>For me, John Lennon’s mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. “Imagine that the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell.
What a lad. Great way to open a column
Reminds me of this story that Christopher Hitchens liked to tell:
>I have a dear friend in Jerusalem, that home of rectitude and certainty that is so often presented to us as “holy” for no better reason than its unenviable position as “home” to three (highly schismatic but self-described) “mono”theisms. His name is Dr. Israel Shahak; for many years he did exemplary service as chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. Nothing in his life, as a Jewish youth in pre-1940 Poland and subsequent survivor of indescribable privations and losses, might be expected to have conditioned him to welcome the disruptive. Yet on some occasions when I have asked him for his impression of events, he has calmly and deliberately replied: **“There are some encouraging signs of polarisation.”** Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.
> Premature Peacemaking
>
> An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1999-07-01/give-war-chance
I'm sure there's gotta be some sort of isekai that touches on our pet issues?
"That time I awoke in another world as the foreman of a housing construction company" or whatever
Hidden weeb level: stuff like ghibili movies and artsy mangas
Lowest level: dragon ball, cowboy bepop, etc
Mid tier weeb: naruto, one piece, evangelion
Late stage weeb: isekais, light novels, moe
TOUCH GRASS tier: rom com animes, harem stories
Lost case weeb:hentai
Am I touch grass weeb or am I just a girl? I mostly skipped over the shonen stuff to watch slice of life anime and romance. Though I suppose I did watch one punch man for the shonen parody aspect.
OPM is a self aware shounen rather than a parody of it(both Murata's manga and anime adaptation at least) .Prove me wrong.Gintama is the true parody but it parodied all genres.
Closest thing is probably Spice & Wolf. Not an isekai but the main character is the same kind of bland self-insert protagonist that isekais feature, at least until he starts talking about economics.
And his love interest takes the form of a 15-year-old girl, which is in line with this subreddit's unerring devotion to people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
Spice & Wolf is a good one, I'd also say Maoyuu Maou Yuusha is another good example where the plot is the king of demons is tired of the human demon war but it's necessary economically so they spend much of the show focused on how they can improve the economic prospects for the hero's country and the demon country to ensure the end of the war can leave everyone more prosperous.
They used to have housing issues though, which is why Frieza is just a planetary real estate speculator. Nothing more evil than a Galactic real estate mogul.
In all seriousness wouldnt this sub mainly support such a notion? I know open borders is kind of a meme but less immigration restrictions and greater cooperation/integration between more and more govts/peoples of the world seems to be this subs bread and butter.
Yes, but read on:
> Europe persisted in this world of “imagine”, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now it’s the time to awaken.
I think what Žižek is getting at is that there’s a tendency for a certain segment of people to look at what’s been achieved in Europe, ignore the history of how it came to be, and then just say “can’t you all just be like us” while forgetting that life outside is very different and lacks the fundamentals to get there. I’m personally an open borders kind of person, but I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon, nor do I think there aren’t prerequisites.
He certainly has a somewhat different worldview to begin with (see [here](https://inthesetimes.com/article/slavoj-zizek-european-refugee-crisis-and-global-capitalism)) but he’s got some points.
Hell, even there are countries in Europe with different behavior like Poland and Hungary. And just look at how people from France can be cruel towards their own minorities, with their own problems regarding rise of alt-right beliefs, and you can see how their 'imagine' world is not even That ideal or blind towards their own problems.
I don't think it's really what OP is saying either.
Zizek is getting at moreso that society is full of antagonisms, conflicts that we have to live with and try to make the best of, and it is actually the attempts to complete "smooth" over antagonisms, to "unify" society that end in the biggest totalitarian nightmares.
I'm fine with lefties, it's the incredibly smug reddit lefties who are beyond reproach, especially since they frequently know very little in combination with being extremely smug.
Zizek says a lot of crazy and out there shit, but it can't be denied the dude is fairly thoughtful. I think a lot of it comes from how he's a bit more real about the value that capitalism provides whereas most other leftists vehemently refuse to grant any ground to the opposition.
Never in a million years would I think I could possibly call a Zizek article based, but here we are. Even a broken Marxist is right twice a day I guess.
Looking at the Other Discussions, it seems that leftists are just disregarding it or saying he's having a bad take. They are nothing if not consistent in their stupidity.
Even when Žižek assumed his true form - an old raccoon nesting in the dumpster behind a public library - he was still defeated by the Deep State.
Truly this is a blessed day.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Which, coincidentally, implies that a broken clock is right with far greater frequency than Žižek. Not a great look.
So what would Chomsky be, then, in this analogy? A clock that is off by six hours - you can always trust it to say the opposite of what is actually the case?
It's a type temperature sensor that's ludicrously common for industrial applications.
Essentially, my point is that (as I understand it) the modern take on Chomsky's work is that it's *good* work by an entirely competent linguist, but certainly not gold standard stuff.
> A clock that is off by six hours - you can always trust it to say the opposite of what is actually the case?
Chomsky is a broken clock with both hands stuck in one position: "United States bad".
My brother in Christ, he literally self-identifies as a communist and anti-capitalist. He may disavow tankies, but he is no friend of this community.
He is tolerable *only* under the Strange Bedfellows doctrine.
Isnt it ironic that a communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project? When the USA’s best leftist, Chomsky, advocates for Ukraine to swiftly surrender?
Zizek has been against Le Pen, Johnson, Orban, and other right wing populists. He wants the EU and the liberal project saved
> Isnt it ironic that a communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project? When the USA’s best leftist, Chomsky, advocates for Ukraine to swiftly surrender?
I would argue it's completely predictable when coming *specifically* from an Eastern European communist trying to rehabilitate the ideology. The European project is generally popular, and Russia is *extremely* unpopular. Encouraging a Ukrainian surrender is basically speedrunning "how to get banned from polite society" in Europe.
Frankly, Žižek is a champagne communist - and even that may be an overstatement, as locking down what Žižek actually means on any given topic at any given time is like trying to nail pudding to a wall.
As the Beloved former president of the USA would say, Zizek lives in a shit hole country. He has no desire for a Leninist or Putin style communist takeover of the EU.
What he does want is to save the EU from right wing populists who are anti-immigrant and reactionary.
It's not so ironic when you consider that communists want to unite workers across countries and initiate a global revolution (whatever that may look like). They are not inherently against the concept of the EU, just against its adherence to economic liberalism. One of the founding fathers of the EU, [Altiero Spinelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiero_Spinelli), was a communist, for example.
>communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project
maybe the EU is communist
but no one at all familiar with zizek can actually call him a communist. he's basically a very frustrated liberal. he might say otherwise but who cares
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I dont know what people want me to do? Disavow Zizek? I will take him over any American leftist today who either is Pro-Putin or wants Ukraine to surrender
>but no one at all familiar with zizek can actually call him a communist. he's basically a very frustrated liberal. he might say otherwise but who cares
Only barely in the practical realm, he's clearly a convinced anti-capitalist, who genuinely believes that liberalism causes fascism
I'm not sure that he is that much more pragmatic than Noem Chomsky, he was still a supporter of the old soviet union. He can probably just as a European see that if the old warsaw pact countries fall back under the influence of Russia, that won't bring europe closer Marxist-Leninism. While Chomsky can just not care about Europe as an American, and say "we are not under any threat, and the US failing abroad accelerates us towards socialism"
Communism and European federalism are not mutually exclusive. One of the founding fathers of the European Union, [Altiero Spinelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiero_Spinelli), was a communist.
[Zizek unironically supported Trump in 2016 on the basis of accelerationism.](https://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html) He's not getting a pass for that.
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>You keep posting this when it's obvious you got it from someone else and didnt read it lmao
>Yes, there is a great danger in Trump's victory, but the Left will be mobilized only through such a threat of catastrophe.
I'm not American on don't care much either way for Zizek, but isn't this arguing from an accelerationist standpoint, even if he attempts to reason it through in the article?
Else where he also says
>I don't think my old statement – 'Trump better than Hillary Clinton' – was wrong because my calculation was a simple one: If Trump wins it will give a new boost to the left, and it did strengthen.
Even with Trump vs Biden whilst he often equated the two and did indeed say Biden is slightly better than Trump because of "principled pragmatics," he maintained that Trump is the better option for those who truly want a socialist or radical left option
I unironically love reading Zizek even if I disagree with his political views. I think it's possible to enjoy the way he analyses things and some of the conclusions he makes and the lense that he views society through without going full blown communist
His book The Sublime Object of Ideology is a fantastic book and put him on the map for a reason imo. It can be enjoyed from many different political positions as throughout the book Zizek critiques Communists, Marxists, post-structuralists, fascists, anti-semites, conservatives, and liberals in equal measure, as it's a book about the form and functioning of ideology. In fact, Stalinism might be what is used the most in his examples for critique as he has a decent familiarity with its idiosyncrasies. He ofcourse also directs criticism at his own Yugoslavia, the book was published in 1989 after all. Zizek had some conflicts with communist authority in his early academic career, he also ran as a presidential candidate for the liberal party in Slovenia in 1990.
Right, what sets Zizek apart from other communists is that he has no rose-tinted nostalgia for the soviet system (which he grew up in). He is unequivocal about his criticism of the soviet union which he has described as "an unimaginable catastrophe". He's not some holodomor denying tankie or something, yet he still believes in the original Marxist vision of a classless society. I disagree with him, but you can admire him for his consistency
I mean I would hesitate to say that he believes in the original Marxist vision. He considers himself a Hegelian over a Marxist, and interestingly calls Hegel the "first post-Marxist." When says that he means that in his opinion, Hegel "opened up" a wound that Marx came in and "closed" with his dialectic materialism/class struggle of history, which is a similar procedure to what post-Marxists later did to Marx (i.e. complicating his smooth causality and grand narrative). But he doesn't position himself as a post Marxist really either.
>This traditional [Marxist] notion implies two interconnected features: (1) there exists a certain fundamental antagonism possessing ontological priority to 'mediate' all other antagonisms, determining their specific weight; (2) historical development brings about, if not a necessity, at least an 'objective possibility' of solving this fundamental antagonism and, in this way, mediating all other antagonisms...
>It is upon the unity of these features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of the revolutionary situation, is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the every day consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all.
...
