#  @jasonwblakely Jason Blakely
Jason Blakely posts on X about maga, theory, pope francis, the great the most. They currently have [------] followers and [---] posts still getting attention that total [------] engagements in the last [--] hours.
### Engagements: [------] [#](/creator/twitter::1157759751591100416/interactions)
- [--] Week [------] +520%
- [--] Month [------] +7,057%
- [--] Months [-------] -75%
- [--] Year [---------] +52%
### Mentions: [--] [#](/creator/twitter::1157759751591100416/posts_active)
- [--] Months [--] -64%
- [--] Year [--] -51%
### Followers: [------] [#](/creator/twitter::1157759751591100416/followers)
- [--] Week [------] +0.83%
- [--] Month [------] +0.70%
- [--] Months [------] +3.70%
- [--] Year [------] +21%
### CreatorRank: [-------] [#](/creator/twitter::1157759751591100416/influencer_rank)
### Social Influence
**Social category influence**
[countries](/list/countries) [celebrities](/list/celebrities) [travel destinations](/list/travel-destinations) [technology brands](/list/technology-brands) [cryptocurrencies](/list/cryptocurrencies) [ncaa football](/list/ncaa-football) [us election](/list/us-election) [stocks](/list/stocks) [social networks](/list/social-networks) [automotive brands](/list/automotive-brands)
**Social topic influence**
[maga](/topic/maga), [theory](/topic/theory) #2578, [pope francis](/topic/pope-francis), [the great](/topic/the-great) #518, [in the](/topic/in-the), [common](/topic/common), [athens](/topic/athens), [politics](/topic/politics), [history](/topic/history), [cogito](/topic/cogito)
**Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by**
[@thenovaforum](/creator/undefined) [@tomasbogardus](/creator/undefined) [@lcinstitute](/creator/undefined) [@matthewsitman](/creator/undefined) [@anthonysci85206](/creator/undefined) [@democritussr](/creator/undefined) [@ab_cummings](/creator/undefined) [@harpers](/creator/undefined) [@mattpolprof](/creator/undefined) [@davidestorey](/creator/undefined) [@agendapub](/creator/undefined) [@columbiaup](/creator/undefined) [@markmanger](/creator/undefined) [@trefeca](/creator/undefined) [@dmk1793](/creator/undefined) [@adamgopnik](/creator/undefined) [@anotherpanacea](/creator/undefined) [@anakasparian](/creator/undefined) [@cenkuygur](/creator/undefined) [@theyoungturks](/creator/undefined)
**Top assets mentioned**
[Cogito Finance (CGV)](/topic/cogito) [Fusionist (ACE)](/topic/fusionist) [Intuit Inc. (INTU)](/topic/$intu) [April (APRIL)](/topic/april) [Telos (TLOS)](/topic/telos) [Validity (VAL)](/topic/validity) [TROY (TROY)](/topic/troy) [Quant (QNT)](/topic/quant) [Dusk (DUSK)](/topic/dusk) [Wormhole (W)](/topic/wormhole)
### Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours
"it's not that Henry Miller or Cormac is graced with any real deep philosophical insight or even an unusual literary talent--it's simply that both discover early on the ability to continually say aloud what was once considered monstrous. they are a literature of the monstrous"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1673422789640876043) 2023-06-26T20:07Z 11K followers, [----] engagements
"My essay on the political handling of the pandemic & the abuse of scientific authority is out now in the latest Harper's. Although I am quite critical of many officials I arrived here only after months of wrangling with the fears & hopes of the pandemic https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/ https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1680962725718155264) 2023-07-17T15:28Z 10.9K followers, 70.5K engagements
"Nietzsche was very profound in this respect: Science as a way of life (carried out by flesh-and-blood humans) needs a code or model of selfhood. It originated according to Nietzsche in an intensely Jewish-Christian culture of truth-telling at all costs (since God always sees)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1683565993417900033) 2023-07-24T19:53Z 11K followers, [---] engagements
"The reason "Catholic Integralism" has of late lost vitality is directly related to the fact that Trump & MAGA are not in power. Were the latter to return Integralism will regain urgency. This implies that it's major ideological role is escapist apologetics for ethnonationalism"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699098044623720664) 2023-09-05T16:31Z [----] followers, 16.4K engagements
"One of the points that emerges quite clearly from the discussion is that liberalism (like all ideologies) has many cultural variants. The illusion of a single timeless Liberalism that must either fail (Deneen) or triumph (Fukuyama) is dispelled by Moyn's kind of history"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699583816749420629) 2023-09-07T00:42Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"i am not a Foucauldian but i have learned a tremendous amount from him that still resonates e.g.: [--]. psychology/clinical practice as political [--]. genealogical inquiry as applicable to a wider range of institutions [--]. Hobbesian state sovereignty disaggregated (governmentality)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699943214889988234) 2023-09-08T00:30Z [----] followers, 19.9K engagements
"i see i didn't mention Foucault by name but i was thinking of him when pursuing this line of criticism against that most Americanized of Schmittians Adrian Vermeule"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699959589096337504) 2023-09-08T01:35Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@AAJDeVille1 ahaha. definitely some bullies busy trying to cut up the country like their private chocolate cake"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699961850790846754) 2023-09-08T01:44Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"in terms of #2: Foucault carries out (some) aspects of Nietzschean genealogy with more ingenuity & sociological ambition than anything Nietzsche himself ever did when reading him one is freed from the illusion that the treatment of e.g. madness or crime must be *thus & so*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699965838949011798) 2023-09-08T02:00Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"to de-naturalize the major social & economic institutions of the ageif nothing else to give us back as *cultural* what can appear to us within our own time as unavoidably naturalis itself an intellectual & philosophical service. it also expands the range of the thinkable"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1699966366735110281) 2023-09-08T02:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Part [--] of [--] covers Taylor's view that both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation helped destroy the enchanted social imaginary of the Medieval world. It also covers Taylor's famous concept of the "porous" & buffered self"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1700531084268908754) 2023-09-09T15:26Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Part [--] of [--] is on Taylor's view that everyone today is "secular" in an important sense. Religious conservatives form of mobilization and social imaginary is distinctly modern. Titled: "What Conservatives Get Wrong about Secularism""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1700536583617925380) 2023-09-09T15:48Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Oh good God.@chucktodd just explicitly pressed Gov Gavin Newsom on my@Harpers article for several minutes. Respect for his journalistic courage"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1701360604903305269) 2023-09-11T22:22Z [----] followers, 22.6K engagements
"Newsom certainly seems ripe for walking into this trap. The way out is open. Simply admit that in a future emergency more could be done to assemble and listen to ordinary concerns (incorporating them into policy). But he appears insulated by the Rule-by-Data constituency"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1701657845417271571) 2023-09-12T18:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"But most people today have no bandwidth for this. They want to play the simple American pastime of Elephants-versus-Donkeys. (Please sir choose your animal now and lavish upon it unstinting love & adoration .)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1701660716527411306) 2023-09-12T18:15Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"you mean the only regime on the planet with the dubious distinction of having overseen the state-sponsored execution of God yeah i think about them sometimes too"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1702495112193073243) 2023-09-15T01:30Z [----] followers, 15.5K engagements
"America in [----] A morbid technocratic liberalism once again claims to be the only "realistic" electoral alternative to a voracious ethnonationalist authoritarianism. The standoff cannot last forever. If a new politics does not emerge I fear the latter will devour the former"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1702682632088437208) 2023-09-15T13:55Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@TomasBogardus @danielwaweru it didn't though. that's the error of anachronism again. it'd be like saying suppose Platonists had invented cars. then Athens could have been a society of automobiles. just because you can imagine it happening doesn't mean it did. in historical thinking chronology matters"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1710807845514649744) 2023-10-08T00:02Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I suspect one reason the sad & disturbing outbreak of violence in Israel is hitting Americans harder (even those with no immediate connection to either side) is because we intuit that some of the murky forces at play might be increasingly present in a parallel way in our society"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1713591965017919957) 2023-10-15T16:25Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Montreal is the largest French speaking city in the world after Paris. Can you imagine if the US had the largest Spanish speaking city in the world after Mexico City And we managed to find a way to affirm both It's almost impossible to imagine thanks to our own ethno-nat'lists"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1713673008089641421) 2023-10-15T21:47Z [----] followers, 12.7K engagements
"Pre-order my book on ideology: A brilliant tour d'horizon of modern politics -@MatthewSitman "A warm humanist & vital book" - @MattPolProf "Joins the ranks of great theorists of ideology" - @FrankPasquale "Terrific" - @craigjcalhoun"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1734959355613843955) 2023-12-13T15:31Z [----] followers, 34.6K engagements
""A must-have for anyone debating politics online" Thanks to Emili for this thoughtful video review of my forthcoming book *Lost in Ideology* (available for preorder via the link in my bio)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1745148276868067705) 2024-01-10T18:19Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Watch Emili's full review of my book at her TikTok account:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1745149163929559316) 2024-01-10T18:22Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I wonder if this inability to debate is partly due to the repression & removal of philosophy from broad swaths of the history discipline in the U.S. I have great reverence for the craft of history but it is too often rendered into a bland empiricism of mere "fact collection" Unlike say economists and philosophers historians don't have a robust professional culture of disagreement and debate. Almost every time I have criticized an American historian here other historians sometimes their colleagues DM me and agree but don't want to in public. Unlike say economists and philosophers historians"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1746216452880031768) 2024-01-13T17:03Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@DavidEStorey you should go to his talk--he & his wife told me he's in BC in a matter of days ()"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1746350524209987985) 2024-01-14T01:56Z [--] followers, [--] engagements
"My new book on exiting ideological confusion just arrived. Pre-order at Amazon or your favorite non-apocalyptic bookstore. @agendapub @ColumbiaUP"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1748146466064097750) 2024-01-19T00:52Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"* advertisement jingle on this book ad reluctantly to you by:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1748381732007817334) 2024-01-19T16:27Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Sorry Ludwig for shoehorning your sprawling genius into my 8-second TikTok video 🙏"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1748382371177795812) 2024-01-19T16:30Z [--] followers, [---] engagements
"A careful reading reveals Tolkien's view of evil is never dualistic (in which one substance is simply evil). Rather evil is always the corruption of someone or something good (hollowed out & losing Being). Thus as in Augustine: absolute evil can't exist absolute good can. @Andrewnsnyder @PhilYanda Only a child thinks good and evil is black and white or that pure embodiments of either exist. There is no Sauron. @Andrewnsnyder @PhilYanda Only a child thinks good and evil is black and white or that pure embodiments of either exist. There is no Sauron"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1748794921124048931) 2024-01-20T19:49Z [----] followers, 28K engagements
"This is the humanism of Shakespeare in my opinion (from Richard III to MacBeth) and of Erasmus. It's a humanism that sees human evil as folly--very nearly almost laughable if it weren't so ghastly. It's a loser's game. It's a denial of self. God . *laughs*. Unbreakable joy"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1748796990589448526) 2024-01-20T19:57Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I was read Tolkien aloud as a boy by my atheist/agnostic father but this entered deep in my mind. My father like many in his generation liked Tolkien because of themes of pastoral & ecological harmony. Nature is good. But I still write & think in this humanistic tradition"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1748797662546289118) 2024-01-20T20:00Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"2 ways Milei is an example of the widespread condition my new book calls "Lost in Ideology": [--]. He mistakes his own politics as *scientific* (mere data & prediction) when ideologies are in fact always ethical/cultural [--]. He's unable to grasp rival ideologies on their own terms Communists Nazis fascists socialists social democrats national socialists Christian democrats Keynesians neo-Keynesians progressives populists nationalists globalists: In the end theres no substantive difference. Javier Milei https://t.co/IRc9ZkDpOQ Communists Nazis fascists socialists social democrats national"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1749103136210653596) 2024-01-21T16:14Z [--] followers, 55K engagements
"Okay this is rightly taking heat but one thing this speaker is right about is that these are narrative (or meaning-making) phenomenon. His mistake is the inference that because something is narrative it is not real. Social reality is *both* narrative and as real as mountains. What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1749902880218464704) 2024-01-23T21:12Z [--] followers, 26.2K engagements
"Granted familiarity with the history of philosophy could significantly decrease the scandal around this empiricist chestnut. It is unoriginal and goes way back to people like Bentham among others (*Rights I can't smell or see them Must be nonsense on stilts*)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1749912770672472482) 2024-01-23T21:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"John Searle took interest in my dissertation in grad school (despite his skepticism of my hermeneutics). Our overlap Social reality. People like Yuval Noah Harari should read Searle. He is similarly naturalist in inclination but sees social reality's ontology more clearly/"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1749915342238048271) 2024-01-23T22:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@thephilosotroll 😂👍"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1749993837085479317) 2024-01-24T03:13Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@TomasBogardus well in one sense they obviously do. prior to say [----] & [----] there aren't human rights as aspects of government (they don't "exist") but in other sense not at all: the story about rights is a bid on an interpretation of the objective significance of human freedom regardless"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1750171308514841006) 2024-01-24T14:58Z [--] followers, [---] engagements
"@TomasBogardus That's because Harari is runs the two together He says in same talk that e.g. states don't exist. So we need to look at two kinds of social ontology he runs together: [--]. that which is instituted in a society (first sense) [--]. that which objectively exists as best story (second)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1750176421736321302) 2024-01-24T15:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"So diametrically opposed am I to Yuval Harari's position that I am quite comfortable saying the total opposite: You can chop reality into the tiniest bits. You can turn your eyes into microscopes. Reality remainsultimately and ineliminablynarrative. Reality is . a *story* What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1750179781147303999) 2024-01-24T15:32Z [----] followers, 86.5K engagements
"@TomasBogardus My view of rights I think some version of rights exists as our best interpretation of political significance of reality (sense 2). Yes. Prob not the standard liberal one out of Kant. Though I would ground it in a theological narrative as our best account of human dignity"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1750183305453171143) 2024-01-24T15:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@TomasBogardus should add when i hear narrative i also think narrator--it's just i take it that there are two narrators in reality: humans (whose stories are often historically contingent) and God who is the ultimate storyteller and when he speaks it is creative of the narrative of creation"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1750209076800446601) 2024-01-24T17:28Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"IMO this inadvertently ends ups as more prescriptive than descriptive. The underlying imperative is: "the Left must insist on partisan purity in politics" Or perhaps: "when encountering ideological hybrids fusionism or even incoherence we must insist on essential types" "Neither right nor left" is always some kind of con-job. "Neither right nor left" is always some kind of con-job"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1751390482863964303) 2024-01-27T23:43Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"If you see ideologies as cultural this would be akin to saying "fusionist cuisine is always a con-job It must either be X or Y" Or else: "All cross-genre musicians are a sham" But ideology is also cultural. So fusionism & what I call *liquidity* can & does occur"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1751392776305172533) 2024-01-27T23:52Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@BraveIowan haven't read it--who's it by"
[X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1751398745609269501) 2024-01-28T00:16Z [--] followers, [--] engagements
"Hey hivemind do you have Hegel book recs for me not written by anyone in Pittsburgh :) Looking for interesting takes especially about his phil. of history. Hey hivemind do you have Hegel book recs for me not written by anyone in Pittsburgh :) Looking for interesting takes especially about his phil. of history"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1756346614057517315) 2024-02-10T15:57Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Also Alasdair MacIntyre's [----] essay "Hegel on Faces and Skulls" has some very provocative thoughts on philosophical disagreement as historically extended. (The essay was also reprinted in MacIntyre's [----] Cambridge Collection of essays The Tasks of Philosophy)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1756368170062151811) 2024-02-10T17:22Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"What does Re miss Mac spent *decades* before his turn to Aristotle criticizing the social sciences & influence of naturalism on ethics. His criticism of Marx echoes his critique in a different way of Kant or Mill. They expect ethics to resolve like science. But it doesn't"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1757568355735842892) 2024-02-14T00:52Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"This is one way to understand the whole *After Virtue* breakthrough that MacIntyre had so late in his life. Namely he suddenly realized that the recovery of teleology (goal-directed) philosophy of action in the social sciences needed to happen simultaneously in ethics"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1757568700432171048) 2024-02-14T00:53Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"When I was studying my PhD at Berkeley there was a big split between the renowned analytic philosopher John Searle & great Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus. Searle was said to have returned the complete works of Husserl on Dreyfus's desk w/ tart remark: "yeah there's nothing there""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1758184556400902624) 2024-02-15T17:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Far from rendering philosophy irrelevant the only way to understand the below statement is as an expression of philosophy. In this case wittingly or not the argument is historically derivative of early twentieth-century logical positivism. why study philosophy at all once the "queen of the sciences" it has been not surpassed but rendered irrelevant by more specialized fields of inquiry (linguistics neuroscience etc.). however to not have read Plato Aristotle the pre-Socratics Lucretius is a disadvantage why study philosophy at all once the "queen of the sciences" it has been not surpassed but"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1758285538308796756) 2024-02-16T00:21Z [----] followers, 21.9K engagements
