Someone at work recently sent a "motivational" email that included "If", and frankly, why cancel anyone if we can't cancel Kipling? Though I do have a soft spot for "My Boy Jack".
My partner is Italian (like, has the passport and everything), but grew up in south central Connecticut, where everyone is either Irish or Italian (with a smattering of Polish... basically everyone's Catholic), and there's definitely an "ethnic white people" vibe about the place that differs from, say, here, or back where I'm from in Middle Tennessee. For one, the food is very different, but also just way more Catholic, culturally more than religiously.
Tangentially related: I have a theory that Italian food is better in places with smaller Italian-American populations, because Italian-Americans have been here for decades, or more than a century (my great grandparents all came to the U.S. in the late 1910s and early 1920s), and have developed their own cuisine(s), Italian-American food. It's good, but if you want food that looks like what you'll get in most of Italy today, you have to go where Italian Americans don't dominate the Italian food scene. Anyway, long story short, if you want good Italian food, not Italian-American food, don't go to south central Connecticut.
HTS was not an ISIS offshoot. The predecessor groups at times worked in a faction with ISIS, but before that had at times been in open, violent conflict with ISIL (as it was known at the time). They were aligned with al-Qaeda in Iraq (which was more of a franchise than an offshoot of the al-Qaeda we all think of, but still ideologically aligned), which was deeply critical of the formation and activities of ISIL from the start. But tye Al-Nusra Front-al Qaeda relationship was also a tense, and HTS was formed in large part because of a multi-group desire to be independent of al-Qaeda.
Anyway, yeah, Syria is complex, but the history of these groups is pretty well documented.
Y'all have had some ridiculous opinions on this site, but this one fa il botto.
I had a pizza in Modena with fontina, prosciutto that might have been from their own basement* and local balsamic, that I have dreams about.
* Not in Modena, but down the street in Parma itself, I used a bathroom in the basement of a restaurant, and most of the basement was taken up with ham hanging from the rafters to cure.
Imagine that after removing much of the population of the surrounding area, some of whom have settled into refugee camps Mexico City, we have violently controlled the city for decades via military occupation. We finally allow the city to vote, and they vote for the people who are most militantly opposed to the military occupation. So we leave, but besiege the city, forcibly impoverishing it even further than we already had for decades prior. Every few years, carrying out bloody, indiscriminate bombing campaigns on the entire population because the group that was elected because it most militantly opposes the occupation continues to do so even as the occupation changes from one with boots on the ground to one in which we merely determine everything that goes in and out of the city, and repress its people violently any time they complain. We have turned the city into a massive open-air prison, because the people hated being violently oppressed to such an extent that they voted for the group that opposed that oppression the most militantly.
Then, one day, the group who most militantly oppose the occupation break out of their open-air prison, and kill a lot of American citizens who have settled into the areas around the city in the process. So we decide to level the entire city, killing tens of thousands of children in the process, destroying their schools, their hospitals, starving the entire population by severely limiting the amount of food and other supplies that can enter the city.
There are claims of "genocide" by pretty much every person who studies genocide, even many of the ones in the the country committing what's being called "genocide" (us, in the analogy), and the international community agrees with those claims and asks us to stop.
What would it take for us to agree?
I suspect that one thing it would take is for us to stop pretending that this war began the day the people in the open-air prison broke out. We'd probably also have to stop believing that we are inherently superior to the people who live in the Open Air prison simply because they were not born American. I think if we admitted those two things to ourselves: that this war is decades old, and that we are no better than they, the reasons we continue to murder them indiscriminately would melt away pretty quickly, and we'd stop. That, or we'd confirm ourselves to be even greater monsters than we've already shown we are by justifying our genocide through falsity and myth.
I have voted for third party candidates before (including in 2000 and 2016, the two elections for which people get the most heat over voting for third party candidates), and I have been called pretentious many times (I mean, I've cited Adorno and Kant in this subthread), but I don't recall ever being called pretentious for voting third party.
Don't think of it in terms of policy, and especially not in terms of potential policy.
Imagine the situation were a bit closer to home: imagine that instead of killing my family over there, they're killing my family here. And them I'm asked to vote either for the person who is killing my family, right now, in front of me (and the entire world), or the person who will likely kill my family in the future. For whom do I vote? There are no policy questions here: my family is being murdered, and will likely continue to be murdered if the other guy wins as well. Why would I vote for either my family's murderer or my family's potential future murderer? Why am I not in fact given the opportunity to vote for someone who won't murder my family?
