#Politics
16 notas · última:
Žižek on three nightmares of the modern world
Mekong scam compounds, neo-slavery with organ-harvesting quotas, and Libyan torture-ransom camps — the industrial horrors Žižek wants at the front of Western attention.
Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015)
Fundador do Singapura moderno; primeiro-ministro de 1959 a 1990. Arquiteto do modelo que combina meritocracia tecnocrática, capitalismo aberto e autoritarismo de partido único.
An alliance of those who refuse to pretend the exit is already known
Host's closing reading: a politics whose starting assumption is that the situation is genuinely deadlocked and no existing tendency — liberal, left or right — has the resources to unlock it.
Neo-slavery: the dark side of global digital capitalism
Tens of thousands enslaved in Mekong scam compounds with organ-harvesting for quota failures; concentration camps in southern Libya running weekly torture-ransom videos.
The left's operational lessons: from Trump to Singapore
Trump won by stating his extreme position; Mamdani's 'radicalism' is old moderate social democracy; Switzerland and Singapore model organic unity 'in a good sense'.
There is no future: from despair to avenir
Hope is deferral; you only act in despair. 'There is no future' — the Democratic 'party of the future' is Fukuyamaism; Bernie Sanders alone at Biden's inauguration was avenir.
We don't know where we are: no hologram for the present
Today we lack the kind of totalizing hologram that capitalism retroactively imposed on all prior history once it contingently emerged. We are in the interval.
Trump as symptom of a dead democratic-welfare center
Trump is real and dangerous but not the primary enemy. He is a symptom of the democratic welfare-state center that lost its ideological content and instinct for self-preservation.
Marx on Balzac: intelligent conservatives see the deadlocks
Žižek's dreamed coalition: renewed left plus intelligent — not reactionary — conservatives, the Balzac type who see the deadlocks and know there is no easy way out.
US tripartite landscape: Democrats, Trumpians, democratic socialists
The coming American contest is three-sided: absorbed Republican-Trumpians, old-center Democrats, and a democratic-socialist current deciding whether to split.
Trump opened a space the left tried and failed to open
Žižek grants that Trump did what the anti-globalization left tried and failed to do: disrupted global capitalism as we knew it, opening a new space.
What if you can deceive all the people all the time?
Žižek inverts Lincoln: authentic mass awakenings are rare and usually end in catastrophe. What politics remains once the myth of the clear-eyed people falls?
Wang Huning: America Against America as CCP bible
Wang Huning, senior CCP ideologist: the soft-fascist question of preserving capitalism's productive energy while suppressing the social disintegration it causes.
Capitalism works — but must be controlled
Denying that capitalism organizes productive activity is a fantasy; but free markets exist only when a strong state breaks the monopolies capitalism generates.
Does the left need a Lee Kuan Yew?
Žižek backs Sloterdijk's prediction that Lee Kuan Yew will be the figure of this era remembered in 100 years — the left needs comparable social cohesion.
War communism: obligatory international cooperation
Against both voluntaristic cooperation and world government: 'war communism' as enforced coordination for the emergency state already arriving.