ergopraxis

@ergopraxis

Liberal of the Kantian variety. Legal, moral and political philosophy. He, she or they are all fine. An it only to my friends. 🌐🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏴

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Bluesky

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ergopraxis@ergopraxis· 22d

Remember when Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades and praises his death and Achilles is like "I was a moron Odysseus, Odysseus I was a fool, I should better have been a hired hand, it wasn't worth it Odysseus" lol. The homeric epic itself is critical of glorious death in battle!

I reassured the ghost, but he broke out, protesting,
‘No winning words about death to
me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· 22d

People with this attitude, who so often (and in my opinion extremely unjustifiably) praise Eggers for supposedly doing this (emphatically false imo) basically relate to the classics not as literature expressing something transhistorically true, but as a literary zoo or circus

Tweet that reads: "I want an Odyssey adaptation (and an Odyssey translation) that makes you feel in your bones how profoundly different the archaic Greeks were from us. Basically space aliens. Nolan is just fundamentally not interested in that kind of estrangement."

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 30

Walker taking this position is *chef kissing fingers*. Of course the guy whose entire life is defending the racial politics of likud would a) take a seat near the rightmost corner of the MAGA asylum, and b) defend ethnic denaturalisation as *the* key objective of US conservatism.

Tweet by pro-israel propagandist Corey Walker: "Repealing birthright citizenship nneeds to become the new Roe vs Wade project for the right. Only select SCOTUS justices who will vote to strike down birthright citizenship

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 30

"All human beings on earth are undocumented Americans" goes so hard, it should legitimately be the political aspiration of progressive forces in the US in a nutshell (and ditto for all progressive forces elsewhere, of course)

Tweet by a conservative: "-I'm proud to be an american!
-What is an "American"?
-A person of no particular ethnicity or religion or culture. All human beings on Earth are undocumented Americans.".

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 30

setting everything else aside why is kantian philosophy in scare quotes, i swear we didn't make that one up, kantianism is a real thing

A skeet that reads: "Don't worry. A Brit who studies "Kantian philosophy" and alleges to align with the left on everything else told me that all you have to do is hand over full control of street planning and flood defence design to the free market." (Narrator's voice: the kantian studier of a yet undisclosed nationality and residence did not in fact tell him this. It may have come to him in a delirious nightmare, what with the heat waves and such).

A meme featuring a collage of Johnathan Frakes stills with the text: It's a total fabrication, pure fiction, not a chance, wrong, no, no way, it never happened

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 28

THE UK IS A PROTESTANT STATE. THAT'S IN THE PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY. DO YOU SUPPORT THAT MR MAYOR? DO YOU SUPPORT THE UK AS A PROTESTANT STATE?

A mamdani interview. "Karl: Israel is a Jewish state. That’s in the charter. Do you support that?

Mamdani: I’ve said time and again that I support the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.

Karl: As jewish state?

Mamdani: I believe that any state that privileges one religion over another is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. And a lot of that comes back to a fundamental belief that we should all be considered equal, no matter what our faith is."

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 27

Recalling this old tweet of mine: I like how Uwe Boll was systematically and uniformly despised and considered a lolcow up until the exact moment it was revealed he is psychotically racist

One of my old tweets: I like how pewdiepie was systematically and uniformly despised in gaming forums up until the exact moment it was revealed he is kinda racist

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 19

It's for the best, as this person observes. Jurors should conceal any such intention as well as knowledge of jury nullification from the court and profess they know nothing about the case and have no opinion on it, in order to avoid deselection.

twitter user @XelenX1: Juries should remember that we no longer know what actual charges the judges will bring after the verdict in such cases.

On this basis, all protestors and activists should be found not guilty regardless of evidence presented.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 19

imo what the government did with Johnson and the filton 4 is going to backfire on them by considerably increasing the chance of jury nullification in all related cases in the future. Making juries lose trust that their decisions will be substantially respected has consequences.

BBC News (UK): Pro-Palestinian protesters trial ends in hung jury

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 18

-It was close to succeeding, and then you guys were stabbed in the back. -Exactly. 🤡

Chotiner: Listening to you, it sounds very personal.

Riklin: It is. You are right. I was in the Oval Office with the Prime Minister several times. I don’t know Trump personally, but I was there when we visited Washington. You are right that it is personal. We are best friends. We are friends. What happened? What happened? We succeeded. Everything we said would happen happened, even more quickly and acutely than we thought.

Chotiner: Except for the strait being closed and the Iranian government not falling. Except for those things, right?

Riklin: No, no. You keep saying it, and that’s your privilege. That wasn’t a surprise. But we thought a blockade to their blockade was genius. And they were really close to a collapse.

Chotiner: It was close to succeeding, and then you guys were stabbed in the back.

Riklin: Exactly. And we don’t understand why. You understand that they are Nazis. What happened to you?

