Video

Ravelstein

This episode is probably my favorite, I thought it was gonna be a bad one because it was old but each host said some real ass shit worthy a quotation at least every 10 minutes

im sorry to take a boring marxist-ish possition here but regarding this "how can fear be bought and sold" question, surely the mechanism at work is taking people's economic fears, fear of losing your job, fear of becoming homeless, etc and redirect that fear towards whatever is profitable for the donors of the respective political parties?

Fascinating to think of the Strausian “hidden meaning” in popular texts next to the conspiracy theories that rely on information that’s “hiding in plain sight”. Illuminati imagery on the dollar, the conspiracies around the art at Denver airport, etc. It’s like the same practice exists for the elites as well as the plebs, but with different media as sources.

57:00 Hope this is still true in US.

You appear to have figured out the scam behind all "high-level" US politics. Once they attain a certain level of success, our representative's perceived interests have nothing in common with those of the preponderance of eligible voters. Their rewards for serving the masters and the already-haves are so overwhelming that it will never be otherwise.

Eric stay Marxist. Don't let Pill Popper and Lib Vic change you.

From Bill Clinton's '93 first inaugural address: "There is no longer division between what is foreign and what is domestic; the world economy, the world environment, the world AIDS crisis, the world arms race;" So now we have the "world presidential election". I've been reading Paul Virilio lately, so I'll quote from 'The Information Bomb' directly: "So the team which trained Clinton for the last election got him to speak as fast as possible. Obeying strict television rules, he had to be able to say everything on a particular theme in less than ninety seconds - before going on to say nothing at all about it after he was elected." This line sort of captures what Victor brings up about presidential talking points/rhetoric. Virilio also, incidentally, spends a few paragraphs on the factor of presidential physical appearance, calling them "political supermodels": "Bill Clinton was first elected because he looked like Kennedy and because Hillary, his wife, was believed to have undergone various forms of plastic surgery. The popular media then set about their only daughter, a pleasant adolescent of thirteen but not exacdy prepossessing. She had to modify her appearance to enable her father to win victory in the presidential election of 1996." "But if you step out of line, you lose your place. New political mutants have recendy appeared on our screens, [...] Apart from a visually correct physical appearance, these characters have understood that in a rapidly globalizing world there is no longer, strictly speaking, either Right or Left, and that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, these things literally no longer have any meaning. All that remains is the great audiovisual dilemma, the conflict between the soft (the word) and the hard (the image). Unlike the general run of the representatives of the old parties which are collapsing all around, these new political supermodels will speak a language which is 'hard' and impactful." Virilio speaks of "soap opera"/"supermodel" presidents, who no longer address the nation, but "go with the general flow of the silent revolution of the audiovisual world". Trump, perhaps more than any other president, has weaponised and accelerated the political media machine. Maybe the 'ritual' was finally beaten into the ground by Trump, but more than anything, he's "advanced" the supremacy of the image and totally locked into the audiovisual world, which has been the hidden 3rd actor and engine of elections.

fourteenth

being afraid is fun. everyone is doing it.

Hope Joe Biden is defeated and stop war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine

Can't say I wanted Biden before the debate, but unfortunately his cabinet is still the only way to not fall into crazy far-right authoritarianism. Would love to see him drop out and put in another Democrat though because it'd be more likely to keep the country out of turmoil.

People Planet Peace Jill Stein 2024

Alteuism is a wek falicy. You never do something without getting something when you do for others in fact you are doing for yourself because nothing here is done in a vacuum…

Fear is a evolutionary trait which has got us to this point in our evolution but, we are now the Gods (Anthropocean) We have become addicted to it and need to regain control of it. What can’t we do as a species? We flush toilets, feed the masses and have gone to the moon to name a few…

A great example of some optical boo boo possibly swinging an election is Ed Miliband and the infamous bacon sandwich in the UK.

von Mises is not neo-liberal, he is austrian school of economics and even though his ideas are more Leise-Faire its still not Milton Friedman.

That debate gave me The Fear.

Third 😂

it's worth specifying that a lot of primary voters are people who have the comfortable, free time to vote and who get all their "news" from Facebook, Fox, and/or Newsmax. which is to say "people who have been able to retire comfortably". they are are the embodiment of "f*ck you, I got mine" mentality. The individual states which are mail-in ballot only would be the exception to this selection bias.

second

first

C'mon guys, this is positivism. Instead of rationality you say system, so what.. posthumanism simply perpetuates the very humanism it's reacting against by anthropomorphizing, unwittingly. Disdained humanism comes out from the technology end. Boring and incoherent.

Pills going one-on-one with someone where they're both knowledgeable and passionate about the thing they're talking about is so upbeat compared to some of the other ways these episodes can go, lol

I live in the Netherlands and we do have a dryer (washing machine + dryer combo) at home, but never use because it ruins your clothes and tye gas bill is ridiculous expensive 😂 And yeah, everyone makes fun of Germany for being such a cash society and having a terrible overall internet network, hahaha.

could you do a carl schmitt episode maybe talking about leftist sympathies which are common nowadays? leo strauss would be good too

Regarding the things we think will be bad will be worse I think i can kind of agree with him, it could be you are selectively assocating a few of the things that were not as bad as more prominent because it actually was the exception, so you remember the times you thought something would be bad and then it wasn't nearly as bad. It stands out becaue it is rare, and I think he is right. Losing family, you know it sucks but some days even years gone it just can devour you. If anything it is neutral, but I think an argument could be made as schopenhauer made

Ok so you read one book by one guy and you write off ALL of metamodernism. I probably wouldn't have chosen this book, I think there are better ones. Your review was correct as far as it went but definitely not a fair view on this.

