Has accelerationism ever actually worked? It's easy to say that when you're not affected by those things. I like my politicians to reaffirm they support my right to exist. He's saying the same...
Has accelerationism ever actually worked?
But as long as they talk and talk and talk some more – about abortion and transgender rights and racism (not that these aren’t relevant issues),
It's easy to say that when you're not affected by those things. I like my politicians to reaffirm they support my right to exist. He's saying the same thing so many right-wing people say, "just stop talking about those certain things and you'll win for sure!" But in effect that translates to being forgotten about.
If I wasn't living on Earth then it'd be an interesting path to watch the world take. But throwing out the old world to start fresh isn't good for the actual members of society.
If I wasn't living on Earth then it'd be an interesting path to watch the world take. But throwing out the old world to start fresh isn't good for the actual members of society.
Yeah, it's the kind of argument that comes from a position of unabashed privilege. I also don't quite follow how he goes on about needing a true leftist movement on the one hand, but then saying...
Yeah, it's the kind of argument that comes from a position of unabashed privilege. I also don't quite follow how he goes on about needing a true leftist movement on the one hand, but then saying these are the people who need to compromise for the sake of practicality.
Also...
The fear that a Trump victory would turn the US into a fascist state is a ridiculous exaggeration: the US has a rich enough texture of divergent civic and political institutions so that their direct fascist Gleichshaltung cannot be enacted (in contrast to, say, France where the victory of Le Pen would have been much more dangerous).
...sounds hilariously naive. Like, to the extent that I'm not sure if Zizek is being sincere, or just being provocative. There's a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis titled It Can't Happen Here that mocks that exact idea. I don't know how that can come from someone who knows who Mitch McConnell is and what he does, much less the broad Republican tactics to game the system. It just feels like a weak attempt to mollify people who would be understandably horrified by the consequences of his accelerationism.
It seems like his thesis is, "it needs to get worse to get better, but it won't get that much worse, and even when it does, those people (who are not me) need to compromise, so we can stop compromising."
I have read dumber shit, but when it comes to a world reknowned philosopher, it becomes notable. Who knows how many families suffered at the southern border just because Trump was elected. The...
I have read dumber shit, but when it comes to a world reknowned philosopher, it becomes notable.
Who knows how many families suffered at the southern border just because Trump was elected. The whole world's economy took a hit. We have economic wars going on. People's lives were ruined. Racism and other bigotry gets support. But well, it steers us to the "right" direction, so it was all good! Accelerationist BS.
This is the problem with all revolutionist no matter what their ideology be: they can't empathise with persons as individuals equal to them, but a chessboard to do politic maneuvres on. They are blinded to it by their imaginary utopias. If a few thousand or million people will suffer for it, so be it! They will be right, so who cares if some n***s suffer or a few Mexican bastards were taken away from their parents! /s
i mean, if a few thousand people suffer for a more just and equal world for everyone then yeah, i'm going to probably take that--i just don't think that electing donald trump is how that happens....
If a few thousand or million people will suffer for it, so be it!
i mean, if a few thousand people suffer for a more just and equal world for everyone then yeah, i'm going to probably take that--i just don't think that electing donald trump is how that happens. the idea that all revolutionary ideology is bad because some people suffer for it and some people can't be given empathy in such cases is kinda silly, given that the ends in almost all revolutions do justify the means. i don't think most people in former colonial holdings for example are particularly complaining about no longer being members of colonial holdings, even though a pretty large number of the states born of colonial legacies won their independence through grotesque wars and violence of one sort or the other directed against colonials and their families, and many of those states still struggle to be cohesive.
I would differentiate what you talk about subsequently after this sentence with revolution: colonial liberation was/is not exactly the same thing with what socialists or far-righters mean when...
the idea that all revolutionary ideology is bad because some people suffer for it and some people can't be given empathy in such cases is kinda silly, given that the ends in almost all revolutions do justify the means.
