Jason Kuznicki
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jkuznicki.bsky.social
Jason Kuznicki
@jkuznicki.bsky.social
5.3K followers 1K following 9K posts
A gay dad cultivating his garden in Puna, Hawaii. Now working on some big projects for the future.🍍🌴🌱📖🌐☸️

Newsletter: https://pacification.beehiiv.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3319839950/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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jkuznicki.bsky.social
Adrian Vermeule, from @lkatfield.bsky.social’s Furious Minds:
Text from Kindle: Vermeule was baptized as a child and raised in the Episcopalian and Anglican traditions but fell away from the religion in college. Then, in 2016, he converted to Catholicism very publicly. In an interview about his conversion with First Things on November 4, 2016, titled "Finding Stable Ground," he reported feeling disheartened by the "heterodox" changes and influences that had taken over the Episcopalian church (the Episcopal Church allowed some gay marriage in 2015).20 He also reported that he had been persuaded by thinkers like John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century English theologian who made a midlife conversion to Catholicism, and the Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory that "there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheist materialism."21
November 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse 🌴🌱🌺
Photo I took of my lavender hibiscus in bloom. It’s a pentagon shaped flower that’s about 6” in diameter with a deep red center and yellow and orange stamens (I think?). It’s crinkly and floppy looking but still visibly fresh; it just grows crinkly.
November 26, 2025 at 9:28 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Thanks AI, that's once again useless.
Asking Google to define "grace note" yields an AI overview that's only about a corporation, and not about the musical term. Conventional search result, shown lower, remains correct (for now). Note that the AI wrongly closed the open compound word.
November 24, 2025 at 3:32 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Testing some things for Thanksgiving. I made a tangerine custard pie with a premade graham cracker crust.

Not sure the filling works. I adapted it from a key lime pie recipe but now the flavor’s too mild. The charred candied tangerines were good though.
Photo I took yesterday evening shows an orange colored custard style pie with charred tangerine slices, pomegranate arils, and whipped cream.
November 22, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
A friend gave us these homegrown tangerines 🌱🌴🍊
Photo I just took shows a cloth lined box full of several dozen tangerines
November 21, 2025 at 10:53 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Photo from the best smelling place in the yard right now 🌴🌱🍊
Photo I just took shows a bunch of pomelo flowers in a sunbeam. They’re white and yellow and smell similar to orange flowers, but they’re bigger, about an inch and a half wide.
November 21, 2025 at 9:58 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Field again, on Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism:
Text from Kindle: “The incoherence of Hazony's work on nationalism came to the fore when Russia went to war against Ukraine in 2022. When the conflict first arose, I remember wondering whether Hazony would side with the extreme and imperialist expression of Russian nationalism, or with the liberal internationalists supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. To the apparent consternation of some of his fellow travelers, he sided with Ukraine, which he claimed was something very different from siding with liberal internationalism, explaining how Russia was not a nation, as Putin claimed, but an empire.”
November 21, 2025 at 4:10 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Liberalism was right to disintegrate certain dimensions of our social life.

As Field writes:
Text from Kindle: “Deneen's book similarly views the dizzying social, political, and technological changes of recent decades, and all he can see is chaos and instabil-ity. Meanwhile, many of us— especially those whose lives have benefited from progressive social changes-see reconfiguration rather than destruction and wonder when things have actually been better. I often look around today and compare it to the world my grandmothers inhabited, and I can't help but shake my head at men like Bloom and Deneen.”
November 21, 2025 at 2:48 AM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
More from @lkatfield.bsky.social’s Furious Minds:
Text from Kindle: “ It is easy to see how a person could become captivated by Deneen's sweeping explanation of modern life. There is a good deal of truth to his idea that liberalism-which originated as a mode of politics meant to mediate between conflicting world-views, and to protect individuals' rights and dignity-has had disintegrative effects on some dimensions of modern social life and community, especially if one considers liberal economic policies as part of the ledger.
November 21, 2025 at 2:48 AM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
“Nazis are bad,” he said anonymously.

