Mentally wandering faraway Knej Mihela Alexander avenue in Belgrade, neighborhood of Vuk's Monument, as I plow through the reading for a future project likely to be accomplished when I'm far from a research library, hopefully because I'm abroad, rather than in internal exile. Though exile in the hills would be preferable to some outcomes that are increasingly imaginable.
Two-month mark.
When the plague hit in 2019, I decamped to my undergrad in the hills (small mountains) of Virginia. I was regarded with some suspicion, as all of the rentals there are corporate developments aimed at the students, with occasional opportunities for working staff. (Faculty generally rent houses.) But I bought a bike, and there was a Walmart nearby. Standard Wittgenstein setup of the room: camp bed, table. The libraries aren't strong at all, even for a public undergraduate university, but the morning runs over the hills, past the cows and the trucks, were invigorating.
But as long as I'm in the fishbowl gulag with access to the research collections, I need to Hoover up as much of this text as humanly possible.
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There's some anxiety about the current executive shifting his focus to this city, and that's partially justified, as this is really the only city where the game means much to him, but what it misses is that what's going on in the other cities is basically New Amsterdam-type enforcement. Precisely this mindset is governing. (I'm apolitical, as always.)
There is perhaps a logic to their targets: Harvard not Yale -- red, not blue (Columbia perhaps merely purged its insufficiently blue elements); DC, Chicago, Minnesota and LA, not Boston or NYC.
New Amsterdam corporatism running amok under the neocons -- but the international actions might prove problematic beyond the potentially useful internal dynamic of Machiavel vs. the Republic. In matters between nations, it takes some time to realize that while there is no right and wrong, there is a very real chance of making a mistake.