Understanding Zizek on Ukraine and Arabs

In the case of nuclear or radiological consequences, people living near potential targets, such as military bases and chemical plants, may be advised to evacuate ok so we're recording so you can start by telling us why you're not live . I'm not live because I'm speaking to the Scottish Parliament. I'm going to Scotland tomorrow and I hope I can convince them to think twice before legislating to allow assisted dying and it's a really complicated issue because it's something I was always in favor of you know I'm a liberal guy and I think you should know how to be free of ending your life, particularly you know, while you should be brought into your life if you're suffering um and I never thought about any of that in Canada when it was being discussed, you know, there were safeguards in place and it seemed like yeah, it was the logical thing to do and then , over time, these stories began to leak out and I realized that we were I didn't allow my sister to die because we had become more liberal, but because we were becoming more indifferent to human life and the value of human life and I I realized it was coming from a really dark place and that's what I believe, I believe you can.

I have witnessed death if you have a commitment to human life as something extraordinarily valuable, but if you have the opposite, which is what I think is happening, it is a very dangerous thing and this is what is happening in Canada, the problem is that when people were legislating or pushing for this legislation and when they do it in all these different countries they will focus on the kind of cases that no one has problems with like you at the end of your life and you are in a lot of pain and people say Yes, of course, but the problem is that everything is maintained well, so we had some technical difficulties at the beginning.

My mic just wasn't plugged in now, that would have been something we picked up on when Ashley joined the stream, she would have told me hey I can't hear you and I would have looked and seen that my mic wasn't plugged in but I didn't realize that , so I'm interrupting the broadcast. To repeat what I said before, which is that, well, two things, one apparently is that the sound on the pre-recorded video is not good, so I'm going to try a different approach to showing it, we have a different approach, but also, hey . uh let me tell you what I was quietly talking about earlier, which is that on Saturday we're releasing a film on our YouTube channel by David Shields, uh, it's the 29-minute core of his documentary about how we got here.

We are publishing his book with the same title, we encourage everyone to watch it at 9:00 am Pacific time. The sound will work. I have tried. There will be sound for this. It will be very exciting. It's also in color, so that's another one. reason to go and look, if you show up at 9:00 a.m. PST, you'll be able to chat with Spencer Leonard, who's a historian, and he'll conduct a sort of automated review of the movie, in the chat. We will also have a Zoom call afterward for people who participate. The reason we are trying to organize a watch party and get everyone to watch the video at 9:00 am. m. on Saturday is that the more people watch a video in the first hour, the more The algorithm thinks: Oh, this is very popular.

I should share it with more people. It drives him. We get more views. We get more excited people who want to help me run the technical side of the operation. And you know, little by little we are conquering the. world, so please show up at 9:00 a.m. m. This Saturday, which is March 30, watch the 29-minute video, it's very good, it's very interesting, professionally done and, you know, it sounds, color all the works and let's see if we can get it. this works to show the prerecorded video I made with Ashley let's see where it would be here as a file on my computer instead of well actually people were saying the sound was fixed let me see if they can run it again that way and what you guys think about it now let me know in the chat if it's working or not so here we go we're recording so you can start by telling us why.

I'm not live I'm not live because I'm speaking to the Scottish Parliament. I'm going to Scotland tomorrow and I hope I can convince them to think twice before legislating to allow assisted dying and it's a really complicated issue because it's something I was always in favor of. You know I'm the liberal type and I think you should be free to end your life. In particular you know well that you should be free to end your life if you are suffering um and I never thought about that in Canada when it was being discussed you know there were safeguards in place and it seemed like yeah it was the logical thing to do and then over time , these stories started leaking and uh.

I realized that we were not allowing our sister to die because we had become more liberal but because we were becoming more indifferent to human life and the value of human life and I realized that it was coming from a really dark place and what I think. You can receive an assisted death if you have a commitment to human life as something extraordinarily valuable, but if you have the opposite, which is what I think is happening, it is a very dangerous thing and this is what is happening in Canada, the problem. is that when people were legislating or lobbying for this legislation and when they're lobbying for this legislation in all these different countries, they're going to focus on the kind of cases that no one has a problem with like you at the end of your life and you.

You are in a lot of pain and people say yes, of course, but the problem is that it keeps you expanding and there is nothing you can do to stop it from expanding because it falls into discrimination territory, so what you are saying is like if you were discriminating against this particular group by not allowing them to have the five to die, then that's how it opens up, so it's like, oh, we should open it up for this group and we should open it up for this group and now in Canada, what's the point? Are they discussing opening it to people with mental illnesses and children?

