Quotes that hit home

[ergophobe]

oops.. double post

[ergophobe]

All this is pretty dark.

I guess it is a dark view of the world, but in Nietzsche's case, he's trying to make an argument for a less dark approach to life.

Way way back I took courses from a professor who was a specialist in Nietzsche (and a Hasidic Jew), but unfortunately, I don't remember much. But Nietzsche was definitively not an antisemite. His works, unfortunately, were under the control of his sister and her husband after his death and they were rabid antisemites.

For Nietzsche, the Pharisees basically means anyone who deploys rules and norms as a means to control and punish. Nietzsche also believed that Christianity valorized weakness ("blessed are the the meek") which was another way of keeping people for rising above the crowd.

In essence, in both cases, he believed that there is an impulse in people to stay even with their neighbors by bringing their neighbors down rather than by raising themselves up, and that the Pharisees and Christians employed different but similar tactics, as opposed to the ancient Greeks who, uniquely for Nietzsche, combined the Appollonian (logic) and Dionysian (emotion) to create art and culture that affirmed life.

So I thought of the quote because in the previous quote, it's about how people who are afraid will seek to punish those they are afraid of. And Nietzsche is basically saying this is a common human impulse  - they would be Pharisees if only they had power.

[ergophobe]

That puts it in perspective...

Last week, the chief judge of the state's federal trial-level court said ICE "has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-admin-attorney-leaves-minnesota-after-telling-judge-her-job-sucks-amid-crush-of-immigration-cases/ar-AA1VEY5l

[littleman]

And just a trial run for the coming midterms.

[ergophobe]

 "I'm not a dreamer. I am analytic and realistic. But there's always a chance of anything. And that chance is taken away if you don't show up."

  -- Jakob Ingebritsen on why he showed up at World's even though he was just coming off an injury
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jan/23/at-home-with-jakob-ingebrigtsen-athletics-norway-big-interview

[rcjordan]

"If wealthy people took the bus, we'd already have a city filled with bus lanes." --bsky

RC: Quotes like this are radicalizing me, Suzanne. hhh

[ergophobe]

> bus lanes

This is the old "public squalor, private opulence" problem

"Pro his nos habemus luxuriam atque avaritiam, publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam" (In place of these we have extravagance and greed, public poverty and private opulence).
 -- Sallust, quoting Cato
  -- https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Bellum_Catilinae*.html
  -- https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Bellum_Catilinae*.html

Or another famous version, this one from JK Galbraith in The Affluent Society

"It is scarcely sensible that we should satisfy our wants in private goods with reckless abundance, while in the case of public goods we practice extreme self-denial."

Quoted in https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/55806/trouble-were-in or p. 111 of The Essential Galbraith, http://digamo.free.fr/afflu58.pdf

The general problem is that when the wealthy have the ability and desire to withdraw from public services, public services get worse. So in TX, everyone has a home pool, but the number of completely kickass aquatic facilities is small. But if just a relatively small portion of all the resources that have been spent on those private pools had been... uh... pooled, you could have an excellent pool in every neighborhood.

Of course, racism plays into that whole story as well. All across the country, when public pools were forced to integrate, the public responded by filling those public pools with concrete and letting the wealthy have their private pools, with no pools at all for anyone else, black, white or other.

Schooling is the more troubling case. In so many cities in America, if you are at all wealthy, you opt out of public school for your kids and private schools are major drivers of inequality (massively over-represented at elite universities).

[ergophobe]

It's easy to call this hypocrisy, but it's not. Hypocrisy is knowing the right thing and choosing the wrong one. This is worse and more interesting. It is a culture that has eliminated the language for asking the question at all. Harvard, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey: secular confirmation rites. They signaled membership among the elect in the way that baptism once did. Except that baptism imposed obligations, and Goldman imposed none that touched the conscience.

 -- Will Manidis https://x.com/WillManidis/status/2021231199365013730 -- This is a long and interesting essay on "Rented Virtue" from the perspective of a Quaker.


He also excerpts the following from Dorothy Sayers

The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sunday. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Full essay at https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Why_Work_Dorothy_Sayers.pdf

[rcjordan]

2020: "A society that ignores or downplays a technological threat so long as it is used to 'only' sexually exploit women will be woefully unprepared to respond when that technology is weaponized against other people and for other causes." --Mary Anne Franks ^{Law Professor at George Washington Law. President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.}

[ergophobe]

>  used to 'only' sexually exploit women

Related: the Imperial Boomerang: "the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to enforce imperialism or control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

In the view of thinkers like Césaire and Arendt, the novelty of Hitler was not the savagery of his acts which could be compared to the acts of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo (for example), but in the fact that he applied them in Europe, rather than in Africa or elsewhere.

[ergophobe]

"You can't put the shit back in the donkey."

Katie Martin, Financial Times columnist on the Prof G pod.