Dave Fortin
LightNews LightNews
banner
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Dave Fortin
@davidwfortin.bsky.social
730 followers 870 following 4.1K posts
History teacher in Philadelphia. APUSH, AP Govt, AP Euro. Dogfather. Irish dance dad. STL Cards, Blues, and STLCity fan. Army vet (Gulf War). Notre Dame alum. Gen X. "The air tasted of lies.” S. De Beauvoir
Posts Replies Media Videos
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 13, 2025 at 10:46 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified. Compared with this, all other experiments are secondary in importance—including those in the field of medicine whose horrors are recorded in detail in the trials against the physicians of the Third Reich—although it is characteristic that these laboratories were used for experiments of every kind.”
November 13, 2025 at 6:12 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Arendt clearly has issues with the police profession...
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “It [the totalitarian police] has given up the traditional old police dream which the lie detector is still supposed to realize, and no longer tries to find out who is who, or who thinks what. (The lie detector is perhaps the most graphic example of the fascination that this dream apparently exerts over the mentality of all policemen; for obviously the complicated measuring equipment can hardly establish anything except the cold-blooded or nervous temperament of its victims. Actually, the feeble-minded reasoning underlying the use of this mechanism can only be explained by the irrational wish that some form of mind reading were possible after all.) This old dream was terrible enough and since time immemorial has invariably led to torture and the most abominable cruelties. There was only one thing in its favor: it asked for the impossible.”
November 12, 2025 at 7:29 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The change in the concept of crime and criminals determines the new and terrible methods of the totalitarian secret police. Criminals are punished, undesirables disappear from the face of the earth; the only trace which they leave behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them, and one of the most difficult tasks of the secret police is to make sure that even such traces will disappear together with the condemned man.”
November 11, 2025 at 11:22 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
It wasn’t a total wasteland…

i.redd.it/7wuto9gmuojb...
November 11, 2025 at 9:09 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Here's a fun appetizer instead of boring old devilled eggs!
November 11, 2025 at 12:58 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “In a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance; under circumstances, moreover, where careers are extremely insecure and where the most spectacular ascents and falls have become everyday occurrences, every word becomes equivocal and subject to retrospective ‘interpretation.’”
November 10, 2025 at 1:17 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 2:24 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
My life as the chauffeur for a teen girl:

Friday drive 2 hours each way to pick her up and bring her to Philly

Saturday get up stupid early for the 5K Italian Stallion Rocky Run

Sunday at an Irish dance—

rockyrun.com/wp-content/u...
November 9, 2025 at 4:46 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Needs some headgear

i.redd.it/yd1bxct3wp09...
November 9, 2025 at 2:03 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Reading the WSJ on-line and in their article on Trump and affordability they're throwing some serious shade with this photo/caption:
November 8, 2025 at 9:37 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the secret police, the "best organized and the most efficient" of all government departments in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime. It constitutes the true executive branch of the government through which all orders are transmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has created for himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinction to the onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely severed and isolated from all other institutions.”
November 7, 2025 at 3:20 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Speaking of sandwiches, I made a pit stop on the way home IYKYK
November 6, 2025 at 9:03 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. Their chief political distinction is that they alone are in the confidence of the highest authority and know which political line will be enforced.”
November 6, 2025 at 2:23 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
From the Inquirer:
November 5, 2025 at 3:01 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
From the Inquirer--sad little Dugan "party":
November 5, 2025 at 2:06 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
One of the Philly suburban counties will have polls open until 10 PM, likely holding up the PA results until later due to a snafu by the county elections board:
November 5, 2025 at 1:19 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
I've been tied up getting my Q1 grades completed and conducting a review of a fellow prep school's history program, so I've fallen behind in the Arendt QOTD. For election day today, something from Bonhoeffer on the importance of the state to protect against the Void:
“Two things alone have the power to avert the final plunge into the Void. One is the miracle of a new awakening of faith and the other is that force which the Bible calls the “restrainer” (II Thess. 2:7), that is to say, the force of order, equipped with great physical strength, which effectively blocks the way of those who are about to plunge into the Abyss…The “restrainer” is the power of the state to establish and maintain order. The two are entirely different in manner, yet in the face of imminent chaos they are close in alliance, and they are both alike objects of the hatred of the forces of destruction, which see in them their deadliest enemies.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (written shortly before his execution by the Nazis in 1943)
November 4, 2025 at 12:40 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
I watched last night (am a Cards' fan) but enjoyed the game. I think the problem was that Wrobleski threw high and tight three times--he said later "I didn't intend to" but what were you doing up there head-high at 96 mph 3xs?
November 2, 2025 at 7:50 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Closely connected with this transformation of the suspect to the objective enemy is the change of position of the secret police in the totalitarian state. The secret services have rightly been called a state within the state, and this not only in despotisms but also under constitutional or semi-constitutional governments. The mere possession of secret information has always given this branch a decisive superiority over all other branches of the civil services and constituted an open threat to members of the government." The totalitarian police, on the contrary, is totally subject to the will of the Leader, who alone can decide who the next potential enemy will be and who, as Stalin did, can also single out cadres of the secret police for liquidation.”
November 2, 2025 at 6:15 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
November 1, 2025 at 7:38 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
He looks like Kurt Rambis

alchetron.com/cdn/kurt-ram...
November 1, 2025 at 3:29 AM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Hannah Arendt QOTD from The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The concept of the "objective opponent," whose identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances—so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another—corresponds exactly to the factual situation reiterated time and again by totalitarian rulers: namely, that their regime is not a government in any traditional sense, but a movement, whose advance constantly meets with new obstacles that have to be eliminated. So far as one may speak at all of any legal thinking within the totalitarian system, the "objective opponent" is its central idea.”
October 31, 2025 at 4:27 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
Insert "not a Nazi" video clip...
October 31, 2025 at 4:05 PM
davidwfortin.bsky.social
@willbunch.bsky.social pulls no punches in this piece---time to get ready for ICE in Philly....gift link:
share.inquirer.com/26iOtd
October 30, 2025 at 11:02 PM