I would differentiate what you talk about subsequently after this sentence with revolution: colonial liberation was/is not exactly the same thing with what socialists or far-righters mean when they talk about revolution, IMO. For a people that suffer under colonialism, there's simply no way out: you have a stronger, immoral, selfish power that eats you up from within; whereas more ideological revolutionary efforts are in a different league where adversities and The Good & Bad ™ are not so clearly distinct: it is ideological, and a revolution turns what needs to be an intellectual debate into a fist fight, and the strongest survives, not the honest and/or innocent. Just like in Animal Farm.
Revolutions are violent, and unless there is no alternative, I totally support avoiding them at all costs. It leaves a big part of a population, the losers, with a spite for the revolutionaries. For example, today, we still suffer from the ramifications of Ataturk's revolution in Turkey, because half of the people have not really digested it despite the nearly a hundread years that passed since. If it was significantly greater or less than half, a revolution would not have been necessary anyways. Revolutions happen and tend to foster equally strong opposing sides in societies they happen within. Whereas reforms and gradual progress tend to stick around and create way less bitterness among the sides. It takes longer, but is not a house of cards like revolutions tend to be.
Revolutions always have an ideal and a baggage of ideologies attached to them. The main differentiation that I was trying to make is between a violent quest for rights in a situation where a...
Exemplary
Revolutions always have an ideal and a baggage of ideologies attached to them. The main differentiation that I was trying to make is between a violent quest for rights in a situation where a progressive approach is not possible, and a situation where that is not the case.
The Turkish Independence was a revolution. No non-violent method was possible. It was driven by a set of ideals, and the set was even modified when pragmatic needs pressured the leaders. It was also anti-colonial, both against Western colonial forces and the House of the Ottomans which was indeed a colonial power. The war for independence was followed by a period of revolutions that strived to change the very fabric of the people. There were two results to this decade and a half of revolution: 1) Turkey emerged as a nascent secular social-democrat republic, and 2) the speed and intensity of the revolution created the very situation that I described in my above comment: a century long polarisation: Turkey was either under a right wing religious popularist party, or was recovering from a coup d'etat. We're stilll having problems with the very basics of democracy and community because of the bitterness and the spite that we inherited from the revolution. Revolution was for good, the ideals were mostly good (minus the nationalism, it's never good---but that's another discussion); but there might be a huge gap between what's good for someone and what they want, which is the case today for a half of the population here. The only way to bridge this gap is discussion, but all the misunderstanding and spite and broken pride heritage from the revolution undermines it, and we're only taking the baby steps today to overcome all that. And those steps are on ice: so slippery, so fragile, it seems impossible to walk on as an adult, let alone a toddler.
The path you go matters: say there is a beach down the cliff, would you prefer the walkway that's a bit longer but safe, or would you just let yourself roll down the cliff, hurting yourself, hitting the ground hard, then going to the beach bleeding and maybe even having bruised or broken some bones here and there? We fell down the cliff, now we're limping around; our friends think were some cringy dumb psycho and avoid us, and the onlookers are trying to reason about us but fail to do. It is the same beach, the same one that everybody did end up at and enjoy, well, except us, we can't enjoy it: we don't have enough hands to press ice onto every bruise, in the meantime we're finding thorns everywhere on our body and they don't finish, and we feel kinda dizzy after all that hitting rocks and thorny bushes. That we tripped or someone pushed us does not really matter, does not really make it less hurtful or heal the bruises.
IDK if I succeed or fail to make the point here: the means matter. They matter so much. That we were constrained to pick it does not mean we won't suffer the consequences.
there's also the fact that you can point to many examples of revolutions both violent and peaceful that have genuinely lead to better outcomes for the people living in those states than trying to...
