Appetite4Mimesis

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@NBA__Courtside Foul baiting, flopping etc is why I watch very limited amounts of European Football/Soccer. The NBA is more comedic/tragic because of the proximity of the officials.

Jay Williams says he can’t root for the Thunder because of all the foul baiting: “As a fan of the game, I just want to see the game respected. There are times where I watch OKC play, I don’t feel like they respect the process of the game. It’s too much foul baiting. When you fall down 95% of every shot you take in the 4th, I get physiologically exhausted”

Envy is the least confessed sin

My series pitting René Girard's mimetic theory and Metaphysics continues with Part IV 👇👇

Maybe Ecclesial Anxiety is a Good Thing: youtu.be/AKOL-BPm_cQ?si…

A tale of two cities with and without Flock over the weekend in Texas: "Austin had Flock and then turned it off.  And as a consequence, they were not able to find these guys." "These guys drove into some adjacent town up against Austin. And Flock was live in that town, and so Flock tagged them the minute they drove into that town, and then they caught the guys." "It's crazy to have the ability to solve crimes and stop crimes and not be able to use it." @pmarca with @joerogan

@TFTC21 Maybe this will free up phds to do work with actual societal value.

@Athens_Stranger @millerman With a Girardian lense, this wealth sends a signal to potential rivals as our money sends signal to the market. The former the market for social status.

@millerman Also, lost on soooo many people is that Aristotle makes the case in the Nicomachean Ethics that one cannot be fully virtuous without wealth (“equipment”) since without it one cannot contribute to beautiful public works etc Our wealthy patrons contribute to all the *wrong* things

Why is it good to be rich? You may not know but Plato has Socrates raise this question in the first few pages of the Republic. He asks Cephalus, who says that money means he doesn't have to lie to acquire, and he can die not owing debts, thus entering the afterlife w a just soul

We dont think about scandal enough in the way we stumble each other with our pettiness.

Psychoanalysis trys to justify belief in a secular society, thats why its a bunch of bull.

@SaschaAmato This is basically what reading Dostoevsky is like.

So important to preserve the truth about this legendary Moscow photo #reclaimthenarrative

Charles Taylor was born to Liberian elite, studied econ in US & wrote several influential critiques of how “atomistic liberalism” presumes an individualist blank slate, became civil servant under Doe dictatorship, got caught embezzling millions, fled back to US, jailed, escaped, mentored by Gaddafi, wrote breakout book “Sources of the Self” (1989) about how human agency is defined by what we choose to respect & hold sacred & how powerful the western social technologies of interiority & intentionality have been, invades Liberia with rebel army, publishes “Malaises of Modernity” (1991) about how individuals are but building blocks in his transcendental project of paving over political fragmentation, publishes “Politics of Recognition” (1992) during brutal civil war—about how denying recognition to certain kinds of groups is itself violence, & real democracy requires recognizing distinct cultural identities—& wins landslide victory in the 1997 election with campaign slogans grounded in his philosophy, like “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I’ll vote for him anyway,” & after several other transnational communitarian postliberal civil wars—involving all kinds of public-private partnerships in governance & mining—his work was done, he fled for Nigeria, where he then published “Modern Social Imaginaries” (2003), about how eg de jure political power wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be, & guiding shared myths & collective narratives & social expectations can be more important for connecting with & shepherding one’s networks of subjects, & so Nigeria turned him over to The Hague, where he was recognized as the first African sovereign to have committed war crimes, & so in his comfy confinement began his most prolific period, putting out “A Secular Age” (2007) about how societies are founded by gods in whom disbelief is at first literally unthinkable but eventually they “mature” & not only overthrow their god but also demote belief in him to but one increasingly trivial choice among many, & “Retrieving Realism” (2015) about how he’s not just an abstract mind in one small isolated cell, he’s an embodied & networked being, & his thought must be interpreted through that lens, & publishes “The Language Animal” (2016) about how language use can shape the world & power & politics instead of merely describing it. I’m no “communitarian” or “postliberal” or whatever, but he was pretty badass, & preached what he practiced; & I’m no moralist or canceller or whatever, but it’s interesting nobody judges his followers for his actions. This is after all how philosophy began—with tyranny—& vice-versa; but imo this was actually often bad (it actually seems to have been most widespread in the culturally barren decadent Hellenistic period). Still, can’t help feeling something romantic stir inside when hearing about philosophers with bodycounts, territories, cartels, etc…

