Holding a pen, a highlighter, and a copy of Joshua Gooch’s Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film (2025)

Back on the plane today, with this.

The bird drama is big at home here in San Diego these days. We've got a bunch of hummingbirds going through Top Gun training, and serious ongoing feud between the neighborhood hawks and the neighborhood crows. All in our backyard.

More than a decade!?!?

I used to love riding around it. But when I left Bmore in 2015, one end of the loop was torn up and you couldn’t ride around it.

Worth remembering that just war theory wasn't always put to just purposes, shall we say? For example, in the Salamanca debates over the humanity/fate of Indigenous peoples, Ginés de Sepúlveda explicitly appealed to just war theory as justification for enslavement and domination of the Indies.

Las Casas essentially rewrote just war theory in his response. Which is to say the theory itself is as empty as the ends for which it is invoked.

Worth remembering that just war theory wasn't always put to just purposes, shall we say? For example, in the Salamanca debates over the humanity/fate of Indigenous peoples, Ginés de Sepúlveda explicitly appealed to just war theory as justification for enslavement and domination of the Indies.

Beautiful, emotional win by Wout.

Academic freedom and pedagogical autonomy, you know framework that hilt the modern university.

I will risk the unpopular opinion that student preference doesn’t matter. That is a “customer” framework. Students also often prefer not read paper syllabi or expend cognitive load on classes.

It’s weird how going harder makes riding cobbles easier. Learned this the hard way riding awful cobbles in Ecuador in the early 2000s. There’s just a high level of minimal fitness necessary to make it possible.

Government of the death drive, by the death drive, for the death drive.

Would someone please fire the political consultant who has convinced Dem comms people to respond to every shitty illegal thing Trump says or does with some version of "don't let the president distract you from....."

Oh, go fuck yourself. And then, when you're done, do it again. Sorry, go fuck yourself, Senator Reverend.

Government of the Todestrieb, for the Todestrieb, by the Todestrieb.

Make it a double feature with The Day After!

There has been no greater advertisement for the necessity of attaining nuclear weapons that the circumstances of the last 25 years. Any rational government would pursue them as insurance against aggression.

After hanging out with the normal people of Jena, Hegel said "The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity.... We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a a Night which turns terrifying." Imagine if he'd met JD Vance.

The last 15 years have been the best empirical evidence of the continued relevance of psychoanalysis. I swear, vulgar Marx and Freud explain easily 90% of the USA’s trajectory.

We get tons of bird drama here every day too. Eagles, hawks, hummingbirds, mocking birds, and others beefing for territory, hunting the canyons, etc. Oh, and there are a pair of owls on the street who love to chat.

One of my favorite things about our house in San Diego is that it is on the evening/sunset route of all the crows who overnight in Mission Valley. Every evening there are just hundreds of crows flying low overhead as they cruise from Normal Heights/Univ. Heights/North Park/etc. back to the valley.

Every time my plane arrives at ATL, I like to pretend it’s a Nahuatl airport.

Almost like they want piracy.

Lesson I learned when we moved from Baltimore to Raleigh. It’s been that way for years, and a spat between MLB and providers in NC too.

Every week a new participation trophy.

A Tale of Two Hydras Chad Thomas Black, University of Tennessee Knoxville In 1766, during the dramatic crisis known as the Rebellion of the Barrios, a Quiteño priest named Pedro Joseph Milaneso published a veritable jeremiad titled La hidra de muchas cabezas, denouncing the causes of the uprising. The many heads of the fabled beast that sought to devour the audiencia were vices, an explanation at home in early-modern moral theology. Some sixty years later in 1824, on the other side of the Atlantic, after yet another restoration of Ferdinand VII's absolutist rule, an anonymous author published El monstruo mas deforme, mas feróz y venesoso que han visto jamás los siglos denouncing other heads for another crisis of royal authority. This tract was purportedly written by a repentant liberal looking to hold accountable the ideas responsible for the failed Trienio Liberal. His was not a monster conjured of vice, but instead one made by liberal philosophy, its heads named materialism, popular sovereignty, freedom of the press, Jacobins, radicals, carbanari, and liberals. This paper compares these two works and argues that the arc between monstrous vice and monstrous liberal philosophy marks a shift in the symbolic order of Spanish rule from the mediation of composite sovereignty to the abstractions of the nation-state, a displacement of the old judicial order with politics. In tracking this shift, we can see how fundamentally the age of revolution reordered the metaphorical frames through which social meaning was structured. In other words, it is not only the move between signifiers such as vecino --> ciudadano or indio --> indígena that mark the new age, but also the transformation within seemingly stable discourses such as the monstrous or the apocalyptic.

Let's get this paper done.

Not content with early modernity's drive to remake the world in Europe's own image? Now you can also find any society in the world contemporaneous with Europe's medieval period, and just call it medieval too!

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.

‘The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.’

This act of transcription and translation is so important too, and a grind. There is far too much desire, though, to do away with it and let the computer do it instead.

The metaverse didn’t fail, we failed the metaverse.