Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 30, 2025 • 6:45 am

“Tis Tuesday, September 30, 2025, and, as I’m flying home to Chicago, the Hili Dialogue will consist wholly of, well, the Hili Dialogue.

And here it is.

It’s coming. . . .

It will be up in just a second,

And here is the Hili Dialogue, which is not mine, but it’s a classic photo and exchange: one of the best Hilis yet.

Hili: I have a question.
Me: Not now, I have to answer an idiot first.

In Polish:

Hili: Mam pytanie.
Ja: Nie teraz, muszę najpierw odpowiedzieć idiocie.

29 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping — positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry; they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace; they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead to change the subject and straw man. -Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer and journalist (b. 30 Sep 1975)

      1. T-NC tells us himself (and at great length): the current lack of assertive anti-racism¹ is itself racist oppression.²

        . . . .
        ¹ A.k.a. racism.
        ² And silence is violence, words are bullets, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, etc.

  3. Thank you for my Hili morning meditation. So, since we have some time this morning, I am in the middle of a one-hour Einat Wilf video recorded a week ago on recognition of a Palestinian state with some deeper details on her thinking. The url should be

    Also I recommend a book called “The Lemon Tree” by Sandy Tolan. I am halfway through it and it shows the wars since 1948 (and sometime before) from the perspective of two families: one Jewish Bulgarian survivors of WW2 who emigrated to Israel in 1948 and the other an Arab family who fled their home, becoming refugees just before the Bulgarian family settled into that home. The book was recommended to me by someone at a civic meeting I attended last week and I would be interested in WEIT readers’ opinions if they have read it.

      1. I watched the interview. It was absolutely excellent, in all its horror. Part way through, I realize that I had heard it before, just a few days ago, maybe a different interview but the same Einat Wilf using exactly the same sentences.

        She paints a very scary end to the current episode of global antisemitism: (1) either a few sane people decide they have had enough, inspiring others to reject antisemitism as well or (2) the call to “clean” the world (of Jews) proceeds to its logical conclusion—cleaning the world of Jews—followed by feigned global shame and insincere vows of “Never Again.” Which will it be? She doesn’t know.

        1. Yes Norman. I should have warned people that she repeats some of the themes from the video piece Jerry called our attention to last week, but there are also some new threads in this longer interview. Like you picked up on: “Never again…again!” Also in a good version of her placard thinking, it doesn’t hurt to hear her say the same thing once or twice more.

          1. Ah yes. That’s where I’d heard it before. I agree that it was worth listening again an, indeed, there was new material here. It’s a scary moment for world Jewry. Thank you, Jim, for recommending the interview.

  5. Cryptic crossword clue in the Observer: “Biologist was kind to rocks”.

    (I’m useless at such things, I had to ask Grok, which explained it to me.)

          3. An anagram of “was kind” (the phrase ‘to rocks’ suggests juggling the letters, in cryptic crossword code; not the clearest of such clues to be honest). Surname of a well known biologist.
            Wrote a few good books for the lay reader.

  7. Important news regarding the quagmire that is Wikipedia.

    One of the founders (Larry Sanger) has nailed his “Nine Theses to the door of Wikipedia”.

    Xitter thread:
    https://x.com/lsanger/status/1972698705665888357

    This has been my project for the last nine months. There has never been a thoroughgoing Wikipedia reform proposal—this is the first. If it doesn’t work, we need to organize an alternative. 🧵
    1. End decision-making by “consensus.”
    2. Enable competing articles.
    3. Abolish source blacklists.
    4. Revive the original neutrality policy.
    5. Repeal “Ignore all rules.”
    6. Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are.
    7. Let the public rate articles.
    8. End indefinite blocking.
    9. Adopt a legislative process.

    Here’s the verbose version:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

        1. Yep. On a couple of occasions I have queried the history tab to get a feeling of when significant edits were done. As a user since the beginning, I must say it was grand while it lasted…as was our democratic republic.

          1. The Republic has lasted nearly a quarter of a millennium — a very good innings as these things go. The Founders knew their history, particularly that republics (including Athens’ democratic republic) can readily succumb to mob rule and dictatorship. The French revolutionary republic and its subsequent military dictatorship would have come as no surprise to them.

            “A republic, if we can keep it” (Franklin), “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” (Jefferson), “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people” (J Adams), “The rights of the people… are nothing more than what they are willing to assert” (S Adams), “Let me not be suspected of wilfully undervaluing the struggles of my countrymen; I have only to lament that the experiment is yet to be tried” (Morris), “The people of America must be the patrons of their own liberties” (Jay).

            Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (2021) ends on an optimistic note, with Wikipedia being a then shining example of how social media need not become a cesspool. 😔

  8. Today’s Hili photo is my favorite since we lost the great Malgorzata. Nice to see Andrzej and Hili from the third-person point of view.

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