Now that I'm fully aware of the ironies behind (1) rating this book at a website like Goodreads, (2) maintaining an annual reading goal, and (3) posting about it to produce content on a social media network, I can give 5 of 5 stars to The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and @kjhealy.bsky.social
On reflection, after a good night’s sleep, it seems to me that Biden’s most sensible course of action is to have a memo from the AG’s office find that carrying out his duties as Executive now requires he arrest and indefinitely imprison a Supreme Court Justice at the rate of one per week.
As always with stuff like this I think of Juan Linz and his basically correct conviction that the United States is a country determined to shed any accidentally remaining vestiges of parliamentary tradition and fully join its wider continent’s proud tradition of Authoritarian Presidentialism.
Finished The Ordinal Society. Magnifique! Thinking about connection between Bourdieu’s “twofold truth” and Smith’s impartial spectator in TMS. Slightly pained (as a pol phil)by absence of Rawls and Dworkin from ch7. Dworkin good fit for legitimating alibi @kjhealy.bsky.social@marionf.bsky.social
The Irish Natural History Museum really hasn’t been updated since the 1940s and although they are constantly apologizing for this, really it just means it’s cabinet after cabinet chock full of stuff, with none of your modern “Give exhibits room to breathe, and an interactive component” nonsense.
Some of my favorite bits of Supreme Court oral argument are the ones where Roberts or one of his ilk rolls their eyes and scoffs at the very idea of being expected to understand something as scientifically obscure or mathematically arcane as a bit of eighth-grade algebra or similar.
Overturning Chevron is going to usher in an era where self-taught judicial expertise in technical areas such as chemistry, statistics, mechanical engineering, biology, geomorphology, epidemiology, mathematics, and many other fields will once more be able to shine forth as it did in the Middle Ages.
Supreme Court rules 6-3 that, consistent with the effective locus of Executive Authority, each Justice’s summer home or luxury RV must be retrofitted with a Nuclear Football.
Supreme Court rules 6-3 that bribery is a conceptual impossibility, state administrative capacity is illegal, and it is henceforth the only branch of government. But don’t worry, they’re all good friends who take themselves very seriously.
Arrived in Dublin having only found out yesterday that Taylor Swift, a popular singer, is playing at the Aviva, a short walk from where I’m staying. Area thronged with concert-goers or “Tailfins” as they are known.
my favourite thing about academia: i get to read books where each page sparks more ideas and questions and things to think about as part of my job
less than 50 pages in, ‘The Ordinal Society’ is such a book (but don’t take it from me, take it from danah boyd)
He was talking about the University of Chicago, but Liebling’s remark about “The greatest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Children’s Crusade” does spring to mind.
I hear the distant echo of some ongoing Bluesky nonsense I am pleased neither to observe directly nor feel any need to investigate, like a Roman shepherd on the slopes of a placid hillside facing the Amalfi coast, half-catching now and then on the breeze the sounds of Pompeii’s devastation.
New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”
I see it’s time for another episode of FdB takes the wheel to drive a pretty important topic as quickly as possible into each of his several hobby-horses.
I think of Donald Sutherland as like one of those British actors trained at RADA or wherever who are superb at what they do and who’ll also do pretty much anything for a paycheck as it’s just a job, man, with the result that they work a lot and it’s almost always great to see them pop up in a film.
