Why break a language? To wake it up.
— Ilya Kaminsky
Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp), page 6
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simsa02 (simsa02@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Jan-2026 01:22:31 JST 
simsa02
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simsa02 (simsa02@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Jan-2026 01:19:14 JST
simsa02
THE WORD OF GOING DOWN DEEP
that we have read.
The years, the words since then.
We still are who we are.You know space is infinite,
you know there is no need to fly,
you know: what wrote itself into your eye
deepens us into depth.— Paul Celan
(transl. from German by Johannes Beilharz)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jan-2026 04:22:41 JST 
simsa03
For dinner I had self-baked pan bread which I cut in half, then sliced it in the middle and, in the fashion of a Döner Kepab, filled it with a stew of potatoes, carrots, onions, leek, and celery I had made earlier. Yummy! -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jan-2026 03:14:24 JST 
tinydoctor
And at midnight we burn our old socks.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jan-2026 03:13:05 JST
tinydoctor
What are you doing on New Year's Eve? We plan on sheltering in place. We don't have any fresh lamb's blood to smear on the door lintels, so we're using the syrup from a jar of Amarena cherries we put in our Manhattans. And if the Angel of Death comes for the firstborn, we'll offer him a stiff one. Louisville pour.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jan-2026 03:33:39 JST
simsa03
We are the daily person with its personality and character traits, and are the person behind this person. Same for the person we fall in love with and enter in a relationsship. And it feels like it's the relationship by which the person behind the person looks to come to the fore and blend with its daily person. (As I use and understand the words, the person behind the person is not the person's daimon. A daimon never feels at home, he is connected to but is bot this peculiar person.)
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 23:27:48 JST
tinydoctor
All moons, all years, all days, all winds
reach their completion and pass away.
So does blood reach its place of quiet,
as it reaches its power and its throne.
Measured is the time in which we can praise
the splendor of creation.
Measured is the time in which we can know
the blaze and warmth of the sun.
Measured is the time in which
the phalanx of stars will wheel,
and the gods trapped within the stars
watch over us.(Adapted from the Book of Chilam Balam.)
You're welcome. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 12:46:21 JST
simsa03
Now I believe we'll manage to solve all our problems ... https://youtube.com/shorts/pH86yCMvtVg?si=pf5QIGuQfEbrgtjM -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 12:13:10 JST
simsa03
If I were a right-winger I'd say: "There is no infinite welfare on finite planet." But as I am not, I say that we need to find ways to decouple welfare expenses from resources.
Which brings up the larger point that this right-wing claim is analogous to the one from the Degrowth movement that there is no infinite growth on a finite planet.
While the Right continues with the contention that because there cannot be endless growth in welfare spending we'd have to cut it in order for economies to thrive, the Degrowth movement claims that because there cannot be infinite growth we'd need to cut resources consumption in order for the environment to sustain.
Both arguments are structually similiar, reactionary, and ignore the option of decoupling of social welfare costs from resources as of economic growth from resources.
(See https://theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/11/economic-growth-no-longer-linked-to-carbon-emissions-in-most-of-the-world-study-finds that nudged that thought.)
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #postdoom
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 10:39:45 JST
simsa03
Yep, at times I have difficulties detecting humour. I guess the Equanimous Public University would be a good place to re-enroll again. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 10:37:35 JST
simsa03
Same to you, my best wishes for the new year. Hope the Nov 2026 elections turn out as desired and we'll turn the ship around. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 10:34:30 JST
simsa03
https://youtube.com/shorts/TaeW1y011mM?si=u4XCHI57xmfp7DsU -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 00:09:00 JST
simsa03
Norman Podhoretz, "Hannah Arendt on Eichmann:A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance" (1963) https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/hannah-arendt-on-eichmanna-study-in-the-perversity-of-brilliance/
Podhoretz saw the flaws in Arendt's "Eichmann" early and described them lucidly. Eichmann became for Arendt a vindication of her "Origins of Totalitarianism", albeit she had to distort historical events and entertain questionable premisses. Or perhaps better: Her questionable premisses, visible in "Eichmann" hint to their underlying efficaciousness in "Origins". Anyway, this article is rich in its observations, so I quote passages that are more of interest to me right now.