"An analytic friend insisted my joke about analytic philosophy was uncharitable. And they were right. I apologize & have taken down the original post. The truth is I learned much from analytic philosophy/ philosophers & to repent for my sins will now list some of my favorites:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1758565086984315111) 2024-02-16T18:52Z [----] followers, 11.1K engagements
"At Berkeley Searle was on my dissertation committee (we shared an interest in social ontology). I understand & take seriously his later revealed personal failings. At the time I was kept on my toes & intellectually honest by his work even when disagreeing. Especially:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1758568315830841764) 2024-02-16T19:05Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@MarkManger @trefeca @dmk1793 "pensions" you are clearly not working in the USA. we don't have those anymore"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1763398117012226098) 2024-03-01T02:57Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@MarkManger @trefeca @dmk1793 Well there's an important distinction between traditional pensions (guaranteed salary) and 401ks. The latter were rolled out with neoliberalism and are a form of precarious mass gambling"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1763401864761270477) 2024-03-01T03:12Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"In 17th c. England Hobbes was an atheist because he denied the personal & revealed God of Abraham. Though Leviathan does concede an abstract deistic watchmaker god But post-Nietzsche Hobbes is no atheist because he still has not fully purged metaphysics of the god(s) of Reason Was Hobbes an atheist Was Hobbes an atheist"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764346732232544405) 2024-03-03T17:46Z [----] followers, 14.6K engagements
"In Leviathan Hobbes can *BOTH* write in Chapter 12: miracles failing faith also failed *AND* in Chapter 11: "of necessity" humans who inquire must arrive at "some cause wherefore there is no former cause but is eternal which is it men call God" (XI)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764352405838438488) 2024-03-03T18:09Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Teaching Hobbes his odd form of unbelief is fruitful in two ways: [--]. It challenges theists who overestimate the proofs of Gods existence. All proof gets you is a conceptual abstract god that doesnt fit well with traditional theism (especially not trinitarian Christianity)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764361027540365546) 2024-03-03T18:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"2. It challenges atheists who assume science empties the cosmos of any god(s). Hobbes does not see the new sciences emerging at his time as eliminating the need for deities but as transforming them. The shallow atheism of say Dawkins (science=atheism) is complicated/unsettled"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764368756862841078) 2024-03-03T19:14Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I blame the computational theory of mind for this. Not all cognition is information and symbol processing. The world is not reducible to the sum total of facts or data. There is a thing called *meaning* or significanceit is an event that goes beyond a tallying of information"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764873147638268033) 2024-03-05T04:38Z [----] followers, 22.7K engagements
"It is also a category mistake. As if fiction were trying to do the same as informational articles (data transmission) but via different means One might even say fictional/poetic art often manifests the highest "density" of meaning. *"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1764876424773816461) 2024-03-05T04:51Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Rare photo of a *bearded* Charles Taylor (circa 1972). Stumbled upon it while going through archives I compiled in grad school of obscurer Taylor in preparation for my *Charles Taylor Seminar* this summer via @LC_Institute @theNovaForum at University of Southern California"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1766208760509341787) 2024-03-08T21:05Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@SRDorman @DrAdrianBlau @LC_Institute @theNovaForum the 1970s + youth = very different countenance"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1766215623871545559) 2024-03-08T21:33Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Gray the Archbishop of Los Angeles might like a word Architecture is really the simplest test of politics - before you get to messy stuff - and Tucker is right here. The advent of Bauhaus and then Brutalism has made our public spaces ever worse & dispiriting. Architecture is really the simplest test of politics - before you get to messy stuff - and Tucker is right here. The advent of Bauhaus and then Brutalism has made our public spaces ever worse & dispiriting"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1768730022385463519) 2024-03-15T20:04Z [----] followers, 21.7K engagements
"I fail to see how a Church that has absorbed into itself everything from ancient Classicism of the Pantheon in Rome to the Baroque and Gothic cannot assimilate and affirm what is beautiful in Bauhaus Brutalism Abstraction and modernism. We must find our own language"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1768730867030245836) 2024-03-15T20:07Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 i don't mean a built telos like hegel. just that time keeps tumbling out and we keep wandering in its medium"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1768738970622693711) 2024-03-15T20:40Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"While I appreciate the time taken to review my book: if you are going to review a book do it with care Alas I wonder if there's an ideological animus Far from relativistic on ideology I am particularly hard on Right Liberalism for relying on a scientism of the market"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1773017670356496813) 2024-03-27T16:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The "fascism debate" is partly so confused & interminable because disputants assumes the wrong concept of ideology. The skeptics often pose standards of usage not applied to any other ideology (e.g. fascism's absolute purity/political success). Ch [--] of my new book dispels this This should be the line from now on: We'll start taking your argument seriously when you start taking it seriously. If you say fascism is coming I want to see either your plane ticket to another country or the guns you're stockpiling. All the rest is commentary. This should be the line from now on: We'll start taking"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1774454736194019805) 2024-03-31T15:12Z [----] followers, 37.9K engagements
"@churchmouse6718 i am afraid that's not very good philosophy of social science (even if you are right and its good politics) i do like Roger Griffin's work though"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1774658056552653174) 2024-04-01T04:40Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I went on The Political Philosophy Review podcast with Jeff Church to talk about my new book *Lost in Ideology* With the "fascism debate" heating up again this audio excerpt is on how hermeneutics helps clarify the debate. Listen to full interview here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/thepoliticaltheoryreview/episodes/2024-04-02T11_57_59-07_00 https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/thepoliticaltheoryreview/episodes/2024-04-02T11_57_59-07_00"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1775280191134462201) 2024-04-02T21:52Z [----] followers, 10.7K engagements
"@Chris_arnade it's one of these writings that has massive influence *indirectly*. treated very dismissively for a while in academic circles (Mac's combination of Marxism Catholicism antiliberalism upset practically everyone). opener to an essay i wrote w/ footnote may be of interest:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1775874963540697106) 2024-04-04T13:16Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I'm amazed not only at how vile this is but also its naivete in terms of historical dynamics. Spain today is so unbelieving (less than 20% practicing Catholics) *because* of Franco. Violent reaction can win in the short run but it trashes Christian witness in the long run. And now for a Franco Friday Special: Its the Uncle Frank Theme Song 🎵🎶 https://t.co/qtRejVb7UJ https://t.co/MqO3f1LAa4 And now for a Franco Friday Special: Its the Uncle Frank Theme Song 🎵🎶 https://t.co/qtRejVb7UJ https://t.co/MqO3f1LAa4"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1779208297457025499) 2024-04-13T18:01Z [----] followers, 29.1K engagements
"Franco thought he was disappearing "rojos" but what he disappeared was the credible public witness of Christianity. The New Right has not caught up to history: Countries like Spain are more aggressively secular because they were more aggressively sectarian and theocratic"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1779209822615052682) 2024-04-13T18:07Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 fwiw in the opener to the book i also distinguish it from any "worldview" since I think it belongs to a modern / disenchanted age (it can meld with religion but it not the same as it)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1779532658055479631) 2024-04-14T15:30Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Clip from full lecture on Charles Taylor: *Should Christians Reject the Modern World* here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=ifd2WUxB--o https://www.youtube.com/watchv=ifd2WUxB--o"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1781744913396478185) 2024-04-20T18:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Lecture delivered April [--] [----] as part of an undergraduate course entitled: *Political Theology: A Genealogy of Christian Political Thought.* Pepperdine University California. Text discussed:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1781746467755249939) 2024-04-20T18:07Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The philosophical language of materialists is rarely up to the task of expressing their actual felt & embodied existence. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than when experiencing grief. Hence the return of religion haunting the funerals of atheists like King Hamlet's ghost"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1781810893480935660) 2024-04-20T22:23Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Better once again to begin with Erasmus in the *Complaint of Peace* and his absolute insistence that human war is always folly. It must be repeated over and over again: war is folly. All sides get splattered. Even the justest cause is sullied. Dulce bellum inexpertis"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1782440017631318087) 2024-04-22T16:03Z [----] followers, 17.9K engagements
"Americans now cyclically rediscover what the poor have known for three decades or more: police forces across the USA have para-militarized in terms of tactics technology & culture. Any social conflict now regularly triggers grossly disproportionate shows of force from the state What do you call it when cops start doing this to journalists https://t.co/eQTdQWl6D2 What do you call it when cops start doing this to journalists https://t.co/eQTdQWl6D2"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1783514549473378745) 2024-04-25T15:12Z [----] followers, 14.3K engagements
"One thing I appreciated in @MichaelSWinters was his focus on the way that liberalism struggles to concretely secure those aspects of politics that are mistaken as natural or timeless as opposed to cultural & historical. Michael's reconstruction on the conundrum here:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1783898140573344158) 2024-04-26T16:37Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"That simple weakness makes you right & that justice requires no exercise of authority is not a view ascribable to any major ideology philosophy or religion Alas Elon is trapped inside his ideology Much of what he "sees" are figments of his own thought he wages war upon"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1783953787759341925) 2024-04-26T20:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"In Leviathan somewhere Hobbes says the state of war of all against is natural & universal because otherwise *why do you lock your doors at night* I remembered this reading Jon Fosse's incredible (anti-Hobbesian) sketch of a small Norwegian village where no one locks their doors"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1786792615679304112) 2024-05-04T16:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Depends what we mean by in US "conservative thought"--but at the level of mass mobilization it's virtues via Puritan & Calvinist theology secularized: things like sobriety sexual chastity thrift & industry. Hence the massive resonance of Jordan Peterson's "clean your room" In American conservative thought whose list of the virtues is most widely adopted Plato Aristotle Aquinas In American conservative thought whose list of the virtues is most widely adopted Plato Aristotle Aquinas"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787615378006491155) 2024-05-06T22:48Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I know conservatives in the academy often have an appreciation for Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas but it's really highly selective. They find ways of deleting for example the pinnacle formed out of aristocratic communism in The Republic or Aquinas allowing the poor to steal"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787616584665801041) 2024-05-06T22:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"American notions of preserving the capitalist order via rightly ordered moral persons would view a contemporary Plato or Socrates like either an insufferably idle intellectual (say Brideshead revisited) or a slacker / slob (say a bit of the way they look over at Zizek)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787617107980784079) 2024-05-06T22:55Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@MatthewSitman we somehow scored Susan Sontag"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787633135183884384) 2024-05-06T23:58Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"There's a lot wrong with this bit of armchair theorizing. But few have noted it's a form of bogus scientific prediction: Elon thinks he's found one ahistorical variable (birthrates) that can be linked to another (societal decline). But no such mechanistic "science of man" exists. "Low birth rate was a problem in Rome in [--] BC. The same is true of Ancient Greece." Low Birth Rate = Decline of Civilization https://t.co/enGDnCa9i6 "Low birth rate was a problem in Rome in [--] BC. The same is true of Ancient Greece." Low Birth Rate = Decline of Civilization https://t.co/enGDnCa9i6"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787862609980731618) 2024-05-07T15:10Z [----] followers, 12.8K engagements
"@thanksmach i agree with you can fall in the same problem. i maybe sort of accept it through determinant negation (i.e. via Taylor/Gadamer--a kind of cultural dialectics without telos). but not in the way Hegel would have (as developmental history)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1787972845408240096) 2024-05-07T22:28Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Erasmus and Luther Forget Drake and Kendrick. tell us the best academic beef you've encountered during your research👂 Forget Drake and Kendrick. tell us the best academic beef you've encountered during your research👂"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1788578376485331352) 2024-05-09T14:34Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Books discussed: Oliver's *Political Beliefs* available for free here: And my Lost in Ideology available for not free here: http://rb.gy/8kmuj https://rb.gy/nox64j http://rb.gy/8kmuj https://rb.gy/nox64j"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1789353612516397561) 2024-05-11T17:55Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"topics discussed off the top of my head: objectivity in politics; clairvoyance in ideology (or FAFO); political epistemology vs ontology; analytic versus phenomenological approaches; technocracy & "precision"; ideology as false consciousness. much more"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1789360608384880739) 2024-05-11T18:23Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Readers arrived today for weeklong seminar at USC campus with undergraduates from all over the US looking to spend a week thinking/talking the philosophy of the great Charles Taylor. Look forward to prepping the sessions in the coming days. Hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1790789372331380775) 2024-05-15T17:00Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Students also received a free copy of A Secular Age Okay I must say although I was still an atheist & spent an entire college summer reading Foucault at their age (& A Secular Age hadn't even been written yet) I still would've crawled thru glass for this kind of "summer camp""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1790793250812608941) 2024-05-15T17:15Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"To my 21-y/o self: "Summer binge a dozen genealogies by Foucault in Brighton neighborhood of Boston by yourself Or read an overview of Charles Taylor's philosophy together with other young people food & excursions in Los Angeles" . I suppose we each need our own experiences"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1790884156366541177) 2024-05-15T23:17Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"It's like watching phrenology or alchemy in realtime. Only the alchemists & phrenologists don't realize it. And why would they Our whole society backs such epistemologies in so many sectors expending so much energy on them so as to appear respectable speculations"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1792379410395566121) 2024-05-20T02:18Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I want to say: "You don't know the effects of birthrates on the economy or ecology because the number of humans is not determinative of the political culture they inhabit. Birth numbers do not mechanistically predict politics""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1792381659339522266) 2024-05-20T02:27Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The ideological culture that looks at human life as a "problem" to be technocratically mastered calculated numbered and parsed out is the very ideological culture that has generated the economic and ecological crisis"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1792382469590884615) 2024-05-20T02:30Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I do see some irony in Marth Nussbaum who began her intellectual career as a spectacularly brilliant articulator of various aspects of Aristotelian philosophy ending up here. The anti-dote to such thinking is already there in embryonic (forgive the pun) form in Nicomachean Ethics"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1792573687293722970) 2024-05-20T15:10Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Catholicism is the most bodily form of Christianity. God is a person this person is unspeakably beautiful enters bread & wine turning them to flesh & blood each parish holds this person's body via liturgy & sacraments all believers can take this person's body into themselves someone who is catholic help me out here. what is it about being raised a catholic that leads one to createif one is that kind of personv intense works of art that are either obsessed w sex or are clearly holding sex at arms length. i only kind of understand this. someone who is catholic help me out here. what is it about"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1792585601465933841) 2024-05-20T15:58Z [----] followers, 17.3K engagements