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 18

Between Chotiner going "it's hard to fathom" and Riklin ranting about the duplicitous nature of geminis, this is just objectively very very funny

Chotiner: Putting aside the merits of this war, do you think people such as yourself and the Prime Minister misjudged Donald Trump? I know you said a joyful prayer on the air when he was elected in 2024. You must have had some sense of who this guy is—that he isn’t loyal to anyone, that he had no real core values—

Riklin: Listen, I was really happy when he was elected. I admit it. I think it was good for Israel. And, in the beginning, it was. But today I don’t know what to think. I am really in shock.

Chotiner: It’s hard to fathom.

Riklin: I don’t have a lot of moments like this. I don’t remember someone in modern history who would go with you and do wonderful things, and then suddenly disappear and go against you. So now I am the bad guy? I supported you! I was the good guy! How did I become the bad guy, and the Ayatollah is the good guy?

Chotiner: This is why I was wondering whether you had ever observed Donald Trump.

Riklin: I don’t know what motivated him. You know he is a Gemini? Geminis are not really ones to say the same things a lot. They change their minds. You know Geminis?

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 17

Apropos of nothing in particular, Kundera on the conservative impulse to domesticate the world so "that everything goes well", and the peace of the graveyard. Note how he connects sadism, the death drive and paternalism, to paint the portrait of the busybodies we suffer today.

An excerpt from the farewell waltz: "He scratched the dog's back and thought about the
scene he had just witnessed. The old men armed with
long poles merged in his mind with prison guards,
examining magistrates, and informers who spied on
neighbors to see if they talked politics while shopping.
What drove such people to their sinister occupations?
Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because
the desire for order tries to transform the human world
into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will.
The desire for order is at the same time a desire for
death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or,
inversely, the desire for order is the virtuous pretext by
which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes."

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jun 15

In the UK if you honestly express favourable views about activist groups the government dislikes loyalty squads take you to the gulag for cognitive recalibration. Inquisitors often ask people if they support dissidents to test their mindless loyalty to the regime

Mike Tapp MP asking Polanski "do you support the Palestine Action group?" knowing that honestly expressing your opinion on this matter is literally verbotten unless your opinion happens to coincide with the government's

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Mar 6

In addition, she was also cooking about security culture before it reached its current heights.

America is much more open than Iran, and our public culture is more sexual, but the women in your books strike me as more down to earth about sex and relationships than we are. In the United States right now there’s an absolute panic about divorce, that it’s destroying our culture. And there’s a hysterical romanticization of marriage…

Absolutely, absolutely! They show the belly of pregnant women every second, and write that this actress and that actress is pregnant … they consider that the belly of the woman is just made to make children.

And also they teach in the schools — I know American teenagers — instead of teaching them how to have safe sex, they tell them that they shouldn’t fuck at all! It doesn’t work. People, when they are 17, they are so full of hormones, and the only thing they think about from the morning until the night is sex, sex, sex. Teaching them how to have safe sex is much more logical.

You have gone through a period in the ’60s with sexual liberation and all of that. Now there is this whole thing in America about having to be secure — security makes us very conservative. And there’s a very big coming back of these very moral, religious, heavy things — not having sex before marriage and all of that.

On the contrary, in Iran people are on the way to make a sexual revolution. It’s a little bit later than what has happened in Europe.

You said something interesting before — that fears about security make us conservative. Can you explain the connection?

First, people have stopped talking about pleasure. Eating is a pleasure, but they will tell you if you eat you’re going to get high cholesterol. If you make love, you’re going to get AIDS. If you smoke, you’re going to get cancer. But smoking is a pleasure — I’m a smoker, I can testify. Eating is a pleasure. Making love is a pleasure. OK, it’s a risk sometimes.

The fact is, the world is very fearful, because we don’t know who the enemy is. The world is at war, but at war against who? Bin Laden turns into Saddam and Saddam turns into someone else. They all the time talk about security. Security, security, security. But when you talk about security, then everything is about being safe. And being safe also means having less freedom.

It makes a society much more conservative, looking for security. If you have freedom, then you have more risks. It goes together. Myself, I prefer to take some risks, and once in a while it’s going to hurt. My grandmother always said the saddest life is to be born a cow and to die a donkey.

What does that mean?

That means you are born stupid, and you’re going to die even more stupid.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Mar 6

People are trying to instrumentalise Satrapi to justify this war of aggression, and it's a good time to remind people that genuine political dissidents, such as her, take more considered views about the supposed humanitarian contribution of murdering civilians at scale.

Interview with Marjane Satrapi: Some conservatives here think that secular young Iranians would be happy if America would come and liberate them. What would you say to them?

Democracy, contrary to what they try to tell us, it’s not a paper that you hang on the wall and then you have a democracy. Democracy is a social evolution. It is something cultural. Iranians, they have become much more secular, and they are ready for democracy, but they have to fight themselves for democracy, and the only thing that other countries can do is to understand their fight and help them in their fight.

