Remember when Twitter would slap warning labels on Donald Trump’s tweets? (If not, does this refresh your memory?) Not only has Twitter failed to ban war criminals like Putin from its platform; it is also allowing the Kremlin’s account to spread fake news with impunity — not a single “misleading information” or “glorification of violence” warning label in sight! Behold:
Following up on my previous post, which I am reblogging below, I put the first two parts of my three-part “intellectual autobiography” into Clive Thompson’s “only the questions” online tool, and this is what I got back — click on each image to pull up a larger version:
The panel on the left side contains the questions from part 1 of my “intellectual autobiography” (IA), which covers the first ten years of my teaching career (1998 to 2008), while the right side contains the questions from part 2 of my IA, which recounts the years 2009 to 2019.
That is the name of this simple and elegant online tool (pictured below) created by Clive Thompson, a tech journalist, author, and developer of another similar web tool called “just the punctuation” that I blogged about last year (see here).
To the point, Thompson’s new “only the questions” tool allows you to delete all the regular declarative statements and exclamatory sentences from a text, leaving only those sentences or phrases consisting of questions. FYI, here is an extended excerpt from his essay “The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing” (ellipsis in the original):
When we’re writing, why do we ask questions? Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary signpost, a little trick for ushering the reader along: Great question, glad you asked, let me answer that one! Other times the questions are truly…
That is the name of this simple and elegant online tool (pictured below) created by Clive Thompson, a tech journalist, author, and developer of another similar web tool called “just the punctuation” that I blogged about last year (see here).
To the point, Thompson’s new “only the questions” tool allows you to delete all the regular declarative statements and exclamatory sentences from a text, leaving only those sentences or phrases consisting of questions. FYI, here is an extended excerpt from his essay “The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing” (ellipsis in the original):
When we’re writing, why do we ask questions? Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary signpost, a little trick for ushering the reader along: Great question, glad you asked, let me answer that one! Other times the questions are truly … questions. They come from the moments where we’re genuinely humble, and have arrived at the limits of our knowledge. We’re just thinking out loud, and, ideally, trying to find a really good question, one that frames our ignorance in a productive fashion. Many thinkers — from Socrates to my personal fave literary scholar Northrop Frye — argued that the acme of intellectual life wasn’t in knowing stuff but devising the truly puzzling, awe-inspiring questions that echo in the mind for years.
By way of example, when Thompson put in all of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, he got back this:
Postscript: Regarding your data privacy, Thompson adds (link in the original): “Whatever text you type into the tool isn’t saved or stored anywhere. You can check out the code on Glitch if you want to be sure, and remix it and reuse it yourself if you want.” For my part, I am going to try out Clive Thompson’s new “only the questions” tool on my own work and report my results in the next day or two.
Via Kottke: “Maria Prymachenko is one of Ukraine’s best-known artists. Known for her colorful, expressive, and ‘primitive’ style, Prymachenko won a gold medal for her work at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris and Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked ‘I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian’ after seeing her work. Prymachenko’s paintings featured animals (both real & fantastical), everyday Ukrainian people, food & agriculture, and themes of war & peace.”
Remember when the President of Serbia (Slobodan Milošević) was arrested and put on trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes that occurred under his watch in Bosnia and Herzegovina? (See here.) So, why hasn’t a single Russian military official been charged for Putin’s inhumane actions 22 years ago: the destruction of an entire capital and the indiscriminate massacre of thousands of civilians? [Read about the 1999-2000 Battle of Groznyhere (hat tip: Brian Leiter), and for the bigger picture, see here.] At the very least, why haven’t the free countries of the world created a Russian War Crimes Tribunal to put Vladimir Putin and his men on notice? To be fair, there should also be a special tribunal for U.S. war crimes, and George W. Bush should be prosecuted under international law for his illegal invasion of Iraq, but the misdeeds of Bush (going to war under false pretenses), of the Supreme Leader of Iran (Ali Khamenei), of the Chinese Communist Party chief (Xi Jinping), and of North Korea’s Dear Leader (Kim Jong-un) all pale in comparison to what Putin has done (Grozny) and is now doing (Ukraine)! #FuckPutin #FuckBush #FuckKhamenei #FuckXi
Check out this excellent essay by Tom McTague, a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic. Among other things, McTague compares and contrasts the bravery of Ukraine with the shameful and calculating cowardice of her pusillanimous NATO allies. Below the fold is an extended excerpt from McTague’s essay — links in the original; hat tip: Eugene Volokh.
prior probability 