"He forgot to add that people will even practice an ahistorical bogus psychology of supposedly timeless archetypes that they interpret as if they were the scientific equivalent of astrological signs emerging from a totally invented dimension called the "collective unconscious""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1793124207754420554) 2024-05-22T03:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"So I should amend: *The most damning thing I can say about Jung is his psychological theory is un-psychological his cultural theory ahistorical & his metaphysics speculative ungrounded & invented.* Yet such are the times that Jung counts as resistance to empiricist psych"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1793128386929521125) 2024-05-22T03:54Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@granularshroud interesting- i tend to repeatedly evoke Charles Taylor or Gadamer ad naseum as the way"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1793136648932528551) 2024-05-22T04:27Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"1 week from leading this monomaniacal seminar on the great Charles Taylor at USC with [--] undergrads from around the US & hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum Some mutuals might enjoy this video I edited for the occasion from existing interviews w/ Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watchv=MYwvL6WVpqI https://www.youtube.com/watchv=MYwvL6WVpqI"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1794407823117545970) 2024-05-25T16:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Not only did Taylor participate in analytic philosophy (albeit always very critically & eventually abandoning) but he did so at the absolute highest levels. I think his essays against naturalism are some of the finest examples midcentury analysis Compare: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=yHWEk36e700 https://www.youtube.com/watchv=yHWEk36e700"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1794413419581559176) 2024-05-25T17:01Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The scandal of Taylor to analytic philosophy is after being precociously talented at deploying it (his Explanation of Behavior out-Anscombes Anscombe--which I think she may have half recognized in her own student) he leaves it behind for some very profound reasons"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1794414909670977727) 2024-05-25T17:07Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Taylor's lifelong concerns with: * humanism contra scientism (Marx on his view is stuck between the two & so a defective humanism) * Romanticism and/or Enlightenment as rival modern moral sources * control & disengagement as a family resemblance across modern "punctual self""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1794818661053829480) 2024-05-26T19:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Hey philosophy humanities & all curious-types out therein the spirit of democratizing education I figure I'll just keep sharing whenever it's easy stuff from my *monomaniacal* Charles Taylor seminar offered next week at USC @theNovaForum @LC_Institute https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1790789372331380775 Readers arrived today for weeklong seminar at USC campus with undergraduates from all over the US looking to spend a week thinking/talking the philosophy of the great Charles Taylor. Look forward to prepping the sessions in the coming days. Hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1794820353610715469) 2024-05-26T19:58Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Charles Taylor is perhaps the greatest living defender of Romanticism. In this short video (edited from a publicly available lecture for the purposes of my Taylor upcoming seminar at USC) he also explains how music rose to maybe the most personal art form https://www.youtube.com/watchv=P_qZX3STfTY https://www.youtube.com/watchv=P_qZX3STfTY"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1795829143730635162) 2024-05-29T14:46Z [----] followers, 10.6K engagements
"Public service announcement: John F Kennedy was **not** a "classical liberal." He was a key leader of midcentury *social liberalism* which sought to critique & reform classical liberalism's over-appraisal of individual autonomy & markets by expanding a solidaristic public sector"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1795850713479934131) 2024-05-29T16:12Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I edited this short video of Charles Taylor's critique of Pinker Dennet Dawkins & attempts to reduce human agency to mechanisms through materialism Darwinism computational theory of mind & behaviorism. Some good philosophical wisecracks in there too: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Ksbcs3Cf54g https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Ksbcs3Cf54g"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1800590010707783812) 2024-06-11T18:04Z [----] followers, 12.1K engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 similar pattern as with Elon Musk--I still remember progressive outlets may have thought they went a bit over the top on Islam but basically celebrated their books & personas. being religious allowed immunity at first. now its reversed w/ reactionaries bunching around them"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1800633148461731983) 2024-06-11T20:56Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@kvallier @thedispatch I hope you're right but since it always played a role that was parallel to MAGA I wonder if you don't see it coming back when/if the latter wins electorally in November"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1801284844468813865) 2024-06-13T16:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Formal analysis and logically valid argumentation (while valuable) are fairly low bars in philosophical ideological and other related controversy. The most intractable human disputes are over the *interpretation* of meanings and not the analysis of concepts Analytic philosopher here I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind what am I doing wrong Analytic philosopher here I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind what am I doing wrong"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1801697976588583286) 2024-06-14T19:27Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"In "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man" Taylor points out that scientific civilization tries to break out of the "hermeneutic circle" (or process of interpretive dispute over meanings) in hopes of achieving a view-from-nowhere rationalism or empiricism. But these are deadends"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1801698710579200092) 2024-06-14T19:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@kyrill007 interesting and thanks for that from someone who works in the area. ideologically speaking I think the fear is an older modern one of mechanization. there is something to fear here but its . us. with these new tools at our command"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802733657972687242) 2024-06-17T16:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@jacleo13 but isn't that a clear case of designer- / user-relative functionality I mean the algorithm is so bad since Elon Musk took over and gave directives to engineers etc. . Even this very reply will probably be liked by one to three automated accounts of "women seeking friends""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802740544936009903) 2024-06-17T16:30Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I also shiver at the "self-driving" cars I see around L.A. But the driver of those cars is a rapaciously profiteering tech company that's putting a tool that's not up to the task on the road. Similar points on nukes automated factories drones causing "collateral damage" etc"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802740781868036487) 2024-06-17T16:31Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Okay last point: we are stuck in a bad "test" for what makes a computer intelligent. It's still beholden in the OP to Turing Test notion that our machine can "trick" us. If that's the test our machines are already smart. But that's not a good test. A puppet can also trick me"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802743722268127535) 2024-06-17T16:42Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"It is that time of year again when I slaughter a goat take it to the Castilian Spring and make my arduous journey to Apollo's Temple to ask a question of the Oracle "
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802776132967973125) 2024-06-17T18:51Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"We wanted to be alone and now we are. A perceptive informed & eloquent review of Charles Taylors latest book *Cosmic Connections* in @NewYorker by @adamgopnik Journalism of ideas at a high level of accuracy & elegance. I write this as a *Taylorite* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802815568359412161) 2024-06-17T21:28Z [----] followers, 18.4K engagements
"First he thinks naturalism and disengagement are a gain in understanding physical world. Second he things old porousness was pre-monotheism (i.e. pagan). So he wants porousness but in a mode that keeps the gains spiritual and scientific For more: see "A Catholic Modernity""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802824273847067090) 2024-06-17T22:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I know it's a big ask but *A Secular Age* is his fullest narrative of the new modern situation as both gains and losses. @adamgopnik righly calls him a Hegelian but seems to imply his view is linear developmental. Which is what he rejects in Hegel. His is Hegel without Telos"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1802825042683904238) 2024-06-17T22:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Interesting find by @rafkhach of Schmitt applying his political philosophy to give blanket absolute authority to Hitler. FWIW I am anti-Schmitt without accepting that Schmitt is an "enemy" in his own terms if you see what I mean. Made this 2+ yrs back: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=--fpziJsyVs https://www.youtube.com/watchv=--fpziJsyVs"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1805647938829566024) 2024-06-25T17:03Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"some big figures to the culture war come in for polemical / argumentative blasts here too: esp. Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (which is cited at the beginning but haunts it throughout) as well as in more friendly register the doom & gloom of MacIntyre's After Virtue"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806397109329084525) 2024-06-27T18:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"and i don't remember all the modernist boosters who also receive critical treatment (maybe Fukuyama) but much of what Taylor says can be applied not only to the reactive doomsayers but also the techno-utopians of today (Pinker Elon Musk) or market triumphalists"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806398008894116098) 2024-06-27T18:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Pick your issueclimate wars poverty educationthe dominant elites backing the Democrats are completely in the thrall of technocratic tinkering polling manufacturing electoral politics from the top-down paternalistically making decisions for everyone else in a democracy"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806726921121919447) 2024-06-28T16:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"In [----] when the Old Guard neocons were ousted from the GOP the Democratic Party became the standard bearer of George W Bush's disastrous "stay-the-course" politics The ruling cadre of liberals doubled down on blocking up the halls of power against any bottom-up leftwing party"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806728513892057176) 2024-06-28T16:36Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"This is the position we now face as a society before our "realisms" (political social scientific etc.). Our realisms have failed us and are leading to self-defeating outcomes. But a big part of the problem is one that the Left often lacks a language for: *virtue* (Aristotle)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806732206326612250) 2024-06-28T16:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"In a very real concrete way the question is: Do certain key actors in the Democratic Party have the *virtue* (i.e. prudence courage honesty justice) to properly and intelligently interpret the situation and change course Or are they too addicted to power pride & control"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806732663753211908) 2024-06-28T16:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"*It is easier to to imagine the end of the world then the end of Joe Biden's presidential candidacy.*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1806798158166626380) 2024-06-28T21:13Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I don't know but this sounds to me like a much longer way of saying "too big to fail" Bad debate nights happen. Trust me I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the Bad debate nights happen. Trust me I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807105246390587575) 2024-06-29T17:33Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"You know the banks needed a bailout and now Joe Biden needs one too. He's a structural feature of the whole Democratic Party apparently. A campaign without him is unfathomable"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807106444573233519) 2024-06-29T17:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I was born in [----] & have seen Democrats (override the clear dissent of their Left flank) to back: catastrophically bad wars; manifestly unjust economic policy; mealy-mouthed half-measures too numerous to list. so why would one more massive failure lead to course correction"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807110413047435623) 2024-06-29T17:54Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"And would you believe when the Atlantic piece arguing MAGA had hybridized a form of neoliberal politics with Schmittian notions of sovereign dictatorial decision making published I received the most grief and blowback not from the Right but from centrist *liberals* & moderates"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807118548973846727) 2024-06-29T18:26Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Back in August [----] as now the elites in the Democratic Party were flying blind. Surrounded by technocrats banks of computers churning out statistics reams of data prediction modeling the response was: "Quit talking culture Stand back & let the experts win the election""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807119403621941703) 2024-06-29T18:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Such little "speech acts" by Adrian were made against the backdrop of Trump's presidency & his open expansion of the executive branch. Trump also gave Adrian an honorary post in government. Here Vermeule is not telling a "joke" but also asking for broadscale roundups of opponents"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807815587592351915) 2024-07-01T16:36Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"As a last screenshot I will just add Adrian denying the validity / veracity of the [----] presidential election since I saw various people on here claiming he never did that (in fact he had several such statements before deactivating his account at that time)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1807817544113479950) 2024-07-01T16:44Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@ChineseDruid ethnicity is *not* biological as a Greek friend of mine once quipped when I asked him if he'd ever convert to Catholicism from Othrodoxy: "no because then I'd be italian""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1808939303931949568) 2024-07-04T19:01Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@XboxLiveGOP @njhochman it follows that they did not mobilize around ethnicity/nation as a marker. do try to keep up :)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1808984966879137879) 2024-07-04T22:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Just one more video I edited for students on the philosophy of Charles Taylor. Here I excerpted his beef with Straussian philosopher Allan Bloom's *Closing of the American Mind.* Taylor generally doesn't think Romantic self-expression is relativistic/bad: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=BONbxoRB4zw https://www.youtube.com/watchv=BONbxoRB4zw"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1819498112899232220) 2024-08-02T22:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Thanks to MaryJoy for this. I mostly wrote *We Built Reality* in the hot summer months of [----] in the main public library in Santa Monica California (since we had a baby at home napping) and therefore makes good philosophy-noire-like poolside reading for those so inclined. Next summer book: I'm a bit embarassed to write this one because @jasonwblakely was kind enough to send this to me TWO years ago and I just read it. I am surprised by how accessible this is you could read it with undergrads which makes sense since it is about social science. https://t.co/KjLZbN6Ikr Next summer book: I'm a"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1820477773858951461) 2024-08-05T15:11Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Since L.A. invented the noire genre maybe it inadvertently colors a local form of noire philosophy The parts of America Baudrillard wrote visiting here whatever the Frankfurt school people wrote in the area *Idealized virtuality in dystopian register* https://www.amazon.com/We-Built-Reality-Infiltrated-Politics/dp/0190087382/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/We-Built-Reality-Infiltrated-Politics/dp/0190087382/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1820478922833944736) 2024-08-05T15:16Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Teaser for my conversation with Boston College professor of philosophy David Storey for his podcast *Wisdom at Work.* I really enjoyed this one. David & I resonate a lot philosophically. Follow him here @DavidEStorey and listen to the full conversation: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HKNm2tjfi57X1CiBgqc4ssi=96e86e315abe4cbc https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HKNm2tjfi57X1CiBgqc4ssi=96e86e315abe4cbc"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1824526435937292697) 2024-08-16T19:19Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I highly recommend this piece by @beenwrekt and @leifweatherby on Nate Silver's most recent book. It's a smart critique of Bayesian technocracy being falsely hardwired into the human species. @the_point_mag https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/ https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1828249927228760390) 2024-08-27T01:55Z [----] followers, 14.1K engagements