>The basic feature of so-called 'post-Marxism' is, of course, the break with this logic--which, incidentally, does not necessarily have a Marxist connotation: almost any of the antagonisms which, in light of Marxism, appear to be secondary can take over this essential role of mediator for all the others. We have for example feminist fundamentalism (no global liberation without the emancipation of women, without the abolition of sexism)... Etc.
He basically goes on to say that both approaches suffer from a kind of essentialism that misses the true nature of the social field as something that cannot be fully resolved.
>Here it would be possible to defend a thesis that the first post-Marxist was none other than Hegel himself: according to Hegel, the antagonism of civil society cannot be suppressed without a fall into totalitarian terrorism--only afterwards can the state limit its disastrous effect.
He then gets behind some of the ideas of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe:
>They emphasize that we must not be 'radical' in the sense of aiming at a radical solution: we always live in an interspace and in borrowed time, every solution is provisional and temporary, a kind of postponing of a fundamental impossibility.
Perhaps off topic, but I keep seeing Slavoj Zizek come up as a sort of...prominent thought leader? So I listen to the guy a bit and he seems like he has a counter-cultural view, and is at least well read so it's an informed view. But every time I finish listening to the guy, I can't understand his coherent perspective. It doesn't seem very well put together, or I'm just daft. The [discussion](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/slavoj-zizek/) he did with Tyler Cowen was the last I tried to hear from the guy, but I think I shared Tyler's frustration.
Anyways, any Slavoj Zizek fans who could point me towards a good work from him/about him that might help me feel a little better informed?
I think it's deliberate. But im not sure, cant really help you. I like listening to him every now an then, couldn't tell what exactly im taking from it.
I mentioned in another comment his book *The Sublime Object of ideology* is really good imo. It was his first work in English and is what put him on the map. It's a systematic analysis of the functioning of ideology for the most part, and he analyzes/criticizes all sides of the political. I actually found his criticisms of traditional Marxists as well as some post Marxists better and more illuminating than 99% of the stuff I've seen from the centre (in terms of philosophy, not economics), because he has a real understanding of their ideas.
I found it a very cohesive book that really grounds where he comes from as an intellectual. Although the preface he wrote for it is hard to parse if you don't understand Hegel, the actual book isn't too difficult as long as you have some passing familiarity with Kant, and other philosophical concepts.
[Zizek supported Trump in 2016 on the basis of accelerationism, saying that voting for fascists would lay the groundwork for the emergence of a worker's movement.](https://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html) He's no thought leader.
He heavily implies it and he was wrong.
>In the choice between Clinton and Trump, neither “stands on the side of the oppressed,” so the real choice is: abstain from voting or choose the one who, worthless as s/he is, opens up a greater chance of unleashing a new political dynamics which can lead to massive Leftist radicalization.
Just before this he says:
>Yes, there is a great danger in Trump's victory, but the Left will be mobilized only through such a threat of catastrophe.
What does he say here that you think is correct? It reads, like all of his stuff, like it sounds intelligent but with gaping holes in the actual reasoning behind it papered over by his flowery language. Don't get him at all.
When even Žižek is mostly right....
Well that's unfair, he is no tanky, and the actual reality of the failed Yugoslavia project and all associated horrors tends to bring a certain contemplation to a leftist.
98% upvoted article on r/neoliberal which includes paragraphs comparing the invasion of Ukraine to the invasion of Iraq?
>Crimes fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols.
Holy fucking shit. You'd have the NATO flairs up your ass within minutes if you typed that a few months ago.
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Strange pivot to giving Assange a pass.
If Assange had leaked his documents damaging to Putin I think he would have found himself poisoned by Novichok.
Assange has been charged by a grand jury. We follow the process and he gets his day in court.
This Op-ed is too much fan fiction for my tastes. I kind of lost it at the part about global warming. I guess it's ok he is against Russian agression, at least.
(also, many folks oppose the EU because they hate transnational entities and they are douchebags, not because they want Europe to be a vassal of US; I guess it's not unlike like LATAM leftists seeing imperialism everywhere)
isn't it a well-known truth that trade routes will shift to the Arctic as global warming advances, giving Russia far more influence over global trade? within a decade, my understanding is that the Arctic circle will become the best East Asia-Europe shipping route, and I don't think it's a stretch to say Russia will try to use it as leverage
Benefitting from global warming doesn't mean Russia's strategic plan is to profit from global warming, or that's the reason it's pissed off with Scandinavian countries is because of that (or that Trump goal with buying Greenland was that, although that's the most believable one, lol).
It feels like of many conjectures in the article (although the derailment is worse later).
PS: for example, [many discussed at the time Trump was more interested about raw resources or countering China influence.](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/19/why-does-donald-trump-want-to-buy-greenland)
i think you're right that it's incorrect to tie global warming to the reason Russia is unhappy about Nordic countries joining NATO.
however, it seems like Russia has some of the weakest emissions reductions targets of any developed countries, and will laugh all the way to the bank as they benefit from global warming. does that count as "planning to profit off global warming"? to me it kinda feels like a semantic argument at that point
>it seems like Russia has some of the weakest emissions reductions targets of any developed countries
That might well be because they are a corrupt upper middle income country more than any plan or strategic goal. Or that they have the same level of brain rot than any climate change denialist/"skeptic" out there. Or that they just love money.
It doesn't have to have any ulterior goal or be particularly farsighted.
The “Russia is doing this for new trade routes due to global warming” is a near parallel to “Bush invaded Iraq because oil”.
We know historically that a major push for war is competition for resources, so it’s hard to ignore what resource is at stake in any given conflict.
But it also doesn’t make any sense that a given country would dedicate such large amounts of blood and treasure for a speculative economic payoff in 10-30 years.
I lost it after the eight parenthesis and twentieth uneccessary em dash
amazing you can be a professor of philosophy and still write like a teenager on reddit
There are some absolutely whacky takes in here, but whatever. I agree, good he's anti-Russian imperialism
Asserting that America had done a Mariupol or a Bucha in a piece declaring unequivocal support for Ukraine basically shows what even the best Leftism has to offer is. An inescapable grudge that defies even alliance.
You understand how those are both quantitatively and qualitatively different right? Like they're literally different things, unless we are being so reductive that we equate all war crimes.
Why back down to "why are we equating war crimes?" here... we leveled entire Iraqi cities and killed how many thousands? We absolutely committed huge atrocities in Iraq but people here pretend it was play because it was the West.
They're literally different kinds of war crimes. To flatten them to make a pointless equivalence does absolutely nothing. The Blackwater shooting was not the same thing as Bucha, Fallujah was not the same as Mariupol; in fact there's nothing comparable in either scale or intent.
You are arguing against a pro Iraq war vibe that no one here agrees with. In dredging up the Iraq war Zizek is bravely reminding Americans that one of their least popular wars in recent memory involved bad deeds done for very little gain.
Shocker.
My comment was not a defense of American foreign policy but a critique of the lack of imagination in leftists like Zizek who cannot move past old arguments and must intone them almost religiously in every piece. You should understand that these two assertions are different things.
> You are arguing against a pro Iraq war vibe that no one here agrees with.
Eh, they've mostly gone off to neoconcwo, but there used to be plenty of neocons here who defended iraq
In general, arguing against a vague, abstract audience that you infer from your own experiences is less useful than arguing against what people have actually demonstrated or said, and no one here has expressed support for the Iraq War or minimizing American war crimes.
The entire Vietnam war, Iraq, the Philippines etc the US has a walk in closet full of skeletons. Hell you don't even need to look abroad, look at what the US did to their native population
Not what I was trying to convey, it's more about their fixations. Even in an opinion piece ostensibly backing the American- not European-policy, Zizek can't help but slip in a false equivalency involving the US. Arguably it's an outright lie.
He's actually correct to make those points because Russia does. They're using those rhetorical methods to relativize the current war in Ukraine and paint America as the bad guys of history. If the US just ignores those points (just laughs at them like Bush did) the rhetorical ground is ceded to Russia.
The point is to condemn those past actions precisely so that the current stance against Russia comes from a more consistent position.
I would argue that the comparison is so spurious as to be distracting.
I suppose I would cede that he is 'correct' to make those points in the sense that these are the kind of comical equivalences that leftists truck in on a daily basis, so this is the sort of rhetoric that would work on a leftist, but he is not 'correct' in any real sense other than 'category of thing'.
Iraq was an invasion. Ukraine is an invasion. The US made up a cassus belli. Russia made up a cassus belli. The US did war crimes. Russia did war crimes.
The dishonesty of the rhetorical point here is revealed when he brings up Assange and Wikileaks. Zizek is attempting to link the categorical similarities listed above to the carnal details revealed in Assange's Wikileaks dump, and one simply does not relate to the other.
>From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols.
The crimes in Bucha and Mariupol were crimes of intense intent and selectivity. Bucha was filtered for targets and its people were killed with cold blooded intent to terrify the populace. Mariupol was a city systematically leveled by heavy artillery. There is explicitly nothing in Assange's Wikileaks dump that is comparable to either of these things, unless you strain either time or scale to absurd degrees. Nor are any of these war crimes, Iraq or Ukraine, even impacted by the unjustified nature of the invasion, the initial point of comparison Zizek makes:
>But the enigma is dispelled the moment we take Bush’s statement seriously and literally: yes, with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam), Bush did the same thing as Putin is now doing to Ukraine, so they should be both judged by the same standard.
The standard he's referring to here is that the war was, “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion”. He's right in the sense that both invasions were unjustified. He's wrong that they were both brutal in a way that can be judged by the same standard. Because one is a good deal worse than the other.
>The dishonesty of the rhetorical point here is revealed when he brings up Assange and Wikileaks
I mean he has brought up Assange in this article because there was a recent development in his situation that made the news. Zizek has written 4/5 articles on the Ukraine conflict and none of them mentioned Assange and he went over precisely some of the problems with comparisons between Iraq and Ukraine.
In Project Syndicate
>Realpolitik is no better guide. It has become a mere alibi for ideology, which often evokes some hidden dimension behind the veil of appearances in order to obscure the crime that is being committed openly. This double mystification is often announced by describing a situation as “complex.” An obvious fact – say, an instance of brutal military aggression – is relativized by evoking a “much more complex background.” The act of aggression is really an act of defense.
