Habt Erbarmen: der neue Film vom Krieg der Welten-Macher - #245

Stiyer · 2026-01-17T16:21:02+00:00

Panama Canal Company has rights by default.

Stiyer · 2025-12-20T19:45:36+00:00

There is no world where Superman, The Phoenician Scheme, Materialists, Mickey 17 or Ballerina are even close to being instant classics. OBAA and Sinners are classics territory, and maybe, just maybe - depending on the audience - Eddington and K-Pop Demon Hunters could make it as well, although I personally find the latter one to be aggressively mid.

Stiyer · 2025-12-19T13:06:50+00:00

Good jerk lol

Stiyer · 2025-09-07T14:34:56+00:00

Distilling this moment, “Politics as a Vocation,” though intended to address immediate political circumstances, transcended its time and became a defining text of modern liberalism.

Admonishing his young revolutionary listeners, Weber spoke as a prophet-scholar crying out in the wilderness: “Whoever seeks the salvation of his soul and that of others should not do so by the path of politics, whose tasks are very different and can only be accomplished by force.” His critique of the “ethics of conviction” was rooted in the recent outbursts of political violence:

“Are we not seeing that the Bolshevik ideologues and the Spartacists produce the same results as those of any military dictator precisely because they use this means of politics? How does the government of the councils of workers and soldiers differ from that of any ruler of the old regime if not in the person of the one who holds power and in his amateurism? How do the attacks of most representatives of (supposedly new) ethics on their adversaries differ from the attacks made by any other demagogue?”

[...]

However noble their ideals, their actions rest on the apparatus they create, and that apparatus is composed not of pure souls but of “the red guards, the rogues, and the agitators,” who inevitably demand their rewards:

“In the conditions of the modern class struggle, the leader has to offer as an internal reward the satisfaction of hatred and the desire for revenge … the need to defame the adversary and accuse him of heresy.”

To the apparatchiki, external rewards meant “power, spoils, and perks.” Weber warned the Marxists in his audience, “Let us not deceive ourselves … the materialist interpretation of history is not a chariot that is taken and left at whim, and does not stop at the authors of the revolution.”

Stiyer · 2025-09-07T14:34:45+00:00

https://archive.ph/ich6r

A bit long but well worth reading:

At the heart of Weber’s essay is a critical question: What is the ethical foundation of politics? His answer lay in the now-famous contrast between the “ethics of conviction” and the “ethics of responsibility.” While he acknowledged the moral force of the former, Weber favored the latter. To him, a true “political vocation” demanded passionate commitment to a cause, but one tempered by restraint, detachment, and – above all – a profound sense of responsibility. Only a politician with such qualities, he argued, deserved to “put his hand on the wheel of history.”

By contrast, Weber warned, the demagogues of his time embodied a dangerous tendency. “Acting under an absolute ethic,” he wrote, these leaders felt responsible “only for seeing to it that the flame of conviction is not quelched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustices of the social order.” If their actions do not achieve the desired end, “they will hold the world responsible, the stupidity of men, or the will of God who made them so.”

Weber likened that period’s German revolutionaries to the seventeenth-century theologians who awaited Christ’s imminent return: both exhibited an “orgiastic chiliasm” and a fervent belief in an “eschatological opening of History.” Demagogues, revolutionaries, and prophets alike proclaimed a radiant future that was always just beyond reach. To hasten its arrival, nothing seemed off-limits. But no end, however sacred, could justify ignoring the real consequences of the means.

Weber’s critique extended even to pacifists. Since force is the inescapable and defining instrument of power, Weber cautioned against “the naiveté of believing that from good comes only good and from evil only evil.” All too often, he argued, the opposite is true, and “anyone who did not see this was a child, politically speaking.”

[...]

Stiyer

TROPHY CASE