"Indeed my point in the book is in some ways that there is an infinitely demanding / quasi-sacred dimension to all ideologies. I accept they are overlapping and akin to a phenomenology of religious experience. Yet (and this point is a creative reapplication of Charles Taylor):"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1832457007913431436) 2024-09-07T16:32Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"We do not expect a spooky cosmos to secure our polity for us (i.e. we do not expect a Lady in the Lake or signs and wonders or the very cosmos to reinstate our preferred regime). This is Taylor's famous thesis of the immanent frame which I make a component of my definition"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1832457513100570894) 2024-09-07T16:34Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"We need to learn to treat our own ideology as one map among rivals and not the natural terrain or inevitable "science" of society. We'd be less lost in ideology if we overcame scientism in each of our traditions. Thanks for the smart edits @BrianBergstein. @agendapub @ColumbiaUP"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1841874240292708379) 2024-10-03T16:13Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@mediasres i guess I wasn't placing any special philosophical freight of the kind you are on those terms. but certainly don't believe that Musk's little X sandbox is going to allow us to sort it out fruitfully"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1842268384437707231) 2024-10-04T18:19Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@anotherpanacea Oh yes i see we are operating in different paradigms in the social sciences--I think even that kind of graphing (while maybe useful once in a very long while) is ahistorical and not sensitive to the historical nature of politics/meanings. More of that in all my books fwiw :)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1842651909695402175) 2024-10-05T19:43Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@anotherpanacea a version of my beef (not specific to the graph you set up of course but similar philosophical issues) from Lost in Ideology in case you happen to be curious:"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1842652570726404376) 2024-10-05T19:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@madish2000 yes Taylor seems to have a very complicated dialectical relationship to this political philosophy--like everything Taylor"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1844583168524906659) 2024-10-11T03:37Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Alas the present crop of Democratic leaders does not appear to realize how much of politics is the articulation of a vision Treating politics instead as piecemeal design of wonkish policy proposals they fail to see the story they're telling is muddled uninspired & inarticulate Today I am announcing that as president I will create a bipartisan council of advisors to give feedback on policy and inform my administration. Our democracy needs a healthy two-party system. Today I am announcing that as president I will create a bipartisan council of advisors to give feedback on policy and inform my"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1845508351376933278) 2024-10-13T16:54Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"At minimum it's a form of storytelling with little to no resonance. It's the product of a group in the grips of a view of politics as an institutional science for cracking problems. The result of this blindspot is not no story (impossible) but stories artlessly told"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1845510789886796050) 2024-10-13T17:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The last Democratic candidate skilled at the interpretive art of oratory and storytelling was Obama. But he did not govern with vision but reverted to the technocratic form. MAGA has a clear story. It's vicious. It's tearing the country apart. But it resonates on key points"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1845511215331594536) 2024-10-13T17:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@d_frickel Well I do suppose that if you think Kamala is skilled at narrative and oratory and vision and more or less above criticism as a candidate in this regard then our judgments do indeed differ"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1845518903231107313) 2024-10-13T17:36Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"David Bentley Hart rather hilariously roasts the politics of "Catholic" Integralism with Eugene McCarraher"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1845968612760207614) 2024-10-14T23:23Z [----] followers, 38.6K engagements
"Freeden is obviously a giant in the field. But I do think his morphological approach has a tension between its Wittgensteinian anti-essentialism (of which I approve) and the concept of "cores". Here the concept of a cores gets in the way of subtler interpretation of ideology"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1846708538892025867) 2024-10-17T00:23Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"Freeden's search for a liberal "core" leads him to apply a kind of lithmus test that is too ahistorical and eclipses the object of study. It's an example of flaws in philosophy (of social science) leading to flaws in research ("empirical" inquiry). This is ironic for [--] reasons"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1846710207172210716) 2024-10-17T00:29Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Beauty is decisive for what for Dante For wisdom joy a life well lived. More than an argument or reason trust and follow beauty as a guide as shown in the specificity of particular people you encounter. Not what many think of when they start in on how to lead life"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1847776003403501571) 2024-10-19T23:05Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"I Dante it's not *Midway through life in a dark forest and . a syllogism saved me* Nor apologetics Nor a seminar Nor even philosophy. Less ideology. But a beauty is offered on life's way by particular people with particular names who appear shining against the dark forest"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1847777740780687506) 2024-10-19T23:11Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"When Dante is thwarted from climbing up the path by a lion leopard & wolf he stops to look at the stars for a moment and it gives him hope Rebeggiani: love moves the stars means beauty is addressed to a particular person for Dante. The whole cosmos to show one person the stars"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1847784904236683571) 2024-10-19T23:40Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"@menshevik He's not a good *political philosopher*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1850249422753640583) 2024-10-26T18:53Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I suppose this is what happens when an entire generation of Americans is brought up with an end-of-history illusion that fascism wasn't left standing as a serious contender after WW2. Decades of Cold War in which it was supposedly in the dustbin of history"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852027966261252259) 2024-10-31T16:40Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"The truth is most Americans have little historical and cultural education in the ideology of fascism. They therefore treat it as a morality tale. Their main exposure comes through Steven-Spielberg-type cinema. But they are utterly convinced fascism died with Hitler in the bunker"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852047232771723555) 2024-10-31T17:57Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"But this ideology never really went away. It did go underground into local cells (think Neo-Nazis gangs) but also found new formulations & expressions that hybridized with cultures homegrown in the U.S.: from the CEO boardroom to soft social darwinism of some celebrity aesthetics"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852048853954097543) 2024-10-31T18:03Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"The oft-repeated quote *if fascism arrives in USA it will be with flag and cross* can become unhelpful if we don't stay aware that the point of it is *cultural mutation.* It can come also in high-finance power suits & tabloid celebrity or something else https://x.com/sarahchurchwell/status/1267725712271781888lang=en https://x.com/sarahchurchwell/status/1267725712271781888lang=en"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852050094360793502) 2024-10-31T18:08Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral *fascist minimum* definition. I think she's wrongheaded but probably for sincere reasons. It's a rare case where philosophical reflection might . help@cenkuygur@TheYoungTurks"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852364989778051111) 2024-11-01T15:00Z [----] followers, 10.2K engagements
"So unlike the gradualist conservatism of say Edmund Burke or T.S. Eliot which look askance at any sudden and violent action fascists instead have a pattern of breaking taboos first verbally and later in action. There may be need for an extraordinary man beyond morality"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852404872072601898) 2024-11-01T17:38Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@wrdcsc https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852406264929890493 Note the grammar DT deploys (he's adept rhetorically) which allows for plausible deniability. He is simply *imagining* Cheney in the war zone she created. But he's also imaginatively inviting listeners to enjoy an image of his opponent in front of a firing line. Taboo-broken https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852406264929890493 Note the grammar DT deploys (he's adept rhetorically) which allows for plausible deniability. He is simply *imagining* Cheney in the war zone she created. But he's also imaginatively inviting listeners to"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852414801432989944) 2024-11-01T18:17Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
""Jason you think these pundits want to have philosophical dialogue I must say this is a vastly inferior and very stupid even farcical version of Socrates's world-historical error when he thought philosophy was of any use in the Agora of Ancient Athens""
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852500436340596776) 2024-11-01T23:58Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
""Jason you earnestly believe such commentators want to have philosophical dialogue I must say this is a vastly inferior and very stupid even farcical version of Socrates's world-historical error when he thought philosophy was of any use in the Agora of Ancient Athens" I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral *fascist minimum* definition. I think she's wrongheaded but probably for sincere reasons. It's a rare case where philosophical reflection might . help@cenkuygur@TheYoungTurks https://t.co/h2BmRCAzN5 I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852501010519920869) 2024-11-02T00:00Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"A good read. I agree with Ganz that fascism in U.S. is a novel mutation/hybrid. Also he's right that while interpretively correct it's impossible to tell the political effect of the label. One quibble is I would not limit objective assessment of the two theories solely on. No honest person can deny this at this point. He has the will and the desire. And this is what reading and thinking about fascism helps us keep in mind: it is a living possibility. By @lionel_trolling https://t.co/danMYDqtJ9 No honest person can deny this at this point. He has the will and the desire. And this is what"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853113806064648247) 2024-11-03T16:35Z [----] followers, 10.4K engagements
"@samhaselby Not how I would interpret her politics. Fwiw i have a chapter on the book on progressivism and the other on democratic socialism. I discuss at length varieties of socialism (communist revolutionary versus electoral socialist). figures discussed include Bernie Sanders AOC Biden"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853127155514835348) 2024-11-03T17:28Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Polling can of course produce valid snap shots of belief and opinion but unlike the natural sciences the descriptions are not in any clear way totally separate from the processes they describe. To the contrary they come from within politics & can alter those processes"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853819893575041357) 2024-11-05T15:21Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Along with a popular tendency to (falsely) view polls as photographs that do not change the object they are imaging people also unhelpfully think of pollsters as disembodied. But pollsters are particular people & differing groups interpret their questions & arrival differently"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853822483431833635) 2024-11-05T15:31Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Some are saying "Forecasters calling it close is valuable because it confirms it's close" But this misses how the whole authority behind modern forecasting is a claim to some control over futures. Past elections they got badly wrong this one they have no prediction whatsoever"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853843547474018384) 2024-11-05T16:55Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@rowyourbot that's just because you are a gemini"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853852660543172793) 2024-11-05T17:31Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Some voters might read the seeming inexorable movement of the needle an think: "Well Trump has won so there's no use in casting my vote in Nevada" Or they might see it and interpret otherwise. But no one knows for sure the effects of this kind of thing. And we may never know"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853991483843411969) 2024-11-06T02:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"When I say a profiteering media pursuing clicks can drown out "deliberation" (with say endless gamekeeping/dashboards) I don't just mean thoughtful dialogue. I mean the silence by which a people resolutely considers its vote free of the casino-like cacophony of technocrats"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1853993230976598107) 2024-11-06T02:50Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"You know who else lost big (again) last night Election forecasters. This time around there was a dramatic gap between the *closeness* with which they called the presidential race (as in Nate Silvers "80000 simulations") and how *unclose* it was compared to prior elections"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1854169220004622526) 2024-11-06T14:29Z [----] followers, 12.3K engagements
"My own view perhaps unwelcome is the Left needs a dramatically new bottom-up solidarity that's far more affirmative of traditional religion. It is losing contact not only with many ordinary people but also ancient republicanism virtue politics & Abrahamic spiritual sources"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1854201025768350029) 2024-11-06T16:35Z [----] followers, 60.5K engagements
"My own view is this is what happens when popular social science is dominated by reified social facts ("young male") with little to no ethnography. Philosophically speaking young male doesn't cut at the joints we need to understand a change in *ideological cultures.* How did Kamala Harris lose young male voters by this much https://t.co/KCuK7ZMMvE How did Kamala Harris lose young male voters by this much https://t.co/KCuK7ZMMvE"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1854705308553158747) 2024-11-08T01:59Z [----] followers, 12.9K engagements
"the concept of hubris as it was understood in Homeric religion as a violation of boundaries of the properly human by particular men either down into the beastial or up into the realm of the gods. Achilles must learn that he (and Hector and Patrocolus) are also *mortal*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855104489386086811) 2024-11-09T04:25Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Once this lesson is learned by Achilles (& he allows for the burial of Hector after brutally dishonoring him & dragging him from his chariot) Homer masterfully *ends* the story. It surprises my young son. He wants the whole war at Troy. But it ends because hubris is resolved"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855105349876961759) 2024-11-09T04:29Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@MostlyLurkn yes i think there is a positive use for poles. at the philosophical level i think quant methods need to be placed within an interpretive framwork (depending how deep in the weeds you want to go my [----] book with Mark Bevir is all about this)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855381483579424805) 2024-11-09T22:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"liberalism may recede in one sense and hybridize in another (e.g. ethnic-nationalist emergency Schmittian far-right neoliberalism). In other places other fusions and mutations will happen. Fukuyama assumes liberalism is a kind of object with firm contours (all in or all out)"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855387600388768013) 2024-11-09T23:10Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"like one of those old roosters that crows all night long and must be put out as faraway as possible form the farm so too Fukuyama is a kind of Hegelian Owl of Minerva gone haywire he is always saying it's dusk and he's always flapping around flying into things"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855395731307208963) 2024-11-09T23:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"At a seminar on Dante's Divine Comedy with the great classicist Stefano Rebeggiani & he points out that once in Paradaiso Dante's body moves in a separate time dimension than the shades around him (almost a temporal wormhole). The point In this life time is of urgency & weight"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855691454674309227) 2024-11-10T19:18Z [----] followers, 20.6K engagements
"It's one of these many surprising Dantean paradoxes: the focus on the afterlife is not to diminish this life but rather to infinitely affirm or maximize the importance of one's actions on Earth. Another missed paradox: the only way too paradise for humans is to descend into hell"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855692917337133210) 2024-11-10T19:24Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"As Stefano observed: the way is blocked for Dante out of the dark forest at the beginning of the poem. He can't go straight up. The path to paradise must go down into his own inner darkness & capacity for harm violence malevolence. The way down is the first step up. Felix culpa"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1855693445739774005) 2024-11-10T19:26Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"With regrets to my progressive friends: No Harris did not run a *flawless campaign.* This is the reduction of politics to strategy and PR. A healthy campaign in a democracy emerges out of a process of resonance listening & dialogue with people. None of this even happened"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856404014134399168) 2024-11-12T18:29Z [----] followers, 14.6K engagements
"You cannot land (even a very efficacious) campaign team like some ship on the popular base of democracy & expect the campaign will come to good ends. Candidates in a democracy should be selected through bottom-up processes. Technocracy is the name of the politics that thinks"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856404715464175770) 2024-11-12T18:32Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
". outlining plans hustling on the "campaign trail" tapping donors & staying on message are somehow the same as a *flawless campaign.* This style of politics is not ideologically innocent. It is unwittingly top-down and anti-democratic. And lo & behold was found *unpopular*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856405688987332645) 2024-11-12T18:36Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"This is in fact the endless looping repetition of an (unaware) ideological tradition that has infiltrated the Democratic Party: a kind of soft hybridized neoliberalism that let's in top-down politics via overweening notions of "merit" and winning in colleges & career"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856409974391345336) 2024-11-12T18:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@billburgnyc I'm not sure I see the difference either (or maybe the first articulation isn't quite clearly stated--which may or may not have been on me or lost in translation). The main point is Hobbes sets himself up as an anti-Aristotle (not telos/aim or good for humans) only a "
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856421253529190799) 2024-11-12T19:38Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Among the most dramatic/devastating moments in 20th century music When Bob Dylan meets Donovan (the latter still a golden boy of folk & a rival) & sings him the scorching poetic opener to *Its All Over Now Baby Blue.* It's all over Donovans face: hes been totally eclipsed"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856872569959248115) 2024-11-14T01:31Z [----] followers, 422.7K engagements
"It seems either way (whether the crying like a fire is disproportionate or additive to a world of sorrows burning like a sun) the "orphan" is unaware that he is adding a bit of flame to the hell of sorrows or that he may be overly nursing his own sufferings comparatively"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1856904043081138244) 2024-11-14T03:36Z [----] followers, 10.7K engagements
"@trippinkitty1 all those are great. but i mean Leonard Cohen himself when asked about Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (and award I guarantee none of those singers have the quality to achieve) replied: *that's like putting a medal on Everest for being the tallest mountain*"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1857261891153711570) 2024-11-15T03:18Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I was able to briefly meet him in Vienna a few years ago (he helped organize a Festschrift for Charles Taylor's 90th) & he was in person verbally also intellectually virtuoso if a bit enigmatic & elusive. His grad students there were impressive too"
[X Link](https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1857483567754010641) 2024-11-15T17:59Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
Limited data mode. Full metrics available with subscription: lunarcrush.com/pricing
@jasonwblakely Jason Blakely
Jason Blakely posts on X about maga, theory, pope francis, the great the most. They currently have [------] followers and [---] posts still getting attention that total [------] engagements in the last [--] hours.
