A coincidence of images? I blame the Zeitgeist.
Goodfellas
Ironies and Minor Epiphanies
A Brief Note On the Current Unpleasantness
Seems like these days I can’t walk more than five feet without stepping on some ignorant fascist’s toes. The pundits recommend learning the hippety hop. Me, I’m dreaming of heavier shoes.
Orange Is the New Orange
My new orange iPhone seems a lot bolder, its nubbly tech woven case a lot cruder than its svelte, steel-blue predecessor, now on its way back to Apple to be reincarnated. I’m afraid some fugitive from Miami Vice is gonna sidle up to me one of these days in Walmart and mutter “brown shoes?” as he reaches for a bag of Cheetos on the next shelf over. Anyway, like it or not, it appears I’ll be fencing with a claymore rather than a rapier for the next two years. Worked for Rob Roy, though, didn’t it?
I do wonder, though, if the damned thing is inevitably destined to become a MAGA magnet. You know, because it’s orange, because of the reptilian case, and because MAGA folks do so love to assert their cultural dominance over anything that attracts their ape-like curiosity.
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
Platonisms
The person looked for, the person found—which is the richer eidolon?
Unbidden Bits—September 22, 2024
It occurs to me that the drain-circling vertigo of current politics in the USA can be attributed in large part to the fact that the people who profess to know what’s going on prefer nouns to verbs. They’re well-versed in what’s already dead, in what’s being born, not so much.
Unbidden Bits—May 6, 2024
What if the panpsychists are right, and somehow even sand fleas and vegetables can feel pain? Makes the Christian doctrine of humankind’s essentially sinful nature even more soul-destroying to contemplate than it already is. Listen, I’m conscious enough of my very traditional transgressions, I don’t need to start worrying about how many carrots I’ve murdered in my eight decades of blissful predation. Either panpsychism or Catholicism, or better yet both, have to go. Meanwhile, I just don’t wanna talk about it….
The Apostle’s Creed
“Will you tell me the truth?”
“Almost never. The truth is complex, far more complex than my intention. The truth that I will tell you, that I can tell you, is that between human beings intention is everything, and that my intention is to tell you only as much of the truth as I think likely to leave you undamaged.
That’s why you mustn’t trust me. Good intentions are inevitably tainted with both ignorance and condescension. Never mind what Nietzsche said, no one ever gets beyond good and evil. The nature of reality forbids it.”
Unbidden Bits—April 9, 2023
How many more Republican governors and so-called conservative Supreme Court justices, I wonder, will the American Psychiatric Association have to observe before adding self-righteousness to the DSM as a class B antisocial personality disorder?
Unbidden Bits—April 7, 2023
In this final, metastatic age of social media, the only true luxury is anonymity.