Besides being perhaps the logician of note of the 20th century (against considerable "competition"), he's become an important philosopher in the 21st. I think he realizes he's become a philosopher, although it would seem (from private correspondence) that he doesn't find philosophy all that important, let alone that he's such an important one.

The recommended book-length treatment of Girardian ideas is "The Phantom of Transparence". The TED talk version is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3pgZxU-Cg

I often tell people to watch the video even if they don't know one "euh" of French. There's something about the energy in it that already conveys so much.

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I can't honestly evaluate the other, minor Girard because of the homonymy. It's unfortunate.

(Say you like something like Elm -- wouldn't it be better to have a relatively closely aligned commercial entity that puts significant and effective effort in making it widely used, which in turns makes it easier to find an Elm job or sell Elm-like solutions as a consultant).

The Supreme Court kneecapped Lula in the late 00s and early 10s, arrested his lead cadres and led to his party's decay -- until Lula himself was arrested. They did this by importing theories by German theorists that were never part of our law intellectual traditions, let alone our laws. Then in the late 10s they started arresting bloggers for insulting the Court -- directly, taking on police powers. Now they're with Lula, and further expanding their sweeping powers. I'm scared to even post this. I mean, much of Congress is scared -- they've got people there by the balls.

Also the Julia community is lovely, but R folks are so smug about tiny things like (the admittedly very fine for its applications) ggplot2. Also: have you heard SAS or Stata users telling you they can run neural networks using their built-in matrix languages? Yes we can! Yes we can!

Our 2-yr old doesn't have access to phones at all -- except perhaps when he grabs one that's lying around; but then he expects it taken from him. But he's so taken with TV that we plan screen time in reverse: start at dinner time and subtract how much time we want him to be there. Our whole approach to tantrums is having something else lined up rather than just shutting things off and leaving a void. I'm fascinated by your methods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRpA-_jzV4

I can sort of correlate this, well, expression, with a political view. State it more crisply.