You say that revolutionaries are happy to condemn people to death and suffering, and the long way is safer. I can say that the long way condemns people that are suffering and dying right now to continue to do so, and that the 'safety' you're picturing is a privileged illusion.
there's also the fact that you can point to many examples of revolutions both violent and peaceful that have genuinely lead to better outcomes for the people living in those states than trying to just reform the system organically. for example: the june struggle in south korea which secured the democratization of the nation after decades of military rule and smaller struggles against the south korean government; the russian revolution after which the newly-formed USSR rapidly went from an agrarian-dominated state to an industrial superpower and in the process greatly increased its standards of living for its citizens from how they'd lived under the tsar; the coup which put thomas sankara into power in burkina faso who subsequently sought to make the nation self-sufficient, inoculated the population against disease, outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy, and combated desertification among other things, etc.
sometimes, the short way absolutely does work out for people much better than the long way, even if that short way is only for a short time.
Brilliant article, really captures how ideologically shattering the 2016 election was for the Establishment at large. Very interesting how you have two radically different approaches to...
Brilliant article, really captures how ideologically shattering the 2016 election was for the Establishment at large. Very interesting how you have two radically different approaches to undermining the system on the left (Sanders) and the right (Trump himself). Civil war is semantics; Zizek is correct when he points out that identity politics, as championed by the left, are really just narrative devices to allow the non-marginalised to capitalise on the marginalised.
The slow and eventual collapse of each side is predicated on class struggle as whole, just from differing viewpoints. Surely now it must be acknowledged that the system is not working, that this is not, for any intents and purposes, a functioning democracy - red versus blue needs to be replaced with something more partisan.
As far as I can tell, both parties have been hollowed by various representatives of the lobbying industry, various war hawks and the perpetuation of the petrodollar. The aftermath of 2016 has illustrated how corrupt and hollow the system has become - it's no longer about voting for a candidate, it's about replacing the system entirely.
Yes, but this is just Steve Bannon's argument, down to "if we break everything, the good guys are going to win and rebuild, totes realz." And I get that things weren't great even before Trump was...
The aftermath of 2016 has illustrated how corrupt and hollow the system has become - it's no longer about voting for a candidate, it's about replacing the system entirely.
Yes, but this is just Steve Bannon's argument, down to "if we break everything, the good guys are going to win and rebuild, totes realz." And I get that things weren't great even before Trump was in charge, and that Zizek's endorsement didn't tip the scales, and if Clinton won, and we would have a lot of the same problems, but aggravated. However, it still seems selfish to have rooted for the Empire to blow up Alderaan because now we can finally have a proper revolution.
i mean yes, he is, but this isn't really one of the takes that makes him crazy, it's just a kinda dumb take. he's basically making a case for accelerationism here on the basis that this is the...
i mean yes, he is, but this isn't really one of the takes that makes him crazy, it's just a kinda dumb take. he's basically making a case for accelerationism here on the basis that this is the only way the democratic party can be moved to become truly leftist--which is, of course, a mindnumbingly bad gamble if you're not a white male, but also broadly accurate if you actually game out why the democratic party is currently moving to the left (a broad political movement pushed it to where it is now and was radicalized, strengthened, and backed up further when hillary clinton's relative centrism which was supposedly the only way to win over voters didn't work out like it was supposed to and elected a dude who has no idea what the fuck he's doing).
That's extremely dangerous fortune-telling. The US gave the fucking nuclear football to an impulsive and belligerent narcissist. There are a thousand ways this can wrong.
he's basically making a case for accelerationism here on the basis that this is the only way the democratic party can be moved to become truly leftist
That's extremely dangerous fortune-telling. The US gave the fucking nuclear football to an impulsive and belligerent narcissist. There are a thousand ways this can wrong.
Yeah, the damage Trump does on the international stage (climate, iran, DPRK, china, europe..) is pretty damn bad. Hillary wouldn't have been bad, just not really good either. I don't see the...
