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Adam S. Rust

@asrust.bsky.social

3.3K followers 92 following 420 posts

Lawyer, writes on law things, writings have appeared in Liberal Currents and Balls & Strikes, based in San Jose, CA.

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 23h

Over the next several weeks I am going to live skeet my evening reading of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" for no particular reason.

Picture of the Library of America edition of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" with a glass and decanter of bourbon adjacent for no particular reason.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 9h

Interested to see if I will agree with that assessment. She clearly has no patience for antisemitism as an intellectual project. Even her citation to an antisemitic scholar in the notes (1) flags him as such (2) notes he is the exception to the rule.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 9h

I have ready other Arendt books and she is drawn to hard things it seems. My favorite kind of thinker.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

In Arendt's telling, the emergence of robust race theorizing about Jews runs somewhat in tandem with robust race theorizing about, say, black Americans. It is downstream of attempts to give Enlightenment era scientific rigor and fixity to older amorphous folk thinking.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

Again, I don't really know near enough to comment but here is a section of text where Arendt discusses these points.

"This factual constellation gave rise to an optical illusion under which both Jewish and non-Jewish historians have suffered ever since. Historiography "has until now dealt more with the Christian dissociation from the Jews than with the reverse," thus obliterating the otherwise more important fact that Jewish..."

"...dissociation from the Gentile world, and more specifically from the Christian environment, has been of greater relevance for Jewish history than the reverse, for the obvious reason that the very survival of the people as an identifiable entity depended upon such voluntary separation and not, as was currently assumed, upon the hostility of Christians and non-Jews. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after emancipation and with the spread of assimilation, has antisemitism played any role in the conservation of the people, since only then did Jews aspire to being admitted to non-Jewish society."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

2. Arendt also seems to suggest that Antisemitism as a unifying feature of Jewish experience emerges in the 19th century as some Jews try to assimilate into Gentile culture.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

1. Jewish marginalization from Gentile culture is a product of the Jewish desire for a distinct community as it is for Gentiles to keep Jews out of their daily lives.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

This intro to the Antisemitism section of the book make some claims I feel super wary endorsing without more knowledge on the topic. Below are a few:

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

After trashing Antisemitic historians generally, Arendt carves out an exception and I am vaguely recollecting relying on this scholar got her in a lot of trouble.

"7. The only exception is the antisemitic historian Walter Frank, the head of the Nazi Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands and the editor of nine volumes of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1937-1944. Especially Frank's own contributions can still be consulted with profit."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

From Arendt's intro to her section on Anti-Semitism. One recurrent theme in the intro is the constituent parts of totalitarianism are things thoughtful Europeans considered beneath engagement.

"Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 23h

One observation Arendt makes in the intro is how absurd it is that Anti-Semitism, of all political flashpoints, led the world into totalitarianism. If you had told me immigration would lead us to where we are now 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 23h

True understanding requiring facing up to the parts we don't want to understand is an important intellectual north star during trying times.

"The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality-whatever it may be."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 23h

Love a good opening epigraph. Translation in second picture via Google Translate.

"Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein. - KARL JASPERS"

"Neither falling prey to the past nor to the future. What matters is being completely present. KARL JASPERS"

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 23h

Over the next several weeks I am going to live skeet my evening reading of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" for no particular reason.

Picture of the Library of America edition of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" with a glass and decanter of bourbon adjacent for no particular reason.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 29d

In memoriam, here is my favorite Robert Redford anecdote.

Text: “I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols told an enthusiastic crowd at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in New York, in 2003, at a screening of The Graduate. He even discussed the role with his friend Robert Redford, who was eager for the part. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Sep 9

Just watched "The Bodyguard" (1992) for the first time a few days ago and I cannot stop thinking about the screwdriver Kevin Costner pours during his dark night of the soul. youtu.be/g1rRXO1qiQs?...

Stolichnaya+Orange Juice=Kevin Costner

YouTube video by Prodopotter

Reposted by Adam S. Rust

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · Sep 7

The best one-line criticism of these sort of Democrats that I’ve heard is “they believe they deserve an A in politics.”