M mature miners using the concept of competition Gil, this idea that you should be able to let these kinds of people know the kinds of things that allowed, uh, abortion is really important, allowed decisions to be made about abortion or about the birth control for minors because the argument was good, like you could understand that having a child is going to cause you a lot of problems at least at that age. that's an

understanding

you can have and now that's used to say, well, what about mature minors? These people can also make these types of decisions and that while I was writing an article for compact um about a month ago I was doing a literature review which I normally do before writing an article, I look at the type of recent articles that have been written and it was just an avalanche of articles about allowing people who are in poverty to continue living or forcing them to continue living is harmful and since we are not going to end poverty in the short term or end social problems in the short term , it is harmful, these newspapers argued: "not allowing us this", dying for people in poverty, not allowing us this. to die for people in situations of injustice so this is what happened um so it is very worrying that it is like the one I wrote at the end of that compact piece with this is a policy that emerges in the politics of the Void where we have not been able to save the abyss between what is and what should be and we live, I talk about this a lot, you know in my work, we live in this kind of abyss in the void, uh, in that world, in a world where we have never been able to cross into a future that we know is possible but that we have not been able to create.

We live in this kind of interrogation name, um, and we started throwing people into that a little bit, you know. We are never going to solve these problems, why not just allow people who are suffering, not even allow people, but how can you deny people who are suffering the right to die? This is where we are and I think it's not a good place to be, yeah. It seems to me that many of the problems we face on the left, such as socialists, come down to this difficulty in creating a political project in the context of the contradictions of the present without falling.

Falling into contradiction and taking one side or the other in a way that only deepens the contradiction makes it harder to overcome and this is really why overcoming is called overcoming, it is to try to develop a political project that wins. . I don't fall into that trap, so I hope you have luck tomorrow, but today we're going to talk about this appearance that SVO xek made on Piers Morgan, it circulated on Twitter and went a little viral. People were outraged. for um what the SLO J said um there are some clips that I've taken here from the interview but the one I want to start with is one that I think was circulated and that people were most upset with and we'll do that.

We'll discuss it later, so here's the clip of SL Eject on Piers Morgan, let me talk to you first about Ukraine, Russia. I recently had a guy named John Mimer argue to me that Russia was provoked into this war, they should do it. They don't blame me for it and so on. I have a very different opinion. What is your opinion on where we are with this war? This conversation is getting very bad because again there is no opposition. I agree with you, but what may be a surprise to you is that they agree with you as a leftist, that is, don't listen to people, my God, what Russia, its official media put on Putin and so on, what What are they saying, some of my crazy leftist friends even claim, but anyway Russia is against it, so it must be good, are they crazy?

Look at who Russia supports in Western Europe, just the radical right wingers. The alternative for Germany in Germany and secondly, you know what Putin said on the day of the invasion, February 21 and then February 23, a year ago. or two years ago, he even said something terrifying, he said that the real name of Russia should be the Russia of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, so he wants to take away from the Ukrainians something that, paradoxically, I am very critical of Lening, uh, uh, the first Bevic gave them this is. It is clear that Putin has not been elected in any way, my God no, he is a dark conservative religious fanatic.

So, to provoke people, as you know, I think I said give even nuclear weapons to Ukraine, and at that point I said everything, yes, I think. It was a terrible mistake that Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear capability because it seems to me that that was just a green light for Putin to then absolutely invade them. I mean, okay, I'm either right or wrong at that point. I'm not sure it wasn't Putin yet, he was yelling well, but they should have taken this precaution, yes, because it is clear here that I do not agree with mimer, it is clear that it is not just Ukraine, it is clear that it started with grusia Georgia cria mova y So no, Russia openly says that it is in an expansionist imperial state and I think the longer we tolerate it, the more horrible the final confrontation will be.

Yes, that's why, by the way, I read the media as much as possible. You know, I hope Okay here too one of the most stupid and politically correct pacifist sayings is that an enemy is someone whose work you didn't listen to, no sorry, I read Hitler and came after reading that he was even more my enemy, That's why I think we should read what Horrors. They are saying, hey, the Russian media has a complete return to religious fundamentalism, they portray the war in Ukraine as the war of Christian civilization against demonic Satanism and so on, yes, I mean, they are no less than Arabs, today they are fanatics in the worst sense.

