John Holbo jholbo.bsky.social Profile picture
Jun 1, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
New OBZ pages! Z's made a friend! (Or has he?)

More than ever you see the influence of Nietzsche on Dr. Seuss in these pages. But also the influence of Plato on Nietzsche - the quality of the teacher-pupil relationship in philosophy. onbeyondzarathustra.com/obz-gdfd-p2-01
And yet: is not Seuss' famous, titular Cat also a seducer, in the Socratic mode, terrifying yet entrancing?

At any rate, it's interesting that Nietzsche foresees the rise of modern 'Cinema' culture ...
... also the way in which said cinema culture, which should be the basis of fierce life-promotion, may decline into decadent spectatorship! Cf. 'Goethean man', a.k.a. the 'Catilinist in the Hat', in "Uses and Abuses".
Such colors! (Would it kill you people to like & retweet?)
Wow! Rust and teal! It's as if Z has known the true color palette of my soul all these years, and yet I knew it not myself! I am really looking forward to what comes next! But Thursday seems so far away!

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More from @jholbo1

Feb 1
This @radleybalko debunking of the 'Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted' documentary, "The Fall of Minneapolis", seems quite thorough, convincing, and damning. radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconni…
It's SO thorough & damning it's fair to say that figures like @coldxman who have promoted the documentary, & its conclusion, should either 1) debunk Balko's debunking back or 2) admit they were suckered by liars or 3) be themselves regarded as such. thefp.com/p/what-really-…
Back in December I somehow found myself listening to this bloggingheads discussion between @GlennLoury and John McWhorter, in which Loury quite strongly takes the line that the documentary exonerates Chauvin and proves 'we've been lied to'. bloggingheads.tv/videos/67137
Read 19 tweets
Oct 31, 2023
11 things can be true at once.
1) Israeli policy towards Palestinians has been & continues to be deeply unjust.
2) Belief in 1) is not antisemitic.
3) Since 1) is a main root of the conflict 'solutions' that ignore it won't work & are bad.
4) The left has an antisemitism problem.
5) The left has an idiot problem. Lots of people shouting antisemitic slogans they don't understand out of a vague sense that this is social justice.
6) 4) + 5) is really bad and poisonous to the left.
7) The right has an antisemitism problem (and an idiot problem, duh.)
8) The pro-Israel right has an interest in playing up 4) because it is unwilling to admit 1), despite 3), and would like to believe 7) is less serious than 4), which - maybe? (Who can say, but I doubt it.)
9) 8) predictably exacerbates 4) + 5), hence 6).
Read 5 tweets
Oct 9, 2023
My personal resolution: I'm only going to comment on the Israel/Gaza situation in a calm manner, addressed to the relatively small slice of people I think might be persuaded to see things a bit differently.
Here is @monacharen. Obviously there is a sense in which Israel did nothing to 'provoke' this attack. Nothing could justify or excuse it. But Israel did a great deal to risk it - to recklessly tempt such a development, politically, strategically. plus.thebulwark.com/p/hamas-makes-…
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One can say so without thereby excusing or justifying the attack. Every Israeli is demanding to know who is at fault on the Israeli side for staggering intelligence and defense lapses. No one is saying no one is at fault because, morally, it was the job of Hamas not to attack.
Read 9 tweets
Aug 18, 2023
[Deep breath] It's worse. It's so, so bad - so much worse even than that - that it's hard to keep the big picture in view. But let's try. Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as "dangerous" and "fraudulent" as early as April, 2020. https://t.co/04CKW1Kl7inpr.org/sections/coron…
In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless. But let's just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many R's have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.
Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat - to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by D's.
Read 22 tweets
Aug 13, 2023
Moyn's lectures were great! Haven't read the book yet but the review, which is great, emphasises his key idea: the characteristic pessimism of Cold War-era philosophical liberalism - Trilling, Popper, Himmelfarb, Berlin, Shklar. Let me rub together 2 thoughts via that.
Rothfeld, the reviewer, contrasts these figures, as Moyn portrays them, with an identikit liberal. "A chipper rationalist who is scornfully secular, naively sanguine about humanity’s prospects for self-improvement and devoted to the philosophy of the Enlightenment."
This is just SO wrong. Cold War philosophical liberalism, as Moyn emphasises, is dark, pessimistic, concessive not aspirational, pre-emptively crouched. Per Moyn, it is 'against itself'. As a result - to this day - most anti-liberal critiques of liberalism are not EVEN wrong.
Read 23 tweets
Feb 12, 2023
The pull quote is exactly right for this one from @jbouie. One way to think about it: suppose, for the sake of the argument, there ARE two problems at present. 1) teens confusedly over-identifying as trans due to some social contagion whatever. 2) docs over-accommodating this. 1/
You reply: 1 & 2 aren't actually true. That's fine but just be an abstract normative political philosophy seminar room dork with me on this for a minute. It isn't absurd to imagine 1 & 2. If 1 & 2 were true, for the sake of argument, what would be the proper response? 2/
Broadly, there are two strategies. If you believe in liberty and respect and basic rights for all there is no alternative than muddling through. If the medical community has overcorrected for its long history of insufficiently recognising trans people, we need to correct the over
Read 26 tweets

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