Geoff A.
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pseudonymice.bsky.social
Geoff A.
@pseudonymice.bsky.social
220 followers 240 following 2.8K posts
Been ill, missed the conversations. He/him. Have degrees in history and law. Had a career in politics and research. Mostly just coping with matters beyond my control these days.
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pseudonymice.bsky.social
An anecdote relayed by Samuel Beckett, who studied art in Nazi Germany before joining the French Resistance. Faced with eugenics laws prohibiting Gentile women younger than 45 from working in Jewish households, one servant falsely claimed Jewish heritage rather than confess her age was above 45.
Photo of a book page: "Beckett was quick to pick up on the absurd, such as the story he heard involving a servant and a milkman. In order to prevent racial impurity, no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked Herr Levi's Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him, she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five."
July 7, 2025 at 11:08 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Mary Allen is an interesting character - a Nazi-sympathizing woman so driven to create woman-led police brigades that she helped set up a woman-led force in Cologne to prosecute sex workers. In the UK she had been cited for cosplaying as a cop. Fascist feminism resonant with TERFism today.
Photo of book page: "It was not Mary's first visit to Germany. In 1923, when the British Army still occupied the Rhineland, she had been asked by the War Office to send six women from her Women's Auxiliary Service to Cologne to assist German police in controlling prostitution. The request was a personal triumph since only two years earlier Mary had herself been prosecuted for wearing a uniform resembling that of the Metropolitan police and fined ten shillings. ... In 1934 she was back in Germany. Her mission was to persuade the authorities to set up a women's police force founded on Nazi doctrine."
July 6, 2025 at 6:32 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Observation from an American that a law selectively denaturalizing Jewish citizens introduced a bureaucratic infrastructure for proving and maintaining privileges of citizenship that imposed a sense of precarity for all citizens driving them towards instrumental displays of loyalty to the regime.
Photo of a book page: "In September 1935 the Embassy's first secretary, Ivone Kirkpatrick, had just returned from a 600-mile motoring trip through Mecklenburg and Pomerania having seen 'a lot of people.' Although Kirkpatrick encountered plenty of poverty and discontent, he concluded that the Fuhrer's grip on the population was so complete that 'it is difficult to see what political or economic event could shake Hitler off his perch.' He thought 'the new citizenship law' (the notorious 'Nuremberg laws' that stripped Jews of their nationality) a particularly clever stroke. 'Every German will be obliged to toe the line in order to get his citizenship certificate and when he has got it, he will have to continue to be a fervid supporter of the Government for fear of losing it.'
July 6, 2025 at 6:17 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Early promotion of Dachau as a tourist spectacle, akin to "Alligator Alcatraz": "German authorities, initially at least, proved so willing to show off their concentration camp to foreigners that by the mid-1930s Dachau had become something of a tourist attraction for American and British visitors."
Photo of a book page: "Dummet need not have worried. The German authorities, initially at least, proved so willing to show off their concentration camp to foreigners that by the mid-1930s Dachau had become something of a tourist attraction for American and British visitors, particularly politicians and journalists."
July 5, 2025 at 8:48 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Sharing the dream.
Graphic panel from the old Sandman comic strip from "Dream of a Thousand Cats." The narrator cat speaks to an assembly of gathered cats "But if enough of us dream... if a bare thousand of us dream... we can change the world." In the referenced story, a collective dream would allow cats to become masters of the world and hunt humans for sport.
July 3, 2025 at 7:47 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
I learned about Mezei in law school. It's a heartbreaking story. And an ominous prologue to where we find ourselves now.
Screenshot from the dissent on the Mezei case: "Mezei came to this country in 1923 and lived as a resident alien in Buffalo, New York, for twenty-five years. He made a trip to Europe in 1948, and was stopped at our shore on his return in 1950. Without charge of or conviction for any crime, he was for two years held a prisoner on Ellis Island by order of the Attorney General. Mezei sought habeas corpus in the District Court. He wanted to go to his wife and home in Buffalo. The Attorney General defended the imprisonment by alleging that it would be dangerous to the Nation's security to let Mezei go home even temporarily on bail. Asked for proof of this, the Attorney General answered the judge that all his information was "of a confidential nature" -- so much so that telling any of it or even telling the names of any of his secret informers would jeopardize the safety of the Nation. Finding that Mezei's life as a resident alien in Buffalo had been "unexceptional," and that no facts had been proven to justify his continued imprisonment, the District Court granted bail. The Court of Appeals approved. Now this Court orders Mezei to leave his home and go back to his island prison to stay indefinitely, maybe for life. MR. JUSTICE JACKSON forcefully points out the danger in the Court's holding that Mezei's liberty is completely at the mercy of the unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General. I join MR. JUSTICE JACKSON in the belief that Mezei's continued imprisonment without a hearing violates due process of law. No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish, and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous." * Hitler's secret police were given like powers. "
July 2, 2025 at 10:43 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Never stop believing.