Obviously it's not my family being murdered right now, under Trump, or previously, under Biden, but I feel genuinely bound by the above categorical imperative, and I find it extremely depressing that we live in a country where the only options are to vote for genocide or to vote for potentially even more genocide. I personally am never going to give those two options the tiny bit of legitimacy my vote bestows, and I will not fault anyone who makes the same decision, regardless of where I live: it's easy for me, because I live in a state that is a foregone conclusion, but I can't judge the people in Michigan or Wisconsin for making the same decision. In fact, I applaud them for it, and blame literally all of you for forcing us to make this choice.
Imagine going to a Palestinian-American and telling them, "You must vote for the person who has effectively authorized the murder of your people, and continues to give the murderers the weapons to carry it out," a person whom, we now know, made no efforts to rein in Netanyahu or push for a ceasefire (things the administration said they were doing), "because the next person will murder them worse." To me, this electoral position makes a lot less sense than the one adopted by the people who refused to vote for a genocidal administration. What's more, it makes no sense to me to blame an election loss on the people who refused to vote for genocide when you could blame the people who were facilitating a genocide.
I know there aren't many Kantians here, but it seems to me that if there is anything like a categorical imperative upon which we should be operating, as voters, then with apologies to Adorno (p. 219 of the pdf), it is that we don't vote for people who facilitate genocide.
From Spring and All (the book; the poem is really just I in that book, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is poem XXII in the book):
Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligible to the point of insignificance. Whatever "life" the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat--Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.
His poems, especially from around this period, deliberately played with form and imagery in order to challenge the traditionalist ideas of poetry as having specific formal limits, and relying heavily on complex and often obscure imagery.
You could ask the same question of any of the poems from that book. Look at "The Red Wheelbarrow": it could be read as just part of a full sentence, the rest of which (why so much depends on it, for what it depends, whatever) is missing.
Anyway, if you're asking yourself why this is poetry and not prose, and then thinking about that question, you're on the right track. I also recommend reading Spring and All. It is mostly an essay on poetry in a time of war , industrialization, and alienation, and why what the world needs from poetry in that time (and perhaps this) is something more than formal restrictions and imagery that pulls us away from, instead of towards life and new possibilities.
I do the tortilla by hand things to this day, though I don't know that I'm great at it. I do this mostly because I'm too lazy to go through all the work of heating tortillas properly when it's just me eating.
I read Playing With The Boys 15 or 16 years ago in a reading group. I think it's a flawed book, but worth reading. The biggest issue, I think, is that separate but equal always does separate well, but never approaches equal, and it's difficult to assess the potential of female athletes relative to men when their training, facilities, even diets, are unequal, as is the case in virtually all major sports (and probably the minor ones as well). On top of that, there are likely some women who'd do well in major men's sports, even if that's not true for most women in sports, so excluding them entirely on the basis of race starts to look a lot like discrimination on top of the unequal part of separate but equal.
Anyway, I'd recommend the book to people who are obsessed with trans women in men's sports, but I think it's safe to say the vast majority of them don't read books.
When I was in grad school, lo, these many years ago, those Tyson's chicken cordon bleu were very cheap in bulk at Sam's Club, so I always had a box in the freezer. Those were a real life saver in lean times, supplementing my diet of ramen, mac 'n' cheese, and whatever free food they had at some faculty event. I think Sam's had the broccoli and cheese one too (and I may have tried it), but the other two I don't think I've seen before.
When I was a freshman in high school, we read The Red Wheelbarrow, and while it would be a stretch to say that we understood it, either in itself or in its place in the history of modern poetry, my friends and I enjoyed it immensely, and began to write variants of it. This lasted my entire time in high school, so that some of the quotes in my senior yearbook are silly plays on that poem. Anyway, for that reason, and because it really is kinda cool, I will always love that poem.
An inevitable result of letting Israel commit genocide without consequences is that other countries in similar situations will think, "Well, if there are no rules...": https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kashmir-experts-warn-impunity-amidst-calls-india-implement-israel-playbook?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_9ulhfxyzek
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Last Graduation”
Someone at work recently sent a "motivational" email that included "If", and frankly, why cancel anyone if we can't cancel Kipling? Though I do have a soft spot for "My Boy Jack".
"
Congrats on the graduation.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
My partner is Italian (like, has the passport and everything), but grew up in south central Connecticut, where everyone is either Irish or Italian (with a smattering of Polish... basically everyone's Catholic), and there's definitely an "ethnic white people" vibe about the place that differs from, say, here, or back where I'm from in Middle Tennessee. For one, the food is very different, but also just way more Catholic, culturally more than religiously.
