Jenkins in the article: “there has to be an arrest that takes place of an agent, which requires an intermediary set by another law enforcement agency.” Seems she’s passing the buck to law enforcement.

Edit: I’m not trying to defend her, I’m just quoting her actual excuse for reference.

Bureaucracy.

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

“Yes, Precious—we meant ‘us’!”

Calling Trump “sinister” is an insult to honest hard-working villains.

How much of that reflects an improving assessment of the USSR vs a deteriorating assessment of the subsequent regimes?

In practice, none: wolves are locally extinct in the range of the Siberian tiger.

Not to excuse him or anything—but I have to remind myself that high-profile targets of anti-semitism (or racism in general) are exposed to orders of magnitude more of it than private individuals, and are correspondingly more likely to interpret it as a cause of things that anyone else can see have other motivations.

They gave my younger sister a traditionally masculine name, so apparently they were already out of ideas on that score.

That’s never stopped him before.

Is that technically blackmail, or extortion/racketeering?

“Spotted” like livor mortis spots?

“Info tax”.

I haven’t read the piece by Rodrigo Nunes that they’re drawing from, but the historical reference seems clear enough: instead of the Manichaean division of the physical world into good and evil, Augustine saw a superposition of two worlds (secular and religious, the “City of Man” and the “City of God”) which were superficially identical and which everyone inhabited simultaneously—so Christians could continue to go about their secular lives while reinterpreting it religiously, instead of explicitly separating themselves from evil.

In that context, “alterity without difference” would be like Augustine’s Christians, superficially being part of the capitalist world order while simultaneously undermining it, instead of openly distancing themselves from it like the Manicheans.

just think “medi(cal) eval(uation)”.

Trump’s brain turning to oatmeal would imply that his condition is improving.

A majority stake in Twitter.

It’s contextual: government can be used for right-wing or left-wing purposes, and people opposed to those uses can use libertarianism as a justification whether the actual policies they’re opposing are right- or left-wing. But that means people with right- or left-wing sympathies can selectively target policies they disagree with on purely sectarian grounds, while disingenuously claiming libertarianism as a motivation.

I donate to the Patreon account of a local independent journalist who covers the city council.