What they mean by capitalism's internal contradictions?

HLA Hart derived the term "open texture" from Vienna Circle philosopher Friedrich Waismann, who called it "the possibility of vagueness."

Launching a spontaneous mass movement www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/w...

The unfortunately infrequent novel, Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium, p. 7, a sense of foreboding, this will lead to something no doubt

We see the need for a new principle of life, but some attempt an artificial intensification of the very principle that has led to decay -- the nationalist outburst, which is nothing but a mania, all these nationalisms being so many blind alleys. -- José Ortega y Gasset (1930)

Allen Ginsberg’s centennial is imminent -- June 3, 2026

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. -- Susan Sontag (1961)

Barrington Moore taught that the intellectual's commitment to truth, as best they can reckon it, carries with it the obligation to point out the illusions, ambiguities, and hypocrisies "of those who raise the banner of freedom in order to perpetuate brutality."

The trump-imaged $250 bill would be fully illegal, pursuant to 31 USC § 5114

At least by HLA Hart's lights, Ronald Dworkin and Hans Kelsen held oddly similar views on the position of judges, for RD legal rights being those held against judges to the correct legal decision, for HK laws being commands made on judges and directing that they impose sanctions.

A good look at how lower courts have been treating those unreasoned and nontransparent Supreme Court emergency docket orders. www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/how-...

In the tension between enjoyment and asceticism, ideological reconciliation with existing social conditions needs a powerful psychic support, which is provided by the process of internalization, achieved by a manipulation of consciousness. -- Leo Kofler (1907 – 1995)

"No child under the age of 12 shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment more than 10 hours in one day." -- General Statutes of Massachusetts, Sec 3, ch. 60, ca Industrial Revolution

Hey, sleight of hand Mr. Liptak, we want to know the "origins" of "fund" not just "slush." And the etymology of "fund" no joke is the bottom of the barrel.

In 1958, Justice John Marshall Harlan II pitches in a baseball game between law clerks and lawyers at Covington & Burling. Source: supremecourthistory.org/wp-content/u...

I liked this EB White quote: "I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down."

A 2018 volume of essays dedicated to demonstrating Husserl's profound influence upon analytic philosophy, including specifically upon the work of Bertrand Russell, Polish School logicians such as Ajdukiewicz and Lesniewski, and the young Carnap.

Brazilian academic Fábio Ulhoa Coelho curiously writes that laws are "simply assumptions" adopted by legal officials, values reified so as to appear "as things with inherent meaning," such that future jurists could dispense with laws and directly apply the experienced values in treating conflict.

Ironically, the ophiolite rock formations filled with asbestos appear also to be rich in hydrogen, which when burned "emits only water vapor," with deposits worldwide capable of "supplying the world's needs for hundreds of years." But is the profit system rational? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/c...

There is not, in the United States, either a state religion or a religion declared to be that of a majority, or a predominance of one religion over another. -- Gustave de Beaumont (1835)

Arturo Toscanini refused to include Giovinezza, the fascist party’s official hymn, at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in May 1931 at the concert celebrating Giuseppe Martucci's birthday, leading to the Blackshirts' violent assault and the Italian police's confiscation of his passport.

Jacques Derrida opined provocatively (of course) of the concept of sovereignty that states going to war against rogue states are themselves, as a logical matter, "in their most legitimate sovereignty, rogue states abusing their power."

So sad! A dying breed

Walter Benjamin distinguished Erlebnis, experience as a momentary, defensive response to a passing sensation, from Erfahrung, unmediated experience shaped by a deep relation to reality, having existential depth. (Cf today's resort to AI vs engagement with the materials.)

Meyer Schapiro, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida put a lot of effort into interpreting this van Gogh piece.

New work of interest by Dan Priel challenging the presupposition that the legal realists’ views, and in particular those of Karl Llewellyn, aligned with legal positivism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The mid-17th century brothers Pieter & Johan De la Court argued that democracy is the best system for issuing rational laws in the citizens' interests, and in which the "public will" is least likely to reflect only the private and self-interested concerns of the ruler alone.

