elliot
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williezurmacht.bsky.social
elliot
@williezurmacht.bsky.social
writer (fiction, essays, drama), philosophy academic by training, artist, friend + comrade, downwardly mobile Baltimore thirtysomething. 🆓🇵🇸❗️

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https://elliotswain.substack.com/

bit of new fiction at bruisermag.com
Tom Waits hit and miss for me but a song like HOIST THAT RAG makes me want to start smokin cigars and inhaling, god it rules, his larynx is like a human scrapyard
January 14, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Why is Grimes always flirting with me from a distance
January 13, 2025 at 9:35 PM
Reposted by elliot
Gotta hand it to Aaron Sorkin for this one
January 10, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Dylan movie wasn’t good but it was fun being the only two people in the theater so we could sing to the songs and remark on the most remarkable thing about the movie which is what a bangin bod Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) had
January 13, 2025 at 7:21 PM
Wrote this a long time ago and still think it’s pretty good

medium.com/@elliotswain...
What If School Shootings Were About the Schools?
Our unanimous refusal to consider the institutional context of this particular kind of violence helps ensure that it keeps happening.
medium.com
December 17, 2024 at 12:14 AM
Why does it seem like the most recent thing that anyone on the left or progressive world or whatever has done for or about the hundreds of thousands of people, in the richest country, who are forced to sleep on street sidewalks in the cold is give their Category a clunky new name (the unhoused) ?
December 13, 2024 at 1:54 PM
Let’s Talk TUA (Transcendental Unity of Apperception)
December 13, 2024 at 8:18 AM
Unpopular position: Rawls — the original position + the minimax principles of Justice he derives from it — is absolutely embarrassingly obviously wrong to the point that it’s rhetorically tempting to call him a charlatan
December 13, 2024 at 3:51 AM
I read (most of) an earlier manuscript of this a while ago, @vcwills.bsky.social was my professor and mentor in things Marx in grad school. Finally ordered the book and it is really an instant classic in Marxist philosophy. The most thorough and original treatment of Marxian ethics I’ve read
I've got a long flight ahead of me, and some work to do, but alsooooooo
@vcwills.bsky.social
December 13, 2024 at 3:14 AM
A bully is the lowest thing a person can be. A bully enters a social sphere and sniffs out the Strong people — who of course aren’t actually strong in any virtuous sense but merely efficaciously cruel brutes with psychopathic fauxrisma— and cowers together with them, for safety
December 12, 2024 at 8:06 PM
I made Frankfurt school memes please clap and laugh
December 12, 2024 at 4:31 PM
Having a good time is the mainest thing of life and that means everyone deserves the basic resources for flourishing, a social sphere, and the opportunity to plunk a war guy or sweatshop boss’s head onto a stake
December 12, 2024 at 4:29 PM
There’s a lot I wish I did differently in this piece, kinda wrote it all in one burst in a waiting room years ago, but it at least hints at an issue in drugs discourse that I think has bigger implications. Published under a pseudonym for obvious reasons

hardcrackers.com/class-on-cra...
Class on Crack
This is a story about crack, and everything that cracks underneath its weight. For the uninitiated, some exposition is warranted. The genre of the gonzo drug abuse romp has had its day, and neither...
hardcrackers.com
December 12, 2024 at 7:31 AM
This sometimes causes arguments that begin like “But you love HEGEL!” Which is true, I do think Hegel was perhaps the greatest philosopher, in his time, since Aristotle. So it can come off disciple-like. But he is simply much, much better
No subtype of philosophy nerd is as simultaneously totally devoted to, and totally unable to paraphrase or agree on the correct reading of their favorite Guy like Heideggerians. In combination with the extremely bad writing and question begging claims, it does make one wonder if —
December 11, 2024 at 5:36 AM
No subtype of philosophy nerd is as simultaneously totally devoted to, and totally unable to paraphrase or agree on the correct reading of their favorite Guy like Heideggerians. In combination with the extremely bad writing and question begging claims, it does make one wonder if —
December 11, 2024 at 5:30 AM
I like this new pope
December 10, 2024 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by elliot
This is why Luigi Mangione stopped in Altoona
December 9, 2024 at 10:51 PM
same
Fuck it, I'll get my shit together.

FINE.

But I'm *only* doing it because it will make it easier to travel the world, get laid, exercise agency, buy cool things, and participate in communities I value.

I'm NOT doing it for altruistic good-boy reasons
December 10, 2024 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by elliot
the father the son and the holy ghost
August 10, 2023 at 3:14 AM
What do I do on here what is the point of this, it looks like Twitter for babies
August 20, 2023 at 6:54 PM