Dave Fortin
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davidwfortin.bsky.social
Dave Fortin
@davidwfortin.bsky.social
740 followers 880 following 4.2K posts
History teacher in Philadelphia. APUSH, AP Govt, AP Euro. Dogfather. Irish dance dad. STL Cards, Blues, and STLCity fan. Army vet (Gulf War). Notre Dame alum. Gen X. "The air tasted of lies.” S. De Beauvoir
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davidwfortin.bsky.social
This one highlights the absurdity of ICE detention centers and deportation flights. At a time when federal $$$ is being taken from USAID or health care, we still have money for flying deportees all over the world. There's no economic utility in this--it's just about the cruelty.
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness. The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth. In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality. This atmosphere of madness and unreality, created by an apparent lack of purpose, is the real iron curtain which hides all forms of concentration camps from the eyes of the world. Seen from outside, they and the things that happen in them can be described only in images drawn from a life after death, that is, a life removed from earthly purposes.”
November 30, 2025 at 5:13 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Just back from seeing Penn State at Rutgers---enjoyed Rutgers' old school stadium (except for the constantly on jumbotron)...
November 30, 2025 at 4:20 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolutely tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous, although in times of acute labor shortage, as in Russia and in Germany during the war, he is used for work.”
November 28, 2025 at 5:41 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
I used a dry rub on the bird last night and wiped it off today the covered the Bird with butter and it’s excellent
November 27, 2025 at 9:33 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation for November 26, 1789:
November 27, 2025 at 5:21 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
The segment of OofT I'm working through is on concentration camps and is not easy reading. As we celebrate T-Day---that GW declared in thanks for our Constitution--let's give thanks that we're not where Arendt discusses in her book.....yet...
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.”
November 26, 2025 at 11:33 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 26, 2025 at 10:50 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Philly
November 25, 2025 at 10:55 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “It is the appearance of some radical evil, previously unknown to us, that puts an end to the notion of developments and transformations of qualities. Here, there are neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards but, at the most, the realization that something seems to be involved in modern politics that actually should never be involved in politics as we used to understand it, namely all or nothing—all, and that is an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-together, or nothing, for a victory of the concentration-camp system would mean the same inexorable doom for human beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would mean the doom of the human race.”
November 25, 2025 at 2:53 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “In any event, the fearful imagination has the great advantage to dissolve the sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the superstition that something good might result from evil. Such dialectical acrobatics had at least a semblance of justification so long as the worst that man could inflict upon man was murder. But, as we know today, murder is only a limited evil. The murderer who kills a man—a man who has to die anyway—still moves within the realm of life and death familiar to us; both have indeed a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he destroys a life, but he does not destroy the fact of existence itself.”
November 24, 2025 at 5:21 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
One of the great moments of anguish in life is when the roux doesn't turn out and has to be redone. I've done that twice---both cases of user error--and hope this never happens again...
November 24, 2025 at 1:31 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Pour me a drink Theresa
in one of those glasses you dust off
And I'll watch the bones in your back
like the stations of the cross
'Round your hair the sun lifts a halo
at your lips, a crown of thorns
Whatever the deal's going down
to this one I'm sworn
November 23, 2025 at 2:39 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, "dwelling on horrors" would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. In both these genres there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience; instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead, that they cannot supply anything more than a series of remembered occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their audience.”
November 22, 2025 at 4:38 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 4:24 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 4:09 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 3:11 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We attempt to understand the behavior of concentration-camp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate. The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus.”
November 22, 2025 at 12:05 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hard to talk to people when 82% of them think trump is doing a great job...
November 21, 2025 at 12:34 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hmmm. Seems the AI bubble bursting thing is still on...
November 20, 2025 at 9:15 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
$50 but OMG....
November 20, 2025 at 4:33 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that "everything is permitted," which was already contained in the nineteenth-century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and "normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible. We attempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a thing which, as we all feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses?”
November 20, 2025 at 3:17 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 1:18 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Many things that nowadays have become the specialty of totalitarian government are only too well known from the study of history. There have almost always been wars of aggression; the massacre of hostile populations after a victory went unchecked until the Romans mitigated it by introducing the parcere subjectis; through centuries the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa; slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind and all empires of antiquity were based on the labor of state-owned slaves who erected their public buildings. Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for "undesirable elements"; here, too, we first find the term "protective custody" which was later adopted by the Third Reich.”
November 19, 2025 at 3:39 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense.”
November 18, 2025 at 1:43 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 2:07 AM