Religious fundamentalists have to be on top unconditionally. The West has to stop this ambiguous game of trying to support Ukraine, but not too much so as not to upset Russia too much and so as not to harm our standard of living too much. We're in a state of emergency in Europe, so what did you think of that? um Ashley. One of the things that struck me when I was listening to this interview was that many times when a conflict breaks out we have a tendency to look. for the good guys, who are the good guys, which side should we be on and obviously you know you're on the side of the people who got caught up in all of this and you hope they don't kill innocent people.

That kind of thing, but in terms of the leading actors, sometimes we have to understand that there are no good guys, you know, and that's something that I think we tried to convey around October 7, that just because Israel had done things horrible, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that what Hamas had done was just and good and a lot of people were pretty angry at us for saying that, but I think that's often the case, especially when it comes to capitalist conflicts and imperial expansion, as if obviously not I might be against that, obviously, you have to be against that when it comes to Israel, um, but that doesn't mean that anyone who reaches out is your friend, well, what caught my attention, I mean, you know , The first thing to do. object and what J said was that she believes the United States should continue to arm and fully support Ukraine because Russia is evilparticularly small in the world, represents a kind of Christian fundamentalism and is a liberal State. and that he has imperialist plans on Europe and that he needs to be stopped, so these are pretty standard talking points that you would hear from the neoconservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties, you would hear them from the Conservatives in the UK and probably the Labor party. from K Starmer too, but the difficulty I am going to have, we are going to reach the same point and it is us. this is called both Sidis.

I think you know that's what they'll accuse us of. St um, but both earthquakes are good. I'm going to claim um because in some it's everything except the prescription which is to fund the war to the bottom and uh to uh you know, try to stop Russia now instead of having to deal with a new invasion later. I think we could put all of that aside as misguided, but there is some truth to the idea that the Russian state is less using fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, Orthodox Christianity to reinforce its ideological dominance of the nation. That does present war as a shock.

Clash of civilizations and the West against the Christian East. I guess in this case. or the religious East. You know the great Russian Empire, um, but I think the key to

understanding

the reality of the situation is to ask to what extent there is political freedom in any of the nations that are at war, to what extent do the people in these nations have certain control and they say, and you know, about their government, the states and you know, in Ukraine, the level of freedom is quite restricted, the government is known to be corrupt and run by oligarchs from the beginning.

Really since the fall of the Soviet Union and has never completely overcome that left. We just did an interview with asinko uh vmir asinko, who is a Vero writer and a Ukrainian uh part of the new left in Ukraine um and who has fled Ukraine. Um and you know the interview was about the ways in which a socialist left simply failed to fully emerge in the post-Soviet context and the difficulty is that there was the way in which the leftists themselves were divided among themselves. and they had different class interests and they represented different parts of the country and you know, rural and urban areas, etc., um and uh, Ukraine, where the Communist Party is illegal, the socialist parties are illegal, there is no freedom of the press, they are enclosing dissonants.

The war is those journalists who are dying in prison. It's certainly not on the side of liberalism in any meaningful way and of course you know Russia is like, very bad when it comes to political freedom, the people there don't have it. any ability to legally organize for an opposition to the parent regime and its constitutionally protected free speech laws, actually, you know, Article 29 of the Russian Constitution explicitly says that it guarantees that there will be no censorship except what it actually does. institutionalize and enshrine forms of censorship that say you know propaganda or campaigns to incite hatred and national racial or religious social struggle is inadmissible national racial social propaganda Religious or linguistic superiority is prohibited um and yes, you know it says that everyone will have the right to seek to obtain transfer produce and disseminate information by any legal means the list of information that constitutes the state secret will be established by federal law freedom of the media will be guaranteed censorship is said to be the mass of freedom of the media censorship will be guaranteed to be prohibited, so this basically defines how the Russian State and on what basis the Russian State can pass laws to limit speech in Russia, while in the United States, the First Amendment says that Congress will not pass no law that inhibits or limits freedom of expression.

That's it, there are none of these loopholes, and yet the United States, as the superpower behind Ukraine, is currently in the midst of developing mechanisms for freedom of speech in the United States, which means that not only as you know, oh, you can't say the There's no longer a black word on Twitter or something, but it means that political organizing against the current ruling class, whether Republican or Democrat, will be severely limited and shut down either by the new version of the restriction law or by this network of NOS who seem to be about to get the green light to proceed to censor the United States, so I know I go on and on about censorship, but the point here is that since no Opposition political projects can arise under these conditions in Russia or Ukraine so that socialists believe that supporting one side or the other advances the cause of socialism.