For fear of reprisal.
Text from the linked story: “A Coast Guard official who had seen the new wording called the policy changes chilling. "We don't deserve the trust of the nation if we're unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to a fear of reprisal.”
November 20, 2025 at 8:18 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
“The privilege of ordinary heartbreaks.”

What a great phrase.
“I also want to be clear that my own belief in liberal democracy does not come primarily from my study of political philosophy (especially in the Straussian context, which tends to be oblivious both to public policy and to post-Rawlsian liberal thought). It comes from my study of constitutional law and of history (especially the atrocities of the twentieth century and the wave of liberal constitutionalism that emerged in the aftermath), and from my own experiences in the world-including the experience of becoming a parent. I want to be direct about this because it bears on material in the book, especially when it comes to the Hard Right's contempt for women and nontraditional families (and, indirectly, their contempt for children, too). Becoming a mother has made me ferociously attached to liberalism-to its hospitals, doulas, and midwives; to its everyday domestic comforts; to the time it affords me (because I'm lucky) with my children, husband, friends, and family; to the hope that I can live a long and rich life in community with them while also freely pursuing some of my own interests and loves; and to the hope that my kids will grow up and live good, free lives, too. A person would have to be an ingrate and a fool not to feel immense gratitude for a life like mine —full of what the Russian Jewish writer Nadezhda Mandelstam called the "privilege of ordinary heartbreaks" —and for the political system that makes it possible.”
November 19, 2025 at 9:08 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Now reading: Furious Minds by @lkatfield.bsky.social

