Archive for March, 2025

Thoughts (in the sense of the merest mental activity) on reading Spinoza

March 26, 2025

No, I don’t think he means that. Or yes, maybe he does. Or — no, he does not precisely mean that, or yes maybe he does. Or yes indeed he does — so let us read this again. Or rather, let us read, at least, the preceding section or proposition. Rehearsing this again, basic: procedes, precedes, preseeds, pressed, proceedes, processes, rehearsing this, as in “the proceeds of this function will go to the charity.” Get back to Peter, to Simon, those clear examples. Let us return to that paragraph. I see: yes of course I don’t see, but, looking at the rest of the paragraph, I do think I must revert to my former opinion, which was what again?… what, again, was my former opinion…? Now supposing I were eventually to recall my former opinion, what was I just now saying was it’s significance again…. that I should revert to it? Yes, so what was that one?

… Where was I? Oh, Peter. One’s image, one’s idea of Peter, is always with you, always present. Good. But what about the case in which one was happy to see Peter in the past but would be sorry to see him in the future? Or what about the case in which one was happy to see Peter in the morning (because he was so cheerful and happy in the morning, affording a needed boost to your own flagging spirits) but was sorry to see him at night (when he was so tired and glum, furthering worsening your mood after all the setbacks you’d experienced.) Also, what had become of Simon? There is almost nothing said of Simon. In cases, like those, I believe, one would need to drill down into all the associations the mind may have made with the idea it has of Peter, accidental or efficient causes of our pleasure or our dismay, all of them, all of them more complicated than the situation which, to this point, we’ve been looking into.

In my running clothes, I walked

March 24, 2025

In my running clothes, I walked.

Thought much of characters on social media: “they were the characters of whom I was the play.”
I read a long poem.

Avoided my neighbors as they worked on their yard but not as they stepped from their car. But again I avoided them when I chanced on them stepping out of their house.

I thought of business, cats, weather, others. I didn’t think of anything I’d consider deep or advanced. I’d had no inspirations this day or this week, except as regarded various sociological changes.

“A person doesn’t care,” I saw this and that person attesting, “a person doesn’t care,” of which the obverse I knew was, “a person minds his own business.”

March 24, 2025

Tweet: Spend some time on social media, you’ll find a nearly perfect correlation between antisemitism and anti-vaxx.

March 24, 2025

Tweet: putin knows the US won’t move against him, so he massively escalated his attacks on Ukraine’s civilians since the failed summit in Riyadh & Trump call.

March 23, 2025

Yglesias: “We have to pass the bill so people can find out what’s in it” was truly one of the most vindicated political takes of my lifetime.

March 22, 2025

Tweet: the “inverse lyceum” of Elon Musk.

March 22, 2025

Snopes on the claim that Hitler pardoned 8000 political supporters when he became Chancellor: not a one-to-one match but broadly analogous to Trump’s pardoning of J6ers.

March 22, 2025

The Cairo: “the city’s first “residential skyscraper“, the 164-foot-tall brick building spurred local regulations and federal legislation limiting building height in the city that continue to shape Washington’s skyline.”

March 21, 2025

My basic guesses about the strange behavior of Musk — (a) foreigner who doesn’t have a native understanding of the U.S. or U.S system of governance; (b) engineer-type personality who doesn’t quite get real-life people concerns; (c) successful person who thinks because he knows one thing well, he knows also unrelated things well.

March 20, 2025

Yglesias: The much-feared gentrification of the Democratic Party due to the entry of more affluent voters has manifested not in a retreat from taxes and the safety net but in waning commitment to growth and material prosperity as values.

To bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence

March 19, 2025

Saul Bellow reflecting on writing Augie March et al. (New Yorker, 2005): “The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off.” 

March 18, 2025

o.iang inesvai r
r p…………. * *
d….. a …….* *
r……. p….. * *
i………. e * *
h…………. r. * *
* * * * * * * *

o you a …………o you a
u …… ke …………u …… ke
h …… i …………h …… i
a …… l …………a …… l
v …… ml …………v …… ml
e …… he …………e …… he
nt …… t …………nt …… t
o …… t …………o …… t
h …… h …………h …… h
b …… a …………b …… a
e …… u …………e …… u
a …… o …………a …… o
rs …… Y …………rs …… Y
.v v iR v v………….v v iR v v

o.iang inesvai r
r p…………. * *
d….. a …….* *
r……. p….. * *
i………. e * *
h…………. r. * *
* * * * * * * *

March 18, 2025

POST: Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said the administration’s response to Boasberg’s order could be oneof the first real assertions of judicial defiance by the president.

