If BlueSky suspends someone, natural justice requires, surely, that they be given some explanation? @jay.bsky.team #sarahkendzior

What he said👇; moved to tears at times, cutting edge: @maryhalvorson.bsky.social

"... it is not, after all, really a question about whether you can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel." Rebecca Solnit #lostness

"Perhaps the role of the philosopher, the role of philosophy at present, is not to be a theoretician of totality, but the diagnostician, if you will allow me to use this word, the diagnostician of today." ― Michel Foucault #BookSky Raymond Aron & Michel Foucault, Dialogue.

Unknowable

CFP: “Embodied Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern World” Conference at the University of Amsterdam Monday, 15 June 2026 How do material conditions shape how & what we know about the natural world? #earlymodern #C18L 1/6

Woven with joyous startles; such a deft & soulful player: @marcribot.bsky.social at the Bimhuis, here in A'dam:

There'll be no messin' here:

We can't see them, but we're told they are there ... hence, an obligatory repost of hares:

Michel de Certeau (on AI?): "The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularisers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) tells us nothing about what it is for its users." - AI mania may deflate, with a farty 'phut' not a bang, just through banal usage.

It is essential, in days like these, to rip into political parties who claim to be 'left' whilst swinging hard-right; Zack Polanski leads the way:

That eternal hope thing seems to be bubbling up again on BSky; mood swing:

“I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. ... The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I'd rather die.’” 🫡

Well this is wonderful ... and not available on easy stream (via Platenzaak, Eindhoven):

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet [The First Letter], 1903

Dear diary - today I went to Eindhoven, it was very tidy. #dutchdesignweek

One for the hive mind, no prizes just gratitude: I helped this little fella today, when he knocked himself out on a plate glass window - a finch?

Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul.~James Hollis

Keir Starmer - my dislike for Margaret Thatcher was a tad less fierce; he's so strange:

Diane Keaton | Interiors | Woody Allen | 1978.

Looks like a hare to me:

Solidarity from Amsterdam : #RodeLijn

Such a pleasure last night, to come across the fine playing of Dimitrios Tsiotas (at the Kring, here in Amsterdam) : #jazzsky #jazzguitar www.dimitriostsiotasmusic.com/bio

A lesser-taken path towards restored faith in humankind: #doncherry #jazzsky

This one goes out to @wendyo.bsky.social ... 'Compleat Imbiber' spirits glass by Frank Thrower for Dartington Crystal ... so 1972:

"Aristotle was profoundly right ... ethics is concerned with how to live and human happiness ... this sort of 'practical knowledge' is ... wider than the sphere of 'science' ... and a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science." Hilary Putnam (1978)

"Instead of being left behind, old evils return under new names ... human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been." John Gray (2018)

In other news ... the Sunday morning concert at Concertgebouw in Amsterdam was not sh*t; Brahms & Strauss were actually rather wonderful:

Medium becomes toxic substrate; internet search is now a bare-faced raft for product placement; obviously, AI will also distribute embedded ads.

Bluesky reminds me today ... Arvo Pärt is 90; when I was drowning, as a young lawyer, the sure stillness of his music was so what kept my head up:

"Although we are well aware that we know much that earlier generations did not, we are much less conscious of what they knew that we do not." Peter Burke (2024) #doubt

Deeply moving; I have no Arabic, but unsurprised that she sings of 'Ruins'; thinking of Gaza, and the arrant, callous, cowardice of England's goverment: open.spotify.com/track/2eAiSx...

"This is why we stay with poetry ... from forest to city, from story to computer ... we know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify." Edouard Glissant #doubt

"Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete ... a false pretension .... a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific ... this is untrue." Michael Polanyi (1949)

And the award for 'Ravishing Book Cover' goes to ... Luis Blackaller of @cartoondistortion.bsky.social for '999 Years of Peace' by James Kaelan:

Echoes of Vilém Flusser, up front from @profstorm.bsky.social - "Postmodern doubt can be made to doubt itself ... show us the way toward humble, emancipatory knowledge" - a rich book: #doubt

If you want to feel that a top-of-their-game NY '50s jazz trio is rehearsing at your place:

"Doubt has dislodged faith and the sense of reality has been lost." Vilèm Flusser #doubt

Just because ... a calming view in St. Omer:

My account seems to have become a tad taken over by the spirit of jazz ... 'not in the sales blurb, but also not so s**t as so much else just now:

Bus stations, not all bad:

Still basking in the after-glow of an impromptu visit to the lovely Saint-Omer 'Jaaz Festival'; the abbey ruins are magical:

Just leaving this picture up of Angelo Debarre, while I try to fathom his brilliance, magic & charm:

Lea Maria Fries, a fine & captivating vocalist, just opened Saint-Omer 'Jaaz Festival' with panache:

"... any music that has been invented today or recently, one that is thus modern, must appear absurd, since if it corresponds to any of the maxims that are pronounced today, it must be rubbish." Ludwig Wittgenstein (trans. Cahill) #fallfriday

Deeply ignorant as I am about jellyfish, they fill me with wonder; I prefer not to know, so that 'what, how & why' dance:

Youth, making it up as they go along, with rapt attention for each other; #redlightjazz topped up my reserves of hope: #jazzsky

Søren Kierkegaard nails the lid down on AI: "... philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability ... it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, shows it off ... ":

Bog-standard English countryside ... gosh, how I miss it when I'm back here in the 'lowlands' :