Engagements: [------] #
- [--] Week [------] +520%
- [--] Month [------] +7,057%
- [--] Months [-------] -75%
- [--] Year [---------] +52%
Mentions: [--] #
- [--] Months [--] -64%
- [--] Year [--] -51%
Followers: [------] #
- [--] Week [------] +0.83%
- [--] Month [------] +0.70%
- [--] Months [------] +3.70%
- [--] Year [------] +21%
CreatorRank: [-------] #
Social Influence
Social category influence countries celebrities travel destinations technology brands cryptocurrencies ncaa football us election stocks social networks automotive brands
Social topic influence maga, theory #2578, pope francis, the great #518, in the, common, athens, politics, history, cogito
Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by @thenovaforum @tomasbogardus @lcinstitute @matthewsitman @anthonysci85206 @democritussr @ab_cummings @harpers @mattpolprof @davidestorey @agendapub @columbiaup @markmanger @trefeca @dmk1793 @adamgopnik @anotherpanacea @anakasparian @cenkuygur @theyoungturks
Top assets mentioned Cogito Finance (CGV) Fusionist (ACE) Intuit Inc. (INTU) April (APRIL) Telos (TLOS) Validity (VAL) TROY (TROY) Quant (QNT) Dusk (DUSK) Wormhole (W)
Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours
"it's not that Henry Miller or Cormac is graced with any real deep philosophical insight or even an unusual literary talent--it's simply that both discover early on the ability to continually say aloud what was once considered monstrous. they are a literature of the monstrous"
X Link 2023-06-26T20:07Z 11K followers, [----] engagements
"My essay on the political handling of the pandemic & the abuse of scientific authority is out now in the latest Harper's. Although I am quite critical of many officials I arrived here only after months of wrangling with the fears & hopes of the pandemic https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/ https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/"
X Link 2023-07-17T15:28Z 10.9K followers, 70.5K engagements
"Nietzsche was very profound in this respect: Science as a way of life (carried out by flesh-and-blood humans) needs a code or model of selfhood. It originated according to Nietzsche in an intensely Jewish-Christian culture of truth-telling at all costs (since God always sees)"
X Link 2023-07-24T19:53Z 11K followers, [---] engagements
"The reason "Catholic Integralism" has of late lost vitality is directly related to the fact that Trump & MAGA are not in power. Were the latter to return Integralism will regain urgency. This implies that it's major ideological role is escapist apologetics for ethnonationalism"
X Link 2023-09-05T16:31Z [----] followers, 16.4K engagements
"One of the points that emerges quite clearly from the discussion is that liberalism (like all ideologies) has many cultural variants. The illusion of a single timeless Liberalism that must either fail (Deneen) or triumph (Fukuyama) is dispelled by Moyn's kind of history"
X Link 2023-09-07T00:42Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"i am not a Foucauldian but i have learned a tremendous amount from him that still resonates e.g.: [--]. psychology/clinical practice as political [--]. genealogical inquiry as applicable to a wider range of institutions [--]. Hobbesian state sovereignty disaggregated (governmentality)"
X Link 2023-09-08T00:30Z [----] followers, 19.9K engagements
"i see i didn't mention Foucault by name but i was thinking of him when pursuing this line of criticism against that most Americanized of Schmittians Adrian Vermeule"
X Link 2023-09-08T01:35Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@AAJDeVille1 ahaha. definitely some bullies busy trying to cut up the country like their private chocolate cake"
X Link 2023-09-08T01:44Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"in terms of #2: Foucault carries out (some) aspects of Nietzschean genealogy with more ingenuity & sociological ambition than anything Nietzsche himself ever did when reading him one is freed from the illusion that the treatment of e.g. madness or crime must be thus & so"
X Link 2023-09-08T02:00Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"to de-naturalize the major social & economic institutions of the ageif nothing else to give us back as cultural what can appear to us within our own time as unavoidably naturalis itself an intellectual & philosophical service. it also expands the range of the thinkable"
X Link 2023-09-08T02:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Part [--] of [--] covers Taylor's view that both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation helped destroy the enchanted social imaginary of the Medieval world. It also covers Taylor's famous concept of the "porous" & buffered self"
X Link 2023-09-09T15:26Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Part [--] of [--] is on Taylor's view that everyone today is "secular" in an important sense. Religious conservatives form of mobilization and social imaginary is distinctly modern. Titled: "What Conservatives Get Wrong about Secularism""
X Link 2023-09-09T15:48Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Oh good God.@chucktodd just explicitly pressed Gov Gavin Newsom on my@Harpers article for several minutes. Respect for his journalistic courage"
X Link 2023-09-11T22:22Z [----] followers, 22.6K engagements
"Newsom certainly seems ripe for walking into this trap. The way out is open. Simply admit that in a future emergency more could be done to assemble and listen to ordinary concerns (incorporating them into policy). But he appears insulated by the Rule-by-Data constituency"
X Link 2023-09-12T18:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"But most people today have no bandwidth for this. They want to play the simple American pastime of Elephants-versus-Donkeys. (Please sir choose your animal now and lavish upon it unstinting love & adoration .)"
X Link 2023-09-12T18:15Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"you mean the only regime on the planet with the dubious distinction of having overseen the state-sponsored execution of God yeah i think about them sometimes too"
X Link 2023-09-15T01:30Z [----] followers, 15.5K engagements
"America in [----] A morbid technocratic liberalism once again claims to be the only "realistic" electoral alternative to a voracious ethnonationalist authoritarianism. The standoff cannot last forever. If a new politics does not emerge I fear the latter will devour the former"
X Link 2023-09-15T13:55Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@TomasBogardus @danielwaweru it didn't though. that's the error of anachronism again. it'd be like saying suppose Platonists had invented cars. then Athens could have been a society of automobiles. just because you can imagine it happening doesn't mean it did. in historical thinking chronology matters"
X Link 2023-10-08T00:02Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I suspect one reason the sad & disturbing outbreak of violence in Israel is hitting Americans harder (even those with no immediate connection to either side) is because we intuit that some of the murky forces at play might be increasingly present in a parallel way in our society"
X Link 2023-10-15T16:25Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Montreal is the largest French speaking city in the world after Paris. Can you imagine if the US had the largest Spanish speaking city in the world after Mexico City And we managed to find a way to affirm both It's almost impossible to imagine thanks to our own ethno-nat'lists"
X Link 2023-10-15T21:47Z [----] followers, 12.7K engagements
"Pre-order my book on ideology: A brilliant tour d'horizon of modern politics -@MatthewSitman "A warm humanist & vital book" - @MattPolProf "Joins the ranks of great theorists of ideology" - @FrankPasquale "Terrific" - @craigjcalhoun"
X Link 2023-12-13T15:31Z [----] followers, 34.6K engagements
""A must-have for anyone debating politics online" Thanks to Emili for this thoughtful video review of my forthcoming book Lost in Ideology (available for preorder via the link in my bio)"
X Link 2024-01-10T18:19Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Watch Emili's full review of my book at her TikTok account:"
X Link 2024-01-10T18:22Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I wonder if this inability to debate is partly due to the repression & removal of philosophy from broad swaths of the history discipline in the U.S. I have great reverence for the craft of history but it is too often rendered into a bland empiricism of mere "fact collection" Unlike say economists and philosophers historians don't have a robust professional culture of disagreement and debate. Almost every time I have criticized an American historian here other historians sometimes their colleagues DM me and agree but don't want to in public. Unlike say economists and philosophers historians"
X Link 2024-01-13T17:03Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@DavidEStorey you should go to his talk--he & his wife told me he's in BC in a matter of days ()"
X Link 2024-01-14T01:56Z [--] followers, [--] engagements
"My new book on exiting ideological confusion just arrived. Pre-order at Amazon or your favorite non-apocalyptic bookstore. @agendapub @ColumbiaUP"
X Link 2024-01-19T00:52Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"* advertisement jingle on this book ad reluctantly to you by:"
X Link 2024-01-19T16:27Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Sorry Ludwig for shoehorning your sprawling genius into my 8-second TikTok video 🙏"
X Link 2024-01-19T16:30Z [--] followers, [---] engagements
"A careful reading reveals Tolkien's view of evil is never dualistic (in which one substance is simply evil). Rather evil is always the corruption of someone or something good (hollowed out & losing Being). Thus as in Augustine: absolute evil can't exist absolute good can. @Andrewnsnyder @PhilYanda Only a child thinks good and evil is black and white or that pure embodiments of either exist. There is no Sauron. @Andrewnsnyder @PhilYanda Only a child thinks good and evil is black and white or that pure embodiments of either exist. There is no Sauron"
X Link 2024-01-20T19:49Z [----] followers, 28K engagements
"This is the humanism of Shakespeare in my opinion (from Richard III to MacBeth) and of Erasmus. It's a humanism that sees human evil as folly--very nearly almost laughable if it weren't so ghastly. It's a loser's game. It's a denial of self. God . laughs. Unbreakable joy"
X Link 2024-01-20T19:57Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I was read Tolkien aloud as a boy by my atheist/agnostic father but this entered deep in my mind. My father like many in his generation liked Tolkien because of themes of pastoral & ecological harmony. Nature is good. But I still write & think in this humanistic tradition"
X Link 2024-01-20T20:00Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"2 ways Milei is an example of the widespread condition my new book calls "Lost in Ideology": [--]. He mistakes his own politics as scientific (mere data & prediction) when ideologies are in fact always ethical/cultural [--]. He's unable to grasp rival ideologies on their own terms Communists Nazis fascists socialists social democrats national socialists Christian democrats Keynesians neo-Keynesians progressives populists nationalists globalists: In the end theres no substantive difference. Javier Milei https://t.co/IRc9ZkDpOQ Communists Nazis fascists socialists social democrats national"
X Link 2024-01-21T16:14Z [--] followers, 55K engagements
"Okay this is rightly taking heat but one thing this speaker is right about is that these are narrative (or meaning-making) phenomenon. His mistake is the inference that because something is narrative it is not real. Social reality is both narrative and as real as mountains. What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q"
X Link 2024-01-23T21:12Z [--] followers, 26.2K engagements
"Granted familiarity with the history of philosophy could significantly decrease the scandal around this empiricist chestnut. It is unoriginal and goes way back to people like Bentham among others (Rights I can't smell or see them Must be nonsense on stilts)"
X Link 2024-01-23T21:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"John Searle took interest in my dissertation in grad school (despite his skepticism of my hermeneutics). Our overlap Social reality. People like Yuval Noah Harari should read Searle. He is similarly naturalist in inclination but sees social reality's ontology more clearly/"
X Link 2024-01-23T22:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@thephilosotroll 😂👍"
X Link 2024-01-24T03:13Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@TomasBogardus well in one sense they obviously do. prior to say [----] & [----] there aren't human rights as aspects of government (they don't "exist") but in other sense not at all: the story about rights is a bid on an interpretation of the objective significance of human freedom regardless"
X Link 2024-01-24T14:58Z [--] followers, [---] engagements
"@TomasBogardus That's because Harari is runs the two together He says in same talk that e.g. states don't exist. So we need to look at two kinds of social ontology he runs together: [--]. that which is instituted in a society (first sense) [--]. that which objectively exists as best story (second)"
X Link 2024-01-24T15:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"So diametrically opposed am I to Yuval Harari's position that I am quite comfortable saying the total opposite: You can chop reality into the tiniest bits. You can turn your eyes into microscopes. Reality remainsultimately and ineliminablynarrative. Reality is . a story What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q What a philosophically inept position. Villainously inept. https://t.co/225Hxeig8q"
X Link 2024-01-24T15:32Z [----] followers, 86.5K engagements
"@TomasBogardus My view of rights I think some version of rights exists as our best interpretation of political significance of reality (sense 2). Yes. Prob not the standard liberal one out of Kant. Though I would ground it in a theological narrative as our best account of human dignity"
X Link 2024-01-24T15:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@TomasBogardus should add when i hear narrative i also think narrator--it's just i take it that there are two narrators in reality: humans (whose stories are often historically contingent) and God who is the ultimate storyteller and when he speaks it is creative of the narrative of creation"
X Link 2024-01-24T17:28Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"IMO this inadvertently ends ups as more prescriptive than descriptive. The underlying imperative is: "the Left must insist on partisan purity in politics" Or perhaps: "when encountering ideological hybrids fusionism or even incoherence we must insist on essential types" "Neither right nor left" is always some kind of con-job. "Neither right nor left" is always some kind of con-job"
X Link 2024-01-27T23:43Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"If you see ideologies as cultural this would be akin to saying "fusionist cuisine is always a con-job It must either be X or Y" Or else: "All cross-genre musicians are a sham" But ideology is also cultural. So fusionism & what I call liquidity can & does occur"
X Link 2024-01-27T23:52Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@BraveIowan haven't read it--who's it by"
X Link 2024-01-28T00:16Z [--] followers, [--] engagements
"Hey hivemind do you have Hegel book recs for me not written by anyone in Pittsburgh :) Looking for interesting takes especially about his phil. of history. Hey hivemind do you have Hegel book recs for me not written by anyone in Pittsburgh :) Looking for interesting takes especially about his phil. of history"
X Link 2024-02-10T15:57Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Also Alasdair MacIntyre's [----] essay "Hegel on Faces and Skulls" has some very provocative thoughts on philosophical disagreement as historically extended. (The essay was also reprinted in MacIntyre's [----] Cambridge Collection of essays The Tasks of Philosophy)"
X Link 2024-02-10T17:22Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"What does Re miss Mac spent decades before his turn to Aristotle criticizing the social sciences & influence of naturalism on ethics. His criticism of Marx echoes his critique in a different way of Kant or Mill. They expect ethics to resolve like science. But it doesn't"
X Link 2024-02-14T00:52Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"This is one way to understand the whole After Virtue breakthrough that MacIntyre had so late in his life. Namely he suddenly realized that the recovery of teleology (goal-directed) philosophy of action in the social sciences needed to happen simultaneously in ethics"
X Link 2024-02-14T00:53Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"When I was studying my PhD at Berkeley there was a big split between the renowned analytic philosopher John Searle & great Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus. Searle was said to have returned the complete works of Husserl on Dreyfus's desk w/ tart remark: "yeah there's nothing there""
X Link 2024-02-15T17:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Far from rendering philosophy irrelevant the only way to understand the below statement is as an expression of philosophy. In this case wittingly or not the argument is historically derivative of early twentieth-century logical positivism. why study philosophy at all once the "queen of the sciences" it has been not surpassed but rendered irrelevant by more specialized fields of inquiry (linguistics neuroscience etc.). however to not have read Plato Aristotle the pre-Socratics Lucretius is a disadvantage why study philosophy at all once the "queen of the sciences" it has been not surpassed but"