Yeah, the damage Trump does on the international stage (climate, iran, DPRK, china, europe..) is pretty damn bad. Hillary wouldn't have been bad, just not really good either. I don't see the acceleration towards election reform (im(very)ho the core issue of the US) by maybe one or two election cycles as worth the damage of trump. What Zizek says here (again, imvho) is that the damage done by the election system needs to hit hard (Trump), in order for reform to get underway. He's welcoming the most negative consequence of the current system as a catalyst for change away from said system, not even trying to avoid it. It's like saying that a climate crisis is a necessary condition for ecological reform.
He really is an edgelord of a philosopher sometimes.
If I'm allowed to go a bit off-topic here, when he came to Istanbul a few years ago, I felt like going tthere o sit there and listen to him---I was getting into philosophy, and this one's a...
If I'm allowed to go a bit off-topic here, when he came to Istanbul a few years ago, I felt like going tthere o sit there and listen to him---I was getting into philosophy, and this one's a philosopher, so why not. When I arrived at Santral Istanbul, the venue, I saw a queue out there even tho the conference was to be started maybe more than fifteen minutes ago. I asked the guys in front of me in the queue what's going on, and one of them told me that the seats were full, and they were waiting to get in to listen to him standing. At that point I was sure as heck that there wasn't anything good to come out of this man, if in a place like Istanbul you can gather this many people, you're either a populist or a good showman. So I left the queue and went about with my day, go grab a coffee or something. Today I see that he's part one, part the other: a populist showman, a pop-philosopher. I'm happy I didn't sit through his lecture.
Has accelerationism ever actually worked?
It's easy to say that when you're not affected by those things. I like my politicians to reaffirm they support my right to exist. He's saying the same thing so many right-wing people say, "just stop talking about those certain things and you'll win for sure!" But in effect that translates to being forgotten about.
no, lol.
If I wasn't living on Earth then it'd be an interesting path to watch the world take. But throwing out the old world to start fresh isn't good for the actual members of society.
Yeah, it's the kind of argument that comes from a position of unabashed privilege. I also don't quite follow how he goes on about needing a true leftist movement on the one hand, but then saying these are the people who need to compromise for the sake of practicality.
Also...
...sounds hilariously naive. Like, to the extent that I'm not sure if Zizek is being sincere, or just being provocative. There's a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis titled It Can't Happen Here that mocks that exact idea. I don't know how that can come from someone who knows who Mitch McConnell is and what he does, much less the broad Republican tactics to game the system. It just feels like a weak attempt to mollify people who would be understandably horrified by the consequences of his accelerationism.
It seems like his thesis is, "it needs to get worse to get better, but it won't get that much worse, and even when it does, those people (who are not me) need to compromise, so we can stop compromising."
As a general rule I assume both Zizek and Peterson are, at any given point, just trying to stir the pot.
Fair enough. :p At least Peterson is easier to see through, since he usually just implies things and then plays dumb.
I have read dumber shit, but when it comes to a world reknowned philosopher, it becomes notable.
Who knows how many families suffered at the southern border just because Trump was elected. The whole world's economy took a hit. We have economic wars going on. People's lives were ruined. Racism and other bigotry gets support. But well, it steers us to the "right" direction, so it was all good! Accelerationist BS.
This is the problem with all revolutionist no matter what their ideology be: they can't empathise with persons as individuals equal to them, but a chessboard to do politic maneuvres on. They are blinded to it by their imaginary utopias. If a few thousand or million people will suffer for it, so be it! They will be right, so who cares if some n***s suffer or a few Mexican bastards were taken away from their parents! /s
i mean, if a few thousand people suffer for a more just and equal world for everyone then yeah, i'm going to probably take that--i just don't think that electing donald trump is how that happens. the idea that all revolutionary ideology is bad because some people suffer for it and some people can't be given empathy in such cases is kinda silly, given that the ends in almost all revolutions do justify the means. i don't think most people in former colonial holdings for example are particularly complaining about no longer being members of colonial holdings, even though a pretty large number of the states born of colonial legacies won their independence through grotesque wars and violence of one sort or the other directed against colonials and their families, and many of those states still struggle to be cohesive.