www.amazon.com/Furious-Mind...
Photo from Kindle reads “We were barely into the first course, during the first event of that first day, when Todd mentioned that he had recently been at an event with First Lady Michelle Obama. He described his impressions succinctly: "She was truly statuesque. Very tall, very impressive. I'd really like to fuck her." An awkward grimace and head shake from Ronnie. I didn't know what to say, so I set down my napkin and excused myself to the restroom. I'm not an especially buttoned-up person. At the time I was writing a dissertation about Rousseau and Nietzsche. Rousseau abandoned all his (four or five) newborn children to an orphanage in Paris, and Nietzsche has often been called the intellectual godfather of fascism. I am pretty inured to offensive behavior and ideas, and I try to carry this into everyday life. And that summer wasn't my first time at the conservative rodeo—I had been in these circles for nearly a decade. But Todd's remark got under my skin. Maybe he was showing off for Ronnie, but it felt like a provocation aimed my way—a little jab meant to test my prudishness, or inversely my philosophic coolness. It was also clear that it had to do with more than sex, and with more than me. It had to do with women, and it had to do with Michelle Obama, a Black woman, and the first Black president's wife.” Photo from Kindle reads “When I look back at the people from that summer program in Charlottesville, I was meeting a cut of professors from the conservative mainstream, and I never would have expected them to turn toward Trump. But some became Trump's defenders or collaborators, and very few repudiated him in public, even after January 6. Most have gritted their teeth and watched the show unfold. They are patient enough—and, justifiably or not, trusting enough in America's capacity to resist Trumpism's excesses—to wait it out and see what comes next. This book is about them, too: about all the people on the elite right whose silence, acquiescence, and bad judgment allowed Trumpism to grow, who could have spoken up and helped things go a different way but didn't.”
November 19, 2025 at 3:52 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
We don’t talk enough about how some Costco products land there because they’re too much effort to figure out
Photo: Genius gourmet sparkling protein. The fine print mentions blue raspberry lemonade. Zero sugar but somehow 30g protein
November 15, 2025 at 11:19 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Unfortunately both of these statements can be true. We call that condition a “policy mistake.”
“One takeaway from these facts is that the voters are stupid. An alternative is that it is very easy for us to deliver what they're asking for.”
November 14, 2025 at 12:10 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
It doesn’t look like much, but this might be the most important plant picture I’ve ever shown. 🌱🌴🧵
Photo I took shows a 50’ diameter stand of naupaka, a medium sized shrub with thick oblong leaves and white berries. There are trees in the picture including coconut, ohia, and a small rainbow eucalyptus.
November 9, 2025 at 10:25 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Panel from Spider-Man. Spider-Man says, “YOU CAN REWRITE DNA ON THE FLY, AND YOU'RE USING IT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO DINOSAURS? BUT WITH TECH LIKE THAT, YOU COULD CURE CANCER!” A talking dinosaur guy answers, “BUT I DON'T WANT TO CURE CANCER. I WANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO DINOSAURS.”
November 9, 2025 at 9:13 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Taro and pineapple beds 🌴🌱🍍
Photo I took just now shows a raised rectangular garden bed filled with several varieties of taro. Photo I took just now shows a raised garden bed full of pineapple plants in many different sizes, though none have fruit at the moment.
November 8, 2025 at 6:27 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Diderot, with a bit on what we’d call hard versus softcore porn.
Screenshot from Robert Darnton’s book The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Diderot writes: At that time [a girl] worked in a little book shop on the quai des Augustins: a doll-like figure, white and straight as a lily, red as a rose. I entered with that dashing, ardent, crazy manner I had in those days; and I said to her, "Mademoiselle, the Contes de La Fontaine, a Petrone [i.e., acceptable erotic literature], if you please." "Here they are, sir. Do you need any other books?" "Well, excuse me, Mademoiselle, but.." "Yes, do say.." "La Religieuse en chemise [Venus in the Cloister or The Nun in a Nightgown, a work considered obscene]. "Fie, Monsieur! Does one sell, does one read such wicked things?" "Oh, oh, they are wicked, are they, Mademoiselle? I had no idea ..." And then, another day, when I passed by again, she smiled, and I did, too.
November 7, 2025 at 7:54 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
And then there’s my all time favorite.
Screenshot of an ad. Text reads “Simple Habit That Harms Sleep (Read More).” The illustration shows a man sleeping on a mattress that’s on a beach and getting lapped by waves, which, yeah, that’ll do it
November 7, 2025 at 2:48 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Saying tariffs aren’t taxes would have been laughable in the nineteenth century.

No one, for or against, could possibly take it seriously.
Graph. Tariffs today make up less than 2% of federal receipts. Most years of the nineteenth century have the tariff share of total revenue above 50%, with many over 80%. Sources: WhiteHouse, Census, CEA calculations. Data as of June 20, 2024. Note: data prior to 1940 does not match current fiscal year convention. 2023
November 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Frog and scorpion meme. "But now we shall both surely drown", said the Frog. “lol" said the Scorpion, "Imao"
November 4, 2025 at 1:38 AM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Planted a cassava in June and it’s been busy 🌱🌴
Photo I took just now shows the corms of a mature cassava plant, moments after I hauled it out of the ground. They probably weigh about fifteen pounds.
November 2, 2025 at 2:43 AM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
😑
Screenshot from the linked quiz. Antonio opposes school vouchers, opposes mass deportation, and supports a stronger welfare state. He also voted for Donald Trump.
October 29, 2025 at 4:43 PM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Probably tomorrow. 🌱🌴🍍
Photo I took just now shows that pineapple I’ve been tracking. Its stem is bent over so it’s kinked parallel to the ground now. The fruit itself is getting nicely yellow too.
October 29, 2025 at 2:26 AM
jkuznicki.bsky.social
Meme image: Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are fighting. Donald says, “Everything that we know and love is reducible to the absurd acts of chemicals, and there is therefore no intrinsic value in this material universe.” Mickey answers, “Hypocrite that you are, for you trust the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals. All knowledge is ultimately based on that which we cannot prove. Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?”
October 28, 2025 at 10:21 PM