skells @skells@qoto.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBeiuhb36RY

Linked a few weeks back but can't stop listening to it recently

trying to find a more upbeat part of Taine's work but couldn't resist sharing this dark beauty

From the first impulse, the chimera of Marat, with pull of wing, had carried its frenetic rider until the final charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering, hobbling, arrives there in its turn; in its turn, it asks to graze, and the arranger of periods, the professor of dogmas begins to measure the voracity of the monstrous beast on which it is assembled. Slower than the other and less carnivorous in appearance, it is even more devouring; for, with claws and teeth likewise, it has larger appetites. After three years, Robespierre joined Marat in the extreme position where Marat had established himself from the very first days, and the doctor appropriated the policy, the goal, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of the madman: armed dictatorship of the urban scoundrel, systematic panic of the bribed populace, war on the bourgeois, extermination of the rich, proscription of writers, administrators, and opposing deputies.

The two monsters were fed the same diet; only Robespierre added "vicious men" to his ration as a special and preferred game. From then on, no matter how much he abstracts himself from the action, locks himself up in sentences, plugs his chaste ears, raises his preacher's eyes to heaven, he cannot help hearing or seeing around him, under his immaculate feet, the bones that crack, the blood that trickles, the insatiably gaping maw of the monster that he has formed and that he rides.

At the Constituent Assembly, he spoke only by groaning; at the Convention, he speaks only by foaming. This monotonous voice of a gullible regent takes on a personal accent of furious passion; one hears it hissing and squealing; sometimes, by a change of sight, it affects to weep; but its most bitter outbursts are less frightful than its commanding tenderness. An extraordinary deposit of aged resentments, corrosive envy and recuperated sourness has amassed in this soul; the gall pocket is full, and the extravasated gall overflows even on the dead. He is never tired of killing again his guillotined adversaries, the Girondins, Chaumette, Hébert, especially Danton, probably because Danton was the active worker of the Revolution, of which he is only the incapable pedagogue; on this still lukewarm corpse, his posthumous hatred oozes out in prepared slanders, in palpable untruths.

Thus eaten away internally by the venom it distils, his physical machine goes haywire, like Marat's, but with other symptoms. When he speaks in the gallery, "he clenches his hands with a kind of nervous contraction", sudden jerks run "in his shoulders and in his neck, which he shakes convulsively to the right and to the left". His complexion is bilious, livid; his eyes flash under his glasses; and what a look! "Ah!" said a Montagnard, "you would have voted like us on the 9th of Thermidor, if you had seen his green eyes!"

- Hippolyte Taine on Robespierre and the French Terror

when physicists say "hey we're physicists not mathematicians" and throw in an imprecise approximation, how do mathematicians feel about it?

c'mon jay, better get cranking

you're welcome to dislike the beatles

I'll assume you either

1) haven't actually listened to them
2) have no taste

I considered 3) you're french but even they love them so you've not got a leg to stand on

@bonifartius watched last night, good recommend