Brooklyn dinner spot

Spinoza's 1705 biographer Johannes Colerus reported that the philosopher was entranced by spider fights, and "was so well-pleased with that battle, that he would sometimes break into laughter."

Étienne Balibar astutely opines that democratizing democracy openly confronts the lack of democracy in existing institutions toward transforming them in a beneficial direction, the active citizen being the agent of this transformation via a process that is continually begun anew.

Bluesky suspended my account yesterday over this post, apparently its AI interpreted 'retards' as a pejorative plural noun rather than a third person verb form.

Louis Althusser and his wife Hélène Rytmann, they seem happy

Aimé Césaire, here pictured at the Sorbonne arriving at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Sept 1956), wrote, "No one colonizes innocently, a civilization which justifies colonization is already a sick civilization."

Ágnes Heller, a Budapest School philosopher, was born OTD, a global authority on democracy's fragility and the need to maintain civic participation in thwarting potential tyrannies.

Themes in Jeremy Waldron's fairly recent volume include individuals' self-application of legal norms, and the balancing of rule of law aspirations toward certainty, predictability, coherence .. with its commitment to agency, dignity, thoughtfulness.

In his original 1958 essay, HLA Hart advocated candor on the side of legal positivism, a simple acknowledgement that evil law is nevertheless valid and that we might sometimes have to openly violate the rule against retrospective sanctions as the best moral option.

The historic case of Morgan v Virginia, launched by Irene Morgan's spontaneous refusal to give up her Greyhound bus seat to white folks, issued by a 7-judge SCOTUS panel June 3, 1947, Harlan Fiske Stone having died, Robert Jackson assigned to prosecute the Nuremberg trial.

Liam Murphy, with Jeremy Waldron, reacting to Joseph Raz's fascinating presentation of his paper on normative powers at the @nyulaw Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy (Oct 17, 2019).

Manufactured in a race for profits, AI has an inbreeding aspect that may lead to model collapse and incoherence, absent the time or effort needed to confirm the validity and human source of inputs, which sources increasingly become AI generated stuff, multiplying the errors. Example via The Lancet.

The Pittsburgh Courier launched the "Double V" campaign in 1942 in protest against the continuing egregious mistreatment of Black soldiers and sailors upon returning to the US during WW2, advocating twin victories over enemies abroad and racial injustice at home.

Joseph Raz said the practice theory of rules, e.g., HLA Hart's, suffers from three fatal defects: doesn't explain rules that aren't practices; doesn't distinguish b/w social rules & accepted reasons; & deprives rules of their normative character.

Perhaps revisiting this take from 2016, that Trump’s mode "excludes some of fascism’s classic features, for he rarely invokes the language of blood and soil, the rejuvenating experience of war, or explicit opposition to electoral institutions and politics." jacobin.com/2016/12/trum...

Thanks to the Hofstra L Review - Conceptions of Law, Ideology, and the Rule of Law - why the rule of law project can be conducive in its moral evaluative commitments to an oppositional ideology in service of democratic agency and an ameliorative social function. hofstralawreview.org/wp-content/u...

Leon Trotsky's view of the progressive then regressive function of natural law doctrine

Robert Castel astutely coined "negative individualism" as the neo-liberal situation in which individuals are exhorted to behave as "entrepreneurs" of their own lives even as they're deprived of social conditions that would actually allow them to assert their autonomy.

Nietzsche formulates the human situation as Ordnungsschwund - a disappearance of order - not to lament loss of cosmic guidance but to celebrate an awakening from cosmic illusion toward self-assertion.

50th Anniversary "revised, expanded, and updated edition" of Strike! - the classic, otherwise suppressed history of workers' struggles in the US

Paul Ricoeur noted Freud's discovery of the stratum of morality that both prepares the way for autonomy via the agency of the ideal, and retards autonomy via tradition and the inner tyrant.