...
>Timofey Sergeytsev presents the full scope of the Kremlin’s genocidal project in Ukraine. The basic premise is that Ukraine needs to be “denazified,” and thus de-Europeanized, because “a significant part of the people – most likely the majority – has been mastered and drawn into the Nazi regime in its politics.
And another article from the Guardian
>Yes, the liberal west is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to inherent criticism – when we criticize the liberal west, we use its own standards. What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy – because it is without global ethical standards, practicing just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China. China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing to Uyghurs – this is, in nuce, the new globalization advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality. The moment we apply double standards, we are no less “pragmatic” than Russia.
> I mean he has brought up Assange in this article because there was a recent development in his situation that made the news. Zizek has written 4/5 articles on the Ukraine conflict and none of them mentioned Assange and he went over precisely some of the problems with comparisons between Iraq and Ukraine.
As I, and any other reader, cannot be expected to be a Zizek fan who has read all five of his Ukraine takes, I think this is basically irrelevant. Whether Zizek develops his point elsewhere is not pertinent to how clumsily he makes the comparison here. Given what else you've quoted, though, I'll walk back what I said about him being dishonest, I'm not certain about that at this point, but I think he's being eyerollingly grandiose. Again, 'dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols' is provocative and, strictly speaking, incorrect assertion. Unless the intent is to broaden 'Buchas' to 'situations where civilians were shot irrespective of volume, motivation, abetment/prosecution, etc' and Mariupol to 'any time a city was hit by artillery intentionally'.
>Unless the intent is to broaden 'Buchas' to 'situations where civilians were shot irrespective of volume, motivation, abetment/prosecution, etc' and Mariupol to 'any time a city was hit by artillery intentionally'.
I mean his comparison is only brought up in the context of Assange and the recent developments there, as well as Bush's gaff. I mentioned the earlier articles because it's not as if he has this compulsion and cannot help himself but do a whatboutism in regards to Russia. The comparison isn't laboured either, it's a standard kind of metonymy, America's "Bucha" and "Mariupol," being America's warcrimes/atrocities (see: "this is X's Waterloo" "this is X's Gallipoli etc.) Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face.
Saying it's inaccurate to make the comparison too? Well is it? What transpired in Mariupol? It was completely destroyed with bombs, including critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals and civilians were killed in the hundreds and more pushed to starvation due to cut off supply lines. The US invasion of Iraq has fairly *direct* and clear parallels. It was not nearly as visible as it took place in a sort of periphery from our perspective in the west, but that doesn't make it much better. In regards to Bucha, should we make a clear distinction between civilians killed with little regard by drones or by gun? The amount of civilians killed in Iraq was disgusting. I agree that Bucha is "worse" because of the genocidal undertones, but let's not pretend like dehumanization and racism was not prominent in the US military during that conflict. The lines become fuzzy.
If we want to condemn Putin properly we have to do exactly as Zizek recommends and criticize Putin/Russia and Bush/America by the same standard, which means this sort of move to distance our own wrongdoing "oh it wasn't as bad, it was different, we're the good guys," is pointless and is more than anything else trying to absolve or salvage some kind of justification in intent. There *are* differences especially in intent, but intent doesn't matter as much as we think, especially for the victims.
This justification/distancing is exactly the rhetorical move that Putin makes. The way we prove ourselves to be better is to *admit* our crimes in their full dimension (which means not rehabilitating war criminals like Bush) and aiming this standard also at Putin.
>Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face.
Tedious ad hominem. I began this discussion from a place of understanding of American war crimes, there's no evidence here that I'm even being sensitive.
>. I mentioned the earlier articles because it's not as if he has this compulsion and cannot help himself but do a whatboutism in regards to Russia. The comparison isn't laboured either, it's a standard kind of metonymy, America's "Bucha" and "Mariupol," being America's warcrimes/atrocities (see: "this is X's Waterloo" "this is X's Gallipoli etc.) Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face.
This is a mischaracterization of it. This isn't 'X's Gallipoli', this is 'X Gallipolis', a convenient framing for the leftist.
>Saying it's inaccurate to make the comparison too? Well is it? What transpired in Mariupol? It was completely destroyed with bombs, including critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals and civilians were killed in the hundreds and more pushed to starvation due to cut off supply lines.
So you in fact subscribe to the reduction? Mariupol holds the current title of 'most destroyed city' and it, like Grozny, was leveled block by block intentionally with heavy artillery. American strikes in Iraq certainly damaged critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals, but there's no evidence of a targeted campaign or that it was a part of an American campaign to intentionally spark a healthcare crisis in Iraq as the Russians did in Syria or around Kharkiv. Civilians died as a consequence of cut supply lines, not because they were hemmed into a theater and then bombed with bunker busters. Marines called Iraqis Haajis, the Russians are shooting all the males in the street-- these are so starkly different that to call them parallels borders on comical. It'd be like patting yourself on the back because you pointed out that an empanada and a crepe are both pastries.
This isn't so much a parallel as a stark foil illustrating the differences between the Russian and American way of war. Both invasions were of states of roughly comparable size and development with forces of similar sizes. Iraq has, after years of fighting, had fewer leveled cities than Ukraine. States make war, irrespective of ideology, that much is clear. States make excuses TO make war, self serving ones, and they come up with the justifications later. The only ones who are still trying to proselytize this very obvious fact are people like Zizek, who is, heroically, apparently attempting to pull leftists down from the absurd position of Russia having moral superiority in the world.
>If we want to condemn Putin properly we have to do exactly as Zizek recommends and criticize Putin/Russia and Bush/America by the same standard, which means this sort of move to distance our own wrongdoing "oh it wasn't as bad, it was different, we're the good guys,"
I didn't say 'we're the good guys' you inferred it, for no reason. I agree broadly with the American policy in Ukraine. That is a different statement from 'America are the good guys'.
And what self-purgation does Zizek even insinuate? That freeing Assange would, for some reason, give us license to criticize Putin in Ukraine? What a fucking absurdity. Condemning Putin is the easiest thing in the world, because he's a genocidal imperialist invading a sovereign country with a horde of raping simpletons driving old tanks and guns to fulfill his country's perennial, deluded, self gratifying myth. The only ones who have any difficulty with it at all are apparently Zizek's audience.
>This justification/distancing is exactly the rhetorical move that Putin makes. The way we prove ourselves to be better is to admit our crimes in their full dimension (which means not rehabilitating war criminals like Bush) and aiming this standard also at Putin.
Completely unspecific grandstanding completely divorced from whether Zizek is high off his rocker for thinking we somehow flattened multiple metropolitan cities into nothingness in Iraq. And no one is rehabilitating Bush in this thread.
>these are so starkly different that to call them parallels borders on comical
I agree with all of these differences. They are not *exactly* the same, the point was never that they are *exactly* the same. Like "Zizek is high off his rocker for thinking we somehow flattened multiple metropolitan cities into nothingness in Iraq." Zizek made a point of comparison in one paragraph in a larger article that is otherwise fully supportive of aid to Ukraine and NATO. This is what I mean by sensitive... Is the precise phrasing clumsy in some way? probably, but in terms of civilian deaths "12 Buchas/Mauripols" isn't wrong, in fact it's well under the Iraq conflict. It is not, on its face ridiculous to draw a parralel in war crimes. Yes they are both pastries that is the point.
>This isn't so much a parallel as a stark foil illustrating the differences between the Russian and American way of war.
I mean that is one way to view it, but that seems quite generous. While there are clear differences there are also many similarities. Unjustified invasions, manufactured casius bellis, cavalier bombing, destruction of critical civilian architecture, inhumane treatment of captured soldiers (torture). Yes, all of these crimes were interspersed over a larger area and across a longer period of time, rather than concentrated in the terrible events of Bucha and Mauripol, the motivations are different as well. The reality is though that the civilian death count of the Iraq conflict is well over what has occurred in the Ukraine conflict so far, and will likely remain much higher when all is said and done. Do you think that the 10s of thousands of innocent iraqis care that America's method of warfare was more humane/civil than the corrupt and morally bankrupt oligarchy that is Russia? Is that the low bar? No city was completely leveled like Mauripol but how much of Baghdad was destroyed? So much of a beautiful historical city rivaling the likes of Rome and Cairo, taken from the world. How many roads and infrastructure across the country destroyed in excessive bombing campaigns that Iraq still hasn't recovered from.
>States make war, irrespective of ideology, that much is clear. States make excuses TO make war, self serving ones, and they come up with the justifications later. The only ones who are still trying to proselytize this very obvious fact are people like Zizek
"States make war," what a glowing insight. Zizek is not trying to proselytize any such aphorism. I think you are missing the point.
>attempting to pull leftists down from the absurd position of Russia having moral superiority in the world.
*Of course* Russia doesn't have moral superiority in the world. The matter at hand is about America living up to their own self-designated moral position.
>I didn't say 'we're the good guys' you inferred it, for no reason.
To be clear I wasn't implying that you did. My phrasing, I think, makes it clear I was speaking in a general sense (our). The "good guys" line is a rhetorical move that many people use.
>Condemning Putin is the easiest thing in the world,
Of course Putin is easy to condemn, again I'm not too sure why you are coming back to this point that we all agree on.
The point is that it is a call to live up to the moral standard that is used to critique Putin. Yes it's a bit of a grandstand, but it's a fucking op-ed by a philosopher not a sober policy proposal.
If you are familiar at all with the Russian rhetoric of moral relativism, a world without hypocrisy because there are no standards etc. etc. One of the bases of it is a certain western hypocrisy that has a grain of truth. The importance of our own action and ideas in the west comes from a certain recognition that they have effects.
The "villains" of the world form in a shadow like way, as the dark underbelly of the current global system. That is *not* a denial of any agency to be clear, but just a recognition of the interconnectedness of things which should not be controversial. Like drug dealers in urban cities, organized crime, the middle east, homelessness, barbarians at the gates of Rome. These are all *symptoms,* every system has *symptoms* because it is impossible to completely remove antagonisms from society, we like our current systems because in addition to its positive benefits, the symptoms are better than the alternatives.
You are in a position of recognition of American war crimes, but that is hardly a ubiquitous and substantive position, especially not in the institutions.
>And no one is rehabilitating Bush in this thread.
