2. “Crazyism” in philosophy:

3. Sam Haselby on the good cop/ bad cop routine that underlies the pseudo-leftism of America’s elites:

Most people are familiar with the bad cop / good cop routine from cinema or television. America’s elite neoliberal institutions rely on it too, recognize and promote both professional types.

Think of it this way: the dogmatic neoclassical economists (in Larry Summers’s words if there is more inequality it is because people are getting more what they deserve) are the bad cops of elite neoliberalism. They frame you and beat you up, so to speak. But then their…

…colleagues come into the holding cell and say, look I want to abolish the police, return the land to the indigenous, and provide reparations. None of this is going to happen. They are the good cops of elite neoliberalism. The legitimacy and power of the system relies on both.

Another way to think of it is the bad cops have helped secure material resources of historic abundance, the good cops come in and provide the moral resources which to try to balance out the bad cop’s depredations have to be pushed to a grandiosity, a meta-historical scale.

Originally tweeted by Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) on March 17, 2023.

4. Orson Welles moaning “Mwahhh, the French”:

5. Fr Reginald Foster was a better teacher than he pretended to be:

6. Tom Holland on Saint Paul:

Here’s @holland_tom on St Paul: “You are kind of hearing him thinking aloud as he wrestles with the implications of the fact that Christ suffered this. And everything that he’s writing is an attempt to say – how this could be?

“It’s upended his expectations of God’s plan so radically that he can never arrive at, I think, a stable sense of exactly what it means. Although Paul absolutely recognizes that the fact that Jesus was crucified lies at the heart of everything that Jesus’ mission is

“and therefore how he relates to God’s plan, what is happening, the very character of the world, the very character of God, the very nature of God’s relationship to humanity – Everything has been upended by this.

“So the cross is absolutely at the heart of everything that Paul’s writing about. But at the same time, there is kind of an embarrassment about it because it is the most shocking thing imaginable, which is kind of the point.”

Originally tweeted by Susannah Black Roberts, Niece Appreciator (@suzania) on March 18, 2023.

7. Carolina Eyck plays the “Queen of the Night” aria:

8. Adult reading as a reward for adulthood: