1000RH

Curated snippets on modern counter-culture and the malaise of the modern world

[1000rh]

Jewish Zionists see Palestine and align with Jews because they’re Jews; Jewish anti-zionists see Palestine and align with Palestinians because they are of the sacred Below being crushed by the Above, the salt of the earth fighting for dignity and liberation on their own land, on their own terms. The land indeed fights with them. We don’t waver or flinch on our positions because it is fellow Jewish people who are the fascists running children over alive with tanks: Anti-Zionist commitments are ethical, not identitarian.

– Amanda Gelender, “Yes, All Jews.” (2026) Link

[1000rh]

If you’re serious about liberation, then you sacrifice career, you sacrifice upward mobility, you sacrifice access, you sacrifice awards, you sacrifice prestige, you sacrifice adulation.  In short, you sacrifice the convenience of easy solutions.   I don’t want to be anybody’s goddamn mayor.  That’s my contribution to the cause.  Surely there will be remonstration along these lines:  “But you need to get the message out to people!”  I don’t find it to be a convincing argument mainly because while it’s true that audiences need different voices to educate them, in the examples I witness it is the messenger who is impressionable to the audience.  In many cases, the purpose isn’t to spread messages, but to capitalize on the value of a following. 

– Steve Salaita, “Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction” (2026) Link

[1000rh]

I used to wonder whether it was good or bad to have multiple enemies. Was it a poor reflection on me or the byproduct of an unjust world? It turns out that my confusion was a temporal glitch, not a contradiction, for it became clear as life went on that the reactionary in the United States and the Zionist in Palestine are in fact the same enemy.

– Steve Salaita, "Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction" (2026) Link

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

Atom smasher at U of Chicago, 1948.

[1000rh]

…it is important that we note, following Lukács’s insights, that irrationalism tends to lead philosophers to abandon the prospect of a coherent understanding of the antagonisms and contradictions that make up bourgeois society. As such, philosophy falls into an apologetics for the bourgeois social order. This apologetics can take two forms: a direct apologetics in which the philosopher aims to champion the unjust social order directly, as we find in thinkers such as the libertarian writer Ayn Rand; or an indirect apologetics for capitalist exploitation, as we find in thinkers such as James Burnham or Nietzsche, in which the philosopher critiques the bourgeois social order and even aspects of capitalism, but keeps open an implicit justification of the social order. Indirect apologists often make for more effective proponents of reactionary agendas, as they incorporate an anti-capitalist critique but do not decisively champion a revolutionary position. In other words, indirect apologetics involves an obscuring or a mystification of the political and social situation.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[1000rh]

Even to this day, many of Nietzsche’s most famous memes and quotable phrases on social media are popular and resonate precisely because we live in a world that is fundamentally shaped by disciplined austerity. Phrases such as “You must first conquer yourselves,” or “Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger,” or “It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong” reveal the heart of Nietzsche’s tough and austere wisdom. This wisdom is forged in the fires of a political commitment to austerity, which is why Nietzsche remains our very timely contemporary and why the liberal mainstream establishment (not just conservatives) relishes him. While these maxims are plucked by self-help gurus and young people off Google on a daily basis — Nietzsche frequently trends on Twitter and social media — so as to further a rugged individualism compatible with a bootstrap capitalist ethos, beneath these inspirational phrases lies a concerted political project.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[1000rh]

Nietzsche glorified capitalist exploitation openly, without phrase-mongering. His apology consisted in the fact that he dressed the glorification of capitalism in the form of criticism of modernity, in the fact that, accordingly, his apology was indirect, not direct.

– Georg Lukacs, "Nietzsche" (1934) Link

[1000rh]

This realist/nominalist debate splits the liberal and socialist or communist perspectives on political truths: the liberal position insists that the universal ideals of the French Revolution must reach certain limits in capitalist society, and most specifically those limits revolve around the persistence of the unjust system of wage labor and the labor market. A nominalist relation to the universal demands established in the Revolution faces the contradictions of bourgeois society that prevent the extension of universal demands in the market sphere, specifically that the wage-labor system cannot be transcended. This is at the heart of why liberals must adopt a nominalist orientation to political truths, because they face inherent limits in what they are able to advocate based on the fact they have accepted capitalist market relations as the guiding force of social and political life. […] In this way, the socialist position can be thought as a realist conception of political epistemology, one in which politics is about arriving at a universal basis of truth without insisting on distortions or nominalist compromises.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[1000rh]