Tangentially related: I have a theory that Italian food is better in places with smaller Italian-American populations, because Italian-Americans have been here for decades, or more than a century (my great grandparents all came to the U.S. in the late 1910s and early 1920s), and have developed their own cuisine(s), Italian-American food. It's good, but if you want food that looks like what you'll get in most of Italy today, you have to go where Italian Americans don't dominate the Italian food scene. Anyway, long story short, if you want good Italian food, not Italian-American food, don't go to south central Connecticut.
"
No, but I gather it is in, like upstate New York, Binghamton, that sort of thing.
"
This is one of those "Y'all will argue about literally anything" moments.
"
HTS was not an ISIS offshoot. The predecessor groups at times worked in a faction with ISIS, but before that had at times been in open, violent conflict with ISIL (as it was known at the time). They were aligned with al-Qaeda in Iraq (which was more of a franchise than an offshoot of the al-Qaeda we all think of, but still ideologically aligned), which was deeply critical of the formation and activities of ISIL from the start. But tye Al-Nusra Front-al Qaeda relationship was also a tense, and HTS was formed in large part because of a multi-group desire to be independent of al-Qaeda.
Anyway, yeah, Syria is complex, but the history of these groups is pretty well documented.
"
This analysis might make sense if it wasn't the left that had been warning about these U.S.-backed Islamists in Syria for years.
On “A Post-Conclave Conclave”
Y'all have had some ridiculous opinions on this site, but this one fa il botto.
I had a pizza in Modena with fontina, prosciutto that might have been from their own basement* and local balsamic, that I have dreams about.
* Not in Modena, but down the street in Parma itself, I used a bathroom in the basement of a restaurant, and most of the basement was taken up with ham hanging from the rafters to cure.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
There is a rather large literature on Kashmir from a left perspective. I recommend checking it out.
"
"As long as you don't want to be ethnically cleaned, you will be," is not much of an argument.
"
I suspect Lee has used these adjectives to describe third-party voters, but mostly he just says they don't actually care.
"
I'm going to fix your analogy for you:
Imagine that after removing much of the population of the surrounding area, some of whom have settled into refugee camps Mexico City, we have violently controlled the city for decades via military occupation. We finally allow the city to vote, and they vote for the people who are most militantly opposed to the military occupation. So we leave, but besiege the city, forcibly impoverishing it even further than we already had for decades prior. Every few years, carrying out bloody, indiscriminate bombing campaigns on the entire population because the group that was elected because it most militantly opposes the occupation continues to do so even as the occupation changes from one with boots on the ground to one in which we merely determine everything that goes in and out of the city, and repress its people violently any time they complain. We have turned the city into a massive open-air prison, because the people hated being violently oppressed to such an extent that they voted for the group that opposed that oppression the most militantly.
Then, one day, the group who most militantly oppose the occupation break out of their open-air prison, and kill a lot of American citizens who have settled into the areas around the city in the process. So we decide to level the entire city, killing tens of thousands of children in the process, destroying their schools, their hospitals, starving the entire population by severely limiting the amount of food and other supplies that can enter the city.
There are claims of "genocide" by pretty much every person who studies genocide, even many of the ones in the the country committing what's being called "genocide" (us, in the analogy), and the international community agrees with those claims and asks us to stop.
What would it take for us to agree?
I suspect that one thing it would take is for us to stop pretending that this war began the day the people in the open-air prison broke out. We'd probably also have to stop believing that we are inherently superior to the people who live in the Open Air prison simply because they were not born American. I think if we admitted those two things to ourselves: that this war is decades old, and that we are no better than they, the reasons we continue to murder them indiscriminately would melt away pretty quickly, and we'd stop. That, or we'd confirm ourselves to be even greater monsters than we've already shown we are by justifying our genocide through falsity and myth.
"
I have voted for third party candidates before (including in 2000 and 2016, the two elections for which people get the most heat over voting for third party candidates), and I have been called pretentious many times (I mean, I've cited Adorno and Kant in this subthread), but I don't recall ever being called pretentious for voting third party.
"
Don't think of it in terms of policy, and especially not in terms of potential policy.
Imagine the situation were a bit closer to home: imagine that instead of killing my family over there, they're killing my family here. And them I'm asked to vote either for the person who is killing my family, right now, in front of me (and the entire world), or the person who will likely kill my family in the future. For whom do I vote? There are no policy questions here: my family is being murdered, and will likely continue to be murdered if the other guy wins as well. Why would I vote for either my family's murderer or my family's potential future murderer? Why am I not in fact given the opportunity to vote for someone who won't murder my family?
