra.bsky.social
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Habermas said, "the gradual incorporation of moral principles into concrete life is not something one can entrust, pace Hegel, to the progress of the absolute spirit, but requires the collective struggles of social and political movements" - at least early Hegel may have agreed.
Contending moral positions seem to presuppose a reference to some shared impersonal standard, yet the poverty of current arguments and the characteristically shrill mode in which they are uttered suggest strongly that there is no such standard.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (2007)