.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Ezra Klein: “This is not just how authoritarianism happens. This is authoritarianism happening […] it’s been about six months since Schumer decided that it wasn’t the time for a fight, that neither he nor the country was ready. Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there’s a better plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, then Democrats need new leaders.”

Not an economist by any means but it looks like both the supply and the demand for labor are shrinking. We’re losing workers (deportation, aging population) *and* losing jobs (tariffs, gov’t positions, possibly also a deportation effect.)

On top of this, the deficit is exploding (BBB) while borrowing costs are rising, and so will inflation, too, probably rise (tariffs, energy policy). Fun times.

|…May…..|
______________________________ ___ _ ___
|…bloated puffy face …………..Not like an upstart…..|
|…I can’t remember …………little did he ever dare……|
|…but they’ll help ………………….and yet a Hotspur…..|

|………….cold water all around the sunny rock………..|
|………….which you reach with a puffy face………………|
|………….behind the bridge………………………………………..|

|…cold water al ……………….Not like an upstart………..|
|…ll around the ………………little did he ever dare……..|
|…e sunny rock ………………and yet a Hotspur………….|
|…e sunny rock ………………….
|…you reach with ……………bloated puffy face………….|
|…a puffy face be ……………I can’t remember……………|
|…hind the bridge …………….but they’ll help…………….|
___ _ _ _________ ____________ _________

Noting that I’ve completed another revision of Chance Sweepings, which was my first attempt (2020?) at compiling my coffee shop notes. I have shaved off around a tenth.

Also in this series that’s relatively polished: Community Spread.

“I keep thinking how my life would have been happier had I finished second,” he said. [nyt]

Plato is a fundamentally generous writer, and he offers his work as the beginning of something for you, rather than your end …

Ezra Klein: “I mean, there’s a famous Federalist Paper that says: If men were angels, we wouldn’t need all this government. And I read the Supreme Court as saying repeatedly: Let’s first assume Donald Trump is an angel, and then let’s work from there.”

Proust calls courage a sort of defense of one’s inner self, which I found inspiring; I understood courage as finding and retaining one’s identity.

I thought Socrates was right: courage was a kind of knowledge about what was truly fearsome and what wasn’t. (Being in the wrong, not being good, was something truly to be afraid of, while pain and death weren’t actually fearsome relatively, not if one had true knowledge.)

But it’s painful to be a regression.

Then I wasn’t sure that was right and thought that if only a little medication were applied to this spot or the other of the brain, I would be serviceably brave, just like a person with a broken leg, provided a staff, could serviceably walk. My fears required sedation, was all. (You required true knowledge of the name of a good doctor.)

Then I thought, maybe in the absence of real courage when it was really needed, our only recourse was aforethought (although maybe Science/medication is a kind of aggregate of forethought — science was Humanity’s Aforethought): of heading off well in advance those situations one doubted one had the courage to face in person. (This was why people exercised.)

Then I thought, there is magic in reality but it is always black magic since we don’t have proper minds. The mind, unless specially trained, makes illusions of the world, which stir us up about everything over nothing and the opposite.

Magical thinking is the failure to see past one’s own biases, narratives, scripts and hopes. There is the cause of, “how could this ever have happened to us?” That is the spell we enchanted persons weave.

Appreciate the measured Laura Rozen (tweet): “My 2 cents. When I noted at the top that Trump did not have public events on the long weekend schedule & had not been seen for a few days, I did not know what it meant, if anything. Maybe getting some sort of medical attention. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing. Sometimes one only finds out later what was going on. But for someone who likes to always be on TV etc, the absence seemed worth noting. It genuinely never occurred to me that anyone would think he was not alive. and when started to see the volume of responses to that effect, I felt like a bystander to whatevever was driving that virality. In any case, it is obvious today from photos of him going to his golf club with his grandchildren, he is still functional. Still, fair to say, there is something sort of limited about his visibility in those photos, and his grandchildren more discreet witnesses to his demeanor than his sometimes weekend golfing partners, say like Lindsey Graham. Still wonder if he’s had some sort of medical procedure or something. I don’t know.”

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration

(Four Quartets)

Compelling Noah Smith thread. Part of the story of our drift toward autocracy is that leftists won’t brook Democrats.

ngrams: funk, spunk

Interesting: Noah Smith thinks that what separates literary fiction from genre fiction is that literary fiction has unrealistically interesting characters (as opposed to sci-fi and mystery novels which have unrealistically interesting settings.) He also seems to think this creates a problem of thinking that people in real life are more interesting than they actually are.

I suppose my first response to this is that literature has many more uninteresting characters than it has interesting ones — to every Hamlet there are many Osrics and other bit players.

But secondly, even the Hamlets are interesting to us precisely because we recognize in them our own behavior. Achilles and Agamemnon, far from seeming strange to us, are like two kids quarrelling on a playground, (or more exactly, like two CEOs acting like two kids quarrelling on a playground.)

I think that the first thing people tend to notice about literary fiction is that it can be a little challenging to read and that this points to what really separates literary from genre fiction: its use of language. But perhaps an even more obvious answer is that it is just a story that is artfully constructed. You could of course have a sci-fi novel that was also a literary work, it would just have to be really well told.

As to his second point, about literature making people seem more extraordinary than they are, I think the danger lies the other way, and that readers of literature are apt to read themselves into books in a way that is not necessarily helpful: “Oh, I am just like King Lear,” etc.

