Someone

@abhispake They have bigger problems to deal with. Like get rid of Bangladeshi occupation or land; get rid of the millions of illegal infiltrations and enemies of India inside borders. Buses can wait. Even economic development can wait.

I hope the first thing BJP does in Kolkata is to get rid of these buses from 1926

Lurid Orientalism? American media often refer to the BJP as “Hindu nationalists,” but rarely describe Republicans as “Christian nationalists,” even as the relationship between the Republican Party and Christian nationalism has shifted from a quiet alliance to a central pillar of the party’s identity and policy agenda. Recent surveys by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) find that a majority of Republicans are now either “adherents” or “sympathizers” of Christian nationalism. This reluctance to label the GOP “Christian nationalist” reflects Western self-image. To do so would be to acknowledge that the United States is not an “enlightened, secular” state, but one where religious identity is a primary driver of power — much like the systems the West often scrutinizes in the East through Edward Said’s lens of Orientalism. In the Western imagination, Eastern politics is often cast as inherently religious or tribal. The media’s reluctance to apply the same labels at home has, in effect, enabled Christian nationalism to grow by allowing it to operate under the ostensibly “neutral” banner of conservatism. This has, ominously, helped fuel racial bigotry. nytimes.com/2026/05/04/wor…

@RohanBhardxxxx @Chellaney You are nuts. Yiy haven’t lived here

@Chellaney Not a single state in US where GOP governs as Christian nationalist, it occasionally flirts with it but that’s it. In India there’s this temple, that beef, love jihad, lynchings, bulldozer justice against minorities etc. Yours is a fallacious argument based on false equivalence.

@Sohom03 Isn’t his wife, Thai??

This man has looted Bengal - He's involved in multiple scams - coal scam, cattle scam, ssc scam and what not. Sources claim his wife was caught while smuggling gold in Kolkata airport. Now we need to see how investigation takes place .

@f1isabadsport @heeney_luke Fair.. that’s a rough commute. I must be old fashioned because I think if you call yourself boyfriend and girlfriend you move or make adjustments vs breaking up. But then again I’m old fashioned.

@PlatoCosmos @heeney_luke honestly sf to palo alto is pretty fucking inconvenient for people with lives, i can see it

On the CalTrain and there’s a guy breaking up with his girlfriend because he can’t handle long distance (he’s SF, she’s Palo Alto)

@spluscollective 😂

I think this is where Service $NOW would be helpful to let the concerned parties know that their data is gone, for good.

I don’t usually share things like this, but I think it’s important to be honest. I’ve been looking for a full-time role since September. I’m a senior iOS engineer + product designer with 10+ years experience, and I’ve spent that time building and shipping real products (most recently: @ateiq_app, @naturalis_app, @getuppapp). Despite interviews and ongoing work, I’m now about a month away from needing something stable for my family. If you know a team that values someone who can both design and build, I’d really appreciate an introduction. Thank you! ❤️

@antoniogm Those are upwards of $4-5m homes, right? Dang, good for the young folks with that kind of money.

Not sure what it is, but NoPa has become absolute strollerville, even more so than Noe Valley. I'm old enough to have lived there when it was still just Western Addition(ish).

@gregorykennedy Ah. Did not know that. I just wish someone had the courage to decide between the 3 competing systems which one to invest in and make it work; or start from scratch. 40miles from sjc to sf is trivial distance-heck even dedicated bus lanes along 101 would be better than this mess.

The system is a clown car of bad decisions compounded on one another, making operations expensive. It's a unique technology, and they can't use off-the-shelf parts. It doesn't receive as much funding as comparable systems. They suck at monetizing the ancillary revenue streams they have, like advertising and kiosk rentals. I think they should offer first-class cars and make more money the way airlines do.

I took Bart the entire time I was here, and it's a much better experience than it was in the past. But let's not forget how many on the lunatic fringe fought this sensible and civilized approach for years and years. It took a long time, but eventually, common sense prevailed. It should be celebrated.

@gregorykennedy lol. My point was it needs to be cost effective, not about needing a discount. That’s the problem here: every solution is taking money from middle/rich. Well middle and high income people don’t like their money wasted either.

@PlatoCosmos It's your lucky day

@HusseinAboubak Why is it that Indian sub continent suffered two colonizations and yet its literature is positive, hopeful and empathetic, even during colonization. I think the “Arab” intellectuals haven’t even acknowledged one colonization..and accepted its darkness as internal.