While you weren’t paying attention, this is all the fraud that’s recently been uncovered in Ohio - 7 nearly empty buildings housing 288 companies billed a combined $250 million between 2018–2024 - Investigators found widespread shell companies tied to Somali immigrant networks in Columbus, which is the 2nd largest Somali population in the US. Ohio spent $1 billion on home health care services in 2024 alone. - Nearly 100 Medicaid home health companies found operating out of a single empty building in Columbus billed taxpayers $66 million over a few years for services like “companionship” - $3.8 billion total in Pandemic Unemployment Fraud - $477 million+ in fraudulent claims - $3.3 billion in overpayments due to weak controls and an outdated system - 9 Medicaid providers charged with $500k–$578k stolen taxpayer money with over billing, falsified timesheets - Home health agencies sentenced for $5.7 million schemes due to inflated hours, ineligible and fake patients

This is indefensible: Spraying glyphosate over wild lands is ecocide, and toxic to humans, of course. But there is one upside: It allows us to see the full corruption of our system, which pretends to be preoccupied with our health, even as it poisons the world behind our backs.

Oh, I think I found a new guy to watch! youtube.com/watch?v=-Lc6Vi…

205 years ago today, Napoleon Bonaparte died on a tiny British prison island in the middle of the South Atlantic. He was 51. He had ruled most of Europe. And he changed the world so thoroughly that you are still living inside the systems he built. Start with the obvious one. The Napoleonic Code. He commissioned it in 1800, sat in on the drafting sessions personally, argued with the lawyers, and pushed it through in four years. Equality before the law. Property rights. Religious freedom. The end of feudal privilege. It is still the basis of civil law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, most of Latin America, Quebec, Louisiana, and chunks of the Middle East and Africa. About a third of the planet writes contracts using rules a Corsican artillery officer wrote between battles. He sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 for 15 million dollars. Roughly four cents an acre. It doubled the size of the United States overnight. Without that deal there is no St. Louis, no New Orleans as an American city, no Lewis and Clark, no Manifest Destiny. The American century starts with Napoleon needing cash for a war. He invaded Egypt in 1798 with an army and, weirdly, 167 scientists, mathematicians, and artists. They found the Rosetta Stone. That single slab is the reason we can read hieroglyphs at all. Egyptology as a field exists because Napoleon brought scholars to a war. He built the Bank of France, which still runs French monetary policy. He created the lycée system that still educates French teenagers. He shoved the metric system across Europe at sword-point until it stuck. He emancipated the Jews of every territory he conquered, tearing down ghetto walls in Rome, Venice, Frankfurt. He abolished serfdom in Poland. He standardized road networks, civil registries, and tax codes that European governments still operate from. And then there's the soldiering. He fought around 60 major battles and won most of them. Austerlitz, in 1805, against the combined Russian and Austrian empires, is still taught at West Point as one of the closest things to a tactically perfect battle ever fought. He was outnumbered, baited the enemy onto ground he had pre-selected, and broke them in a single afternoon. Three emperors took the field that morning. Only one walked off it on his own terms. He slept four hours a night. He read constantly, dictated letters to four secretaries at the same time, and personally signed off on everything from cavalry boot specs to the seating chart at the Comédie-Française. Wellington, the man who finally beat him at Waterloo, was asked decades later who the greatest general in history was. He answered without hesitating. "In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon." He lost, in the end, because he could not stop. Russia in 1812 swallowed his army whole. Six hundred thousand men marched in. Maybe a tenth came back. He abdicated in 1814, escaped from Elba, ruled France again for 100 days, and lost it all for good in a wheat field in Belgium in June 1815. The British shipped him to St. Helena, a volcanic dot 1,200 miles off the African coast, and waited. He spent six years there dictating his memoirs, gardening, complaining about the dampness, and quietly rewriting his own legend so effectively that Europe spent the next century arguing about him. He died on May 5, 1821, during a storm so violent it ripped up the willow tree he liked to read under. His last words trailed off into fever. France. The army. Joséphine. Nineteen years later France brought him home. Two million people stood in the snow to watch the coffin go by. He was a tyrant. He was a reformer. He started wars that killed somewhere between three and six million people. He also wrote the rulebook that a third of humanity still lives under. Most people who try to conquer the world are forgotten inside a generation. Napoleon has been dead for 205 years and we are still arguing about him because we are still using his furniture.

@DefiantLs When one door closes another one opens, duh.

Liberal on TikTok: “I made a stupid video about the president, the far right found it and posted it on Twitter, and then got me fired from my job”

@George_Boreas youtu.be/5t6VhwYQj3s?si…

@George_Boreas Idk all the hand wringing reminds me of a quote "PEE- WEE listen to reason"

Tucker is cornering neocons with increasingly elucidated arguments that lead to a very dark and embarrassing truth.

@realparksgore Excellent topic, ngl I always loved current events as a topic.

Reacting to this: youtube.com/watch?v=ad3h_1…