Happy New Year. Here’s hoping for better days.

Early fireworks, rising moon.

The sun has now set on 2023.

with a view of Presidential immunity so expansive as to encompass the whole republic, individual vaccinations become superfluous.

then there is the theory that
if you provoke
a deluge of tears
somehow the trail
will simply appear.

you can identify members of the uniparty by their unibrows and unique unitard uniforms.

@inertiate (what proposal by a former US President?)

how ordinary and extraordinary that the sky is blue.

the best authentic is a fake fake.

just by observing their current states, we can infer that asteroids were sites of great vengeance.

“It’s not the proportionality of self defense that must be resolved… but the question of what the action is defending, if anything.”

a thoughtful meditation on proportionality by @philipncohen https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/ethical-fault-lines-and-empirical-assumptions-in-israel-gaza/

@Schlining Using scala-cli to do a lot of this (Scala or Java, doesn’t matter) has really changed my life.

I script and automate sysadmin stuff much, much more confidently than when I improvised my way through bash scripts.

#Java #Scala

This essay by @g_shullenberger on wokeness and its discontents is worth reading.

Ultimately it portrays identitarian politics in a way I’d describe as akin to neoliberalism. Both tendencies have spawned whole academies in opposition, and lost whatever broad public approval they might once have claimed. Yet they remain the organizing fabric of our economy and institutions because no positive alternative has emerged to do the job.

https://compactmag.com/article/the-poverty-of-anti-wokeness

CW: dismissal of trans concerns

@pallenberg that’s wrong, should only match when it’s on fire.

@scott i think it depends what one means by disappear. if it means murder, i think it's way too pessimistic. if it means transfer of a sizable fraction of the Palestinian population, i think the odds are pretty high. it might not quite be the modal outcome of my guesstimated distribution (usually a kind of muddling continuation of a status quo should be our predicted mode), but it's close.

"Centrists are the great noticers because their essential purpose is to resist the critiques of the left. Not every leftwing analysis will turn out to be correct, and not every prescription emerging from the left effective, but enough will be such that the passage of time will oblige centrists to accommodate and absorb many of those analyses and prescriptions." #DavidTimoney https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-low-dishonest-decade.html

@admitsWrongIfProven too many seem to itch for them.

@noracodes your brother-in-law always makes the best ones.

@admitsWrongIfProven (i think the irony that i had in my was the antidecolonization people coming to identify as the true, indigenous academics whose authentic culture is being displaced by colonial woke interlopers.)

@libramoon oh believe me, as a Florida citizen i hold no brief for DeSantis. he is among the very worst.