Liberal thought, in all its variety, from the progressive left to the neoconservative right, aims for a culturalizing and what we will call a “nominalizing” of political contradictions, and this can take many forms. Liberals on both the right and the left nominalize the social contradictions inherent to both the market and its tyranny over the working class and the contradictions that are borne from the working class itself. The raison d’être of liberal politics is built on the need to displace antagonisms of capitalism back onto the individual worker; that is, liberals must find ways to stamp down working-class discontent, and the result is that working-class experience and demands are taken to be a scandal affecting the very semblance of social order. The desired end of mitigating these agitations is to foster anti-solidarity and especially hyper-racial animus among workers so that cross-racial solidarity is off the table.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[jareckiworld]

Adrian Ghenie — The Hotel Room (oil on canvas, 2023)

[1000rh]

Romantic anti-capitalism is a form of critique of the capitalist system that proposes the return to a better version of capitalism, or to a more harmonious management of capitalism, in distinction to transformation or total revolution. Romantic anti-capitalism is thus an ingenious form of ideological operation that has proven attractive to the bourgeois class, especially the creative class, because the capitalist ruling class requires a philosophy and an ideology that can make the degradations and injustices that are produced by its system of exploitation and division of labor seem natural and “par for the course.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is a Janus-faced dialectical philosophy that aims to enact a new social order and bring about a society in which artistic and aesthetic greatness is relegated to the vocation of a small elite capable of bringing it about. Nietzsche’s philosophy is unabashedly elitist, and this is why it has remained attractive to elites, precisely because the joyful, rebellious aspects mesh with his obsession with rank order and blunt its more vulgar side. Nietzscheanism remains elusive because it appears edgy and critical.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[jareckiworld]

Adrian Ghenie — The Hotel Room II (oil on canvas, 2025)

[1000rh]

We will define a “reactionary” as someone who concocts a series of strategies to prevent and block any changing of the world. As such, reactionaries should not be thought of only in terms of their extreme varieties, like someone who express blatant racism or hatred of their political opponents. Bob Dylan once encapsulated the elusive basis of the reactionary position when he wrote, “The enemy I see wears a cloak of decency.” In this way, the very concept of the reactionary describes the elusive means by which the status quo of capitalist social relations remains intact. To maintain an unjust status quo, it is necessary that the ruling class perfect an ideological rationale for the world as it is, despite all its inequality and exploitation and the cascade of suffering it engenders. The ideology of liberal capitalism is premised on the lie that informs the reproduction of our educational and business institutions, namely that we live in a meritocratic, free, and fair society. We are told that our version of advanced Western liberal democracy is the beacon of freedom in the world and that those who are successful earned that success because they fought and struggled with greater grit and determination than those who did not make it.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[1000rh]

Here perhaps is the root of Nietzsche’s extraordinary bond with his readers. Reading Nietzsche successfully means reading for victory, reading so that we identify ourselves with the goals of the author. In so unscrupulously seeking for ourselves the rewards of the text we become exemplars of the uninhibited will to power. No wonder Nietzsche can so confidently identify his readers with the Supermen. It is not just flattery. If Nietzsche’s readers have mastered his text, they have demonstrated just those qualities of ruthlessness and ambition that qualify them to be ‘masters of the earth’. But they have done more than earn a status in Nietzsche’s fictional world. In arriving at an understanding of Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine they have already proved it to themselves. Nietzsche persuades by appealing to experience—not to our experience of the world, but our experience as readers, in particular, our experience as readers of his text. There is an alternative to reading for victory: reading like a loser. […] Reading like losers, we respond very differently to the claims Nietzsche makes on behalf of himself and his readers. Rather than reading for victory with Nietzsche, or even reading for victory against Nietzsche by identifying with the slave morality, we read for victory against ourselves, making ourselves the victims of the text. Doing so does not involve treating the text with scepticism or suspicion. In order to read like a loser you have to accept the argument, but turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche’s extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us.

 – Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche (2011)

[1000rh]

In many ways, the basic common sense of our culture is sadomasochistic: we see the world as divided between winners and losers. We are fearful that we may grow to become a loser, that others might see us as a loser. And so we compete in a game that we can’t — or that we refuse to — see is rigged. We struggle in a system that is stacked against us. But this is the only world we know, and it is very difficult to protest this common sense, for to protest it would be to protest reality itself. The ideology of our world maintains that what is determined on the site of the market — competition for work, status, recognition, etc. — is to be internalized by us as natural.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[1000rh]

Nietzsche’s thought must be read as giving ideological support to a social order where both joyful affirmation and anarchic celebration are experienced at the same time as a cruel and brutal defense of rank order. This makes Nietzsche’s thought a Janus face which must be understood in its highs and lows.

– Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite (2024)

[weepingwidar]

Matija Bobičić (Slovenian, 1987) - Muri the Cat (2025)