It's Sunday, so I should do my weekly "Jugend" run. Today I only got through January of 1899. But first the cover and titlepage from the volume. Lovely embossed stuff, plus bugs and peacock on your head, plus Pan. 1/
Lots of good Julius Diez in this stuff. I was a bit puzzled by Baubo's daughter riding the pig but evident Baubo does that on Walpurgisnacht. 2/ sothebys.com/es/auctions/ec…
I assume the limited color palette is dictated by limits of print technology. But it makes for very charming, if lurid, effects. 3/
We have a Käthe Kolwitz. Not such a great one. More Diez. Mixed pickles. 4/
Society ladies, dissolute mask-wearers and a really great hallucination. 5/
Fantasy stuff. The Orientalist harem has great orange and green. Böcklin kind of fairy stuff. Merpeople. 6/
More ladies and bears. And pan. And ladies. 7/
More Diez. And I like all the bicycle jokes from this era. Peleton as Wild Hunt. That's it for me for tonight. I had a hard day of research into serious stuff. Real hat-on-a-twig stuff, if you know what I mean. 8/
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This @radleybalko debunking of the 'Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted' documentary, "The Fall of Minneapolis", seems quite thorough, convincing, and damning. radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconni…
It's SO thorough & damning it's fair to say that figures like @coldxman who have promoted the documentary, & its conclusion, should either 1) debunk Balko's debunking back or 2) admit they were suckered by liars or 3) be themselves regarded as such. thefp.com/p/what-really-…
Back in December I somehow found myself listening to this bloggingheads discussion between @GlennLoury and John McWhorter, in which Loury quite strongly takes the line that the documentary exonerates Chauvin and proves 'we've been lied to'. bloggingheads.tv/videos/67137
11 things can be true at once. 1) Israeli policy towards Palestinians has been & continues to be deeply unjust. 2) Belief in 1) is not antisemitic. 3) Since 1) is a main root of the conflict 'solutions' that ignore it won't work & are bad. 4) The left has an antisemitism problem.
5) The left has an idiot problem. Lots of people shouting antisemitic slogans they don't understand out of a vague sense that this is social justice. 6) 4) + 5) is really bad and poisonous to the left. 7) The right has an antisemitism problem (and an idiot problem, duh.)
8) The pro-Israel right has an interest in playing up 4) because it is unwilling to admit 1), despite 3), and would like to believe 7) is less serious than 4), which - maybe? (Who can say, but I doubt it.) 9) 8) predictably exacerbates 4) + 5), hence 6).
My personal resolution: I'm only going to comment on the Israel/Gaza situation in a calm manner, addressed to the relatively small slice of people I think might be persuaded to see things a bit differently.
Here is @monacharen. Obviously there is a sense in which Israel did nothing to 'provoke' this attack. Nothing could justify or excuse it. But Israel did a great deal to risk it - to recklessly tempt such a development, politically, strategically. plus.thebulwark.com/p/hamas-makes-…
One can say so without thereby excusing or justifying the attack. Every Israeli is demanding to know who is at fault on the Israeli side for staggering intelligence and defense lapses. No one is saying no one is at fault because, morally, it was the job of Hamas not to attack.
[Deep breath] It's worse. It's so, so bad - so much worse even than that - that it's hard to keep the big picture in view. But let's try. Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as "dangerous" and "fraudulent" as early as April, 2020. https://t.co/04CKW1Kl7inpr.org/sections/coron…
In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless. But let's just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many R's have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.
Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat - to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by D's.
Moyn's lectures were great! Haven't read the book yet but the review, which is great, emphasises his key idea: the characteristic pessimism of Cold War-era philosophical liberalism - Trilling, Popper, Himmelfarb, Berlin, Shklar. Let me rub together 2 thoughts via that.
Rothfeld, the reviewer, contrasts these figures, as Moyn portrays them, with an identikit liberal. "A chipper rationalist who is scornfully secular, naively sanguine about humanity’s prospects for self-improvement and devoted to the philosophy of the Enlightenment."
This is just SO wrong. Cold War philosophical liberalism, as Moyn emphasises, is dark, pessimistic, concessive not aspirational, pre-emptively crouched. Per Moyn, it is 'against itself'. As a result - to this day - most anti-liberal critiques of liberalism are not EVEN wrong.
The pull quote is exactly right for this one from @jbouie. One way to think about it: suppose, for the sake of the argument, there ARE two problems at present. 1) teens confusedly over-identifying as trans due to some social contagion whatever. 2) docs over-accommodating this. 1/
You reply: 1 & 2 aren't actually true. That's fine but just be an abstract normative political philosophy seminar room dork with me on this for a minute. It isn't absurd to imagine 1 & 2. If 1 & 2 were true, for the sake of argument, what would be the proper response? 2/
Broadly, there are two strategies. If you believe in liberty and respect and basic rights for all there is no alternative than muddling through. If the medical community has overcorrected for its long history of insufficiently recognising trans people, we need to correct the over