X Link 2024-02-16T00:21Z [----] followers, 21.9K engagements
"An analytic friend insisted my joke about analytic philosophy was uncharitable. And they were right. I apologize & have taken down the original post. The truth is I learned much from analytic philosophy/ philosophers & to repent for my sins will now list some of my favorites:"
X Link 2024-02-16T18:52Z [----] followers, 11.1K engagements
"At Berkeley Searle was on my dissertation committee (we shared an interest in social ontology). I understand & take seriously his later revealed personal failings. At the time I was kept on my toes & intellectually honest by his work even when disagreeing. Especially:"
X Link 2024-02-16T19:05Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@MarkManger @trefeca @dmk1793 "pensions" you are clearly not working in the USA. we don't have those anymore"
X Link 2024-03-01T02:57Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@MarkManger @trefeca @dmk1793 Well there's an important distinction between traditional pensions (guaranteed salary) and 401ks. The latter were rolled out with neoliberalism and are a form of precarious mass gambling"
X Link 2024-03-01T03:12Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"In 17th c. England Hobbes was an atheist because he denied the personal & revealed God of Abraham. Though Leviathan does concede an abstract deistic watchmaker god But post-Nietzsche Hobbes is no atheist because he still has not fully purged metaphysics of the god(s) of Reason Was Hobbes an atheist Was Hobbes an atheist"
X Link 2024-03-03T17:46Z [----] followers, 14.6K engagements
"In Leviathan Hobbes can BOTH write in Chapter 12: miracles failing faith also failed AND in Chapter 11: "of necessity" humans who inquire must arrive at "some cause wherefore there is no former cause but is eternal which is it men call God" (XI)"
X Link 2024-03-03T18:09Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Teaching Hobbes his odd form of unbelief is fruitful in two ways: [--]. It challenges theists who overestimate the proofs of Gods existence. All proof gets you is a conceptual abstract god that doesnt fit well with traditional theism (especially not trinitarian Christianity)"
X Link 2024-03-03T18:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"2. It challenges atheists who assume science empties the cosmos of any god(s). Hobbes does not see the new sciences emerging at his time as eliminating the need for deities but as transforming them. The shallow atheism of say Dawkins (science=atheism) is complicated/unsettled"
X Link 2024-03-03T19:14Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I blame the computational theory of mind for this. Not all cognition is information and symbol processing. The world is not reducible to the sum total of facts or data. There is a thing called meaning or significanceit is an event that goes beyond a tallying of information"
X Link 2024-03-05T04:38Z [----] followers, 22.7K engagements
"It is also a category mistake. As if fiction were trying to do the same as informational articles (data transmission) but via different means One might even say fictional/poetic art often manifests the highest "density" of meaning. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust""
X Link 2024-03-05T04:51Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Rare photo of a bearded Charles Taylor (circa 1972). Stumbled upon it while going through archives I compiled in grad school of obscurer Taylor in preparation for my Charles Taylor Seminar this summer via @LC_Institute @theNovaForum at University of Southern California"
X Link 2024-03-08T21:05Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@SRDorman @DrAdrianBlau @LC_Institute @theNovaForum the 1970s + youth = very different countenance"
X Link 2024-03-08T21:33Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Gray the Archbishop of Los Angeles might like a word Architecture is really the simplest test of politics - before you get to messy stuff - and Tucker is right here. The advent of Bauhaus and then Brutalism has made our public spaces ever worse & dispiriting. Architecture is really the simplest test of politics - before you get to messy stuff - and Tucker is right here. The advent of Bauhaus and then Brutalism has made our public spaces ever worse & dispiriting"
X Link 2024-03-15T20:04Z [----] followers, 21.7K engagements
"I fail to see how a Church that has absorbed into itself everything from ancient Classicism of the Pantheon in Rome to the Baroque and Gothic cannot assimilate and affirm what is beautiful in Bauhaus Brutalism Abstraction and modernism. We must find our own language"
X Link 2024-03-15T20:07Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 i don't mean a built telos like hegel. just that time keeps tumbling out and we keep wandering in its medium"
X Link 2024-03-15T20:40Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"While I appreciate the time taken to review my book: if you are going to review a book do it with care Alas I wonder if there's an ideological animus Far from relativistic on ideology I am particularly hard on Right Liberalism for relying on a scientism of the market"
X Link 2024-03-27T16:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The "fascism debate" is partly so confused & interminable because disputants assumes the wrong concept of ideology. The skeptics often pose standards of usage not applied to any other ideology (e.g. fascism's absolute purity/political success). Ch [--] of my new book dispels this This should be the line from now on: We'll start taking your argument seriously when you start taking it seriously. If you say fascism is coming I want to see either your plane ticket to another country or the guns you're stockpiling. All the rest is commentary. This should be the line from now on: We'll start taking"
X Link 2024-03-31T15:12Z [----] followers, 37.9K engagements
"@churchmouse6718 i am afraid that's not very good philosophy of social science (even if you are right and its good politics) i do like Roger Griffin's work though"
X Link 2024-04-01T04:40Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I went on The Political Philosophy Review podcast with Jeff Church to talk about my new book Lost in Ideology With the "fascism debate" heating up again this audio excerpt is on how hermeneutics helps clarify the debate. Listen to full interview here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/thepoliticaltheoryreview/episodes/2024-04-02T11_57_59-07_00 https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/thepoliticaltheoryreview/episodes/2024-04-02T11_57_59-07_00"
X Link 2024-04-02T21:52Z [----] followers, 10.7K engagements
"@Chris_arnade it's one of these writings that has massive influence indirectly. treated very dismissively for a while in academic circles (Mac's combination of Marxism Catholicism antiliberalism upset practically everyone). opener to an essay i wrote w/ footnote may be of interest:"
X Link 2024-04-04T13:16Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I'm amazed not only at how vile this is but also its naivete in terms of historical dynamics. Spain today is so unbelieving (less than 20% practicing Catholics) because of Franco. Violent reaction can win in the short run but it trashes Christian witness in the long run. And now for a Franco Friday Special: Its the Uncle Frank Theme Song 🎵🎶 https://t.co/qtRejVb7UJ https://t.co/MqO3f1LAa4 And now for a Franco Friday Special: Its the Uncle Frank Theme Song 🎵🎶 https://t.co/qtRejVb7UJ https://t.co/MqO3f1LAa4"
X Link 2024-04-13T18:01Z [----] followers, 29.1K engagements
"Franco thought he was disappearing "rojos" but what he disappeared was the credible public witness of Christianity. The New Right has not caught up to history: Countries like Spain are more aggressively secular because they were more aggressively sectarian and theocratic"
X Link 2024-04-13T18:07Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 fwiw in the opener to the book i also distinguish it from any "worldview" since I think it belongs to a modern / disenchanted age (it can meld with religion but it not the same as it)"
X Link 2024-04-14T15:30Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Clip from full lecture on Charles Taylor: Should Christians Reject the Modern World here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=ifd2WUxB--o https://www.youtube.com/watchv=ifd2WUxB--o"
X Link 2024-04-20T18:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Lecture delivered April [--] [----] as part of an undergraduate course entitled: Political Theology: A Genealogy of Christian Political Thought. Pepperdine University California. Text discussed:"
X Link 2024-04-20T18:07Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The philosophical language of materialists is rarely up to the task of expressing their actual felt & embodied existence. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than when experiencing grief. Hence the return of religion haunting the funerals of atheists like King Hamlet's ghost"
X Link 2024-04-20T22:23Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Better once again to begin with Erasmus in the Complaint of Peace and his absolute insistence that human war is always folly. It must be repeated over and over again: war is folly. All sides get splattered. Even the justest cause is sullied. Dulce bellum inexpertis"
X Link 2024-04-22T16:03Z [----] followers, 17.9K engagements
"Americans now cyclically rediscover what the poor have known for three decades or more: police forces across the USA have para-militarized in terms of tactics technology & culture. Any social conflict now regularly triggers grossly disproportionate shows of force from the state What do you call it when cops start doing this to journalists https://t.co/eQTdQWl6D2 What do you call it when cops start doing this to journalists https://t.co/eQTdQWl6D2"
X Link 2024-04-25T15:12Z [----] followers, 14.3K engagements
"One thing I appreciated in @MichaelSWinters was his focus on the way that liberalism struggles to concretely secure those aspects of politics that are mistaken as natural or timeless as opposed to cultural & historical. Michael's reconstruction on the conundrum here:"
X Link 2024-04-26T16:37Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"That simple weakness makes you right & that justice requires no exercise of authority is not a view ascribable to any major ideology philosophy or religion Alas Elon is trapped inside his ideology Much of what he "sees" are figments of his own thought he wages war upon"
X Link 2024-04-26T20:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"In Leviathan somewhere Hobbes says the state of war of all against is natural & universal because otherwise why do you lock your doors at night I remembered this reading Jon Fosse's incredible (anti-Hobbesian) sketch of a small Norwegian village where no one locks their doors"
X Link 2024-05-04T16:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Depends what we mean by in US "conservative thought"--but at the level of mass mobilization it's virtues via Puritan & Calvinist theology secularized: things like sobriety sexual chastity thrift & industry. Hence the massive resonance of Jordan Peterson's "clean your room" In American conservative thought whose list of the virtues is most widely adopted Plato Aristotle Aquinas In American conservative thought whose list of the virtues is most widely adopted Plato Aristotle Aquinas"
X Link 2024-05-06T22:48Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I know conservatives in the academy often have an appreciation for Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas but it's really highly selective. They find ways of deleting for example the pinnacle formed out of aristocratic communism in The Republic or Aquinas allowing the poor to steal"
X Link 2024-05-06T22:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"American notions of preserving the capitalist order via rightly ordered moral persons would view a contemporary Plato or Socrates like either an insufferably idle intellectual (say Brideshead revisited) or a slacker / slob (say a bit of the way they look over at Zizek)"
X Link 2024-05-06T22:55Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@MatthewSitman we somehow scored Susan Sontag"
X Link 2024-05-06T23:58Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"There's a lot wrong with this bit of armchair theorizing. But few have noted it's a form of bogus scientific prediction: Elon thinks he's found one ahistorical variable (birthrates) that can be linked to another (societal decline). But no such mechanistic "science of man" exists. "Low birth rate was a problem in Rome in [--] BC. The same is true of Ancient Greece." Low Birth Rate = Decline of Civilization https://t.co/enGDnCa9i6 "Low birth rate was a problem in Rome in [--] BC. The same is true of Ancient Greece." Low Birth Rate = Decline of Civilization https://t.co/enGDnCa9i6"
X Link 2024-05-07T15:10Z [----] followers, 12.8K engagements
"@thanksmach i agree with you can fall in the same problem. i maybe sort of accept it through determinant negation (i.e. via Taylor/Gadamer--a kind of cultural dialectics without telos). but not in the way Hegel would have (as developmental history)"
X Link 2024-05-07T22:28Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Erasmus and Luther Forget Drake and Kendrick. tell us the best academic beef you've encountered during your research👂 Forget Drake and Kendrick. tell us the best academic beef you've encountered during your research👂"
X Link 2024-05-09T14:34Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Books discussed: Oliver's Political Beliefs available for free here: And my Lost in Ideology available for not free here: http://rb.gy/8kmuj https://rb.gy/nox64j http://rb.gy/8kmuj https://rb.gy/nox64j"
X Link 2024-05-11T17:55Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"topics discussed off the top of my head: objectivity in politics; clairvoyance in ideology (or FAFO); political epistemology vs ontology; analytic versus phenomenological approaches; technocracy & "precision"; ideology as false consciousness. much more"
X Link 2024-05-11T18:23Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Readers arrived today for weeklong seminar at USC campus with undergraduates from all over the US looking to spend a week thinking/talking the philosophy of the great Charles Taylor. Look forward to prepping the sessions in the coming days. Hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum"
X Link 2024-05-15T17:00Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Students also received a free copy of A Secular Age Okay I must say although I was still an atheist & spent an entire college summer reading Foucault at their age (& A Secular Age hadn't even been written yet) I still would've crawled thru glass for this kind of "summer camp""
X Link 2024-05-15T17:15Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"To my 21-y/o self: "Summer binge a dozen genealogies by Foucault in Brighton neighborhood of Boston by yourself Or read an overview of Charles Taylor's philosophy together with other young people food & excursions in Los Angeles" . I suppose we each need our own experiences"
X Link 2024-05-15T23:17Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"It's like watching phrenology or alchemy in realtime. Only the alchemists & phrenologists don't realize it. And why would they Our whole society backs such epistemologies in so many sectors expending so much energy on them so as to appear respectable speculations"
X Link 2024-05-20T02:18Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I want to say: "You don't know the effects of birthrates on the economy or ecology because the number of humans is not determinative of the political culture they inhabit. Birth numbers do not mechanistically predict politics""
X Link 2024-05-20T02:27Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The ideological culture that looks at human life as a "problem" to be technocratically mastered calculated numbered and parsed out is the very ideological culture that has generated the economic and ecological crisis"
X Link 2024-05-20T02:30Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I do see some irony in Marth Nussbaum who began her intellectual career as a spectacularly brilliant articulator of various aspects of Aristotelian philosophy ending up here. The anti-dote to such thinking is already there in embryonic (forgive the pun) form in Nicomachean Ethics"
X Link 2024-05-20T15:10Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Catholicism is the most bodily form of Christianity. God is a person this person is unspeakably beautiful enters bread & wine turning them to flesh & blood each parish holds this person's body via liturgy & sacraments all believers can take this person's body into themselves someone who is catholic help me out here. what is it about being raised a catholic that leads one to createif one is that kind of personv intense works of art that are either obsessed w sex or are clearly holding sex at arms length. i only kind of understand this. someone who is catholic help me out here. what is it about"
X Link 2024-05-20T15:58Z [----] followers, 17.3K engagements
"He forgot to add that people will even practice an ahistorical bogus psychology of supposedly timeless archetypes that they interpret as if they were the scientific equivalent of astrological signs emerging from a totally invented dimension called the "collective unconscious""
X Link 2024-05-22T03:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"So I should amend: The most damning thing I can say about Jung is his psychological theory is un-psychological his cultural theory ahistorical & his metaphysics speculative ungrounded & invented. Yet such are the times that Jung counts as resistance to empiricist psych"
