“Over the years the light he cast waned until, with his stance on Gaza, it seemed to go out. Historians will decide whether that was an anomaly or the culmination of a long process in which Frankfurt School critical theory turned into a form of liberalism too often complicit with US imperialism.”

Rereading Beauvoir's Prime of Life: didn't remember that Sartre does Donald Duck impressions and tries to master the yo-yo (in imitation of Gide, apparently).

Shocked and saddened to learn that Eduard Bernstein has died.

Great day to read or reread IWD-founder Clara Zetkin's 1923 "Struggle Against Fascism." And her 1932 speech as Communist Deputy in the Reichstag's final session before its dissolution: "Fascism Must be Defeated." (There's even an audio recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qmi...)

Pleased to realize the Pogues' Dirty Old Town plagiarizes Hank Williams' Lost Highway. Annoyed to realize Ballad of the Green Berets does too.

Springfield (eating the dogs / cats) Ohio desperately needs your help with ICE. Ohio Gov Mike DeWine said it will be “the next Minneapolis” as 15,000 Haitians (1/4th of the entire city) will have their TPS status prematurely revoked Weds Feb 4th. Here are links to donate and volunteer directly: 1/

Minneapolis is 2.6mil people. Springfield is 60,000 with 15,000 of that population under threat of deportation (1/4th of the whole city.) Springfield is 26 square miles. 1000 ICE agents is 40 agents per mile. People are terrified. We need all the help we can get.

"If we'd stepped onto the precipitous slide to fascism at a point further up the slide, we wouldn't be so far down the slide right now" is both absolutely true and absolutely beside the point.

In this respect, our feckless universities mirror our feckless opposition party, both thoroughly corrupted by a phony spirit of seriousness. Taking a position is seen as a pathology, an embarrassing failure to serious personhood, defined as continually adjusting to, rather than adjusting, reality.

True education is the constant disruption of ataraxia.

Although cowardice, bullshit, and cynicism motivated Texas A&M's Plato censorship, they've accidentally arrived at true ancient skepticism: absolute suspension of judgment entails absolute moral conformism. Being truly neutral or non-ideological requires accepting the status quo as default.

For 2,000 years one could reasonably argue either “democracy has never worked” or “true democracy has never been tried.” (One still can.)

Lenin's philosophical writing is so embarrassing. After claiming there's no differences between Berkeley, Fichte, and Mach (who tries to move materialism out of the 18th century), he goes out of his way to argue Hegel isn't *really* an idealist. The word "absolute" didn't give you a clue, buddy?

More Nietzschean moments in Schlick's moral theory.

I’d completely forgotten that Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna) made an album cover in the style of the old Vintage edition of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.

Amusing to learn how much Moritz Schlick's "Problem of Ethics" cribs from Nietzsche's moral psychology. (A quick search reveals that Schlick was even a confessed admirer!)

1/ I'm excited to share that Franz Knappik’s and my Cambridge Element on Hegel and Colonialism is finally out – open access below! We trace how Hegel defends European colonial rule, including transatlantic slavery, and how that defence runs through his entire philosophical system. Thread below ⬇️

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

The ruling itself is remarkable, but it closes with something I've never seen: a 12-page assessment of Trump himself as an ignorant bully, braggart and threat to free speech and the republic writ-large. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

To be clear: this entire “we’ve got to run more pro-lifers” insanity is because literally a week ago polling showed that Democrats would prefer politicians like AOC and Mamdani over Jefferies and Schumer by, let me emphasize this, a 20 point fucking margin. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

A new poll from Data for Progress found that “voters of all parties” are open to leftist policies, and that a majority of Democratic voters polled preferred democratic socialism to capitalism “when written definitions of each are read aloud to them.” Read more: www.teenvogue.com/story/gen-z-...

Large union-led protests and strikes are expected tomorrow in France in rejection of Emmanuel Macron. My latest for @thenation.com on the French crisis and Macron's dwindling options: www.thenation.com/article/worl...

UC-Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names “related” to anti-semitism, mostly for voicing support for Palestinians. Judith Butler is among them, she calls this “McCarthyism” UC Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names in antisemitism probe www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

857 people arrested in a single day in London for holding signs opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine These include Holocaust survivors, vicars, retired nurses and teachers. So many of them are elderly. Labour is dead www.instagram.com/p/DOTb3nIjYIS/

Nine grafs deep into the article and we find out: "Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters."

30 helens agree this is some bullshit

about four or five times a year for the past several decades the first ever study finds that giving poor people money really helps them. it's always the first ever time

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

old enough to remember the breathless litigation over whether or not it was credible that the IDF may have possibly bombed 1 (one) hospital

An initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online offers influencers up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep it secret—and agree to restrictions on their content. www.wired.com/story/dark-m...

" Democrats are so worried about alienating a small slice of the electorate that they’re hesitating to condemn the most abusive act yet by a historically unpopular president from the opposing party." newrepublic.com/article/1996...

Today’s Executive Order creating a *nationwide* military “quick reaction force” and setting up an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in U.S. politics in my adult life. Why is it not getting more attention?

Why would Fanon draw in the Damned of the Earth on the political philosophy of an expressed anti-socialist like Nietzsche? I try to answer that question on the Blog of the APA.

The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state. presswatchers.org/2025/08/we-h...

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...

This memo is being sent to Democratic leaders/elites, arguing that directly attacking Trump's deployment of the National Guard in DC is politically unwise. It encourages the use of terms like distraction and stunt. (I am not endorsing this kind of thinking at all. ) www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bz9d8...

I had a professor of Jewish Studies at UChicago who made the administration very angry because every year he made a proposal for the university to create an on-campus memorial to the worldwide victims of the UChicago economics department.

America now

looking through some old posts and stumbled on this. the other day chris murphy said the military occupation of dc was a distraction from epstein. a month ago, they were calling epstein a distraction.

Todd Wolfson, AAUP President, warned of a more “militant” response on campuses in the fall – including possible mass strikes. “We’re going to need to politicize this fight. It’s not an economic strike on our job conditions – it’s a political strike for the future of the sector.” #DefendHigherEd

The former top State Department spokesperson has admitted that the U.S. knew that Israel was systematically sabotaging ceasefire negotiations — even as he spread the lie to the press and the public that it was Hamas standing in the way of a deal.

Leaked Israeli intelligence confirms one of the highest civilian tolls in modern conflicts.