Serpent logics: the marathon

It's funny how 'mature content' is a phrase used primarily to mark immature content, especially with schoolboy humour in games.

— Chris Bateman (@SpiralChris) September 18, 2013

How’s this for naming your donkey after your President?

FOR THOSE THAT MISSED IT A FARMER HAS BEEN ARRESTED FOR NAMING HIS DONKEY SISI.

— Stanley Cohen (@StanleyCohenLaw) September 21, 2013

Consider this one, another instance of nominalism in action, from the French justice system:

A mother who sent her three-year-old son Jihad to school wearing a sweater with the words “I am a bomb” on the front, along with his name and ‘Born on September 11th’ on the back, was handed a suspended jail sentence on Friday for “glorifying a crime”. A court of appeal in the city of Nimes, southern France, convicted Jihad’s mother Bouchra Bagour and his uncle Zeyad for “glorifying a crime” in relation to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001.

The classic nominalist image — with which I’d compare and contrast the French three-year-old with the unfortunate name and tsee-shirt — is Magritte’s cdelebrated “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”:

And here’s one final nominalist example:

There is something very pharisaical about pointing at other people and calling them pharisaical.

— Chris Henrichsen (@Chrishenrichsen) September 30, 2013

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The spiral:

Here’s a potential downwards spiral, for those watching India:

Watching Modi watch Bharatanatyam http://t.co/dC4wcoZRCI

— TOI India News (@TOIIndiaNews) September 30, 2013

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Straight parallelism:

This one’s from Jonathan Franzen:

And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

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Simple Opposition:

People who used to queue for bread find it odd to see people standing in line to get a phone almost identical to the one in their pocket.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 20, 2013

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Some of these categories seem pretty fluid — or to put that another way, some of these examples might fit with equal ease into several doifferent categories. Here’s another oppositional class:

Arms crossed:

Grad school, the inevitable process of feeling dumber while getting smarter.

— Hans-Inge Langø (@hilango)September 24, 2013

From Ezra Klein and Evan Solta blogging at WaPo’s Wonkbook: The Republican Party’s problem, in two sentences:

It would be a disaster for the party to shut down the government over Obamacare. But it’s good for every individual Republican politician to support shutting down the government over Obamacare.

A great “values” juxtaposition:

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