I would differentiate what you talk about subsequently after this sentence with revolution: colonial liberation was/is not exactly the same thing with what socialists or far-righters mean when they talk about revolution, IMO. For a people that suffer under colonialism, there's simply no way out: you have a stronger, immoral, selfish power that eats you up from within; whereas more ideological revolutionary efforts are in a different league where adversities and The Good & Bad ™ are not so clearly distinct: it is ideological, and a revolution turns what needs to be an intellectual debate into a fist fight, and the strongest survives, not the honest and/or innocent. Just like in Animal Farm.
Revolutions are violent, and unless there is no alternative, I totally support avoiding them at all costs. It leaves a big part of a population, the losers, with a spite for the revolutionaries. For example, today, we still suffer from the ramifications of Ataturk's revolution in Turkey, because half of the people have not really digested it despite the nearly a hundread years that passed since. If it was significantly greater or less than half, a revolution would not have been necessary anyways. Revolutions happen and tend to foster equally strong opposing sides in societies they happen within. Whereas reforms and gradual progress tend to stick around and create way less bitterness among the sides. It takes longer, but is not a house of cards like revolutions tend to be.
Revolutions always have an ideal and a baggage of ideologies attached to them. The main differentiation that I was trying to make is between a violent quest for rights in a situation where a progressive approach is not possible, and a situation where that is not the case.
The Turkish Independence was a revolution. No non-violent method was possible. It was driven by a set of ideals, and the set was even modified when pragmatic needs pressured the leaders. It was also anti-colonial, both against Western colonial forces and the House of the Ottomans which was indeed a colonial power. The war for independence was followed by a period of revolutions that strived to change the very fabric of the people. There were two results to this decade and a half of revolution: 1) Turkey emerged as a nascent secular social-democrat republic, and 2) the speed and intensity of the revolution created the very situation that I described in my above comment: a century long polarisation: Turkey was either under a right wing religious popularist party, or was recovering from a coup d'etat. We're stilll having problems with the very basics of democracy and community because of the bitterness and the spite that we inherited from the revolution. Revolution was for good, the ideals were mostly good (minus the nationalism, it's never good---but that's another discussion); but there might be a huge gap between what's good for someone and what they want, which is the case today for a half of the population here. The only way to bridge this gap is discussion, but all the misunderstanding and spite and broken pride heritage from the revolution undermines it, and we're only taking the baby steps today to overcome all that. And those steps are on ice: so slippery, so fragile, it seems impossible to walk on as an adult, let alone a toddler.
The path you go matters: say there is a beach down the cliff, would you prefer the walkway that's a bit longer but safe, or would you just let yourself roll down the cliff, hurting yourself, hitting the ground hard, then going to the beach bleeding and maybe even having bruised or broken some bones here and there? We fell down the cliff, now we're limping around; our friends think were some cringy dumb psycho and avoid us, and the onlookers are trying to reason about us but fail to do. It is the same beach, the same one that everybody did end up at and enjoy, well, except us, we can't enjoy it: we don't have enough hands to press ice onto every bruise, in the meantime we're finding thorns everywhere on our body and they don't finish, and we feel kinda dizzy after all that hitting rocks and thorny bushes. That we tripped or someone pushed us does not really matter, does not really make it less hurtful or heal the bruises.
IDK if I succeed or fail to make the point here: the means matter. They matter so much. That we were constrained to pick it does not mean we won't suffer the consequences.
there's also the fact that you can point to many examples of revolutions both violent and peaceful that have genuinely lead to better outcomes for the people living in those states than trying to just reform the system organically. for example: the june struggle in south korea which secured the democratization of the nation after decades of military rule and smaller struggles against the south korean government; the russian revolution after which the newly-formed USSR rapidly went from an agrarian-dominated state to an industrial superpower and in the process greatly increased its standards of living for its citizens from how they'd lived under the tsar; the coup which put thomas sankara into power in burkina faso who subsequently sought to make the nation self-sufficient, inoculated the population against disease, outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy, and combated desertification among other things, etc.
sometimes, the short way absolutely does work out for people much better than the long way, even if that short way is only for a short time.