«And the Nature of Totalitarianism? What Miss Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial teaches us about the Nature of Totalitarianism is that the time has come to re-examine the whole concept. Apart from the many other weaknesses it has revealed since the days when it was first developed to distinguish between the “simple” dictatorships of the pre-modern era and the ideologically inspired revolutionary regimes of Stalin and Hitler, the theory of totalitarianism has always been limited in its usefulness by the quasi-metaphysical and rather Germanic terms in which it was originally conceived. For what the theory aimed at describing was a fixed essence, not a phenomenon in flux, and the only changes it saw as possible within the totalitarian structure were those leading toward a more perfect realization of the totalitarian idea itself. (One consequence of this—and it speaks worlds about the limitations of the theory in general—was that many students of Soviet society refused for a long time to credit the significance of the liberalizing tendencies that were so obviously becoming manifest under Khrushchev: once a totalitarian state always a totalitarian state, unless, of course, it could be overthrown by force.)
But since the perfect totalitarian state did not yet exist, how did the theorists of totalitarianism know what it would look like in a fully realized condition? The answer is that they knew from the Nazi concentration camps, which, as they rightly understood, had in part been set up to serve as models and as “laboratories” for experimenting with techniques of absolute domination. Here was where totalitarianism stood nakedly revealed; here was its essential meaning; here was what the system was really all about.
So far, so good. The trouble began with a tendency to speak of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as though they had already attained to the perfection of vast concentration camps, and as though the Nazis in their style and the Communists in theirs had already been transformed into the new men of the transvalued totalitarian future. Yet on the basis of a somewhat more optimistic view of human nature than is implicit in the theory of totalitarianism (which substitutes for the naïve liberal idea of the infinite perfectibility of man the equally naïve idea of the infinite malleability of man), one may be permitted to doubt that the whole world could under any circumstances ever be made over into a concentration camp. As it is, Soviet Russia seems to be moving in the other direction. And so far as the Third Reich is concerned, it lasted for less than thirteen years and conquered only a small section of the globe, with the result that: (1) Nazi Germany never had a chance to seal itself off completely from outside influences; and (2) the people who participated actively in Nazism knew they were being criminal by the standards under which they themselves had been raised and that also still reigned supreme in the “decadent” culture of the West.
This is why it is finally impossible to accept Miss Arendt’s conception of Eichmann’s role and character. Eichmann was not living in the ideal Nazi future, but in the imperfect Nazi present, and while we can agree with Miss Arendt that, as a mere lieutenant-colonel, he probably did not enjoy the importance that the Israeli indictment attributed to him, neither can he have been quite so banal as she makes him out to be. After all, there was enough opposition to the Final Solution to have persuaded him that not everyone looked upon the murdering of Jews as a fine and noble occupation, and after all, he was a first-generation Nazi and an important enough one to have been trusted with a large measure of administrative responsibility for a top-priority item in the Nazi program. Now, if we are not to lose our own minds in the act of trying to penetrate into the psychology of the Nazi mind, we must be very careful to keep it clear that this item of the Nazi program—the “cleansing” of Europe, and ultimately the whole world, of Jews—was literally insane. It is one thing to hate Jews, but it is quite another to contemplate the wholesale slaughter of Jews; it is one thing to believe that no nation-state can be healthy when it contains “alien” elements, but it is quite another to decide upon the murder of eleven million people (the estimated target of the Final Solution) as a means of achieving ethnic homogeneity. Ponder the difference between the Germans and the Rumanians in this connection. The Rumanians were the worst anti-Semites in Europe and were delighted to join in the butchering of Jews, until they discovered that there was money to be made from the saving of Jews, whereupon they began saving Jews: this is pathological anti-Semitism bounded by rational limits. The Germans, on the other hand, regarded the Jews, whom they had rendered utterly helpless with a stroke of the pen, as dangerous enemies, and they were so convinced of the necessity to do away with these enemies that they were willing to let the war effort suffer rather than let up: this is pathological anti-Semitism bounded by no rational limits. Insanity, in short.»