A mock propaganda poster for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism: NOW" with a crowd of protestors at the bottom of the image, a picture of Lenin speaking, and a fleet of dirigibles against a hot pink sky. There's also some kind of tower to the left of the picture.
July 2, 2025 at 7:42 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
I prefer enigmatic and disdainful.
A graph showing the class bias of my food preferences, with a fairly even distribution among all five classes, but a slight prefernece toward lower and middle class options.
June 30, 2025 at 9:54 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Your relatively determined future...
Screenshot from an episode of PBS's "Space Time" series depicting a man, a cat, and a bird traveling at different relativistic speeds such that the man's present is the already concluded past of a bird located in the cat's present.
June 25, 2025 at 10:02 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
I still see Bill the Cat whenever I see that guy's name.
Picture of a cartoon cat from the old comic strip Bloomsbury - a very mangy cat who says "Ack!! Ack!""
June 25, 2025 at 9:26 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Sadi Carnot, inventor of "Hot or Not"
A portrait of Sadi Carnot as a young man. Carnot is a French physicist and inventor who devised the "Carnot heat engine," which generated power through exploitation of heat gradients (hence the joke on 'hot or not')
June 25, 2025 at 10:25 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
This is a repost of the images, with transcriptions in the alt text. Minor edits have made to compress the text on the second page. The story recounted is of an economics doctoral student in 1932 who was invited to a private audience in which Hitler detailed his thoughts on Black life in America.
Page 1: "Of all the foreigners studying at Heidelberg University in 1932, none was more conspicuous than Milton S.J. Wright, for the simple reason that he was an African-American. He was, as he himself admitted, 'somewhat of a curiosity'. The public was familiar enough with black boxers, jazz-band players and minstrel men but few people in Heidelberg had actually met a black person. And, as Wright pointed out, the concept of 'Negroes as cultural ladies and gentlemen' was to most people completely novel. He remembered how passers-by would often stop to gaze at him, expecting him at any moment to break into a dance. Sometimes he was asked if he was an African pricne. In fact, Wright, a Columbia graduate, was at Heidelberg University studying for a PhD in economics. Ten years later, just after Peral Harbor, he gave an interview to the Pittsbrug Courier in which he recounted the extraordinary tale of how he had met Hitler. Each summer Heidlerber put on a spectacular son et lumiere. The castle, set high above the River Neckar, was bathed in red 'flames', in memory of its destruction by the French in the seventeenth century. Then, as the lights on the castle faded, the sky was set ablaze with fireworks. In 1932 Milton Wright, together with fellow members of..." End page 1/3 (see next photo) Page 2/3 : his fraternity, watched the show from the river in a boat decked out with lanterns. When it was over, the crowd sang 'Deutschland uber Alles' before listening to Hitler give a hate-filled speech. After, Wright and his companions adjourned to the hotel where Hitler was staying, where they planned to have dinner. But Wright had been spotted. As they entered the dining room, he was accosted by two of Hitler's SS guards, who informed him the Fuhrer wished to see him. Before entering the room where he was to meet Hitler, Wright gave his passport to a friend with instructions to inform the American Consul if he did not re-emerge. He need not have worried. 'The time with Hitler was spent almost entirely by his asking me questions about Negroes in the United States,' Wright recalled. 'Of course I had little opportunity to answer because he would no sooner ask a question than he would immediately proceed to give his own answer.' Despite this, Wright found Hitler unexpectedly courteous. 'It was a bit surprising to me', Wright told the reporter, 'that he seemed to know so much about Negroes in America' - though the only one he mentioned with any respect were Booker T. Washington and Paul Robeson. Hitler told Wright he considered 'Negroes' third-class people, destined to be slaves of one kind or another, because, Hitler argued, if they had any backbone they would not have allowed whites to lynch, beat and segregate them without rising up against them. He asked Wright why he wanted 'a white man's education' when he knew he would never be able to use it like a white man. He suggested Wright's Heidelberg experience would make him more miserable once he returned to America. Initially Wright was flattered Hitler praised his German, telling him that he spoke it better than any American he had ever met. However, Hitler remarked that he had always heard 'Negroes' were natural born imitators, clearly the reason why Wright had gained such mastery of the 'Master language'. page 3/3: The American summed up the encounter by recalling how calm Hitler had appeared and how intensely interested he had been in everything Wright had told him. 'Although he spoke loudly, deliberately and with finality, he never lost his poise and composure.' Before dismissing him from his presence, Hitler instructed a bodyguard to give Wright a signed photograph of himself and suggested they meet again in Munich. There is a coda to this odd tale. Wright's PhD was on 'The Economic Development and Native Policy of the Former German Colonies, 1884-1918'. After he returned to America it was translated from the original German into French and English and sent back to Germany. I twas then widely circulated throughout Europe by the Nazis as part of their campaign to regain Germany's lost African colonies. One wonders how many of them were aware that its author was black.
