Left Nietzschean

Not naïve at all, this is one of the earliest and most enduring arguments leveled against Nietzsche’s idea (by Georg Simmel in particular). The most comprehensive recent response to this can be found in Paul Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

they let you add pics to posts on this site too!

Here’s the link! I talked with @jonathanbfine.bsky.social about Lessing, the origins of the German Enlightenment and the early bourgeois public sphere, and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on both for “humanity in dark times.” Hope you enjoy!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

You can now listen to my conversation with @devingoure.bsky.social about Lessing, Arendt, and their respective places in the German intellectual tradition wherever you get your podcasts.

Sounds like a good time to reread A Thousand Plateaus.

Listen to me call Lessing, the paragon of the German Enlightenment, a dick

Listen to learn about one of the Enlightenment’s most elusive and pugnacious figures. Currently subscriber-only, but as usual we’ll be releasing it to the general public before too long!

Contemporary Conversations: Jonathan B. Fine on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the German Enlightenment | Moral Minority Get more from Moral Minority on Patreon

We talked with @jonathanbfine.bsky.social about Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the German Enlightenment, and Hannah Arendt’s lecture on Lessing and humanity in dark times for a new installment of Moral Minority!

www.patreon.com/posts/contem...

State and local government have to find ways to protect their citizens against federal violence—now, everywhere, not just in MN. States and jury trial are our best legal instruments against actual fascism now.

'Trump Has Already Rigged the 2028 Presidential Election': US Defence Insider Regardless of how people vote, the chances of a Democrat Government coming to power in 2029 is now virtually nil, argues Brynn Tannehill

This piece from @brynntannehill.bsky.social is terrifyingly persuasive.

bylinetimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

I’m not sure I think there’s any way out of this without a fundamental renegotiation of the entire constitutional order.

So I’m all for proceeding as if elections will happen as long as we see them as part of a larger strategy of mass mobilization that is fundamentally oriented towards countering fascist violence with the forceful display of the people’s power and much less so about winning office.

Yeah, this definitely seems fair. I guess my view is that the elections are best seen as part of a broader strategy that is less about electoral politics in the conventional sense and more about displaying the balance of forces in the country arrayed against Trump.

It doesn’t mean we should be doomers but it does seem to make a big difference w/r/t the concrete steps we should take right now? Mobilizing people to get trained as ICE watchers and take the fascist threat seriously feels more useful than debating the likelihood of elections right now.

There just still seems to be a lot of reasoning among mainstream liberals based on what Trump technically “can’t” do rather than what he has the coercive power to do. He might not succeed in consolidating rule through violence and terror but Bouie seems clearly to underestimate the chance he’ll try.

I don’t think you have to be a maximal Doomer, or even a pessimist at all, to be less sanguine than Bouie about midterms proceeding as usual. Some of the arguments just don’t make sense to me? Like, why should it be reassuring that states will still hold elections? Won’t that just split the states?

Trump adding $500 billion to the military budget should be read as anticipatory military Keynesianism for when the recession arrives and the GenAI bubble inevitably pops. They’re going to be financially locked into military escalation, both at home and abroad.

"What we are missing...is not agreement over ideals, or even agreement over the facts...What we are missing is that public realm, that shared world of appearances, in which alone any facts can ever appear and be agreed upon in the first place."

Thank you Karen!! Sorry for the delayed response, I haven’t been over here in a while. I know we’ve really been dragging our feet on the de Beauvoir episode but we’re hoping to have the first installment out soon!

Hannah Arendt, Minneapolis, and the Refusal to Judge Reflections on the murder of Renée Good

Haven’t posted it here yet, but I wrote a piece for my substack on Hannah Arendt’s writings on judgment and the events in Minneapolis. I hope you’ll give it a read!

open.substack.com/pub/devingou...

Things are looking pretty grim, so while I’m still going to go down brawling on the other place, I’m switching over here again as well, at least for the time being.

*Geralt and Yen’s past, more accurately

Love the show, but yes, they don’t do a great job communicating that half the S1 story is catching you up on Geralt’s past. I don’t think it clicked for me the first time around until the child surprise episode. IIRC it stops being a thing in S2 though.

OK but what about your body *without* organs?

There’s even more reason for skepticism when polls that don’t support his preferred politics conveniently get dismissed as inaccurate, like the recent abundance vs populism poll.

Let me put it this way: no empirical political scientist worth their salt would ever say this is conclusive enough of a result to warrant such definitive pronouncements about political strategy.

I mean… “limited” benefits of “less than 2%” (within polling margins of error) is hardly a roaring vindication of Yglesias’s claim.

I am not saying that it *can’t* be measured accurately or that we can’t talk about more or less accurate polls. The point is still that undefended assumptions that are empirically controversial do the vast majority of the legwork for Yglesias.

The point here is that there’s something question-begging about saying that Dems should just measure public opinion “accurately.” It is an open question whether public opinion can be measured accurately enough to support the simplistic approach he’s recommending here.

I’m obviously not saying that it *can’t* be measured accurately or that we can’t talk about more or less accurate polls out of what’s on offer. The issue is still that unsupported assumptions are doing the vast majority of the legwork for Yglesias.