I think it's a mistake now, obviously there are many, you know, there are other arguments like we want to support the struggles for independent national dependency and Liberation and so on, which would put us on the side of Ukraine, um for those reasons, but um, but On the other hand there is the anti-imperialist left that says oh no, it is Russia despite its character that is facing the global hedgehog, therefore the United States. should be supported to defeat that global hedgemon um, I just feel like none of those positions, Pro Ukraine, Pro Russia, make much sense and stuff, and at least when we hear someone like Soek say that. he supports Ukraine, the last thing we should do is try to cancel him or, of course, remove him from the debate, but to accept what he says and see to what extent what he is saying makes sense, I don't think. the divide between West and East in terms of cultural attitudes or the amount, even the level of freedom, although we have more freedom in the West than exists in Russia or Ukraine, um, those things are under threat, so I don't think that that dcom really holds up, but I definitely think the last thing we need to do is highlight the fact that he mentioned the Arabs as fundamental, you know, saying that, yeah, so what I find very interesting is the degree to which the conflicts Now you not only know the large-scale military conflict, but also our cultural conflict.

Many conflicts are framed as a fight between the West. Western values, civilizational values ​​and some kind of threat. And people eat it and buy it, so it's like. because the West is so we're going to oppose that, um, so I've seen Israel framed that way, obviously like, oh God, I've been in very deep, um drunk debates, about this, but it's like, well, now You know, Israel has to win, they have to win because it's a civilizational conflict, it's a civilizational conflict, you know, it's crazy, but in the same way it's like this kind of anti-imperialism has had this kind of knee-jerk anti-Western reaction that I no I don't think it's particularly well thought out when it's like, um, yes, this is a civilizational conflict, but it's between you, the forces of good against the terrible expansionism of, quote, your so-called civilization and I don't think those framings are correct. um, but what's interesting also is that despite all the discussion, all the attempts to frame the conflict and the terms of um civilization or Western values ​​or um, what becomes a kind of new kind of good versus bad is the degree to which no one really believes in the civilizational values ​​of the liberal Enlightenment, you know, that's what we're supposed to be defending, right, when we talk about it, oh, against barbarism, against this, against that, against the Arabs, but who really believes in any of those values ​​as you said?

The governments of all these supposedly liberal Western civilizations are doing everything they can to reposition civilization as kindness and caring and if you are on the side of kindness and caring then you should actually want us to eliminate our liberal values ​​that are not caring enough. and protector of the weak in our society and then this becomes a thin veneer for the destruction of freedoms so well why why are we supposed to accept limitations on freedom of expression oh certainly not to protect those in power no no no those in power simply want to protect the weak in society, they simply want to protect them from pain and harm and of course that becomes a way of doing it, that is prohibition, that it's what people love because what are you going to say like no, we should have hurt the weak in society there are no people you know you should be able to say the N word whenever you want, you know that's where they invite us to debate about things and only one would be like well, yeah, yeah, you should be able to say you know a good person would be like that, why do you need to say that?

But of course, in a free state you don't need to say why you need to say something. That is the point. That's why you have that kind of freedom. Has this become our reason for conflict? We are supposed to fight for these things, either before or against them, even though there is nothing there anymore, there is nothing, no one believes in Western values, what does that mean? Oh, excuse my French. I'm sorry, what do these things mean? Their meaning has been emptied and that is why it becomes, I don't know, a kind of representation of good versus evil, where the West is good or what is anti-Western is good, and it is a very superficial way of understanding a global conflict or even our culture wars, well let's talk about that, let's try again, so let's talk about what is the evil that everyone fears, it's often called fascism, that's how it was discussed in uh. on the Piers Morgan show and I'll post the clip where they talk about the great evil facing all of society here.

To me, the problem with cancer culture is obvious to me, as a philosopher, they preach inclusion and diversity, but what are they doing? Precisely they exclude all those who are diverse, yes, those who do not follow their line, the situation is extremely annoying, yes, because you don't even know the rules beforehand, you know, suddenly some think that you can be. canceled the rules the rules are not the rules they are not clear so you know what this cancel culture reminds me of you know this eternal joke everyone knows it the researcher comes to a tribe and asks them if you still have cannibals there the answer What What you understand is that no, we just ate the last cannibal last week, you know, that's what council culture is.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, earthquake, exclusionism, whatever here because we just exclude, uh, we just exclude the last one, that's the reality, that's the tragedy. of the council culture I agree in principle with their objective, somewhat of no, but in general, but the way they want to enforce their objectives, the way they do what they are doing undermines what they are doing, it is a tragedy and, as such, are energizing the arguments. For the new populist right fit for me, the new populist right and this left that awakens the politically correct council culture are simply two sides of the same God.