Obviously it's not my family being murdered right now, under Trump, or previously, under Biden, but I feel genuinely bound by the above categorical imperative, and I find it extremely depressing that we live in a country where the only options are to vote for genocide or to vote for potentially even more genocide. I personally am never going to give those two options the tiny bit of legitimacy my vote bestows, and I will not fault anyone who makes the same decision, regardless of where I live: it's easy for me, because I live in a state that is a foregone conclusion, but I can't judge the people in Michigan or Wisconsin for making the same decision. In fact, I applaud them for it, and blame literally all of you for forcing us to make this choice.
"
Imagine going to a Palestinian-American and telling them, "You must vote for the person who has effectively authorized the murder of your people, and continues to give the murderers the weapons to carry it out," a person whom, we now know, made no efforts to rein in Netanyahu or push for a ceasefire (things the administration said they were doing), "because the next person will murder them worse." To me, this electoral position makes a lot less sense than the one adopted by the people who refused to vote for a genocidal administration. What's more, it makes no sense to me to blame an election loss on the people who refused to vote for genocide when you could blame the people who were facilitating a genocide.
I know there aren't many Kantians here, but it seems to me that if there is anything like a categorical imperative upon which we should be operating, as voters, then with apologies to Adorno (p. 219 of the pdf), it is that we don't vote for people who facilitate genocide.
On “POETS Day! Things from William Carlos Williams”
Another favorite we read in high school:
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
https://alexsheremet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Pieter-Bruegels-Landscape-With-The-Fall-Of-Icarus-1560s.jpg
"
From Spring and All (the book; the poem is really just I in that book, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is poem XXII in the book):
His poems, especially from around this period, deliberately played with form and imagery in order to challenge the traditionalist ideas of poetry as having specific formal limits, and relying heavily on complex and often obscure imagery.
You could ask the same question of any of the poems from that book. Look at "The Red Wheelbarrow": it could be read as just part of a full sentence, the rest of which (why so much depends on it, for what it depends, whatever) is missing.
Anyway, if you're asking yourself why this is poetry and not prose, and then thinking about that question, you're on the right track. I also recommend reading Spring and All. It is mostly an essay on poetry in a time of war , industrialization, and alienation, and why what the world needs from poetry in that time (and perhaps this) is something more than formal restrictions and imagery that pulls us away from, instead of towards life and new possibilities.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
I do the tortilla by hand things to this day, though I don't know that I'm great at it. I do this mostly because I'm too lazy to go through all the work of heating tortillas properly when it's just me eating.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
I read Playing With The Boys 15 or 16 years ago in a reading group. I think it's a flawed book, but worth reading. The biggest issue, I think, is that separate but equal always does separate well, but never approaches equal, and it's difficult to assess the potential of female athletes relative to men when their training, facilities, even diets, are unequal, as is the case in virtually all major sports (and probably the minor ones as well). On top of that, there are likely some women who'd do well in major men's sports, even if that's not true for most women in sports, so excluding them entirely on the basis of race starts to look a lot like discrimination on top of the unequal part of separate but equal.
Anyway, I'd recommend the book to people who are obsessed with trans women in men's sports, but I think it's safe to say the vast majority of them don't read books.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
When I was in grad school, lo, these many years ago, those Tyson's chicken cordon bleu were very cheap in bulk at Sam's Club, so I always had a box in the freezer. Those were a real life saver in lean times, supplementing my diet of ramen, mac 'n' cheese, and whatever free food they had at some faculty event. I think Sam's had the broccoli and cheese one too (and I may have tried it), but the other two I don't think I've seen before.
On “POETS Day! Things from William Carlos Williams”
When I was a freshman in high school, we read The Red Wheelbarrow, and while it would be a stretch to say that we understood it, either in itself or in its place in the history of modern poetry, my friends and I enjoyed it immensely, and began to write variants of it. This lasted my entire time in high school, so that some of the quotes in my senior yearbook are silly plays on that poem. Anyway, for that reason, and because it really is kinda cool, I will always love that poem.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/28/2025”
Amazon did a 180 so fast when the Trump admin called them out that they're probably too dizzy to deliver packages today.
"
We should track down their schools and withhold federal funding.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Should we find out what colleges these people go to and block their federal funding?
https://x.com/danpjsheehan/status/1915869709511364822?t=OywTD0hISakwcIJFjuLYWQ&s=19
"
An inevitable result of letting Israel commit genocide without consequences is that other countries in similar situations will think, "Well, if there are no rules...": https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kashmir-experts-warn-impunity-amidst-calls-india-implement-israel-playbook?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_9ulhfxyzek
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.