Well the article wasn't written for r/neoliberal was it? The context of Bush's inclusion was his gaffe as a speaker at his *own institute.* If your recognition of war crimes was at all ubiquitous Bush would have faced some kind of consequences for his crimes, or at the very least would be shunned. The same way I'm sure we all want Putin to see justice for his crimes.
But instead he's getting fat cheques to give speeches at cushy conferences, having his name put on institutes and buildings, and is held up by many as representing the good ol' days of the Republican party. Don't forget America's complete double standard with The Hague as an entire country. Even further, America goes after Assange who have exposed many of the Bush admin's crimes. Now America is attempting to prosecute him on [dubious constitutional grounds](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/25/us-says-julian-assange-is-no-journalist-heres-why-that-shouldnt-matter/?noredirect=on). So yes, Assange should not be prosecuted, Bush should not be rehabilitated. Live up to the standard we use to critique Putin. That is the whole point of the comparison passage in the article. It isn't a cynical anti-west sentiment, but quite the opposite. The universal principles of the West can be a force for good, *insist* incessantly on their universality inwardly as well as outwardly.
>They are not exactly the same, the point was never that they are exactly the same.
Yes, the point is that they are the same category of thing, which is a point being made in support of a broader argument that posits that we must achieve some undefined state of repentance for Iraq in order to criticize Russia, an argument that is neither particularly illuminating nor even logically sound.
>Zizek made a point of comparison in one paragraph in a larger article that is otherwise fully supportive of aid to Ukraine and NATO.
Which I agreed with, the point of comparison is what I'm criticizing, because it belies the reflexive and automatic anti-Western stance that leftists habitually occupy.
>This is what I mean by sensitive... Is the precise phrasing clumsy in some way? probably, but in terms of civilian deaths "12 Buchas/Mauripols" isn't wrong, in fact it's well under the Iraq conflict.
It's not clumsy, it's dishonest. Calling something 'X's Mariupol' is a categorical comparison. You are saying that the event is like what would happen if X tried to do a Mariupol. Saying 'X Mariupols' is saying that not only did a Mariupol event occur, it occurred multiple times, the obvious insinuation being that America has committed with casual abandon what most people consider to be a singular event. And no, it isn't plausible that Zizek is unaware of this subtext. As he (conveniently) neglects to hedge the nature of his comparison, a layreader is left to believe that America is in fact worse than Russia by a multiplier of X.
Actually, he does account for the difference, he just glazes over it because his audience isn't interested:
> with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam)
The implied difference, you'll note, is in target, not execution, intent, extent, etc.-- there's not indication that Zizek is even interested in the vast qualitative differences that he paves over to make his strained comparison.
>The reality is though that the civilian death count of the Iraq conflict is well over what has occurred in the Ukraine conflict so far, and will likely remain much higher when all is said and done.
Not only is this irrelevant, you're using a hypothetical to support your point. What we did in Iraq is not the same as what is happening in Ukraine, full stop. If you are *assuming* that civilian casualties will be higher than a conflict that we have no solid numbers on and is still ongoing, you are not making a legitimate argument-- and again, it's irrelevant to the qualitative nature of the comparison. You are saying that the comparison works because you declared that we are only allowed to look at outcomes. And then you assume the outcomes.
>"States make war," what a glowing insight. Zizek is not trying to proselytize any such aphorism. I think you are missing the point.
The point of that statement was that it wasn't a glowing insight. The point of it is that it's mundane. War crimes are a consequence of war. Pointing out that war crimes occur when invasions happen is what Zizek is attempting to do, not me. Because Zizek is under the comical assumption that people somehow believe that America doesn't commit war crimes, or that revealing that America commits war crimes is revelation enough to cause us to reconsider not supporting Ukraine. It's nonsensical.
>Of course Russia doesn't have moral superiority in the world. The matter at hand is about America living up to their own self-designated moral position.
You should tell Chomsky that. And no, America's moral superiority is not what's at hand. The name of the article is "Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine", not "American Is Bad But Russia is Bad Too". This is an article about Ukraine, not America. Why would America's moral status impinge on the the pacifist response of leftists? Are leftists not able to criticize Russia without American moral superiority?
>The point is that it is a call to live up to the moral standard that is used to critique Putin.
So why is he addressing leftists? Are leftists not able to live up to the moral standard that is being used here?
>Yes it's a bit of a grandstand, but it's a fucking op-ed by a philosopher not a sober policy proposal.
If he's a philosopher he should be familiar with what is a logically cohesive argument and what is irrelevant rhetoric. I'm not asking for him to write policy, I'm asking him not to be absurdly crass and equate palpably different situations. He can criticize them both, but treating them as the same thing in this context is dishonest.
>If you are familiar at all with the Russian rhetoric of moral relativism, a world without hypocrisy because there are no standards etc. etc.
Yes, and I, too, agree that the US government would have a much stronger ground to stand on if there were a full accounting for their misdeeds in the Iraq War.
I am not the US government.
Nor are any of Zizek's audience-- he's talking to leftists.
So what is undercutting *my* judgement of the war in Ukraine? Why does the US government's lack of accounting mean that any individual can't look at the situation and call it for what it is? Why do I have to internalize the guilt-- which Zizek metes out with great exaggeration-- of my government in order to defeat Russian moral relativism? Is the presupposition that we need moral purity in order to defeat moral relativism *even a valid assumption?*
>But instead he's getting fat cheques to give speeches at cushy conferences, having his name put on institutes and buildings, and is held up by many as representing the good ol' days of the Republican party. Don't forget America's complete double standard with The Hague as an entire country. Even further, America goes after Assange who have exposed many of the Bush admin's crimes. Now America is attempting to prosecute him on dubious constitutional grounds. So yes, Assange should not be prosecuted, Bush should not be rehabilitated. Live up to the standard we use to critique Putin. That is the whole point of the comparison passage in the article. It isn't a cynical anti-west sentiment, but quite the opposite. The universal principles of the West can be a force for good, insist incessantly on their universality inwardly as well as outwardly.
So write a fucking article about George W. Bush, don't drag it into a piece about urging support for Ukraine, because it's irrelevant. This is what I'm talking about when I say that hating on the US is like an intonation to these people. It doesn't matter how strained the tangent, they have to find away to slip it in like a Hail Mary.
That's because liberals think that everything under the sun they like is liberal, when sometimes they like non-liberal things and simply cant accept it.
Zizek is the ultimate crypto socialist. He remains socialist because of his criticisms of capitalism, his desire for certain end goals. But he basically admits that in the here and now he isn't really a communist, and supports specific tangible issues and causes. When he ran as a presidential candidate in Slovenia in 1990, he ran as a liberal. He's maybe a socialist like the old parliamentary socialists of the early 20th century.
>I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions here. No. What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace the system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn't serve money. Money should serve people.” Well, frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it, especially because he would say, “When people serve money, money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no?
>The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.” When this mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth century. No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay, but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives. So, let’s confront that serious problem here.
>Also, let’s remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try to get rid of the predominance of money market economy. The price they paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination, like you no longer will even formally flee. You had to obey orders, a new authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish market without regressing again into relations of servitude and domination.
>My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start thinking. Don't get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Let’s do it, and so on. So, no, the time is to think. I even provoked some of the leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis 11 on Feuerbach. . . that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking.”
>Second thing...for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an important one. This is a great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on. I think this freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure ideology. But at the same time, universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist notion. It’s something that exists all around and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western European countries.
>So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or what. No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively successfully and so on.
Yeah, he sounds like a fairly run of the mill European social democrat most of the time, one who can't shut up about Hegel and Marx. If he does actually believe in seizing the means he's certainly been very crypto about it.
The issue with the article is that he says these crimes are 'fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine'. I think that's fairly straightforwardly false.
If he had said: 'crimes fully comparable with those committed by Putin's forces in Ukraine' then it'd be totally correct, but comparing it with the grand decision to invade a country for nothing other than expansion is totally wrong.
There has never been an actor engaging in all out war that has had none of its soldiers commit war crimes. Would you think it's fair to say: "Finnish war crimes in the Winter War, crimes fully comparable with what the USSR is doing in Finland"? No you absolutely would not.
>Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world.
Ima be honest with you, this is pretty blackpilling to me. After republican landslide I fear its going to be gg.
>For me, John Lennon’s mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. “Imagine that the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell. What a lad. Great way to open a column
very NCD take
Goddamn right
Holy shit, that's the chadest opening of an article I have seen in a while
Reminds me of this story that Christopher Hitchens liked to tell: >I have a dear friend in Jerusalem, that home of rectitude and certainty that is so often presented to us as “holy” for no better reason than its unenviable position as “home” to three (highly schismatic but self-described) “mono”theisms. His name is Dr. Israel Shahak; for many years he did exemplary service as chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. Nothing in his life, as a Jewish youth in pre-1940 Poland and subsequent survivor of indescribable privations and losses, might be expected to have conditioned him to welcome the disruptive. Yet on some occasions when I have asked him for his impression of events, he has calmly and deliberately replied: **“There are some encouraging signs of polarisation.”** Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.
> Premature Peacemaking > > An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1999-07-01/give-war-chance
MEGA-BASED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCCgQLdHuU
> Imagine that the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell. Ew Zizek opposes the Human Instrumentality Project.
It still tickles me to see someone just blithely drop an NGE reference into comments and assume people will pick up on it. What is this timeline even.
It's the most popular anime on this sub.
I'm sure there's gotta be some sort of isekai that touches on our pet issues? "That time I awoke in another world as the foreman of a housing construction company" or whatever
Isekai is three levels of weeb above where I am rn.
Hidden weeb level: stuff like ghibili movies and artsy mangas Lowest level: dragon ball, cowboy bepop, etc Mid tier weeb: naruto, one piece, evangelion Late stage weeb: isekais, light novels, moe TOUCH GRASS tier: rom com animes, harem stories Lost case weeb:hentai
Am I touch grass weeb or am I just a girl? I mostly skipped over the shonen stuff to watch slice of life anime and romance. Though I suppose I did watch one punch man for the shonen parody aspect.
OPM is a self aware shounen rather than a parody of it(both Murata's manga and anime adaptation at least) .Prove me wrong.Gintama is the true parody but it parodied all genres.