They [America] talk about the human rights in Iran … how is it that the United States makes the biggest deals with China, and China is far from respecting human rights? What about Saudi Arabia? If you want to talk about an inquisition, the Iranian regime is far from being an inquisition. We have almost a free press, people leave, women have the right to study, they drive, they work. Saudi Arabia, they don’t have anything like that! Talk about human rights in Saudi Arabia! Why doesn’t anyone go and put a bomb in Saudi Arabia and kill the king?

Do you think it’s ironic that, in the face of American threats, you almost find yourself defending the Iranian regime?

Absolutely, but if we want a democracy, the Iranian people have to do it themselves. The Americans say they want a democracy in Iran, and at the same time, when the Iranians wanted to become democratic in 1953 with [Mohammad] Mosaddeq and to nationalize our oil, the CIA came and made a coup d’état in my country. Why do you want me to believe that they want to come and make a democracy? We have to make our democracy!

There are many things that I wish for in my country — I want my country to be free, I want my country to be democratic, I don’t want any journalists to go to jail because of an article they wrote in my country. But if the United States of America attacked my country, no matter what, I would be against the United States.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jan 28

I don't know guys, I suspect the best way to honor holocaust victims and safeguard its historical memory may not be to split hairs about which victims count in order to downwardly revise the death count by millions of people. Sounds kind of obscene, actually. Just my opinion though.

Statement of the Holocaust Educational Trust in the UK, which reads: The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children. Ignoring that the victims were Jews, widening the figure to include all victims of the Second World War, or attempting to draw in contemporary conflicts, is an abuse of the memory of the Holocaust, and an insult to victims and survivors. Any attempt to dilute the Holocaust, strip it of its Jewish specificity, or compare it to contemporary events is unacceptable on any day. On Holocaust Memorial Day, it is especially hurtful, disrespectful and wrong. Karen Pollock CBE, Chief Executive, Holocaust Educational Trust.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jan 27

Hundreds of people have died or are "missing from" ICE's "prisons", btw. ICE is refusing to provide healthcare to detainees. There literally are people who have been hauled off by masked thugs to a literal camp to die of preventable disease and mistreatment, just like Anne Frank.

Tweet by the holocaust museum of the US that reads as follows: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jan 16

Moments of river swimming captured just an instant ago. The river you stepped in no longer exists

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jan 13

We are Jerome Powell we carry the bonds We'll fight for the dollar we'll honor the mandate

Jerome Powell looking down, sadly (colorised, 2026)

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Nov 26

>You could argue similarly that humans are fish After all... why not? Why shouldn't I do it?

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Nov 25

You're right, you know, it's really inefficient and RAM intensive to keep so many tabs open. That's why I'm not using tabs, but bookmarks.

A screenshot of the number of boomarks in one of my bookmark folders, in one of my firefox profiles: a mere paltry thirteen thousand eighty four (13.084) items. I'm sure I'll get to them one of these days

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Nov 22

Reading "Why Liberalism Failed" and really enjoying it. It's surprisingly easy to go through

Stock image of someone flipping the blank pages of an empty book

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Oct 22

We could have a contemporary rendition of 7 Samurai about palestinian villagers fighting off rabid israeli settlers backed by the IDF, but our filmmakers are too cowardly to grasp this opportunity.

Haaretz report on armed settler attacks on palestinians during olive harvest. "As the olive harvest begins in the West Bank, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians while the IDF watches on"

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Oct 14

Also: we should not judge anyone by "the standards of their time". We should judge them by actually correct standards, as far as we have gradually found out what those are, and condemn both them and the false, unjust standards that legitimised their wrongs on that basis.

A twitter post that reads: Annual reminder that judging Christopher Columbus by the standards of his own time doesn't make him look better: His contemporaries criticized his greed, his inability to do basic math, his terrible management of his crew, and his cruelty. He went back to Spain in chains.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Oct 6

Against economic justice, against trans rights, against palestinian rights, against our shared right to assemble and protest and *speak*. Whatever the struggle du jour, Rowling's there, valiantly defending established interests, oppressors, those that want to take our liberties.

Rowling retweeting a spectator article by Nick Cohen, in defence of labour's attempted restriction of the right of assembly and protest, which recurgitates the usual canards that pro-palestinian protesters are antisemitic and calling for the murder of jewish people worldwide.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Aug 20

"all art is political" pfff ok what are the politics of this image

Per Walter Benjamin: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Aug 19

We do have to assume responsibility before the court of ages.

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Aug 8

Centrists always turn into this guy exactly before or immediately after getting obliterated. Their coveted electoral "pragmatism" turns out to be a bunch of hare-brained schemes where they shoot themselves on the foot and improve the enemy's position impelled by some primal ideological self-delusion

Picture of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems with the subtitle "this is how I win."

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jul 30

YOU WERE LISTENING TO SPOTIFY, YOU SICK FUCK!

ergopraxis@ergopraxis· Jul 30

Not to drown you in variations of the same basic theme, but you definitely should not have to prove you're an adult, and indeed should not be required to be an adult at all, to listen to fucking music on the internet.