The latest platform
My life in micro-publishing and text-based social networking: Usenet (1992-2008) WordPress (2003-2026) Twitter (2008-2023) Facebook (2008-2025) Bluesky (2024-present) ...and now Ghost.
Latest
How should a society control itself?
[I]t is not necessary to choose between social control administered by the aggrandized state [collectivism] and a self-assertive individualism subject to no social control [libertarianism]. That supposedly exclusive choice, which causes such furious party antagonism in our society, overlooks entirely one of the oldest, best established, and most successful
How do we educate ourselves for democracy?
How [is] a democracy to become so well-educated [that it can] find the answers to [its] problems? The necessary education for popular government cannot be obtained in the schools and colleges, from books, newspapers, lectures, and the radio, alone. Popular education is indispensable, and I should be the last to
What historical newspapers are good for
Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information [...N]ewspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves. —Robert Darnton, “The Library in the New Age”, The New York Review of Books (12 Jun
Will librarians go the way of tailors?
As do-it-yourself information finding in cyberspace becomes more common, will librarians go the way of custom tailors—unusual and perhaps a little antiquated? Off-the-shelf clothing doesn't fit anybody as perfectly as custom-made clothing would, but it is good enough (and cheap enough) for most of us. Perhaps the
Weeknote 36, 2024
§1 Writing prompts “It's just that I remember you telling me that you would be glad to take care of this kind of thing. I'm sorry I keep forgetting that you never meant what you said.” “She wants to feel good about herself. Don't
Abortion laws as a form of power over women
Even before Dobbs, it was clear that the devotion of many American conservatives to restricting or outlawing abortion was about regulating the lives of women, not about “life”. When you put that together with the “family values” fairy tale of a society where sexuality was reproductive and contained within a
Weeknote 11, 2024
§1 The benefits of watching baseball The best baseball announcers have voices like cat purrs, reducing stress and healing bones.
Weeknote 10, 2024
§1 The #1 song a century ago What the kids were listening to this time of year in 1924.
Weeknote 9, 2024
§1 Writing prompt “Jesus Christ loves you, but He sure hasn't convinced me to yet.” §2 With age comes knowledge I am now old enough to understand why old people love watching baseball so much. I can sink into a telecast like it's a comfortable recliner.
The power of recognition
For Kojève, the key concept in Hegel’s “Phenomenology” was recognition. Human beings want the recognition of other human beings in order to become self-conscious—to know themselves as autonomous individuals. As Kojève put it, humans desire, and what they desire is either something that other humans desire or the
Weeknote 8, 2024
§1 Extraneous information omitted As of February 20, 2024, this Easton Press book page lacked any information about either the author(s) of the book's text or when the text was written.
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Weeknote 7, 2024
§1 Billy Joel finds his second wind Billy Joel's resurrection of his past in the video for his new song “Turn the Lights Back On” is a use of deep fake video that I can enjoy.
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Weeknote 6, 2024
§1 A writing prompt “Thank you for making the effort to produce the illusion that I have a choice about this decision.” §2 Relationship advice xkcd strikes again... §3 SOFA “Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, and nothing lasts.” §4 A tune to brighten your day Is it a gloomy
Music
"February 3rd" can make your day...
...maybe your night...
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Weeknote 5, 2024
§1 xkcd Another winner. §2 A writing prompt “So what if they would have snubbed each other five years ago? I'll bet in another five years they won't know what they were thinking today. But they need each other now, and sometimes nothing else matters but
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Weeknote 4, 2024
§1 Things We Take for Granted It is only in the past half-century or so that every conceivable subdivision and admixture of the rainbow has been available [to painters] in off-the-shelf tubes. -- Philip Ball, Bright Earth : Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago : Univ of Chicago, 2003, 2001), pg.
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Weeknote 3, 2024
§1 That's it! One minor irritant in what could be a truly tragic year in American political history is the return of this sort of thing. §2 “Fake It 'Til You Make It” The flaw in the advice to “fake it 'til you make it” is
Chapbook
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man
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Weeknote 2, 2024
§1 Open up your Golden Gate… “California, Here I Come” was first recorded 100 years ago this week.
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Weeknote 1, 2024
§1 Quotation “[A] huge segment of the ‘free speech activist’ culture is just absolutely pathologically oversensitive to criticism and dissent and […] much of the ‘we hate cancel culture’ culture is consumed with telling people to shut up.”—Ken White §2 Free Mickey! This Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon welcomes Mickey
Racism
"White culture"
https://www.stereogum.com/2246426/grimes-says-she-is-proud-of-white-culture-complains-about-being-called-a-nazi/news/ But what IS “white culture”? “Parisian culture” I can understand. “Glaswegian culture” I can understand. “West Virginian culture” I can understand. “Bourgeois culture” I can understand. “D&D culture” makes sense to me in a way. But what is “white culture”? What
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Weeknote 52, 2023
§1 A final judgment on the year 2023 was exhausting. On to 2024!
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Weeknote 51, 2023
§1 The power of Bob Dylan If you wonder how Bob Dylan got to be such a big deal in the first place, take a listen to this performance from 1963. §2 Farewell, Evernote I have closed the free Evernote account I had used since 2012. The first strike was