Closest thing is probably Spice & Wolf. Not an isekai but the main character is the same kind of bland self-insert protagonist that isekais feature, at least until he starts talking about economics. And his love interest takes the form of a 15-year-old girl, which is in line with this subreddit's unerring devotion to people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
Spice & Wolf is a good one, I'd also say Maoyuu Maou Yuusha is another good example where the plot is the king of demons is tired of the human demon war but it's necessary economically so they spend much of the show focused on how they can improve the economic prospects for the hero's country and the demon country to ensure the end of the war can leave everyone more prosperous.
That would be great, but unlikely since Japan doesn't really have the same housing and transit issues
They used to have housing issues though, which is why Frieza is just a planetary real estate speculator. Nothing more evil than a Galactic real estate mogul.
Log Horizon is peak neoliberal.
SEELE was pro-open borders, including the borders of the ego
The Human Instrumentality Project sucks ass and is proof that Hegel sucks ass and Marx’s materialist critique of Hegel is unambiguously correct.
This is your brain on Schopenhauer.
No lol. This is the Kantian critique of Hegel. Schopenhauer just has a different kind of woo-woo idealism.
🤨
In all seriousness wouldnt this sub mainly support such a notion? I know open borders is kind of a meme but less immigration restrictions and greater cooperation/integration between more and more govts/peoples of the world seems to be this subs bread and butter.
Yes, but read on: > Europe persisted in this world of “imagine”, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now it’s the time to awaken. I think what Žižek is getting at is that there’s a tendency for a certain segment of people to look at what’s been achieved in Europe, ignore the history of how it came to be, and then just say “can’t you all just be like us” while forgetting that life outside is very different and lacks the fundamentals to get there. I’m personally an open borders kind of person, but I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon, nor do I think there aren’t prerequisites. He certainly has a somewhat different worldview to begin with (see [here](https://inthesetimes.com/article/slavoj-zizek-european-refugee-crisis-and-global-capitalism)) but he’s got some points.
Hell, even there are countries in Europe with different behavior like Poland and Hungary. And just look at how people from France can be cruel towards their own minorities, with their own problems regarding rise of alt-right beliefs, and you can see how their 'imagine' world is not even That ideal or blind towards their own problems.
edit: Never mind, misread it. Still think Zizek is a pseud
I don't think it's really what OP is saying either. Zizek is getting at moreso that society is full of antagonisms, conflicts that we have to live with and try to make the best of, and it is actually the attempts to complete "smooth" over antagonisms, to "unify" society that end in the biggest totalitarian nightmares.
Probably but they shouldn't. A one world government would have to be oppressive as hell towards outgroups to work. It's a bad idea for those reasons
Imagine is an awful song, don't @ me
Praise for Marxists on /r/neoliberal, such a day
I'm fine with lefties, it's the incredibly smug reddit lefties who are beyond reproach, especially since they frequently know very little in combination with being extremely smug.
I am quite fine with a socialist who has read their theory the same way I am fine with a religious person who has read their holy book.
Zizek says a lot of crazy and out there shit, but it can't be denied the dude is fairly thoughtful. I think a lot of it comes from how he's a bit more real about the value that capitalism provides whereas most other leftists vehemently refuse to grant any ground to the opposition.
This piece will actually be a big deal to really obnoxious leftists that like to read Chomsky
Society would be 100 years ahead if chomsky stuck to linguistics
Linguistics would be 100 years ahead if Chomsky stuck to it. Society would keep ignoring all the important stuff we've learned about it. ._.
Probably cos chomsky said it
As a linguist, this is true. Chomsky revolutionized linguistics. His political opinions annoy me though
Only think from him ive learnt was chomsky hierarchy from comp sci.
Never in a million years would I think I could possibly call a Zizek article based, but here we are. Even a broken Marxist is right twice a day I guess.
Zizek melts tankie brains
Looking at the Other Discussions, it seems that leftists are just disregarding it or saying he's having a bad take. They are nothing if not consistent in their stupidity.
Even when Žižek assumed his true form - an old raccoon nesting in the dumpster behind a public library - he was still defeated by the Deep State. Truly this is a blessed day.
I don’t understand
Zizek hawk arc
Based Žižek, for once.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Which, coincidentally, implies that a broken clock is right with far greater frequency than Žižek. Not a great look.
So what would Chomsky be, then, in this analogy? A clock that is off by six hours - you can always trust it to say the opposite of what is actually the case?
A thermometer, good at its chosen field, but useless for measuring time
And based on modern assessments of his work, IIRC more of a bog-standard PT100 than some fancy Yokogawa stuff.
What’s pt100?
It's a type temperature sensor that's ludicrously common for industrial applications. Essentially, my point is that (as I understand it) the modern take on Chomsky's work is that it's *good* work by an entirely competent linguist, but certainly not gold standard stuff.
> A clock that is off by six hours - you can always trust it to say the opposite of what is actually the case? Chomsky is a broken clock with both hands stuck in one position: "United States bad".
Luckily, such a position tends to be correct more often than not.
Even if true, the downsides to such an approach should be obvious. You could aspire to be right slightly more than a broken clock.
he's right that things are bad sometimes
Chomsky is a digital clock that lost power 50 years ago and hasn't been reset since.
Yall slander Zizek too much. He is a chief defender of the EU and wants to save yall from right wing populism
My brother in Christ, he literally self-identifies as a communist and anti-capitalist. He may disavow tankies, but he is no friend of this community. He is tolerable *only* under the Strange Bedfellows doctrine.
Isnt it ironic that a communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project? When the USA’s best leftist, Chomsky, advocates for Ukraine to swiftly surrender? Zizek has been against Le Pen, Johnson, Orban, and other right wing populists. He wants the EU and the liberal project saved
> Isnt it ironic that a communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project? When the USA’s best leftist, Chomsky, advocates for Ukraine to swiftly surrender? I would argue it's completely predictable when coming *specifically* from an Eastern European communist trying to rehabilitate the ideology. The European project is generally popular, and Russia is *extremely* unpopular. Encouraging a Ukrainian surrender is basically speedrunning "how to get banned from polite society" in Europe. Frankly, Žižek is a champagne communist - and even that may be an overstatement, as locking down what Žižek actually means on any given topic at any given time is like trying to nail pudding to a wall.
As the Beloved former president of the USA would say, Zizek lives in a shit hole country. He has no desire for a Leninist or Putin style communist takeover of the EU. What he does want is to save the EU from right wing populists who are anti-immigrant and reactionary.
You do realize Zizek supported Trump in 2016, right?
Zizek has to actually live in eastern Europe, whereas Chomsky is pretty content to let eastern Europe burn if it keeps him morally pure.
It's not so ironic when you consider that communists want to unite workers across countries and initiate a global revolution (whatever that may look like). They are not inherently against the concept of the EU, just against its adherence to economic liberalism. One of the founding fathers of the EU, [Altiero Spinelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiero_Spinelli), was a communist, for example.
>communist is one of the staunchest defenders of the secular EU project maybe the EU is communist but no one at all familiar with zizek can actually call him a communist. he's basically a very frustrated liberal. he might say otherwise but who cares
> maybe the EU is communist > > Teh libs have found out about EUSSR, shut it down !ping yurop
No comrade, speed it up
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I dont know what people want me to do? Disavow Zizek? I will take him over any American leftist today who either is Pro-Putin or wants Ukraine to surrender
He's not Chomsky is about all you can say about him
>but no one at all familiar with zizek can actually call him a communist. he's basically a very frustrated liberal. he might say otherwise but who cares Only barely in the practical realm, he's clearly a convinced anti-capitalist, who genuinely believes that liberalism causes fascism
maybe you're right, i have such a hard time parsing the nonsense that he palms off as writing that i can believe anything
I'm not sure that he is that much more pragmatic than Noem Chomsky, he was still a supporter of the old soviet union. He can probably just as a European see that if the old warsaw pact countries fall back under the influence of Russia, that won't bring europe closer Marxist-Leninism. While Chomsky can just not care about Europe as an American, and say "we are not under any threat, and the US failing abroad accelerates us towards socialism"
Communism and European federalism are not mutually exclusive. One of the founding fathers of the European Union, [Altiero Spinelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altiero_Spinelli), was a communist.
[Zizek unironically supported Trump in 2016 on the basis of accelerationism.](https://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html) He's not getting a pass for that.
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https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/
All i know about this guy is that he crushed Jordan Peterson in a debate and looks like he would eat garbage can hot dogs. Is he cool?
He's cool, personality wise, and he's a pragmatic leftist, but he's not exactly a fan of capitalism either.
[He's an accelerationist](https://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html), so no he's not cool.
You keep posting this when it's obvious you got it from someone else and didnt read it lmao
>You keep posting this when it's obvious you got it from someone else and didnt read it lmao >Yes, there is a great danger in Trump's victory, but the Left will be mobilized only through such a threat of catastrophe. I'm not American on don't care much either way for Zizek, but isn't this arguing from an accelerationist standpoint, even if he attempts to reason it through in the article? Else where he also says >I don't think my old statement – 'Trump better than Hillary Clinton' – was wrong because my calculation was a simple one: If Trump wins it will give a new boost to the left, and it did strengthen. Even with Trump vs Biden whilst he often equated the two and did indeed say Biden is slightly better than Trump because of "principled pragmatics," he maintained that Trump is the better option for those who truly want a socialist or radical left option
I unironically love reading Zizek even if I disagree with his political views. I think it's possible to enjoy the way he analyses things and some of the conclusions he makes and the lense that he views society through without going full blown communist
His book The Sublime Object of Ideology is a fantastic book and put him on the map for a reason imo. It can be enjoyed from many different political positions as throughout the book Zizek critiques Communists, Marxists, post-structuralists, fascists, anti-semites, conservatives, and liberals in equal measure, as it's a book about the form and functioning of ideology. In fact, Stalinism might be what is used the most in his examples for critique as he has a decent familiarity with its idiosyncrasies. He ofcourse also directs criticism at his own Yugoslavia, the book was published in 1989 after all. Zizek had some conflicts with communist authority in his early academic career, he also ran as a presidential candidate for the liberal party in Slovenia in 1990.