X Link 2024-05-22T03:54Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@granularshroud interesting- i tend to repeatedly evoke Charles Taylor or Gadamer ad naseum as the way"
X Link 2024-05-22T04:27Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"1 week from leading this monomaniacal seminar on the great Charles Taylor at USC with [--] undergrads from around the US & hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum Some mutuals might enjoy this video I edited for the occasion from existing interviews w/ Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watchv=MYwvL6WVpqI https://www.youtube.com/watchv=MYwvL6WVpqI"
X Link 2024-05-25T16:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Not only did Taylor participate in analytic philosophy (albeit always very critically & eventually abandoning) but he did so at the absolute highest levels. I think his essays against naturalism are some of the finest examples midcentury analysis Compare: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=yHWEk36e700 https://www.youtube.com/watchv=yHWEk36e700"
X Link 2024-05-25T17:01Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The scandal of Taylor to analytic philosophy is after being precociously talented at deploying it (his Explanation of Behavior out-Anscombes Anscombe--which I think she may have half recognized in her own student) he leaves it behind for some very profound reasons"
X Link 2024-05-25T17:07Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Taylor's lifelong concerns with: * humanism contra scientism (Marx on his view is stuck between the two & so a defective humanism) * Romanticism and/or Enlightenment as rival modern moral sources * control & disengagement as a family resemblance across modern "punctual self""
X Link 2024-05-26T19:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Hey philosophy humanities & all curious-types out therein the spirit of democratizing education I figure I'll just keep sharing whenever it's easy stuff from my monomaniacal Charles Taylor seminar offered next week at USC @theNovaForum @LC_Institute https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1790789372331380775 Readers arrived today for weeklong seminar at USC campus with undergraduates from all over the US looking to spend a week thinking/talking the philosophy of the great Charles Taylor. Look forward to prepping the sessions in the coming days. Hosted by @LC_Institute @theNovaForum"
X Link 2024-05-26T19:58Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Charles Taylor is perhaps the greatest living defender of Romanticism. In this short video (edited from a publicly available lecture for the purposes of my Taylor upcoming seminar at USC) he also explains how music rose to maybe the most personal art form https://www.youtube.com/watchv=P_qZX3STfTY https://www.youtube.com/watchv=P_qZX3STfTY"
X Link 2024-05-29T14:46Z [----] followers, 10.6K engagements
"Public service announcement: John F Kennedy was not a "classical liberal." He was a key leader of midcentury social liberalism which sought to critique & reform classical liberalism's over-appraisal of individual autonomy & markets by expanding a solidaristic public sector"
X Link 2024-05-29T16:12Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I edited this short video of Charles Taylor's critique of Pinker Dennet Dawkins & attempts to reduce human agency to mechanisms through materialism Darwinism computational theory of mind & behaviorism. Some good philosophical wisecracks in there too: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Ksbcs3Cf54g https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Ksbcs3Cf54g"
X Link 2024-06-11T18:04Z [----] followers, 12.1K engagements
"@AnthonySci85206 similar pattern as with Elon Musk--I still remember progressive outlets may have thought they went a bit over the top on Islam but basically celebrated their books & personas. being religious allowed immunity at first. now its reversed w/ reactionaries bunching around them"
X Link 2024-06-11T20:56Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@kvallier @thedispatch I hope you're right but since it always played a role that was parallel to MAGA I wonder if you don't see it coming back when/if the latter wins electorally in November"
X Link 2024-06-13T16:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Formal analysis and logically valid argumentation (while valuable) are fairly low bars in philosophical ideological and other related controversy. The most intractable human disputes are over the interpretation of meanings and not the analysis of concepts Analytic philosopher here I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind what am I doing wrong Analytic philosopher here I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind what am I doing wrong"
X Link 2024-06-14T19:27Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"In "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man" Taylor points out that scientific civilization tries to break out of the "hermeneutic circle" (or process of interpretive dispute over meanings) in hopes of achieving a view-from-nowhere rationalism or empiricism. But these are deadends"
X Link 2024-06-14T19:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@kyrill007 interesting and thanks for that from someone who works in the area. ideologically speaking I think the fear is an older modern one of mechanization. there is something to fear here but its . us. with these new tools at our command"
X Link 2024-06-17T16:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@jacleo13 but isn't that a clear case of designer- / user-relative functionality I mean the algorithm is so bad since Elon Musk took over and gave directives to engineers etc. . Even this very reply will probably be liked by one to three automated accounts of "women seeking friends""
X Link 2024-06-17T16:30Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I also shiver at the "self-driving" cars I see around L.A. But the driver of those cars is a rapaciously profiteering tech company that's putting a tool that's not up to the task on the road. Similar points on nukes automated factories drones causing "collateral damage" etc"
X Link 2024-06-17T16:31Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Okay last point: we are stuck in a bad "test" for what makes a computer intelligent. It's still beholden in the OP to Turing Test notion that our machine can "trick" us. If that's the test our machines are already smart. But that's not a good test. A puppet can also trick me"
X Link 2024-06-17T16:42Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"It is that time of year again when I slaughter a goat take it to the Castilian Spring and make my arduous journey to Apollo's Temple to ask a question of the Oracle "
X Link 2024-06-17T18:51Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"We wanted to be alone and now we are. A perceptive informed & eloquent review of Charles Taylors latest book Cosmic Connections in @NewYorker by @adamgopnik Journalism of ideas at a high level of accuracy & elegance. I write this as a Taylorite https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review"
X Link 2024-06-17T21:28Z [----] followers, 18.4K engagements
"First he thinks naturalism and disengagement are a gain in understanding physical world. Second he things old porousness was pre-monotheism (i.e. pagan). So he wants porousness but in a mode that keeps the gains spiritual and scientific For more: see "A Catholic Modernity""
X Link 2024-06-17T22:02Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"I know it's a big ask but A Secular Age is his fullest narrative of the new modern situation as both gains and losses. @adamgopnik righly calls him a Hegelian but seems to imply his view is linear developmental. Which is what he rejects in Hegel. His is Hegel without Telos"
X Link 2024-06-17T22:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Interesting find by @rafkhach of Schmitt applying his political philosophy to give blanket absolute authority to Hitler. FWIW I am anti-Schmitt without accepting that Schmitt is an "enemy" in his own terms if you see what I mean. Made this 2+ yrs back: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=--fpziJsyVs https://www.youtube.com/watchv=--fpziJsyVs"
X Link 2024-06-25T17:03Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"some big figures to the culture war come in for polemical / argumentative blasts here too: esp. Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (which is cited at the beginning but haunts it throughout) as well as in more friendly register the doom & gloom of MacIntyre's After Virtue"
X Link 2024-06-27T18:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"and i don't remember all the modernist boosters who also receive critical treatment (maybe Fukuyama) but much of what Taylor says can be applied not only to the reactive doomsayers but also the techno-utopians of today (Pinker Elon Musk) or market triumphalists"
X Link 2024-06-27T18:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Pick your issueclimate wars poverty educationthe dominant elites backing the Democrats are completely in the thrall of technocratic tinkering polling manufacturing electoral politics from the top-down paternalistically making decisions for everyone else in a democracy"
X Link 2024-06-28T16:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"In [----] when the Old Guard neocons were ousted from the GOP the Democratic Party became the standard bearer of George W Bush's disastrous "stay-the-course" politics The ruling cadre of liberals doubled down on blocking up the halls of power against any bottom-up leftwing party"
X Link 2024-06-28T16:36Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"This is the position we now face as a society before our "realisms" (political social scientific etc.). Our realisms have failed us and are leading to self-defeating outcomes. But a big part of the problem is one that the Left often lacks a language for: virtue (Aristotle)"
X Link 2024-06-28T16:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"In a very real concrete way the question is: Do certain key actors in the Democratic Party have the virtue (i.e. prudence courage honesty justice) to properly and intelligently interpret the situation and change course Or are they too addicted to power pride & control"
X Link 2024-06-28T16:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"It is easier to to imagine the end of the world then the end of Joe Biden's presidential candidacy."
X Link 2024-06-28T21:13Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I don't know but this sounds to me like a much longer way of saying "too big to fail" Bad debate nights happen. Trust me I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the Bad debate nights happen. Trust me I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows"
X Link 2024-06-29T17:33Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"You know the banks needed a bailout and now Joe Biden needs one too. He's a structural feature of the whole Democratic Party apparently. A campaign without him is unfathomable"
X Link 2024-06-29T17:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I was born in [----] & have seen Democrats (override the clear dissent of their Left flank) to back: catastrophically bad wars; manifestly unjust economic policy; mealy-mouthed half-measures too numerous to list. so why would one more massive failure lead to course correction"
X Link 2024-06-29T17:54Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"And would you believe when the Atlantic piece arguing MAGA had hybridized a form of neoliberal politics with Schmittian notions of sovereign dictatorial decision making published I received the most grief and blowback not from the Right but from centrist liberals & moderates"
X Link 2024-06-29T18:26Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Back in August [----] as now the elites in the Democratic Party were flying blind. Surrounded by technocrats banks of computers churning out statistics reams of data prediction modeling the response was: "Quit talking culture Stand back & let the experts win the election""
X Link 2024-06-29T18:30Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Such little "speech acts" by Adrian were made against the backdrop of Trump's presidency & his open expansion of the executive branch. Trump also gave Adrian an honorary post in government. Here Vermeule is not telling a "joke" but also asking for broadscale roundups of opponents"
X Link 2024-07-01T16:36Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"As a last screenshot I will just add Adrian denying the validity / veracity of the [----] presidential election since I saw various people on here claiming he never did that (in fact he had several such statements before deactivating his account at that time)"
X Link 2024-07-01T16:44Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@ChineseDruid ethnicity is not biological as a Greek friend of mine once quipped when I asked him if he'd ever convert to Catholicism from Othrodoxy: "no because then I'd be italian""
X Link 2024-07-04T19:01Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@XboxLiveGOP @njhochman it follows that they did not mobilize around ethnicity/nation as a marker. do try to keep up :)"
X Link 2024-07-04T22:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Just one more video I edited for students on the philosophy of Charles Taylor. Here I excerpted his beef with Straussian philosopher Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Taylor generally doesn't think Romantic self-expression is relativistic/bad: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=BONbxoRB4zw https://www.youtube.com/watchv=BONbxoRB4zw"
X Link 2024-08-02T22:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Thanks to MaryJoy for this. I mostly wrote We Built Reality in the hot summer months of [----] in the main public library in Santa Monica California (since we had a baby at home napping) and therefore makes good philosophy-noire-like poolside reading for those so inclined. Next summer book: I'm a bit embarassed to write this one because @jasonwblakely was kind enough to send this to me TWO years ago and I just read it. I am surprised by how accessible this is you could read it with undergrads which makes sense since it is about social science. https://t.co/KjLZbN6Ikr Next summer book: I'm a"
X Link 2024-08-05T15:11Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Since L.A. invented the noire genre maybe it inadvertently colors a local form of noire philosophy The parts of America Baudrillard wrote visiting here whatever the Frankfurt school people wrote in the area Idealized virtuality in dystopian register https://www.amazon.com/We-Built-Reality-Infiltrated-Politics/dp/0190087382/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/We-Built-Reality-Infiltrated-Politics/dp/0190087382/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="
X Link 2024-08-05T15:16Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Teaser for my conversation with Boston College professor of philosophy David Storey for his podcast Wisdom at Work. I really enjoyed this one. David & I resonate a lot philosophically. Follow him here @DavidEStorey and listen to the full conversation: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HKNm2tjfi57X1CiBgqc4ssi=96e86e315abe4cbc https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HKNm2tjfi57X1CiBgqc4ssi=96e86e315abe4cbc"
X Link 2024-08-16T19:19Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"I highly recommend this piece by @beenwrekt and @leifweatherby on Nate Silver's most recent book. It's a smart critique of Bayesian technocracy being falsely hardwired into the human species. @the_point_mag https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/ https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/"
X Link 2024-08-27T01:55Z [----] followers, 14.1K engagements
"Indeed my point in the book is in some ways that there is an infinitely demanding / quasi-sacred dimension to all ideologies. I accept they are overlapping and akin to a phenomenology of religious experience. Yet (and this point is a creative reapplication of Charles Taylor):"
X Link 2024-09-07T16:32Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"We do not expect a spooky cosmos to secure our polity for us (i.e. we do not expect a Lady in the Lake or signs and wonders or the very cosmos to reinstate our preferred regime). This is Taylor's famous thesis of the immanent frame which I make a component of my definition"
X Link 2024-09-07T16:34Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"We need to learn to treat our own ideology as one map among rivals and not the natural terrain or inevitable "science" of society. We'd be less lost in ideology if we overcame scientism in each of our traditions. Thanks for the smart edits @BrianBergstein. @agendapub @ColumbiaUP"
X Link 2024-10-03T16:13Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@mediasres i guess I wasn't placing any special philosophical freight of the kind you are on those terms. but certainly don't believe that Musk's little X sandbox is going to allow us to sort it out fruitfully"
X Link 2024-10-04T18:19Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@anotherpanacea Oh yes i see we are operating in different paradigms in the social sciences--I think even that kind of graphing (while maybe useful once in a very long while) is ahistorical and not sensitive to the historical nature of politics/meanings. More of that in all my books fwiw :)"
X Link 2024-10-05T19:43Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@anotherpanacea a version of my beef (not specific to the graph you set up of course but similar philosophical issues) from Lost in Ideology in case you happen to be curious:"