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Sep 7

real problem that democratic politicians fetishize being “responsible” and “the grown ups”

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Aug 29

Hemingway taking drive by shots at the legal profession in "A Farewell to Arms".

Highlighted text "I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Aug 29

At a cocktail bar and overheard "I was watching "Cocktail" with a friend who was seeing it for the first time and had to restrain myself yelling out lines like it was a "Rocky Horror" screening" which may be among the most chaotic sentences I have ever heard.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Aug 5

One I want to write a reply brief that is just quoting this letter to editor of a small literary magazine after it published the "Nausicaa" episode from James Joyce's "Ulysses".

"Damnable, hellish filth from the gutter of a human mind born and bred in contamination. There are no words I know to describe, even vaguely, how disgusted I am; not with the mire of his effusion but with all those whose minds are so putrid that they dare allow such muck and sewage of the human mind to besmirch the world by repeating it—and in print, through which medium it may reach young minds. Oh my God, the horror of it . . . It has done something tragic to my illusions about America. How could you?"

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Aug 1

Every time.

Boy in therapy identified as Ilan Wurman: I've created a persuasive theory of originalism.

Therapist: Is it originalism or is it just conservative judicial activism?

Boy as Wurman: Conservative judicial activism.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Jul 30

British Suffragettes were so lit.

Text 1/2: "Νο one exemplified the interchange between radical politics and art more than Dora Marsden, a renegade suffragette who would radicalize Ezra Pound and publish James Joyce's first novel. In 1909, Marsden led a march of thirty women to Parliament and was charged with assaulting a police officer by hitting him with her banner (she claimed it was an accident). After spending a month in jail, Marsden broke up a Liberal Party meeting by throwing iron balls through a glass partition. That earned her two more months in prison, where she went on a hunger strike, smashed her cell windows and tore off her prison clothes to protest naked. When the guards forced her into a straitjacket, Dora Marsden, at four foot ten, squirmed her way out.

Liberal Party meetings routinely..."

Text 2/2: "became suffragist protest sites. When a young Winston Churchill addressed an audience in Southport in 1909, police officers surrounded the hall so that Churchill could rally support for a budget bill that the House of Lords vetoed. When he argued that the Lords should acquiesce to the House of Commons because it represented the will of the electorate, a voice shouted out from a ceiling porthole, "But it does not represent the women, Mr. Churchill!" The audience flew in an uproar. Dora Marsden had eluded the tight security by hiding in the hall's attic space the previous day and waiting through a night of rain and freezing temperatures. After haranguing Churchill for several minutes, Marsden and two accomplices were dragged off the roof and arrested."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Jul 26

Still think I wasn't mean enough, all things considered.

Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · Jul 26

I knew of him because of @asrust.bsky.social’s debut essay and yeah he always seemed careerist but boy has the mask completely come off this year www.liberalcurrents.com/original-lea...

Original Leanings: Wurman's Originalism as Judicial Activism

Law schools teach many subtleties of questionable relevance. I was in my Constitutional Law class in law school when I learned about the subtleties of Originalism. The class was discussing an affirmat...

www.liberalcurrents.com

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Jul 26

Incidentally the second meanest thing I wrote about prestige members of the legal academy that year. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-fight-ma...

The Fight Makes the Meaning: Noah Feldman, James Oakes, and the Lessons of Antislavery Constitutionalism

Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a frequent public commenter on the state of constitutional law and the Supreme Court. Over the last few years he’s been in a ...

www.liberalcurrents.com

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Jul 4

Just ended my time at my current job representing parents who had their kids taken by CPS. Normally people receive a plaque at five years of service. I was two weeks short of five years. My colleagues had my back.

Plaque stating "Adam Rust survived 4.9 years as a DAC attorney."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · Jul 3

This was really fun to do.

My Reader's Choice Ballot for NYT greatest movies of 21st century. List is:

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)
Up (2009)
Michael Clayton (2007)
Tár (2022)
The Act of Killing (2013)
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Lady Bird (2017)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Zodiac (2007)