I completely agree, in fact I would go further and say it's basically both ways. of fascism and the irony about the woke left is that if you asked them what you hate most in the world they would probably say fascism and yet the way they behave by canceling people for having opinions by trying to destroy their lives by canceling history. and canceling everything that people enjoy in life is that they are behaving exactly how fascists would behave here. No, I completely agree with you, no, finally, completely, no, no, no, I agree with you, I would just be careful with the term fascism. because if we define fascism in a broader sense, not antisemitism kills all enemies, but the basic idea of ​​the fashion is that for me we want modernization of modern technology, etc., but we do not want the disruptive effects of liberalism of the freedom we want. control it through some ideology and party imposed by the National Central, then you know how far I am here ready to go, take countries like Russia, like India, like Turkey and maybe China itself, in some sense, this broad not exactly Nazism, all They are moving in this direct direction.

Well, the interesting thing about that clip is that the fascism they're talking about starts with the West, it starts with cancel culture, it starts with the care, health and protection regime, this feminized, bureaucratic state, and then it slides. Basically, defining Trump and any populist movement as fascist as well, and I guess I wonder to what extent it's fair to categorize what we're actually facing as fascism, when you know, if you look at Russia. and Ukraine, can we say that they are both fascist or that Hamas and Israel are fascist political entities? So this is the complicated thing.

When you take a list approach or a definitional approach to fascism, anything that shares those characteristics becomes fascist. and of course this gets really silly, it's like fascists are often vegetarians, so anyone who is a vegetarian is a fascist. S I have to think that's right. I mean, I think in fact, if you're a vegetarian you're clearly a fascist, but anyway. Go on or you like they were anti-smoking, so anti-smoking laws are fascist, this kind of thing, um, whereas if you take a kind of relational approach tofascism, so you understand it, you understand it in his historical fiction and that's why Talk and Go about Shant's work and I think more people should read it, but I think he takes that relational approach which is that fascism was a response to the failures of liberalism and, of course, Landis is the only one who says that.

There is very good literature from the '60s and '70s that talks about the roots of fascism and frustrated liberalism and you can see this in a lot of the proto-fascists who were frustrated liberals, you know, my favorite proto-fascist is Alfredo. peredo where he starts out as a liberal and gets frustrated with the fact that people just don't behave correctly and instead of rethinking his models and his understanding of how capitalism should work, how free markets should work, whether they should work or not, in the sense of dictating but saying, look, this is how the system works and then he kind of looks out at the world and sees that it's not working and blames the people, so instead of questioning his model, he, you know, He throws Humanity out the window because they don't live up to the standard, and this, and then he becomes increasingly frustrated with the freedoms and says that the problem with his government is that they were not willing to use force, that They were too scared to use force to achieve the end that they needed to achieve and that this led the world to hell, this led to a kind of erosion of support for the markets and the policies that they really should undertake, they become too weak and, you know, they fall into the hands of socialists who are completely wrong, so there is a core of frustrated liberalism and In addition, it is necessary to suppress the results of liberalism, which is why Landa talks about the division between economic liberalism and political liberalism.

If what happens with many liberals is that they have a commitment to economic liberalism and, in order to take economic liberalism to the end, their conclusions must be thrown political liberalism out the window because if there are people who have freedom, they will want to have a voice over the economy, they're going to want to have a say over their material existence, they're not going to want to leave that up to chance or technocratic intervention or you know, the free market or whatever they want to subject that to political contestation as well that's what the socialism or communism or that is what socialism and communism aim towards this type of democratization of the economy which is a horror which is a horror story for economic liberals and therefore if you understand fascism as that type of relationship between a contradiction that arises between economic liberalism and political liberalism, then it makes much more sense why they begin to exert so much control. and of course particularly German fascism or Nazism arose out of this horror towards socialists and the communists should say that the Marxist communists were attempting a revolution and they blamed Hitler, particularly they blamed the loss of the first world war on the communists and to the Jews that there was a mix between a kind of communist conspiracy and a Jewish conspiracy and people think it's interesting that we have this, the legacy of fascism in our minds, it's like people became so supremacist, so sure of their superiority, that they would just kill everyone else, if you really look.