You are essentially asking why there is no arc that leads to redemption in the modern Arabic novel. That is an excellent question. There are two established frameworks for answering it. The first is postcolonial: the darkness of the Arabic novel is the darkness of colonized peoples working through historical trauma. The second is civilizational: Arab and Muslim culture lacks a moral architecture for redemption and falls back on ruthlessness and darkness. Both are grand, sweeping, and, in my humble opinion, mostly wrong — or rather, mostly ideological. Each reproduces its own premise as its conclusion. You cannot accept the postcolonial answer without first accepting a Leninist analysis of imperialism and culture. You cannot accept the civilizational answer without first accepting a developmental schema in which the Arab world is measured by what it lacks relative to Europe. Neither explains; both presuppose. What if the answer is simpler? What if, instead of reaching for macro-historical frameworks, we look at the men who actually wrote these novels? Given an understanding of how Western elites led their own society into a trajectory of kitsch and ugliness, one should be sympathetic to the idea of an elite-led cultural collapse, which is what I believe happened in the Middle East. The major Arab novelists of the twentieth century belong, almost without exception, to a single class: the radically secularized cultural elite. Many are radical atheists. They passed through European or European-style education and emerged having internalized a very specific moment in European intellectual history — its most spiritually nihilistic moment, usually through France and Germany. They absorbed existentialist despair, naturalist determinism, and post-Enlightenment nihilism. They did not arrive at darkness through the pressure of their own civilizational or colonial experience, etc. They adopted it, consciously, from a European literary discourse that was itself already a symptom of spiritual crisis. Here one must invoke René Girard's concept of mimetic contagion, because what happened next is textbook mimetic dynamics. The first generation were still imitating Europe directly. They had read their Flaubert, their Camus, their Dostoevsky-without-the-Christianity, and they wrote in conscious dialogue with those models. But the imitation did not remain at this level. What emerged very quickly was a self-referential, closed literary discourse in which Arab novelists began imitating each other. The model was no longer Europe itself but the image of Europe already internalized by the previous Arab novelist. Darkness became the mark of seriousness. Nihilism became the credential of literary authenticity. The bleaker the novel, the more "realistic" it was judged to be — where "realism" had long since ceased to describe any actual relation to reality and had become instead a term of prestige within the closed circle of the discourse itself. It became pure unreality. This, of course, applied to the modern history of European aesthetics as well. Realism means ugliness, for some degenerate reason. This is mimetic rivalry in its purest form. Each new novelist must outdo his predecessor in despair in order to be recognized as serious. Rape, dismemberment, political torture, sexual degradation — these escalate not because Arab reality is uniquely brutal (it actually became so brutal largely as a result of this tradition, in my opinion) but because the internal logic of the literary discourse demands perpetual intensification. The audience for this literature is not the broad Arab public, which largely does not read these novels. The audience is the discourse itself: other novelists, critics, prize committees, translation editors in Paris and London who have their own mimetic investment in the image of the Arab world as a theater of darkness. The award-selection algorithm is the mechanism by which the mimetic cycle reproduces itself. The prizes reward the darkness, the darkness attracts the prizes, and the entire circuit operates at a comfortable distance from any lived reality — which contains, as all human reality does, suffering and joy, cruelty and tenderness, despair and faith. One must then ask: what is the expected result when such dispositions are crowned at the top of a semi-literate and developing society? One may even go deeper and suggest that later Arab real-world nihilism, political and religious, is related to this. Dickens does not write humane novels because Victorian England was a kind or gentle place. It was monstrous. He writes humane novels because he writes from within a Christian moral structure that remained functional even as it was being secularized — a structure in which characters can change and redemption is a live possibility. The same holds for Tolstoy and George Eliot. The Arab novelists in question do not work within any equivalent — not because Arabic or Islamic civilization lacks one, but because these writers personally rejected the one available to them and replaced it with borrowed European despair. They were writing a century after Dickens. Dostoevsky was, of course, a revolutionary nihilist who became genuinely Christian, and that is why his works trace an arc through the deepest despair and onward to redemption. The last major European work that attempted to reach redemption at all was, I believe, Richard Wagner's Parsifal — which Friedrich Nietzsche hated profoundly, writing: "I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics... an outrage upon morality." It is not an accident that the last work Roger Scruton wrote before he died was a monograph on Parsifal. I am here only right, of course, if we exclude redemptive works like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — which was in many ways a response to Wagner and late Romanticism — from the canon of high culture, which the Western cultural elite indeed does exclude. The darkness of the Arabic novel is the voice of a specific class of intellectuals who chose the most despairing available version of European modernity and made it the dominant register of serious Arabic literature. The redemption is absent because the men who write have decided, as a matter of intellectual conviction, that redemption is no longer a serious category. Nietzsche himself wrote that "redemption" is one of the most repulsive words. The great partial exception is Naguib Mahfouz. His career begins in social realism — the Cairo Trilogy is a genuine attempt at the Dickensian novel, and it nearly succeeds. It then passes through crisis: Children of Gebelawi is the patricide, the allegory in which God is killed. But Mahfouz, unlike his contemporaries, could not rest in the nihilism. His late work represents a sustained effort to retrieve faith and redemption from within the wreckage. His oeuvre is really to be read as one man's journey out of post-Christian nihilism. He is the one major Arabic novelist who turned back. That is what makes him the greatest of them, and it is also what is most consistently missed in how he is read. He began his career writing as his peers wrote. Then he separated from them, and spent the remainder of his life writing allegories about seeking the Father who had been murdered or forgotten.

@bubbleboi Don’t know your spirituality. Meditation and intentionally donating food always grounds me back.

I’m ngl the money is going to my head

@bubbleboi 😂 sure thing. I gotta get some tips to fire.

@PlatoCosmos Just ask for me at the front desk

Oh wow I’m at the Blue Bottle in Palo Alto and the Chinese people are talking about Intel, ARM, & AWS gravitron.

@rohanpaul_ai Hunh. Why do people see language as something magical and not bound by laws, like Math? It has grammar.

Peter Thiel on who is most likely to lose jobs to AI: "It seems much worse for the math people than the word people" "Within 3-5 years AI will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit."

@ashwinkumar_v This be true.

Amazing post! If you are young in mind, despite being a senior engg or product or xyz person and are in a place where your superiors are old and fixed in mind - be brave, either leave the place or they will make you leave.

@rustsoldev Ah. Fixed. I’ll dm you

@PlatoCosmos Interesting... can we discuss? @PlatoCosmos your dm is closed, btw

@sv_techie I never could understand what they offering was..

Not long ago, people used to rave about Service now and its CEO and I wonder what the sentiment is today.