Finally, as a side note, I’d observe that having read these Econ / data analysis types for years — Smith and Krugman and Yglesias and the late Kevin Drum — I’ve found it notable that these super smart guys (with Yglesias being somewhat of an outlier, particularly recently) don’t have a lot interest in the literary but are more about sci-fi and history. I don’t have anything to say about that, just something I’ve noticed.

Assassination of Henry IV

Feel that with each adventure we’re being shown a different aspect of Don Quixote’s folly.

In the adventure of the windmills, he mistakes windmills for giants. He says wizards changed the giants to windmills.

In the adventure of the sheep flocks, something similar happens but with a twist: he mistakes two approaching flocks of sheep for warring armies — he admits, after having been stoned, they look like sheep– then tells Sancho as soon as the sheep get out of visual range, they will reveal their true human forms again.

In the adventure of the fulling hammers, there’s a bit of an inversion; he at first believes the sound of the hammers to be something terrible and a source of adventure, then discovers them to be mere fulling hammers. (Why didn’t he imagine them to be Giants, like the windmills? In this instance, he goes from imagining something fantastic to realizing the banal reality, unlike the sheep and windmills.)

[Note: it is interesting Quixote encounters industrial things as antagonists. Quixote resists the world’s progress, while acknowledging and respecting this progress.]

With respect to the Helmet of Mambrino, he can see that it *looks like* a barber’s basin, but not that it is that and only that. (That it *looks like that* becomes part of the story of how it’s really not that.)

[Note: Quixote imbues the ordinary with the exceptional.]

In the whipping of the servant incident, he misapprehends the facts of the situation *and* misapplies chivalric code; while in the releasing of the prisoners incident, he seems to apprehend the situation clearly enough, but then he uses bad judgment.

In the Cardenio episodes, Cervantes purposely juxtaposes a truly dejected lover, with Quixote, who’s only pretending to be one. The *truly* mad one is Cardenio, who actually experiences fits of madness, while Quixote is quite rationally, but crazily, pretending to be something he’s not.

In chapters 29 and 31 Quixote’s forced to confront the ill consequences of have “rescued” the whipped servant and having freed the galley slaves (interesting that both these adventures involve the liberation of people who shouldn’t be, or shouldn’t necessarily be). In both cases, he seems clearly to realize the actual case, that he has done something egregiously stupid, but he is unable to draw any broader conclusions from that….

Conclusions. First, on a very perfunctory level, one observes a pattern, of Quixote imagining something that isn’t so, acting on it, often courageously, and then being badly beaten for it, often savagely. Secondly, as a person of my times, I am tempted to ponder whether Quixote’s pursuit of knight errantry might be compared to the pursuit of a political ideology, or conspiracy-theorizing — arranging contradictory facts to fit a preconceived outlook or disposition.

This is the first time the IPC has recorded famine outside of Africa… a “man-made disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself […] People are starving. Children are dying. And those with the duty to act are failing.”

Comparing Achilles’ and Agamemnon’s opening remarks in their dispute in book 1, (1.121-129) and (1.130-147).

Similarities in language:

Both Agamemnon and Achilles use flattering as well as slighting language in their addresses. Achilles calls Agamemnon “noblest” (κύδιστος) while Agamemnon calls Achilles “good” or “brave” (ἀγαθός) and “godlike” (θεοείκελος).

The slighting words they use of each other are both in the superlative. Achilles calls Agamemnon φιλοκτεανώτατε πάντων (“most greedy of all”), while Agamemnon calls Achilles πάντων ἐκπαγλότατ᾽ ἀνδρῶν (“most greedy of all men.”)

Both speeches also use the phrase “great hearted Achaians,” μεγάθυμοι Ἀχαιοί in statements that involve the Achaians giving (Achilles: “how can the great hearted Achaians give you a gift.” Agamemnon: “if the great hearted Achaians give me a gift”). Perhaps the phrase is meant to indicate the generosity of the Achaians.

Besides the similarities in language, there is a similarity in their arguments, in that both envision the source of dispute as being resolved in the indefinite future: for Achilles, Agamemnon does not need to worry about getting a prize now, as he will get it when Troy is sacked; for Agamemnon, he will worry about what prize the Achaians will give him, willingly or not, at some future time. Meanwhile, both agree that the important thing right now is returning Chrysies to her father.

Achilles’ remarks seem intended to reassure Agamemnon, that he will eventually get what is owed him; he tacitly acknowledges Agamemnon is due a prize and doesn’t blame Agamemnon for his disparagement of Chryses. Agamemnon’s remarks seem intended to say, while he’s serious about getting his due, what he really cares about is the safety of the people; he tacitly acknowledges his treatment of Chryses is to blame. They are both making an effort to preserve their own dignity, and each other’s, and do what’s right; but the good intentions don’t rate, and the situation escalates, indeed explodes.

A basic observation about these two speeches is that Agamamenon’s remarks seem to echo Achilles’, and I’ll be curious to see if that situation obtains as the dispute develops.

Kadavergehorsam: blind obedience, fanatical or excessive loyalty.

Iliad (1). Having noticed, not that it’s much, that Chryses, priest of Apollo, having walked “far from” (ἀπάνευθε) the Achaean camp, prays to Apollo (1.35), and Apollo “far from” (ἀπάνευθε — 1.48) the ships of their camp, starts to rain arrows upon them, in response to Chryses prayer.

We’re reminded often Apollo strikes from afar. Chryses, to consider it naturalistically, probably only had self-possession enough to pray once he felt physically safe, and was at a remove from the Achaean camp.

((Idea:… Apollo strikes from afar, so do priests in general?)

assart: To clear forest land for agriculture; remove stumps.