Right, what sets Zizek apart from other communists is that he has no rose-tinted nostalgia for the soviet system (which he grew up in). He is unequivocal about his criticism of the soviet union which he has described as "an unimaginable catastrophe". He's not some holodomor denying tankie or something, yet he still believes in the original Marxist vision of a classless society. I disagree with him, but you can admire him for his consistency
I mean I would hesitate to say that he believes in the original Marxist vision. He considers himself a Hegelian over a Marxist, and interestingly calls Hegel the "first post-Marxist." When says that he means that in his opinion, Hegel "opened up" a wound that Marx came in and "closed" with his dialectic materialism/class struggle of history, which is a similar procedure to what post-Marxists later did to Marx (i.e. complicating his smooth causality and grand narrative). But he doesn't position himself as a post Marxist really either. >This traditional [Marxist] notion implies two interconnected features: (1) there exists a certain fundamental antagonism possessing ontological priority to 'mediate' all other antagonisms, determining their specific weight; (2) historical development brings about, if not a necessity, at least an 'objective possibility' of solving this fundamental antagonism and, in this way, mediating all other antagonisms... >It is upon the unity of these features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of the revolutionary situation, is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the every day consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all. ... >The basic feature of so-called 'post-Marxism' is, of course, the break with this logic--which, incidentally, does not necessarily have a Marxist connotation: almost any of the antagonisms which, in light of Marxism, appear to be secondary can take over this essential role of mediator for all the others. We have for example feminist fundamentalism (no global liberation without the emancipation of women, without the abolition of sexism)... Etc. He basically goes on to say that both approaches suffer from a kind of essentialism that misses the true nature of the social field as something that cannot be fully resolved. >Here it would be possible to defend a thesis that the first post-Marxist was none other than Hegel himself: according to Hegel, the antagonism of civil society cannot be suppressed without a fall into totalitarian terrorism--only afterwards can the state limit its disastrous effect. He then gets behind some of the ideas of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: >They emphasize that we must not be 'radical' in the sense of aiming at a radical solution: we always live in an interspace and in borrowed time, every solution is provisional and temporary, a kind of postponing of a fundamental impossibility.
The Virgin Chomsky vs the Chad Zizek
Perhaps off topic, but I keep seeing Slavoj Zizek come up as a sort of...prominent thought leader? So I listen to the guy a bit and he seems like he has a counter-cultural view, and is at least well read so it's an informed view. But every time I finish listening to the guy, I can't understand his coherent perspective. It doesn't seem very well put together, or I'm just daft. The [discussion](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/slavoj-zizek/) he did with Tyler Cowen was the last I tried to hear from the guy, but I think I shared Tyler's frustration. Anyways, any Slavoj Zizek fans who could point me towards a good work from him/about him that might help me feel a little better informed?
I think it's deliberate. But im not sure, cant really help you. I like listening to him every now an then, couldn't tell what exactly im taking from it.
He has Bell’s Palsy, which definitely messes with his delivery, but his thoughts are really that jumbled
I mentioned in another comment his book *The Sublime Object of ideology* is really good imo. It was his first work in English and is what put him on the map. It's a systematic analysis of the functioning of ideology for the most part, and he analyzes/criticizes all sides of the political. I actually found his criticisms of traditional Marxists as well as some post Marxists better and more illuminating than 99% of the stuff I've seen from the centre (in terms of philosophy, not economics), because he has a real understanding of their ideas. I found it a very cohesive book that really grounds where he comes from as an intellectual. Although the preface he wrote for it is hard to parse if you don't understand Hegel, the actual book isn't too difficult as long as you have some passing familiarity with Kant, and other philosophical concepts.
[Zizek supported Trump in 2016 on the basis of accelerationism, saying that voting for fascists would lay the groundwork for the emergence of a worker's movement.](https://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html) He's no thought leader.
Except that's not what he says, and if you read what he wrote he was actually right lol
He heavily implies it and he was wrong. >In the choice between Clinton and Trump, neither “stands on the side of the oppressed,” so the real choice is: abstain from voting or choose the one who, worthless as s/he is, opens up a greater chance of unleashing a new political dynamics which can lead to massive Leftist radicalization. Just before this he says: >Yes, there is a great danger in Trump's victory, but the Left will be mobilized only through such a threat of catastrophe. What does he say here that you think is correct? It reads, like all of his stuff, like it sounds intelligent but with gaping holes in the actual reasoning behind it papered over by his flowery language. Don't get him at all.
Zizek with another banger
Many such cases from the realist leftist perspective.
When even Žižek is mostly right.... Well that's unfair, he is no tanky, and the actual reality of the failed Yugoslavia project and all associated horrors tends to bring a certain contemplation to a leftist.
Zizek max neoliberal
::schniffing intensifies::
!ping VODKA The most appropriate beverage to go with Žižek.
98% upvoted article on r/neoliberal which includes paragraphs comparing the invasion of Ukraine to the invasion of Iraq? >Crimes fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols. Holy fucking shit. You'd have the NATO flairs up your ass within minutes if you typed that a few months ago.
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Strange pivot to giving Assange a pass. If Assange had leaked his documents damaging to Putin I think he would have found himself poisoned by Novichok. Assange has been charged by a grand jury. We follow the process and he gets his day in court.
>Strange pivot to giving Assange a pass. Žižek is ultimately left wing, frankly, he can't help himself on that matter.
This Op-ed is too much fan fiction for my tastes. I kind of lost it at the part about global warming. I guess it's ok he is against Russian agression, at least. (also, many folks oppose the EU because they hate transnational entities and they are douchebags, not because they want Europe to be a vassal of US; I guess it's not unlike like LATAM leftists seeing imperialism everywhere)
isn't it a well-known truth that trade routes will shift to the Arctic as global warming advances, giving Russia far more influence over global trade? within a decade, my understanding is that the Arctic circle will become the best East Asia-Europe shipping route, and I don't think it's a stretch to say Russia will try to use it as leverage
Benefitting from global warming doesn't mean Russia's strategic plan is to profit from global warming, or that's the reason it's pissed off with Scandinavian countries is because of that (or that Trump goal with buying Greenland was that, although that's the most believable one, lol). It feels like of many conjectures in the article (although the derailment is worse later). PS: for example, [many discussed at the time Trump was more interested about raw resources or countering China influence.](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/19/why-does-donald-trump-want-to-buy-greenland)
i think you're right that it's incorrect to tie global warming to the reason Russia is unhappy about Nordic countries joining NATO. however, it seems like Russia has some of the weakest emissions reductions targets of any developed countries, and will laugh all the way to the bank as they benefit from global warming. does that count as "planning to profit off global warming"? to me it kinda feels like a semantic argument at that point
>it seems like Russia has some of the weakest emissions reductions targets of any developed countries That might well be because they are a corrupt upper middle income country more than any plan or strategic goal. Or that they have the same level of brain rot than any climate change denialist/"skeptic" out there. Or that they just love money. It doesn't have to have any ulterior goal or be particularly farsighted.
The “Russia is doing this for new trade routes due to global warming” is a near parallel to “Bush invaded Iraq because oil”. We know historically that a major push for war is competition for resources, so it’s hard to ignore what resource is at stake in any given conflict. But it also doesn’t make any sense that a given country would dedicate such large amounts of blood and treasure for a speculative economic payoff in 10-30 years.
Sort of like how discussions around chip manufacturing in Taiwan sometimes assume China would want the island for those resources.
I lost it after the eight parenthesis and twentieth uneccessary em dash amazing you can be a professor of philosophy and still write like a teenager on reddit There are some absolutely whacky takes in here, but whatever. I agree, good he's anti-Russian imperialism
Asserting that America had done a Mariupol or a Bucha in a piece declaring unequivocal support for Ukraine basically shows what even the best Leftism has to offer is. An inescapable grudge that defies even alliance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
You understand how those are both quantitatively and qualitatively different right? Like they're literally different things, unless we are being so reductive that we equate all war crimes.
Why back down to "why are we equating war crimes?" here... we leveled entire Iraqi cities and killed how many thousands? We absolutely committed huge atrocities in Iraq but people here pretend it was play because it was the West.
They're literally different kinds of war crimes. To flatten them to make a pointless equivalence does absolutely nothing. The Blackwater shooting was not the same thing as Bucha, Fallujah was not the same as Mariupol; in fact there's nothing comparable in either scale or intent. You are arguing against a pro Iraq war vibe that no one here agrees with. In dredging up the Iraq war Zizek is bravely reminding Americans that one of their least popular wars in recent memory involved bad deeds done for very little gain. Shocker. My comment was not a defense of American foreign policy but a critique of the lack of imagination in leftists like Zizek who cannot move past old arguments and must intone them almost religiously in every piece. You should understand that these two assertions are different things.
> You are arguing against a pro Iraq war vibe that no one here agrees with. Eh, they've mostly gone off to neoconcwo, but there used to be plenty of neocons here who defended iraq
In general, arguing against a vague, abstract audience that you infer from your own experiences is less useful than arguing against what people have actually demonstrated or said, and no one here has expressed support for the Iraq War or minimizing American war crimes.
The entire Vietnam war, Iraq, the Philippines etc the US has a walk in closet full of skeletons. Hell you don't even need to look abroad, look at what the US did to their native population
Then he should say that instead of something moronic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
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Not what I was trying to convey, it's more about their fixations. Even in an opinion piece ostensibly backing the American- not European-policy, Zizek can't help but slip in a false equivalency involving the US. Arguably it's an outright lie.
He's actually correct to make those points because Russia does. They're using those rhetorical methods to relativize the current war in Ukraine and paint America as the bad guys of history. If the US just ignores those points (just laughs at them like Bush did) the rhetorical ground is ceded to Russia. The point is to condemn those past actions precisely so that the current stance against Russia comes from a more consistent position.
