I find these to hold great sophistication

"you'll be visited by three spirits"

The three spirits

Johnny Rocco:

My only thought regarding non-LOTR characters handling the One Ring is that the Road Runner would carry it without issue; whereas the minute Wile E. Coyote picked it up, all nine Nazgûl would descend upon him.

Counter argument. If Chicago style pizza was any good, it wouldn’t need a philosophical argument to defend it.

I used to live there and was told its deliberately a mess streetwise to get potential attackers lost but this may just be an urban legend or smthg

Tokyo/Kyoto seems a counterexample to some extent re the organic bit, though I'm no expert? It seems just as heavily planned and political as Tokyo. It is still a traditional/modern pairing

Burrhus is now up there with like zebulon and thaddeus on my short list of archaic names we should bring back

Lying is so awesome. Crafting reality is usually the provenance of gods and kings, but with one word, I can be the most interesting person at a party, the highest ranking person at a meeting or the least qualified person currently operating heavy machinery.

Little do the asymmetrics know, theyre doom is already sealed by the tendency of the rate of asymmetry to fall. By an inexorable dialectical inversion the asymmetrics shall be asymmetrized.

All academic papers should be titled “an essay concerning the various characteristics of trade, employment population and their effects upon the common weal”

Also crazy bluesky doesnt own the domain name bsky.com

(Company in question is meta)

How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories Palestinian news outlets have seen a steep drop in audience engagement since October 2023.

Facebook severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, and Instagram increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after October 2023.

the good feelings in the era of good feelings were just perpetual tipsiness

Don't forget the micro-asymmetrics, who are very much the invisible heroes of the Bluesky ecosystem. I may only have 100 followers, but I follow even fewer, tending towards that apotheosis of social media engagement: the poster with a single follower, who follows no-one at all.

The Singularity.

Perhaps overly cynical but it really seems like the prevalence of close readings of great literature to understand society as a method in a lot of theory seems less due to it being a plausible method and more due to scholars liking to read great literature

(I'd limit the claim re Plato to Western philosophy, idk what was going on elsewhere except China a bit but I'd stand by the broader point)

The replaceability of philosophers probably increases drastically with the number of philosophers + general societal literacy and education. Plato probably wasn't replaceable and most contemporary philosophers probably are just due to the amount of educated literate people with phil interests

the counter to this is that in such cases the model is rigorous but its application isn't but I do think there is a certain affinity between idealizing rigor and assiduously and precisely built cloud castles

Not Jacksonian but Gordon Wood gives an account of people passing around a bottle of wine at a trial lawyers and accused included. Absolute madlad era

As a side note I think the conflation of rigor and reason is interesting. Its possible to adhere to very silly procedures with absolute rigor (which is probably true of certain types of a prioristic mathematical modeling)

Also interestingly this unified science encyclopedia series published the structure of scientific revolutions later on

Greatest crossovers ever

incredible that bluesky does not own the domain name bluesky.com

Specifically, it is between basically pleasant bureacrats and sexy murder poets without sexy murder poetic talent