June 24, 2025 at 5:01 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
There is so much weird going on in this tale of an African-American university student meeting Hitler in 1932 while studying at Heidelburg University. For the visually impaired will repost the page shots with transcribed Alt text when I can transcribe them with a real keyboard
Photograph of a book page - transcription to follow in a repost Photograph of a book page - transcription to follow in a repost Photograph of a book page - transcription to follow in a repost
June 24, 2025 at 4:32 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Was just reading the other day about the praise Hitler got from foreigners as "A Man of Peace."
Photograph of a passage of text reading in relevant part: "Yet even after witnessing such an event, Wyndham Lewis was still able to write, 'It is essential to understand thet Adolf Hitler is not a sabee-rattle.' And to underline the point, he headed one of his chapters 'Adolf Hitler: A Man of Peace'."
June 22, 2025 at 12:20 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
It takes a village to thwart an ICE raid.
Iconic artwork from A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh story. The bear is stuck in a hole in the ground while Christopher Robin and several rabbits try unsuccessfully to pull him out.
June 17, 2025 at 7:32 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
You can read the resolution that 75 Democrats voted for on Monday yourself.
www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

It does not "condemn anti-semitism" - it prejudges a criminal complaint, ascribing guilt and motives, then thanks an agency that disappeared the man's whole family a week before.
Screecap of the linked resolution, highlighting its text: Resolved, That the House of Representatives— (1) condemns Mohammed Sabry Soliman and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas; (2) affirms that free and open communication between State and local law enforcement and their Federal counterparts remains the bedrock of public safety and is necessary in preventing terrorist attacks; and (3) expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.
June 13, 2025 at 5:11 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
One of my most borrowed books has returned to me along with the review that more people should read it: "Travelers in the Third Reich" by Julia Boyd. She recreates how the rise of Nazism in Germany seemed from the ground level to travelers.
Photograph of a book cover - "Travelees in the Third Reich: The Rise or Fascism 1919-1945" by Julia Boyd
June 11, 2025 at 1:50 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Reminds me of the meme about lobsters.
Image of the "lobster fight meme" where a group of young people are throwing dollar bills at two battling lobsters on the floor
June 5, 2025 at 10:50 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
I looked it up on knowyourmeme at one point and was surprised at how small its recorded usage seemed to be until fairly recently. I'm not sure I know how to read the chart right.... but it would seem that it was pretty niche until fairly recently.

(Source: knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopar... )
Screenshot of a graph from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party that shows the level of search interest in "leopards ate my face" over time from 2004-2024. For most of that time the bar is flat at 0, with a tiny spike in 2005, then an initial surge in 2020, a loss of interest and then a huge spike after July of 2024.
June 5, 2025 at 4:06 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
That was surprising to me, so I looked it up on the FEC's finaly vote tally.
Source here: www.fec.gov/resources/cm...

Confirmation of your claim (screenshot image has been altered for compactness):
A screenshot of the fianl election tally provided by the Federal Election Commission, modified to juxtapose the top of the page identifying the Trump column with the bottom of the page, indicating he received 49.80% of the popular vote.
June 3, 2025 at 8:37 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Huh... scanning Rogan's favorables in the cross-tabs... and like there's only one demographic I can find that gives him a net favorable:
Screenshot of a spreadsheet of the Harvard poll's results, specifically detailing the net favorable and unfavorable opinions of Joe Rogan for a variety of demographic subsets. The Republican column is spotlighted, with 45% of Republicans having a favorable opinion of Rogan and 10% negative. All other demographic categories have strong net unfavorable ratings for Rogan.
May 28, 2025 at 6:59 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Gotta love ancient bookmarks. The account was marked with some shredded campus event flyer.
Photograph of a book page: Chapter 13 of Saint Olaf' Saga from the Heimskringla - "Olaf Breaks Down London Bridgge" Photograph of a book page: Chapter 13 of Saint Olaf' Saga from the Heimskringla - "Olaf Breaks Down London Bridgge
May 27, 2025 at 6:33 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Baby Davros versus Baby Vader, maybe.
An image from Dr. Who portraying Davros (the creator of the Daleks) as a child. An image from Phantom Menace portraying Anakin Skywalker (ultimately Darth Vader) as a young child.
May 27, 2025 at 5:45 PM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
Interesting line from Hannah Arendt: "When Europe in all earnest began to prescribe its 'laws' to all other continents, it so happened that she herself had already lost her belief in them."
Photograph of a book page containing the quoted text in this post: "When Europe in all earnest began to prescribe its 'laws' to all other continents, it so happened that she herself had already lost her belief in them."
May 27, 2025 at 4:45 AM
pseudonymice.bsky.social
"Shocked" means "upset." It's in the dictionary:
dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/e...
Screenshot of the linked definition from the Cambridge Dictionary with the relevant meaning highlighted: "offended or upset by something that you consider to be wrong or unacceptable"
May 17, 2025 at 6:56 PM