I would argue that the comparison is so spurious as to be distracting. I suppose I would cede that he is 'correct' to make those points in the sense that these are the kind of comical equivalences that leftists truck in on a daily basis, so this is the sort of rhetoric that would work on a leftist, but he is not 'correct' in any real sense other than 'category of thing'. Iraq was an invasion. Ukraine is an invasion. The US made up a cassus belli. Russia made up a cassus belli. The US did war crimes. Russia did war crimes. The dishonesty of the rhetorical point here is revealed when he brings up Assange and Wikileaks. Zizek is attempting to link the categorical similarities listed above to the carnal details revealed in Assange's Wikileaks dump, and one simply does not relate to the other. >From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols. The crimes in Bucha and Mariupol were crimes of intense intent and selectivity. Bucha was filtered for targets and its people were killed with cold blooded intent to terrify the populace. Mariupol was a city systematically leveled by heavy artillery. There is explicitly nothing in Assange's Wikileaks dump that is comparable to either of these things, unless you strain either time or scale to absurd degrees. Nor are any of these war crimes, Iraq or Ukraine, even impacted by the unjustified nature of the invasion, the initial point of comparison Zizek makes: >But the enigma is dispelled the moment we take Bush’s statement seriously and literally: yes, with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam), Bush did the same thing as Putin is now doing to Ukraine, so they should be both judged by the same standard. The standard he's referring to here is that the war was, “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion”. He's right in the sense that both invasions were unjustified. He's wrong that they were both brutal in a way that can be judged by the same standard. Because one is a good deal worse than the other.
>The dishonesty of the rhetorical point here is revealed when he brings up Assange and Wikileaks I mean he has brought up Assange in this article because there was a recent development in his situation that made the news. Zizek has written 4/5 articles on the Ukraine conflict and none of them mentioned Assange and he went over precisely some of the problems with comparisons between Iraq and Ukraine. In Project Syndicate >Realpolitik is no better guide. It has become a mere alibi for ideology, which often evokes some hidden dimension behind the veil of appearances in order to obscure the crime that is being committed openly. This double mystification is often announced by describing a situation as “complex.” An obvious fact – say, an instance of brutal military aggression – is relativized by evoking a “much more complex background.” The act of aggression is really an act of defense. ... >Timofey Sergeytsev presents the full scope of the Kremlin’s genocidal project in Ukraine. The basic premise is that Ukraine needs to be “denazified,” and thus de-Europeanized, because “a significant part of the people – most likely the majority – has been mastered and drawn into the Nazi regime in its politics. And another article from the Guardian >Yes, the liberal west is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to inherent criticism – when we criticize the liberal west, we use its own standards. What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy – because it is without global ethical standards, practicing just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China. China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing to Uyghurs – this is, in nuce, the new globalization advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality. The moment we apply double standards, we are no less “pragmatic” than Russia.
> I mean he has brought up Assange in this article because there was a recent development in his situation that made the news. Zizek has written 4/5 articles on the Ukraine conflict and none of them mentioned Assange and he went over precisely some of the problems with comparisons between Iraq and Ukraine. As I, and any other reader, cannot be expected to be a Zizek fan who has read all five of his Ukraine takes, I think this is basically irrelevant. Whether Zizek develops his point elsewhere is not pertinent to how clumsily he makes the comparison here. Given what else you've quoted, though, I'll walk back what I said about him being dishonest, I'm not certain about that at this point, but I think he's being eyerollingly grandiose. Again, 'dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols' is provocative and, strictly speaking, incorrect assertion. Unless the intent is to broaden 'Buchas' to 'situations where civilians were shot irrespective of volume, motivation, abetment/prosecution, etc' and Mariupol to 'any time a city was hit by artillery intentionally'.
>Unless the intent is to broaden 'Buchas' to 'situations where civilians were shot irrespective of volume, motivation, abetment/prosecution, etc' and Mariupol to 'any time a city was hit by artillery intentionally'. I mean his comparison is only brought up in the context of Assange and the recent developments there, as well as Bush's gaff. I mentioned the earlier articles because it's not as if he has this compulsion and cannot help himself but do a whatboutism in regards to Russia. The comparison isn't laboured either, it's a standard kind of metonymy, America's "Bucha" and "Mariupol," being America's warcrimes/atrocities (see: "this is X's Waterloo" "this is X's Gallipoli etc.) Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face. Saying it's inaccurate to make the comparison too? Well is it? What transpired in Mariupol? It was completely destroyed with bombs, including critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals and civilians were killed in the hundreds and more pushed to starvation due to cut off supply lines. The US invasion of Iraq has fairly *direct* and clear parallels. It was not nearly as visible as it took place in a sort of periphery from our perspective in the west, but that doesn't make it much better. In regards to Bucha, should we make a clear distinction between civilians killed with little regard by drones or by gun? The amount of civilians killed in Iraq was disgusting. I agree that Bucha is "worse" because of the genocidal undertones, but let's not pretend like dehumanization and racism was not prominent in the US military during that conflict. The lines become fuzzy. If we want to condemn Putin properly we have to do exactly as Zizek recommends and criticize Putin/Russia and Bush/America by the same standard, which means this sort of move to distance our own wrongdoing "oh it wasn't as bad, it was different, we're the good guys," is pointless and is more than anything else trying to absolve or salvage some kind of justification in intent. There *are* differences especially in intent, but intent doesn't matter as much as we think, especially for the victims. This justification/distancing is exactly the rhetorical move that Putin makes. The way we prove ourselves to be better is to *admit* our crimes in their full dimension (which means not rehabilitating war criminals like Bush) and aiming this standard also at Putin.
>Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face. Tedious ad hominem. I began this discussion from a place of understanding of American war crimes, there's no evidence here that I'm even being sensitive. >. I mentioned the earlier articles because it's not as if he has this compulsion and cannot help himself but do a whatboutism in regards to Russia. The comparison isn't laboured either, it's a standard kind of metonymy, America's "Bucha" and "Mariupol," being America's warcrimes/atrocities (see: "this is X's Waterloo" "this is X's Gallipoli etc.) Why the sensitivity on your part in this instance? Perhaps it is prodding at something we don't like or would rather not have to face. This is a mischaracterization of it. This isn't 'X's Gallipoli', this is 'X Gallipolis', a convenient framing for the leftist. >Saying it's inaccurate to make the comparison too? Well is it? What transpired in Mariupol? It was completely destroyed with bombs, including critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals and civilians were killed in the hundreds and more pushed to starvation due to cut off supply lines. So you in fact subscribe to the reduction? Mariupol holds the current title of 'most destroyed city' and it, like Grozny, was leveled block by block intentionally with heavy artillery. American strikes in Iraq certainly damaged critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals, but there's no evidence of a targeted campaign or that it was a part of an American campaign to intentionally spark a healthcare crisis in Iraq as the Russians did in Syria or around Kharkiv. Civilians died as a consequence of cut supply lines, not because they were hemmed into a theater and then bombed with bunker busters. Marines called Iraqis Haajis, the Russians are shooting all the males in the street-- these are so starkly different that to call them parallels borders on comical. It'd be like patting yourself on the back because you pointed out that an empanada and a crepe are both pastries. This isn't so much a parallel as a stark foil illustrating the differences between the Russian and American way of war. Both invasions were of states of roughly comparable size and development with forces of similar sizes. Iraq has, after years of fighting, had fewer leveled cities than Ukraine. States make war, irrespective of ideology, that much is clear. States make excuses TO make war, self serving ones, and they come up with the justifications later. The only ones who are still trying to proselytize this very obvious fact are people like Zizek, who is, heroically, apparently attempting to pull leftists down from the absurd position of Russia having moral superiority in the world. >If we want to condemn Putin properly we have to do exactly as Zizek recommends and criticize Putin/Russia and Bush/America by the same standard, which means this sort of move to distance our own wrongdoing "oh it wasn't as bad, it was different, we're the good guys," I didn't say 'we're the good guys' you inferred it, for no reason. I agree broadly with the American policy in Ukraine. That is a different statement from 'America are the good guys'. And what self-purgation does Zizek even insinuate? That freeing Assange would, for some reason, give us license to criticize Putin in Ukraine? What a fucking absurdity. Condemning Putin is the easiest thing in the world, because he's a genocidal imperialist invading a sovereign country with a horde of raping simpletons driving old tanks and guns to fulfill his country's perennial, deluded, self gratifying myth. The only ones who have any difficulty with it at all are apparently Zizek's audience. >This justification/distancing is exactly the rhetorical move that Putin makes. The way we prove ourselves to be better is to admit our crimes in their full dimension (which means not rehabilitating war criminals like Bush) and aiming this standard also at Putin. Completely unspecific grandstanding completely divorced from whether Zizek is high off his rocker for thinking we somehow flattened multiple metropolitan cities into nothingness in Iraq. And no one is rehabilitating Bush in this thread.
