Alani Golanski

Duke Ellington (then performing in Turkey) to Jackie Kennedy (23 Nov 1963)

Opinion (ED Pa Feb 16, 2026):
As in Orwell's 1984, the government here claims that truth is the property of the elected chief magistrate, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overriden.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In this fairly recent volume, essays discuss the normative importance and descriptive impact of moral inferences in legal interpretation, and critically analyze the claims of legal interpretivism while uncovering the most recent versions of legal positivism.

Overlooked No More: Clifford Brown, Trumpeter Whose Brief Life Left a Lasting Mark

"Every time he picked up the instrument, something beautiful happened."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

Notions of the end of history and the end of humanity began originally with Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at L'École des hautes études pratique in Paris between 1933 and 1939.

Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

Closure of El Paso’s airspace is what you get when you place loyalty over competence in government.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/u...

This volume (1937) was a political science staple for three decades - Plato to fascism - George Sabine professor of philosophy @Cornell, also a carpenter and blacksmith, assisted Herbert Marcuse with his 1941 work Reason and Revolution.

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

The US has descended into abuse of legal mechanisms for surveillance of "Americans who criticize the agency," i.e. ICE.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Ukranian Vladyslav Heraskevych w/ helmet, disqualified on the ground that, at the Olympics, "no messaging is allowed." But there's nothing but "messaging" at the Olympics, including in Vladyslav's exclusion.

However simple an enumeration of 'facts' may be, however lacking in commentary, it already implies an 'interpretation', a method - they have been wrenched from their living context and fitted into a theory.
-- György Lukács

Quine: Conventions are agreements, and we've never agreed to abide by conventions of language.

Lewis: Conventions aren't agreements, they're practical solutions to recurring coordination problems.

Missouri attorney general wants to rewrite history and redefine who counts in the Census • Missouri Independent Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has filed a lawsuit seeking to require the Census Bureau to “redo” the $14 billion 2020 Census.

Aimed at compressing the census by disregarding non-citizen residents, "Hanaway’s lawsuit is ugly and unfounded. Even in these dark times for the rule of law and basic human decency, this gambit should fail and she should be judged for the attempt."

missouriindependent.com/2026/02/10/m...

Jean-Paul Sartre held a double-edged conception of freedom, on the one hand resting in the fact of people's responsibility for their acts, and on the other hand rooted in the value space in which people can live out what's possible for them.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

Newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre (1973): "Bad Bunny, the man who scares Trump."

Hannah Arendt brilliantly construed Montesquieu's main concern as "not with laws but with the actions their spirit would inspire," less the nature of government (eg republic vs monarchy) than its action-generating principle.

There is nothing so reassuring as a person's listening to reason. Understanding is rationality which takes account of others and nevertheless retains its independence as an aspect of humanity.
-- Hannah Arendt

Cordell Hull (1871- 1955), the retrograde Secretary of State under FDR, whose isolationist bleating that admitting refugees would pose a threat to the US, substantially contributed to the country's penurious WW II immigration policies.

The jurist Eduard Gans, specially known for his historical analyses of succession and property law, was both Hegel’s most prominent student and an important early mentor to Marx at the University of Berlin.

Rights sold in 1939 for ten shillings, original recording of the tune later turned on its head and transmogrified into The Lion Sleeps Tonight, now misappropriated by the degenerate US president to dehumanize his perceived political foes.

The Philosophy of Musical Sounds, Robert Smith (1749); printed by J. Bentham, Printer to the Univerfity.

The economist and émigré from Nazi Germany Paul Baran insisted, in his essay "The Commitment of the Intellectual" (1969), that the Intellectual's responsibility was "the confrontation of reality with reason."

Herman Cohen (1842-1918), founder of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, grounded his socialist perspective in a Kantian framework - toward treating people as ends not means, as legislators and legislated.

A corrupt state of things is often represented as an "abuse"; it is taken for granted that the foundation was good. But a great corruption of a large and comprehensive entity is quite another thing, an innate element that only later reveals itself.
-- G.W.F. Hegel

The law, unlike any other system of norms, regulates its own creation.
-- Hans Kelsen (1941)

The fundamental meaning of a democratic constitution is the assertion that power over individuals, by whatever group or citizen, must have legally established limits, nothing being more inimical to coexistence than unlimited power arbitrarily implemented.
-- Norbert Bobbio (1957)

Horkheimer & Adorno here posited in 1947 that enlightenment had been turned on its head, political control over people instead of rational control over nature, inequality blocking justly organized society, mind control preempting autonomy, and so on.

Amartya Sen, Hilary Putnam, & Antonio Gramsci shared a belief in the "triple entanglement" of facts, values, but also conventions, in public ethical reasoning, Gramsci writing that one always belongs to a collective that shares "the same mode of thinking and acting."

Gretel Adorno (1902-1993)

Missing from Adorno's work is the Hegelian notion of 'self-reference'; missing from the Marxism of both men (Adorno and Benjamin) is any notion of human activity or praxis.
-- Gillian Rose