“We might just be there,” Gerhardt said, calling the administration’s rationale for allowing the deportation flights to complete their mission “really hard to believe.”

March 18, 2025


Can’t be gainsaid, an incredible sound – You Came, You Saw, You Conquered.

March 17, 2025

“I’m just asking how you think my equitable powers do not attach to a plane that has departed the U.S., even if it’s in international airspace,”

March 17, 2025

Heavens, straight up propaganda from the Post, it looks like. Rarely take note of a byline, but this is David Lynch.

Trying to return to a dream by remembering it

March 15, 2025

I “had to get up.” I didn’t have anything I needed to be up for, yet I “had to get up” because “pleasures were like nails,” according to Socrates, “nailing the soul to the body,” which was probably a roughly accurate way to think of how pleasures were, I supposed at the time, pleasures innuring us to being pleased and making us expect to be pleased; and of course lying here was a definite pleasure; and so likely I would feel at once, upon dying, the sudden wrenching up of the weight of all those nails, that had been pounded into me during moments of pleasure like this; I would feel in reverse, and all at once, the pleasure of all those mornings I didn’t get immediately up.

But, again, I didn’t actually “have to” get up (I had no commitments, no work or appointments); in this case, the only question determining whether I would or would not get up involved what I thought death was and what I thought its importance to be.

I lay there thinking of the arrangement of my coverings and considering if the arrangement was quite optimally suited to my comfort. I lay there thinking of how I had slept: not well. I lay there thinking — growing gradually more cognizant of how much I was thinking and of how active what I called my mind was becoming relative to what I called my body. If I wanted to get up, I didn’t have to actually will myself to get up, I supposed, which would probably be ineffective in any case: all I had to do was what I was doing: continue thinking, and then the rest of my body would get infected with the brain’s activity and I would be up. Although in that case there was nothing for me to do in order to get up, as I was already thinking, and had no choice in the matter. I was thinking more and more, and soon this thinking would attain a critical mass and result in me getting up.

Now, on occasions when I did feel I had a choice in whether or not I could return to sleep, I would try to remember my dreams more vividly, which seemed to me signposts back to unconscious. If I could simply remember the dream better, I was thinking, I would find myself within it again, I would pick up where I left off, dreaming and therefore also sleeping again. The dream I had woken with could not, after all, be so very far away — and remembering was very close to dreaming, these must be abutting, even adjoining compartments, I believed — so if I could only press a bit harder on the gate, if I could only hop over the low stone wall, step in through the shared bathroom… After all, I wasn’t trying to use my mind to do something magical; to, for example, teleport, or levitate; the only super power I now requested of my mind was that it transition between two of its actual functions: that it go from remembering a dream to actual dreaming … but it inevitably appeared, again, that I in fact had no choice in the matter: I continued to remember I had dreamed and I failed to turn my memories of dreams into dreaming.

I knew that I was tired enough that, if I could only stop thinking, I would probably return to sleep, which I desired, not having anything I “had” to do. But thinking had now become an inescapable crown, like the inevitable sunlight itself, with its message that I would be getting up. Even if I told myself not to, even were I to absolutely insist, the magic carpet would be in effect: my legs would swing over, and I would be half-up.

March 13, 2025

………..E
……….Ca
………bs r
……..No l
…….r………..y
……Gl……….da
………..iei……..y
………..us….. mo
………..E…………ti
……………………… n
………..ἣ μὲ………..0
…………..ν γά………)
………………ρ θ᾽……..28
………………… ὕδ……0
…………………..ατι….45
……………………..λια ..(0)
………………………..ρῷ
………………………….ῥέει
……………………………, ἀ
……………………………..μ
……………………………….φὶ

………………………….

March 13, 2025

Namaqualand: Arid region in Namibia, South Africa.

March 12, 2025

Wide-ranging Elizabeth Nelson conversation on the high lonesome sound* — with exciting Bill Kirchen digression — along with a reveal of her video for Are You Loathesome Tonight?

(*surprised there’s a wiktionary entry for that.)