Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp), page 6
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 07:51:51 JST 
simsa03
♪ Sonny Landreth, "Great Gulf Wind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HVgVmC4VN0
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 07:45:45 JST
simsa03
♪ Sonny Landreth, "Congo Square" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBXMlmjS780
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 07:39:19 JST
simsa03
♪ Sonny Landreth, "Shooting For The Moon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKPCf26-UJs
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jun-2026 04:17:43 JST
simsa03
Amelia Schafer, "AMERICA 250: How the Haudenosaunee shaped America’s democracy" https://ictnews.org/news/america-250-how-the-haudenosaunee-shaped-americas-democracy/
A pretty detailed account of the "Great Law of Peace", the "constitution" of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Recommended (as read and as inspiration).
!reading -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jun-2026 10:24:49 JST
simsa03
The new essay collection by George Scialabba, "The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia", came with the mail. Lovely. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jun-2026 00:44:57 JST
simsa03
Adam Kredo, "US Probe Finds 101 More Staffers for UNRWA ‘Gaza Relief Organization’ Are Hamas Soldiers From October 7: Schoolteachers, Principals Exposed as Terrorists" https://freebeacon.com/trump-administration/exclusive-us-probe-finds-101-more-staffers-for-unrwa-gaza-relief-organization-are-hamas-soldiers-from-october-7-schoolteachers-principals-exposed-as-terrorists/
I'd love to see more respectable sources on this. But beside that: Defund UNRWA! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jun-2026 00:23:43 JST
simsa03
New blog post : "The Omertà That Is Family" https://simsa01.wordpress.com/2026/06/09/the-omerta-that-is-family/ -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jun-2026 08:51:49 JST
simsa03
♪ Elai Botner and the Children of Abroad, "נעים עכשיו" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaB88Y_A9ns
Very much like the upbeat tempo.
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 06-Jun-2026 11:27:10 JST
simsa03
"Totalitarianism is completely incomprehensible in the West. They think they can negotiate with a psychopath like Putin, like Hitler."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbUFEGX03Q
A conversation between Andrea Chalupa and Jonathan Fink. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 06-Jun-2026 10:46:44 JST
simsa03
"I don’t really believe in truth—not even in the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.”
— Harold Bloom -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 05-Jun-2026 12:33:54 JST
simsa03
George Scialabba has a new book out : "The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia" (2026)
A new collection of his essays (although some were already published in other collections of his). Still, it's great to see such an eminent voice talk about utopia.
sources
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 05-Jun-2026 12:07:08 JST
simsa03
Drones have targets. I wish "online selfs" with all their muttering and screeching and tik-toking had some such. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 05-Jun-2026 07:59:44 JST
simsa03
German media freak out over Germany not getting a seat on the UN Secuity Council. Gee! Germany already got the presidency of the UN General Assembly. Why should anybody offer Germany another high profile position at the UN? Stop being greedy and lachrymose at the same time.
It is just embarrassing to hold the membership card to German citizenship in these times. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 01-Jun-2026 22:48:50 JST
simsa03
Congratulations! May your business live long and prosper... :-) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 01-Jun-2026 11:28:37 JST
simsa03
As we have way too many texts by way too many writers and way too few receptive readers, the rise of #AI as automated reading utility may only on the surface sound alarming or ridiculous.
Given an oeuvre that AI may parse according to specific prompts ("questions"), the public character of text may change or disappear, but not its intellectual value. We may continue to write, publish, engage, but no longer with the aim of reaching out, getting involved, or prosper economically.
Rather, #AI may decisevly change our attitudes towards writing (and with that: to reading). AI can parse and make explicit tendencies and traits in our personal intellectual lifes we hitherto didn't sensed. That is: What once was "conversation" (cf. hermeneutics) and its community creating role (cf. Martin Buber) may now radically change its character. Talking to ourselves may lead us astray and to hallucinations, but also to a more concentrated way of individual worldmaking.
Imagine a painter like Picasso. Could we really fathom him as creating his art "on feedback"? At most we can see him create his art depending on the atmospheres arising by the successions of solitude, conversations with muses and intellectuals. But the art itself? That happened in reclusion. Apply that to writing. Even the most public of public intellectuals and writers worked in solitude, relying only from time to time on a change in settings via change in atmospheres and conversational exchanges. The writing appeared in solitude.