«It is in this insanity, I believe, and not in the pedestrian character of Adolf Eichmann, that whatever banality attaches to the evil of the Final Solution must be sought. And because Hitler and his cohorts were madmen on the Jewish question, there is probably little of general relevance we can learn from the Final Solution beyond what the Nuremberg trials established concerning the individual’s criminal accountability when acting upon superior orders, even within a system guided by insane aims. There is, however, much to be learned from the Final Solution about other matters, and principally about anti-Semitism. When Miss Arendt speaks of the amazing extent of the moral collapse that the Nazis caused “everywhere,” she must be referring specifically to the Jewish question. The will to fight the German armies did not collapse everywhere, and the will to defend democracy against the Nazi onslaught stood up well enough to triumph in the end; the only collapse that took place “everywhere” was a collapse of the will to prevent the Nazis from wiping the Jews off the face of the earth. Here again, Miss Arendt can be refuted out of her own mouth, for acquiescence in the Final Solution (as she demonstrates) was far from universal in Europe (though it may well have been nearly universal in Germany). The fact remains, however, that there was acquiescence enough to allow this insane Nazi ambition to come very close to succeeding. Nobody cared about the Gypsies because nobody ever thinks about the Gypsies—except the police. But how did it happen that nobody cared about the Jews when everyone seems always to be thinking about the Jews? The question surely answers itself, and the answer incidentally provides the justification for Ben Gurion’s statement that one of the purposes of the Eichmann trial was to make the nations of the world ashamed.
[...]
This habit of judging the Jews by one standard and everyone else by another is a habit Miss Arendt shares with many of her fellow-Jews, emphatically including those who think that the main defect of her version of the story is her failure to dwell on all the heroism and all the virtue that the six million displayed among them. But the truth is—must be—that the Jews under Hitler acted as men will act when they are set upon by murderers, no better and no worse: the Final Solution reveals nothing about the victims except that they were mortal beings and hopelessly vulnerable in their powerlessness. And as with the victims, so with those who were lucky enough to survive the holocaust. There is no special virtue in sheer survival, whatever Bruno Bettelheim may say, and there is no martyrdom in sheer victimization, whatever certain sentimentalists among us may think.»
!reading -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Dec-2025 20:24:42 JST
simsa03
Not quite sure what to make of your sentence. https://www.study.eu/article/study-in-europe-for-free-or-low-tuition-fees https://www.studying-in-germany.org/is-college-free-in-germany/ -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Dec-2025 20:20:57 JST
simsa03
"Half-Life 2 Blendwerk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6UUYWMM0bo
That could become a full-fledged and very interesting game. Why did no-one think earlier of combining the teleportation bubbles of HL1 with the environments of HL2 to create a maze? -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Dec-2025 19:54:23 JST
simsa03
Wäre ich ein Rechter, würde ich sagen: «Kein unendlicher Sozialstaat auf einem endlichen Planeten.»
Da ich aber kein Rechter bin, denke ich, wir müssen zu einem Decoupling von Sozialausgaben und Resourcen kommen.
Das ist keine Forderung, sondern Problemformulierung. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 10:53:31 JST
simsa03
I have the impression that I am entering a new phase in my life. One in which I drift away from my adoptive family, staring out in this no man's land. I have two mothers and three fathers, sure, lost sibling there, present ones here, still, with the latest developments, I don't feel like belonging or kin anymore. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 03:50:57 JST
simsa03
Alison Killing, "End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled" https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/
A vivid warning for every large-scale #infrastructure project, e.g., energy transitions. Apparently, people didn't learn from the USSR's industrialization or China's Great Leap Forward. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 23:28:50 JST
simsa03
That is really strange. Using Chrome or any other browser in Windows 10 makes gnusocial.jp nearly impossible to use, with endless manual reloads required. But using FF in a Debian derivate, gnusocial works fine. Still, avatar images are not always loaded, but the site is now accessible and usable for me. Very strange. I wonder what it is that prevents gnusocial.jp being properly accessed in a browser on W10. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 11:24:36 JST
simsa03
I don't believe in life before death.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the