Brilliant article, really captures how ideologically shattering the 2016 election was for the Establishment at large. Very interesting how you have two radically different approaches to undermining the system on the left (Sanders) and the right (Trump himself). Civil war is semantics; Zizek is correct when he points out that identity politics, as championed by the left, are really just narrative devices to allow the non-marginalised to capitalise on the marginalised.
The slow and eventual collapse of each side is predicated on class struggle as whole, just from differing viewpoints. Surely now it must be acknowledged that the system is not working, that this is not, for any intents and purposes, a functioning democracy - red versus blue needs to be replaced with something more partisan.
As far as I can tell, both parties have been hollowed by various representatives of the lobbying industry, various war hawks and the perpetuation of the petrodollar. The aftermath of 2016 has illustrated how corrupt and hollow the system has become - it's no longer about voting for a candidate, it's about replacing the system entirely.
Yes, but this is just Steve Bannon's argument, down to "if we break everything, the good guys are going to win and rebuild, totes realz." And I get that things weren't great even before Trump was in charge, and that Zizek's endorsement didn't tip the scales, and if Clinton won, and we would have a lot of the same problems, but aggravated. However, it still seems selfish to have rooted for the Empire to blow up Alderaan because now we can finally have a proper revolution.
The problem is that there is no guarantee that the good guys are going to be the ones to win and rebuild.
Of course the good guys are going to win!
The question is who the bad guys are going to be.
Sure, the people that win are the ones that will be called the "good guys" afterward.
So Zizek really is crazy. Noted.
i mean yes, he is, but this isn't really one of the takes that makes him crazy, it's just a kinda dumb take. he's basically making a case for accelerationism here on the basis that this is the only way the democratic party can be moved to become truly leftist--which is, of course, a mindnumbingly bad gamble if you're not a white male, but also broadly accurate if you actually game out why the democratic party is currently moving to the left (a broad political movement pushed it to where it is now and was radicalized, strengthened, and backed up further when hillary clinton's relative centrism which was supposedly the only way to win over voters didn't work out like it was supposed to and elected a dude who has no idea what the fuck he's doing).
That's extremely dangerous fortune-telling. The US gave the fucking nuclear football to an impulsive and belligerent narcissist. There are a thousand ways this can wrong.
Yeah, the damage Trump does on the international stage (climate, iran, DPRK, china, europe..) is pretty damn bad. Hillary wouldn't have been bad, just not really good either. I don't see the acceleration towards election reform (im(very)ho the core issue of the US) by maybe one or two election cycles as worth the damage of trump. What Zizek says here (again, imvho) is that the damage done by the election system needs to hit hard (Trump), in order for reform to get underway. He's welcoming the most negative consequence of the current system as a catalyst for change away from said system, not even trying to avoid it. It's like saying that a climate crisis is a necessary condition for ecological reform.
He really is an edgelord of a philosopher sometimes.
If I'm allowed to go a bit off-topic here, when he came to Istanbul a few years ago, I felt like going tthere o sit there and listen to him---I was getting into philosophy, and this one's a philosopher, so why not. When I arrived at Santral Istanbul, the venue, I saw a queue out there even tho the conference was to be started maybe more than fifteen minutes ago. I asked the guys in front of me in the queue what's going on, and one of them told me that the seats were full, and they were waiting to get in to listen to him standing. At that point I was sure as heck that there wasn't anything good to come out of this man, if in a place like Istanbul you can gather this many people, you're either a populist or a good showman. So I left the queue and went about with my day, go grab a coffee or something. Today I see that he's part one, part the other: a populist showman, a pop-philosopher. I'm happy I didn't sit through his lecture.
Yep. He's a loon.