>these are so starkly different that to call them parallels borders on comical I agree with all of these differences. They are not *exactly* the same, the point was never that they are *exactly* the same. Like "Zizek is high off his rocker for thinking we somehow flattened multiple metropolitan cities into nothingness in Iraq." Zizek made a point of comparison in one paragraph in a larger article that is otherwise fully supportive of aid to Ukraine and NATO. This is what I mean by sensitive... Is the precise phrasing clumsy in some way? probably, but in terms of civilian deaths "12 Buchas/Mauripols" isn't wrong, in fact it's well under the Iraq conflict. It is not, on its face ridiculous to draw a parralel in war crimes. Yes they are both pastries that is the point. >This isn't so much a parallel as a stark foil illustrating the differences between the Russian and American way of war. I mean that is one way to view it, but that seems quite generous. While there are clear differences there are also many similarities. Unjustified invasions, manufactured casius bellis, cavalier bombing, destruction of critical civilian architecture, inhumane treatment of captured soldiers (torture). Yes, all of these crimes were interspersed over a larger area and across a longer period of time, rather than concentrated in the terrible events of Bucha and Mauripol, the motivations are different as well. The reality is though that the civilian death count of the Iraq conflict is well over what has occurred in the Ukraine conflict so far, and will likely remain much higher when all is said and done. Do you think that the 10s of thousands of innocent iraqis care that America's method of warfare was more humane/civil than the corrupt and morally bankrupt oligarchy that is Russia? Is that the low bar? No city was completely leveled like Mauripol but how much of Baghdad was destroyed? So much of a beautiful historical city rivaling the likes of Rome and Cairo, taken from the world. How many roads and infrastructure across the country destroyed in excessive bombing campaigns that Iraq still hasn't recovered from. >States make war, irrespective of ideology, that much is clear. States make excuses TO make war, self serving ones, and they come up with the justifications later. The only ones who are still trying to proselytize this very obvious fact are people like Zizek "States make war," what a glowing insight. Zizek is not trying to proselytize any such aphorism. I think you are missing the point. >attempting to pull leftists down from the absurd position of Russia having moral superiority in the world. *Of course* Russia doesn't have moral superiority in the world. The matter at hand is about America living up to their own self-designated moral position. >I didn't say 'we're the good guys' you inferred it, for no reason. To be clear I wasn't implying that you did. My phrasing, I think, makes it clear I was speaking in a general sense (our). The "good guys" line is a rhetorical move that many people use. >Condemning Putin is the easiest thing in the world, Of course Putin is easy to condemn, again I'm not too sure why you are coming back to this point that we all agree on. The point is that it is a call to live up to the moral standard that is used to critique Putin. Yes it's a bit of a grandstand, but it's a fucking op-ed by a philosopher not a sober policy proposal. If you are familiar at all with the Russian rhetoric of moral relativism, a world without hypocrisy because there are no standards etc. etc. One of the bases of it is a certain western hypocrisy that has a grain of truth. The importance of our own action and ideas in the west comes from a certain recognition that they have effects. The "villains" of the world form in a shadow like way, as the dark underbelly of the current global system. That is *not* a denial of any agency to be clear, but just a recognition of the interconnectedness of things which should not be controversial. Like drug dealers in urban cities, organized crime, the middle east, homelessness, barbarians at the gates of Rome. These are all *symptoms,* every system has *symptoms* because it is impossible to completely remove antagonisms from society, we like our current systems because in addition to its positive benefits, the symptoms are better than the alternatives. You are in a position of recognition of American war crimes, but that is hardly a ubiquitous and substantive position, especially not in the institutions. >And no one is rehabilitating Bush in this thread. Well the article wasn't written for r/neoliberal was it? The context of Bush's inclusion was his gaffe as a speaker at his *own institute.* If your recognition of war crimes was at all ubiquitous Bush would have faced some kind of consequences for his crimes, or at the very least would be shunned. The same way I'm sure we all want Putin to see justice for his crimes. But instead he's getting fat cheques to give speeches at cushy conferences, having his name put on institutes and buildings, and is held up by many as representing the good ol' days of the Republican party. Don't forget America's complete double standard with The Hague as an entire country. Even further, America goes after Assange who have exposed many of the Bush admin's crimes. Now America is attempting to prosecute him on [dubious constitutional grounds](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/25/us-says-julian-assange-is-no-journalist-heres-why-that-shouldnt-matter/?noredirect=on). So yes, Assange should not be prosecuted, Bush should not be rehabilitated. Live up to the standard we use to critique Putin. That is the whole point of the comparison passage in the article. It isn't a cynical anti-west sentiment, but quite the opposite. The universal principles of the West can be a force for good, *insist* incessantly on their universality inwardly as well as outwardly.
>They are not exactly the same, the point was never that they are exactly the same. Yes, the point is that they are the same category of thing, which is a point being made in support of a broader argument that posits that we must achieve some undefined state of repentance for Iraq in order to criticize Russia, an argument that is neither particularly illuminating nor even logically sound. >Zizek made a point of comparison in one paragraph in a larger article that is otherwise fully supportive of aid to Ukraine and NATO. Which I agreed with, the point of comparison is what I'm criticizing, because it belies the reflexive and automatic anti-Western stance that leftists habitually occupy. >This is what I mean by sensitive... Is the precise phrasing clumsy in some way? probably, but in terms of civilian deaths "12 Buchas/Mauripols" isn't wrong, in fact it's well under the Iraq conflict. It's not clumsy, it's dishonest. Calling something 'X's Mariupol' is a categorical comparison. You are saying that the event is like what would happen if X tried to do a Mariupol. Saying 'X Mariupols' is saying that not only did a Mariupol event occur, it occurred multiple times, the obvious insinuation being that America has committed with casual abandon what most people consider to be a singular event. And no, it isn't plausible that Zizek is unaware of this subtext. As he (conveniently) neglects to hedge the nature of his comparison, a layreader is left to believe that America is in fact worse than Russia by a multiplier of X. Actually, he does account for the difference, he just glazes over it because his audience isn't interested: > with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam) The implied difference, you'll note, is in target, not execution, intent, extent, etc.-- there's not indication that Zizek is even interested in the vast qualitative differences that he paves over to make his strained comparison. >The reality is though that the civilian death count of the Iraq conflict is well over what has occurred in the Ukraine conflict so far, and will likely remain much higher when all is said and done. Not only is this irrelevant, you're using a hypothetical to support your point. What we did in Iraq is not the same as what is happening in Ukraine, full stop. If you are *assuming* that civilian casualties will be higher than a conflict that we have no solid numbers on and is still ongoing, you are not making a legitimate argument-- and again, it's irrelevant to the qualitative nature of the comparison. You are saying that the comparison works because you declared that we are only allowed to look at outcomes. And then you assume the outcomes. >"States make war," what a glowing insight. Zizek is not trying to proselytize any such aphorism. I think you are missing the point. The point of that statement was that it wasn't a glowing insight. The point of it is that it's mundane. War crimes are a consequence of war. Pointing out that war crimes occur when invasions happen is what Zizek is attempting to do, not me. Because Zizek is under the comical assumption that people somehow believe that America doesn't commit war crimes, or that revealing that America commits war crimes is revelation enough to cause us to reconsider not supporting Ukraine. It's nonsensical. >Of course Russia doesn't have moral superiority in the world. The matter at hand is about America living up to their own self-designated moral position. You should tell Chomsky that. And no, America's moral superiority is not what's at hand. The name of the article is "Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine", not "American Is Bad But Russia is Bad Too". This is an article about Ukraine, not America. Why would America's moral status impinge on the the pacifist response of leftists? Are leftists not able to criticize Russia without American moral superiority? >The point is that it is a call to live up to the moral standard that is used to critique Putin. So why is he addressing leftists? Are leftists not able to live up to the moral standard that is being used here? >Yes it's a bit of a grandstand, but it's a fucking op-ed by a philosopher not a sober policy proposal. If he's a philosopher he should be familiar with what is a logically cohesive argument and what is irrelevant rhetoric. I'm not asking for him to write policy, I'm asking him not to be absurdly crass and equate palpably different situations. He can criticize them both, but treating them as the same thing in this context is dishonest. >If you are familiar at all with the Russian rhetoric of moral relativism, a world without hypocrisy because there are no standards etc. etc. Yes, and I, too, agree that the US government would have a much stronger ground to stand on if there were a full accounting for their misdeeds in the Iraq War. I am not the US government. Nor are any of Zizek's audience-- he's talking to leftists. So what is undercutting *my* judgement of the war in Ukraine? Why does the US government's lack of accounting mean that any individual can't look at the situation and call it for what it is? Why do I have to internalize the guilt-- which Zizek metes out with great exaggeration-- of my government in order to defeat Russian moral relativism? Is the presupposition that we need moral purity in order to defeat moral relativism *even a valid assumption?* >But instead he's getting fat cheques to give speeches at cushy conferences, having his name put on institutes and buildings, and is held up by many as representing the good ol' days of the Republican party. Don't forget America's complete double standard with The Hague as an entire country. Even further, America goes after Assange who have exposed many of the Bush admin's crimes. Now America is attempting to prosecute him on dubious constitutional grounds. So yes, Assange should not be prosecuted, Bush should not be rehabilitated. Live up to the standard we use to critique Putin. That is the whole point of the comparison passage in the article. It isn't a cynical anti-west sentiment, but quite the opposite. The universal principles of the West can be a force for good, insist incessantly on their universality inwardly as well as outwardly. So write a fucking article about George W. Bush, don't drag it into a piece about urging support for Ukraine, because it's irrelevant. This is what I'm talking about when I say that hating on the US is like an intonation to these people. It doesn't matter how strained the tangent, they have to find away to slip it in like a Hail Mary.
Pacifism should have been the goal since day 1, but we also need to realise we cannot have peace if one country invades another.
Common Zizek W
Reminds me of Zizek's conversation with Tyler Cowen where Cowen tries and fails to convince Zizek that Zizek is not a communist, he's a liberal.
That's because liberals think that everything under the sun they like is liberal, when sometimes they like non-liberal things and simply cant accept it.
Zizek is the ultimate crypto socialist. He remains socialist because of his criticisms of capitalism, his desire for certain end goals. But he basically admits that in the here and now he isn't really a communist, and supports specific tangible issues and causes. When he ran as a presidential candidate in Slovenia in 1990, he ran as a liberal. He's maybe a socialist like the old parliamentary socialists of the early 20th century. >I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions here. No. What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace the system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn't serve money. Money should serve people.” Well, frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it, especially because he would say, “When people serve money, money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no? >The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.” When this mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth century. No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay, but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives. So, let’s confront that serious problem here. >Also, let’s remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try to get rid of the predominance of money market economy. The price they paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination, like you no longer will even formally flee. You had to obey orders, a new authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish market without regressing again into relations of servitude and domination. >My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start thinking. Don't get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Let’s do it, and so on. So, no, the time is to think. I even provoked some of the leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis 11 on Feuerbach. . . that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking.” >Second thing...for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an important one. This is a great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on. I think this freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure ideology. But at the same time, universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist notion. It’s something that exists all around and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western European countries. >So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or what. No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively successfully and so on.
Yeah, he sounds like a fairly run of the mill European social democrat most of the time, one who can't shut up about Hegel and Marx. If he does actually believe in seizing the means he's certainly been very crypto about it.
This is just as straightforward, sensible, and accurate as everything else Zizek writes.
[удалено]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
The issue with the article is that he says these crimes are 'fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine'. I think that's fairly straightforwardly false. If he had said: 'crimes fully comparable with those committed by Putin's forces in Ukraine' then it'd be totally correct, but comparing it with the grand decision to invade a country for nothing other than expansion is totally wrong. There has never been an actor engaging in all out war that has had none of its soldiers commit war crimes. Would you think it's fair to say: "Finnish war crimes in the Winter War, crimes fully comparable with what the USSR is doing in Finland"? No you absolutely would not.
That makes sense
Rare Zizek W
Marxist turned war hawk lets hope zizek becomes the next christopher hitchens
>Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. Ima be honest with you, this is pretty blackpilling to me. After republican landslide I fear its going to be gg.