So how awful can it then be when all of us can now write and try out thoughts, ideas, edifices of words in our solitude, only to open up at times to the conversations we may have with #AI? No worry, you may still talk to your human friends. That's not the point.
The point is that AI can give us a glimpse on our work, and thus a perspective on not yet seen options and possible developments, that we hitherto used to have only with our immediate and intimate friends. This linkage may dissolve.
We talk with the machine to see what can be seen as machine-like in our thinking. That is a pretty exciting prospect.
Take, as mentioned briefly above, the "service" AI can give us: It may parse an oeuvre according to certain prompts. But prompts are not a questions. The difference between question and answer, this very basal form of receiving information-cum-atmosphere is no longer a proper way of describing prompt and reply in AI mediated settings. "The medium is the message"? "The medium is an extension of man"? These are approaches outdated by now. Both slogans represent stages of reflection when the I and Thou (Martin Buber again) were still safely in place. Man, simply by looking, by attending, creates the very efficacy of the object of his perecption or deliberation to impress him.
In that sense, the object is of his making, and the hiatus between Him and It a function of his attending. So far, so good. And so banal and well-worn. But in the moment that it is us who decide what the machine is going to focus on, on us, our oeuvre, our intellectual efforts, in that moment we no longer ask questions and wait for answers but find ourselves swimming in water, spheres of dissolved differences between us and these.
Prompts and replies are not questions and answers. And they happen in circumstances no longer presupposing for their existence the observing "I". The dissolution of "I" and "Thou", "here" and "there", has direct impact on what questions are and what answeres (or their lack) may deliver.
For a while it will be quite amusing to toy with the possibilities of AI, to see how they return what we hand them. But as much as mind is no longer a mirror of Nature (cf. Richard Rorty), so is the answer no longer a mirror of the question or the retrieval no longer a mirror of the prompt. What we find in #AI guided contemplation and reflection is the disappearance of space and of time as structural features of thought. We may approach these changes in rationality less with worry and far more with playfullness, even joy.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 01-Jun-2026 02:57:24 JST
simsa03
When times lose their ambiguities, their multiple layers of meaning and possibility, when they become literal, then these are times that not only invite but bring about war. What also happens in literal times is that when options fade, the sense of history, the memory of the long coming-to-be and passing-away — and the knowledge of how much this memory sits on top of mountains of not-knowing, not-remembering — fades as well. This seems to be a major function of this literalism. Not just the dissappearance of options, of possibilities, of the floating openness of a world (and worlds inside worlds) in favour of a war-like situation created by ubiquitous disambiguation. But that memory, remembrance, and with that the openness and ambiguity that is the past, disappears as well. The power of practical constraints not only impacts the present and the future but in a debilitating sense the past as well. And then, afterwards, everybody is astounded how it was even possible that we could have become what we are now, how we could act so terrifyingly, how we become the monsters we fearded all the time were lurking under our beds. How we could become that way. Amnesia. The first victory of a relentless literalism. Brought about by the horrors we faced and our emotional compulsion to act, somehow, anyhow, just to make it stop and to maintain our conscience, leading to a broad call to action throughout our collective spheres. Not knowing is one thing, being deceived another, not being capable of bearing emotional and cognitive distress even a third. But happily giving up remembrance for the ability to act, to happily give away memory in order to become monsters which we only later, if at all, flabbergastedly consider, that is an aspect that usually evades our awareness and our conscience. Although it lies plain in the open. And is something on which authoritarian rule (inside and outside) rests.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 31-May-2026 07:33:01 JST
simsa03
♪ Rembetiko (1983, Greek, with English subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZXSjtZ0P1I
When I first saw the nmovie in 1984 or 1985, it hit me. I drowned in these songs. Rarely has pain been made so relatable, it seems. (The film is said to be loosely based on the life of rebetiko singer Marika Ninou.)
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 10:41:17 JST
simsa03
Watching the sci-fi anime "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise" (1987). It's not the story that impresses me but the detailedness of the alternate world depicted. Only "Le Garage hermétique" (1976-1979) by Moebius comes to mind as on a par in visual playfulness and richness. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 27-May-2026 10:59:07 JST
simsa03
Being hawkish doesn't mean being conservative or on the right.
forgottendistinctions
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 27-May-2026 10:58:19 JST
simsa03
Evil is not insanity.
forgottendistinctions
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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