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Left Nietzschean

@devingoure.bsky.social
6.2K followers 528 following 195 posts

PhD in political theory, posts on philosophy, Nietzsche, mental health, politics, and games of all sorts. “The stillest words are those that bring the storm.”

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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
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.
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petey @peteypayless.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
they let you add pics to posts on this site too!
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
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...
podcasts.apple.com
Contemporary Conversations: Jonathan B. Fine on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the German Enlightenment
Podcast Episode · Moral Minority · 02/06/2026 · 1h 30m
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Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Sounds like a good time to reread A Thousand Plateaus.
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Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Listen to me call Lessing, the paragon of the German Enlightenment, a dick
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
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!
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
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...
patreon.com
Contemporary Conversations: Jonathan B. Fine on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the German Enlightenment | Moral Minority
Get more from Moral Minority on Patreon
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Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
This piece from @brynntannehill.bsky.social is terrifyingly persuasive. bylinetimes.com/2026/01/22/t...
bylinetimes.com
'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
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
I’m not sure I think there’s any way out of this without a fundamental renegotiation of the entire constitutional order.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
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?
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
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.
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Chemtrails of Arise @databasemanimal1.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
"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."
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
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!
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
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...
open.substack.com
Hannah Arendt, Minneapolis, and the Refusal to Judge
Reflections on the murder of Renée Good
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
*Geralt and Yen’s past, more accurately
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
OK but what about your body *without* organs?
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
I mean… “limited” benefits of “less than 2%” (within polling margins of error) is hardly a roaring vindication of Yglesias’s claim.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
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.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Here at Moral Minority, we don’t talk enough about all the hard work our team puts in behind the scenes to make the show possible. Here’s our producer, Bambi, catching up on the reading for our upcoming episode.
Adorable kitten reads Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Yglesias’s model is basically clickbait. Everything is some version of: “This one simple trick is all you need to win elections!” As if he hadn’t been the preferred wonk of an administration whose catastrophic mistakes in political strategy we learn more about every day.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Not to mention the false dichotomy. Either Democrats can do what Yglesias advises or they can try to shape public opinion in the most hamhanded ways imaginable. Nothing in between these extremes appears to be even conceivable in this framework.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Yglesias of course will never respond to this but this seems like a perfect case study in his standard practice of laundering the controversial views of supposed centrists as the obvious common sense by studiously ignoring pertinent objections.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
…”elite” opinions? Trump arguably won because his voters perceive him as authentic. But where did public opinion stand on Trump’s incendiary claims when he first started running for nomination in 2015-2016? How much did he succeed in moving public opinion? Etc etc
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
…Trump’s term, or where it is now? It appears to have moved substantially in a short period, which raises even more fundamental questions about your proposed strategy. Could it also be that one reason Democrats are struggling is that they are already perceived as simply catering to the prevalent…
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Really I can think of several more questions off the top of my head. What does it mean to study public opinion “accurately,” and why this question-begging? Public opinion often seems volatile: should Democrats have catered their platform to where public opinion appeared to be at the start of…
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Personally I don’t know the state of the literature on this one way or the other. But in any case, this seems like the perfect example of how your “I’m just saying the obvious uncontroversial thing here” is actually premised on controversial assumptions that you seem uninterested in backing up.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Matt, could you please point me toward peer-reviewed political science research showing clearly that mimicking public opinion results in more electoral success than trying actively to shape public opinion? You’re laundering a controversial empirical claim as obvious common sense.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
I could maybe have gotten on board if it was a widespread thing but it would be total bullshit to make a rule change just to punish one team for being able to do something no one else can.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Incidentally, Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
“It was entirely reasonable to say that Israel didn’t have genocidal intentions” says guy on the internet as Israeli officials brag about committing genocide.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
If you base your philosophy on the importance of the moral foundations of critique, you can’t get the single most urgent moral issue of this century so far exactly wrong.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
A month after October 7, some of the world’s leading Critical Theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, issued this statement. Their contributions to political philosophy will now forever be tainted by this singular, catastrophic failure in moral judgment.
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Joe Stieb @joestieb.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
s-usih.org/2025/05/the-... Savage review by @notoriousrsg.bsky.social: "Little did Steinmetz-Jenkins know that, within a year of its publication, his volume would go from being a triumphant coup-de-grace against the liberal tyrannophobes, to an artifact of the shortest victory lap ever taken. "
s-usih.org
“The Wolves Came”: Richard Steigmann-Gall on Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’s *Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America* | Society for US Intellectual History
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed intermi...
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
Also, and against my better judgment, I've released another Substack post debunking myths about Nietzsche in Daniel Tutt's recent book that I've been sitting on for a long time. Hopefully it helps dispel some illusions about his historical and political context. open.substack.com/pub/devingou...
open.substack.com
How to Read Like a Parasite, Part III
Debunking myths about Nietzsche and the Paris Commune
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
A new episode of Moral Minority, the second part of our discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, is available wherever you get your podcasts! open.spotify.com/episode/5Nmr...
open.spotify.com
Being & Nothingness, Part 2
Moral Minority · Episode
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Moral Minority Podcast @moralminority.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Without further ado, Moral Minority presents Part 2 of our discussion of Being & Nothingness. You can now listen to it on our Patreon, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. As always, please consider supporting us and the philosophy podcast community by chipping in $5 on Patreon
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
We’re all feeling despair, but it’s worth noting that an intelligent authoritarian could easily have gone about this in a way that would provoke less outrage. Trump will instead continue to do what is maximally cruel, dishonest, and illegal, and this makes him vulnerable.
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Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
Update: stray cat friend is now a momma!
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