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James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

2.4K followers 330 following 130 posts

dialectics fan account

follow my friends Mohammed @mohadajayab.bsky.social and Mahmoud @tahany1287601.bsky.social

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James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Stealing this from Pasolini for my classes

A black-and-white film frame showing a white dress overlaid by Italian text. The English subtitles say, "We suggest you use this interval to think about something else."

November 17, 2025 at 9:30 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

I'm always heartened to hear good news from Mohammed, who's working with incredible steadfastness at getting his degree amid an ongoing genocide. If you're able to, please consider supporting his survival and education here: chuffed.org/project/gomo...

A Whatsapp exchange.

James: I'm glad you were able to get an upgrade! Is the semester going well?

Mohammed: Thank you, I have completed several important courses this semester, such as network engineering, decision support systems, and other courses. The grades for the semester will be available soon.

November 15, 2025 at 3:28 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Mahmoud is asking for help covering $450 of his brother's university fees this semester (his uncle has kindly loaned them $637.32). I think we can get this covered for them!

chuffed.org/project/1336...

@mommunism.bsky.social @satwatr.bsky.social

An Arabic-language bill for $450 in university fees, with $637.32 paid.

November 4, 2025 at 1:54 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

and the weight we once / thought a burden turns out to form / the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain

Toward The Space Age by Mary Oliver

We must begin to catch hold of everything
around us, for nobody knows what we
may need. We have to carry along
the air, even; and the weight we once
thought a burden turns out to form
the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain.
Colors balance our fears, and existence
begins to clog unless our thoughts
can occur unwatched and let a fountain of essential silliness
out through our dreams.

And oh I hope we can still arrange
for the wind to blow, and occasionally
some kind of shock to occur, like rain,
and stray adventures no one cares about --
harmless love, immoderate guffaws on corners,
families crawling around the front room growling,
being bears in the piano cave.

October 21, 2025 at 6:22 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Do you worry that directing commercials will influence your style?

First of all, I have no desire to create a unified style. For each of my films I am looking for the most suitable approach for the theme. The commercial work I do is completely different: advertising is devoted to what one sees, to what one shows; while in cinema the most beautiful is what you don't see, the abstract or intangible. As a film unfolds, the spectator takes into account all the things outside of the film itself, the physical parameters of....

...the screen. The films that I like always have, in one way or another, this kind of beauty. Cinema conveys poetry; it's capable of revealing the invisible poetry that occurs in life itself; the lights, the colors, the bitter experiences of humans, their exchange of words, the state of the sky. Sometimes, it's a material poetry based on technical decisions: a camera movement or the musicality of a change in shot can conjure up this poetry. (From The World of Jia Zhangke)

October 19, 2025 at 2:07 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Chantal Akerman
taking a haughty drag of a cigarette: "I took two hours of someone's life."

October 17, 2025 at 5:04 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Jesse Bryant, a sociologist studying right-wing environmentalism at Yale University, sees the issue as emblematic of a larger trend. He said the bigger issue lies in the fossil fuel industry’s funding of nearly every conservative political issue in the United States.

“Fossil fuels have seeped into every crease of American politics,” he said. “So if you're concerned about this connection between anti-trans legislation and fossil fuel dollars, it's super important to acknowledge that money in politics is a gigantic problem—specifically fossil fuel dollars in American politics."

Keeping trans people in the margins is the whole point, though. The fossil fuel industry has a vested interest in maintaining the cultural status quo: the white-picket fence in the suburbs where the white wife stays home to take care of her white kids and her white husband drives to work in his gas-guzzling car.

Queer families, especially queer families of color, don’t fit this image.

“What trans and queer movements are doing is challenging a gender binary that that entire dream rests upon,” said Dr. Cara Daggett, a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Germany, where she researches gender in American culture and its connection to energy.

September 27, 2025 at 2:37 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Quite a week to encounter this passage

On May 16, 1933, Max Planck, the physicist whose black-body radiation law had set off the quantum revolution, met with Adolf Hitler. As the head of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, the foremost scientific institute in Germany, it was customary for Planck to meet with new heads of state. Hitler had been chancellor for less than four months, and he had already seized dictatorial power over the young Weimar Republic, using the threat of domestic terrorism in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire as an excuse. Now, Hitler had passed a law decreeing that anyone not of "pure Aryan" descent was barred from holding any civil service jobs, including public university professorships. For Planck, this was simply a step too far. Surely "there are different kinds of Jews, some valuable for mankind and others worthless," Planck told Hitler, "and that distinction must be made."

"That is not right," replied Hitler. "A Jew is a Jew. All Jews stick together, like leeches."

Planck tried a different tack. "It would be self-mutilation to make valuable Jews emigrate, since we need their scientific work.

At the suggestion that he could ever need the help of a Jew, Hitler snapped. "If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!" Speaking faster and faster, Planck recalled later, the Führer "whipped himself into such a frenzy that I had no choice except to fall silent and leave." Jews no longer had a place in German science, and there was nothing Planck could do about it.

Germany's universities, all of which were public, had been at the heart of European intellectual life for over a century. Now, 1,600 scholars were out of a job. The burden fell disproportionately on the sciences. . . . Now, over a hundred German physicists were unemployed--a full quarter of all physicists in what had been the unrivaled center of the physics world. With a single act, physics in Germany had been destroyed.

August 29, 2025 at 2:48 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Lea Seydoux, kneeling, raptly regards Viggo Mortensen's surgically installed abdomen zipper

August 23, 2025 at 2:36 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Play time with the nikon d3100

A full-body close-up of a medium-sized white dog looking into the camera.

August 9, 2025 at 3:52 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Terrified as she is of the firework noise, Camilla has posted herself between me and the window 🥺

July 5, 2025 at 1:24 AM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Sharing some of the materials I've made. This is a flyer about court watching I plan to print and hand out at large actions

June 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Along with being an all-around lovely person, Mohammed adores my dog and can barely contain himself when I share pics of her ☺️ Please contribute to his new Chuffed campaign: tinyurl.com/gomohammedgo

Mohammed responding to a photo of Camilla, a white dog with a black eye patch, "Oh my god this is so cute"

Mohammed responding to a picture of a white dog with a black eye patch looking directly at the camera, "This is so beautiful I feel like hugging him"

May 30, 2025 at 1:30 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Made to print & distribute. The QR code directs to the Streetsblog NYC story

$¡Cuidado! La policía de Nueva York ha comenzado a enviar a personas a tribunales penales por infracciones de bicicletas eléctricas (saltarse un semáforo en rojo o una señal de stop, o conducir en sentido contrario). Mayo de 2025. Noticia en el código QR.$

May 4, 2025 at 3:20 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

From the Mother Jones piece about LGBTQ federal workers

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it will now allow its agents to conduct surveillance based solely on a target's gender identity or sexual orientation.

February 25, 2025 at 3:27 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Fyi

To all my writer friends that use MS Word - Microsoft has turned their AI bits and bots on to automatically go through anything done via Word. Here's how to turn it off. File >Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Connected Experiences. Uncheck the box under "Experiences that analyze your content."

November 13, 2024 at 7:44 PM

James

@thelaterjames.bsky.social

Reading Schulman's ACT UP history. Pretty wild coming across this passage hours after a hygienist at my dentist's office interrogated me about being on PrEP