When it comes to participatory politics, it gets real old hearing "it's all meetings, all the time thing" exaggeration. If a policy meeting pertains to you, go and partake. If it doesn't, cool; don't partake. But disengaging from direct political action as a long-term process because something sounds tedious, or because you want someone to do it for you, is how power-hoarders take control. Conversely, imagine that a political decision gets made that you dislike and you start complaining because it's not what you wanted---well, you disengaged from direct participation because of "meetings." Also, "alienation is good sometimes" is the kind of thought process that gets us garbage hierarchical politics in the first place. WTF.

I know this is completely off topic, but that in Berlin techno clubs everyone wears black was at least originally smth not to stand out as different, but to be as a unity like a inseparable black mass moving to music. But this is in such a hyper individualistic environment quite forgotten and even still keeping the black aesthetic, almost everyone tries to stand out, be or rather look unique, different, anti, etc.

Socialism would take too many evenings - an aphorism attributed to Oscar Wilde

First 10-mins of this podcast: czcams.com/video/gU2ZgaQ_H-Y/video.htmlsi=icU2gApw2K0y2tvv

You guys and Zizek both battle a straw man version of the argument against alienation. We could very well overcome alienation in labor and not force everybody to go to meetings every day, the two things aren't even related, the problem is completely in your conceptualization of communism (and his). The point is social reality needs to be made transparent at the level of labor, even when it "operates behind our backs" we have to set that process in motion consciously. There was NO argument in Marx against alienation that demanded everybody go to meetings, but this straw man (at least for Zizek) is very convenient to keep doing liberalism. It's nonsense.

I watch all yalls videos and never like or comment but the Taylor Swift pun in the title got me on this one

You unfunny bozos are a fine example of the misery of philosophy.

Christianity can be liberating and good for community if they reject capitalism and market logic while putting human needs first

Zizek is paranoid anti Russia weirdo

I mean the obvious retort to choosing a non-expert and non-professional, random or not, is that someone with more knowledge in the domain would make better decisions. If the task is to find a substitute for gasoline to fill up a car tank, clearly you don't want to present equally weighted proposals to a decision makes who has never seen a car. In your discussion, you then end up "why even have a person"? Why not just roll a dice? Well then all of the politics just gets shifted to those who come up with proposals. Random selection of decision makes has been studied a lot. Voting theory, different voting system, this is a mathematical field (e.g. a known gem being "Arrows impossibility theorem", a purely mathematical result.) And inevitably, instead of random picking answers, you'd rather have a anglo which also takes into account facts - and then you're just in an AI technocracy. So let me phrase this hindrance as a question to you: If your system was implemented, why wouldn't people end up trying to design a machine that instead of the d20 takes into account some fact. Bounds the decisions by what's reasonable. That water in the tank makes no sense at all. If you random choose, politics will be about who makes the proposals and how they are weighted.

The thing is that the European voting got so god damned bad. In Romania for example was surprisingly bad low key, even if folks voted but y

Lottery based monarchy? Paul Cockshott, who is a maoist and thus very far from Zizek philosophically, also proposed that. Is this the new leftist trend?

Wow, this is going to be a long, quiet car ride home.

1:00:40 with the dice comment, to go Shakespeare and Latin that die rolling is divination and is evoked several times by Bill in his Julius Caesar, when oracles consulted birds or dice and in the same act the famous line the fault is not in our stars but we do not have the stomach to take charge and act, for unlike the gods we are underlings with a belly that can be stabbed (which sets up the future murder.) And the selection of lots for a jury that too is divination, and we call it chance but the ancients would see it as fate and fortune, the goddess Fortuna or Tyche who was married to the seize the day god, last son of Zeus Tempo / Occasio and you also see his name all the time as Caerus which Walter B, Gramsci lots of early 1900s people talked about with messianic time. (which I think Zizek has written on, so he is reusing his old stuff, just hiding the link.) thanks for the pod and god my comment is long.

47:00 I think Adorno wrote about that in The Jargon of Authenticity

Nice episode. I had to read like the first three chapters of that book (Spanish translation) for my Ethics course, 11 years ago. I should read it again in full I think, but my first impression of the book wasn't that great.

46:05: why communism will never work. Imagine if a large portion of your life was school council meetings!

This lottery monarch would have to be anonymous no? Otherwise opponents could threaten or bribe.

Nested council structures can help to deal with scaling up political delegation. Anark has 2 videos that go into this "when consensus fail" and "after the revolution". I would also look at the decision making structures of groups like the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, The Zapatistas, Cecosesola, and Fejuve.

D20 Democrats unite!

Zizek keeps winning. Hegelian monarchy is a very cogent conceptualization of governance. There is a great PhD defense of the Hegelian monarchy from the late 90s that I recommend everyone check out.

From the start - people not liking Kant: well......I don't think you can have the phenomenologists without Kant and furthermore let's not forget Lacan's Real: the subject never connects to it's object. I've always thought of the phenomenologists as spring boarding off of Kant (reactionary that is)...which is a very Hegelian dialectical thing to do. I am not criticizing Kant, Hegel, or any of the phenomenologists nor do I criticize the post Kantians who try to bring us to our experience as "real enough' to which I think continues to be our only possible path out of nihilistic self-destruction. While I admit we are plagued by the asymptotic strivings - we must as Kant asserts try anyway.