X Link 2024-10-05T19:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"@madish2000 yes Taylor seems to have a very complicated dialectical relationship to this political philosophy--like everything Taylor"
X Link 2024-10-11T03:37Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Alas the present crop of Democratic leaders does not appear to realize how much of politics is the articulation of a vision Treating politics instead as piecemeal design of wonkish policy proposals they fail to see the story they're telling is muddled uninspired & inarticulate Today I am announcing that as president I will create a bipartisan council of advisors to give feedback on policy and inform my administration. Our democracy needs a healthy two-party system. Today I am announcing that as president I will create a bipartisan council of advisors to give feedback on policy and inform my"
X Link 2024-10-13T16:54Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"At minimum it's a form of storytelling with little to no resonance. It's the product of a group in the grips of a view of politics as an institutional science for cracking problems. The result of this blindspot is not no story (impossible) but stories artlessly told"
X Link 2024-10-13T17:03Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The last Democratic candidate skilled at the interpretive art of oratory and storytelling was Obama. But he did not govern with vision but reverted to the technocratic form. MAGA has a clear story. It's vicious. It's tearing the country apart. But it resonates on key points"
X Link 2024-10-13T17:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@d_frickel Well I do suppose that if you think Kamala is skilled at narrative and oratory and vision and more or less above criticism as a candidate in this regard then our judgments do indeed differ"
X Link 2024-10-13T17:36Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"David Bentley Hart rather hilariously roasts the politics of "Catholic" Integralism with Eugene McCarraher"
X Link 2024-10-14T23:23Z [----] followers, 38.6K engagements
"Freeden is obviously a giant in the field. But I do think his morphological approach has a tension between its Wittgensteinian anti-essentialism (of which I approve) and the concept of "cores". Here the concept of a cores gets in the way of subtler interpretation of ideology"
X Link 2024-10-17T00:23Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"Freeden's search for a liberal "core" leads him to apply a kind of lithmus test that is too ahistorical and eclipses the object of study. It's an example of flaws in philosophy (of social science) leading to flaws in research ("empirical" inquiry). This is ironic for [--] reasons"
X Link 2024-10-17T00:29Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Beauty is decisive for what for Dante For wisdom joy a life well lived. More than an argument or reason trust and follow beauty as a guide as shown in the specificity of particular people you encounter. Not what many think of when they start in on how to lead life"
X Link 2024-10-19T23:05Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"I Dante it's not Midway through life in a dark forest and . a syllogism saved me Nor apologetics Nor a seminar Nor even philosophy. Less ideology. But a beauty is offered on life's way by particular people with particular names who appear shining against the dark forest"
X Link 2024-10-19T23:11Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"When Dante is thwarted from climbing up the path by a lion leopard & wolf he stops to look at the stars for a moment and it gives him hope Rebeggiani: love moves the stars means beauty is addressed to a particular person for Dante. The whole cosmos to show one person the stars"
X Link 2024-10-19T23:40Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"@menshevik He's not a good political philosopher"
X Link 2024-10-26T18:53Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I suppose this is what happens when an entire generation of Americans is brought up with an end-of-history illusion that fascism wasn't left standing as a serious contender after WW2. Decades of Cold War in which it was supposedly in the dustbin of history"
X Link 2024-10-31T16:40Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"The truth is most Americans have little historical and cultural education in the ideology of fascism. They therefore treat it as a morality tale. Their main exposure comes through Steven-Spielberg-type cinema. But they are utterly convinced fascism died with Hitler in the bunker"
X Link 2024-10-31T17:57Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"But this ideology never really went away. It did go underground into local cells (think Neo-Nazis gangs) but also found new formulations & expressions that hybridized with cultures homegrown in the U.S.: from the CEO boardroom to soft social darwinism of some celebrity aesthetics"
X Link 2024-10-31T18:03Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"The oft-repeated quote if fascism arrives in USA it will be with flag and cross can become unhelpful if we don't stay aware that the point of it is cultural mutation. It can come also in high-finance power suits & tabloid celebrity or something else https://x.com/sarahchurchwell/status/1267725712271781888lang=en https://x.com/sarahchurchwell/status/1267725712271781888lang=en"
X Link 2024-10-31T18:08Z 11.1K followers, [---] engagements
"I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral fascist minimum definition. I think she's wrongheaded but probably for sincere reasons. It's a rare case where philosophical reflection might . help@cenkuygur@TheYoungTurks"
X Link 2024-11-01T15:00Z [----] followers, 10.2K engagements
"So unlike the gradualist conservatism of say Edmund Burke or T.S. Eliot which look askance at any sudden and violent action fascists instead have a pattern of breaking taboos first verbally and later in action. There may be need for an extraordinary man beyond morality"
X Link 2024-11-01T17:38Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@wrdcsc https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852406264929890493 Note the grammar DT deploys (he's adept rhetorically) which allows for plausible deniability. He is simply imagining Cheney in the war zone she created. But he's also imaginatively inviting listeners to enjoy an image of his opponent in front of a firing line. Taboo-broken https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1852406264929890493 Note the grammar DT deploys (he's adept rhetorically) which allows for plausible deniability. He is simply imagining Cheney in the war zone she created. But he's also imaginatively inviting listeners to"
X Link 2024-11-01T18:17Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
""Jason you think these pundits want to have philosophical dialogue I must say this is a vastly inferior and very stupid even farcical version of Socrates's world-historical error when he thought philosophy was of any use in the Agora of Ancient Athens""
X Link 2024-11-01T23:58Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
""Jason you earnestly believe such commentators want to have philosophical dialogue I must say this is a vastly inferior and very stupid even farcical version of Socrates's world-historical error when he thought philosophy was of any use in the Agora of Ancient Athens" I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral fascist minimum definition. I think she's wrongheaded but probably for sincere reasons. It's a rare case where philosophical reflection might . help@cenkuygur@TheYoungTurks https://t.co/h2BmRCAzN5 I made this short video response to@AnaKasparian and her viral"
X Link 2024-11-02T00:00Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"A good read. I agree with Ganz that fascism in U.S. is a novel mutation/hybrid. Also he's right that while interpretively correct it's impossible to tell the political effect of the label. One quibble is I would not limit objective assessment of the two theories solely on. No honest person can deny this at this point. He has the will and the desire. And this is what reading and thinking about fascism helps us keep in mind: it is a living possibility. By @lionel_trolling https://t.co/danMYDqtJ9 No honest person can deny this at this point. He has the will and the desire. And this is what"
X Link 2024-11-03T16:35Z [----] followers, 10.4K engagements
"@samhaselby Not how I would interpret her politics. Fwiw i have a chapter on the book on progressivism and the other on democratic socialism. I discuss at length varieties of socialism (communist revolutionary versus electoral socialist). figures discussed include Bernie Sanders AOC Biden"
X Link 2024-11-03T17:28Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Polling can of course produce valid snap shots of belief and opinion but unlike the natural sciences the descriptions are not in any clear way totally separate from the processes they describe. To the contrary they come from within politics & can alter those processes"
X Link 2024-11-05T15:21Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Along with a popular tendency to (falsely) view polls as photographs that do not change the object they are imaging people also unhelpfully think of pollsters as disembodied. But pollsters are particular people & differing groups interpret their questions & arrival differently"
X Link 2024-11-05T15:31Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Some are saying "Forecasters calling it close is valuable because it confirms it's close" But this misses how the whole authority behind modern forecasting is a claim to some control over futures. Past elections they got badly wrong this one they have no prediction whatsoever"
X Link 2024-11-05T16:55Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@rowyourbot that's just because you are a gemini"
X Link 2024-11-05T17:31Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Some voters might read the seeming inexorable movement of the needle an think: "Well Trump has won so there's no use in casting my vote in Nevada" Or they might see it and interpret otherwise. But no one knows for sure the effects of this kind of thing. And we may never know"
X Link 2024-11-06T02:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"When I say a profiteering media pursuing clicks can drown out "deliberation" (with say endless gamekeeping/dashboards) I don't just mean thoughtful dialogue. I mean the silence by which a people resolutely considers its vote free of the casino-like cacophony of technocrats"
X Link 2024-11-06T02:50Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"You know who else lost big (again) last night Election forecasters. This time around there was a dramatic gap between the closeness with which they called the presidential race (as in Nate Silvers "80000 simulations") and how unclose it was compared to prior elections"
X Link 2024-11-06T14:29Z [----] followers, 12.3K engagements
"My own view perhaps unwelcome is the Left needs a dramatically new bottom-up solidarity that's far more affirmative of traditional religion. It is losing contact not only with many ordinary people but also ancient republicanism virtue politics & Abrahamic spiritual sources"
X Link 2024-11-06T16:35Z [----] followers, 60.5K engagements
"My own view is this is what happens when popular social science is dominated by reified social facts ("young male") with little to no ethnography. Philosophically speaking young male doesn't cut at the joints we need to understand a change in ideological cultures. How did Kamala Harris lose young male voters by this much https://t.co/KCuK7ZMMvE How did Kamala Harris lose young male voters by this much https://t.co/KCuK7ZMMvE"
X Link 2024-11-08T01:59Z [----] followers, 12.9K engagements
"the concept of hubris as it was understood in Homeric religion as a violation of boundaries of the properly human by particular men either down into the beastial or up into the realm of the gods. Achilles must learn that he (and Hector and Patrocolus) are also mortal"
X Link 2024-11-09T04:25Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Once this lesson is learned by Achilles (& he allows for the burial of Hector after brutally dishonoring him & dragging him from his chariot) Homer masterfully ends the story. It surprises my young son. He wants the whole war at Troy. But it ends because hubris is resolved"
X Link 2024-11-09T04:29Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@MostlyLurkn yes i think there is a positive use for poles. at the philosophical level i think quant methods need to be placed within an interpretive framwork (depending how deep in the weeds you want to go my [----] book with Mark Bevir is all about this)"
X Link 2024-11-09T22:46Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"liberalism may recede in one sense and hybridize in another (e.g. ethnic-nationalist emergency Schmittian far-right neoliberalism). In other places other fusions and mutations will happen. Fukuyama assumes liberalism is a kind of object with firm contours (all in or all out)"
X Link 2024-11-09T23:10Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"like one of those old roosters that crows all night long and must be put out as faraway as possible form the farm so too Fukuyama is a kind of Hegelian Owl of Minerva gone haywire he is always saying it's dusk and he's always flapping around flying into things"
X Link 2024-11-09T23:43Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"At a seminar on Dante's Divine Comedy with the great classicist Stefano Rebeggiani & he points out that once in Paradaiso Dante's body moves in a separate time dimension than the shades around him (almost a temporal wormhole). The point In this life time is of urgency & weight"
X Link 2024-11-10T19:18Z [----] followers, 20.6K engagements
"It's one of these many surprising Dantean paradoxes: the focus on the afterlife is not to diminish this life but rather to infinitely affirm or maximize the importance of one's actions on Earth. Another missed paradox: the only way too paradise for humans is to descend into hell"
X Link 2024-11-10T19:24Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"As Stefano observed: the way is blocked for Dante out of the dark forest at the beginning of the poem. He can't go straight up. The path to paradise must go down into his own inner darkness & capacity for harm violence malevolence. The way down is the first step up. Felix culpa"
X Link 2024-11-10T19:26Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"With regrets to my progressive friends: No Harris did not run a flawless campaign. This is the reduction of politics to strategy and PR. A healthy campaign in a democracy emerges out of a process of resonance listening & dialogue with people. None of this even happened"
X Link 2024-11-12T18:29Z [----] followers, 14.6K engagements
"You cannot land (even a very efficacious) campaign team like some ship on the popular base of democracy & expect the campaign will come to good ends. Candidates in a democracy should be selected through bottom-up processes. Technocracy is the name of the politics that thinks"
X Link 2024-11-12T18:32Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
". outlining plans hustling on the "campaign trail" tapping donors & staying on message are somehow the same as a flawless campaign. This style of politics is not ideologically innocent. It is unwittingly top-down and anti-democratic. And lo & behold was found unpopular"
X Link 2024-11-12T18:36Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"This is in fact the endless looping repetition of an (unaware) ideological tradition that has infiltrated the Democratic Party: a kind of soft hybridized neoliberalism that let's in top-down politics via overweening notions of "merit" and winning in colleges & career"
X Link 2024-11-12T18:53Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@billburgnyc I'm not sure I see the difference either (or maybe the first articulation isn't quite clearly stated--which may or may not have been on me or lost in translation). The main point is Hobbes sets himself up as an anti-Aristotle (not telos/aim or good for humans) only a "
X Link 2024-11-12T19:38Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"Among the most dramatic/devastating moments in 20th century music When Bob Dylan meets Donovan (the latter still a golden boy of folk & a rival) & sings him the scorching poetic opener to Its All Over Now Baby Blue. It's all over Donovans face: hes been totally eclipsed"
X Link 2024-11-14T01:31Z [----] followers, 422.7K engagements
"It seems either way (whether the crying like a fire is disproportionate or additive to a world of sorrows burning like a sun) the "orphan" is unaware that he is adding a bit of flame to the hell of sorrows or that he may be overly nursing his own sufferings comparatively"
X Link 2024-11-14T03:36Z [----] followers, 10.7K engagements
"@trippinkitty1 all those are great. but i mean Leonard Cohen himself when asked about Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (and award I guarantee none of those singers have the quality to achieve) replied: that's like putting a medal on Everest for being the tallest mountain"
X Link 2024-11-15T03:18Z [----] followers, [--] engagements
"I was able to briefly meet him in Vienna a few years ago (he helped organize a Festschrift for Charles Taylor's 90th) & he was in person verbally also intellectually virtuoso if a bit enigmatic & elusive. His grad students there were impressive too"
X Link 2024-11-15T17:59Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
Limited data mode. Full metrics available with subscription: lunarcrush.com/pricing