In Hitler's speeches he often ended with this ultimatum or this kind of thing "us or them" if we don't do this they will do it to us they said the Jews will exterminate us they said the Jews will exterminate us they have a plan for world domination and that plan was clear in the failed German Revolution um and and and in the Soviet Union and in the Russian Revolution that this was a and and you had a particular they were the worst for the Soviet Jews they were right, they saved their vital particular for the Soviet Jews, if you were a jewish soviet prisoner of war you were L um so we lose a lot when we say when we take a list of approaches and I know sometimes I do this too because sometimes it can be kind of enlightening, like kind of scare us into not taking particular positions. , if we recognize that these were positions that the Nazis held and I do this sometimes out of romantic anti-capitalism and I warn people not to do it by pointing out that the Nazis were avowed socialists and hated Marxist socialism, but believed in taking care of each other as community over the individual, that there had been too much individualism, obviously they were referring to taking care of each other in the context of the bull um, but you know.

They confessed to a certain type of socialism that had a history and I know I spent years saying how, oh Nazis, they have the language of socialism and an attempt to deceive the workers. This is partially true, as if Hitler spoke from both sides. From his mouth he said one thing to the workers who were trying to win them over and then he said something else to the capitalists, you know there was a coherent ideology like Notzi, it's hard to pin down, but they tried. to flesh out a type of socialism that had its basis in, you know, romanticism, anti-enlightenment, and then the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, while Marxism was meant to realize the impossible promises of the Enlightenment within the capitalism, so going beyond capitalism to realize the promises of the Enlightenment and this goes back to the roots of Marx and the Young Hegelians The Young Hegelians loved liberalism they loved the Enlightenment they called themselves encyclopedists, you know, they were very pro-Enlightenment and the Nazis were very anti-Enlightenment, they were um you know, it was famous that Himler said that 1789 is abolished, you know French is abolished, this was a mistake, so there are certain aspects of that kind of definitional approach. that cannot be illuminating, but I think that fundamentally we have to understand it as a relational thing, something that arises at a particular moment to exert control over that political force that tries to get its hands on the economy and will try another Revolution to reach its end. and you know Walter Benjamin's famous quote, all fascism is an index of a failed revolution is really illuminating of that, so when we lose that we just say we see fascism everywhere because we see the kind of superficial relationship and, you know, That relational approach can also be illuminating because you can somehow Ask yourself: is it not literally fascism, because the relational approach teaches you about the historical specificity that arises at a particular moment in response to particular things that are happening in those that were happening in those societies, fascism or us in that very particular context, but at the same time, if you understand it as something relational, you can see that we have never really resolved that contradiction and our societies are still trying to resolve it.

CH is still trying to suppress the human. Handon's story continues to try to limit freedom everywhere, that doesn't make it fascist, but it does mean that we have never solved the problems that led to fascistism, one of the consequences, I think, of not having a visible socialist movement present and active nowhere. is that, um, the claims by fascists that, for example, there is a communist conspiracy to destroy Western values ​​in Western society and with that they will at least once point out the very things that I want to defend, like freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry, um and uh. and the power of the people to create alternative political projects and also the limits on industry and free association in the economic sphere will point out all those things and point out how the State is attacking those types of freedoms.

They claim that there is a communist conspiracy and because there is no socialist or Marxist movement among the workers to speak of the progressive capitalists will step forward and say yes, we are communists, we want to abolish the family, yes, we do not trust you direct your own. lives, yes, you need to be protected from yourselves and turn to people in authority before making a move and then also, yes, we need to arm Ukraine to the core and yes, we need to send in your brothers and sisters. to fight wars uh and yes, they need to stay home and be locked up and yes, they need to stop thinking for themselves and so on, so that seems like any movement to criticize society as it is. in reality, an existential threat to society as it is and people who would like some kind of security turn against criticism itself and certainly against the idea of ​​communism, socialism or Marxism, or at least some numbers do, and You have a question: what was it?

The Lindsay guy, what's his name? the one with the new James Lindsay, yeah, James Lindsay is like, you know, he criticizes and criticizes the Marxists and the communists and these illiberal antisocial narcissist sociopaths that are taking over the universities and you know, and in some ways he's not bad if you know that there are many so-called communists who are actually progressive capitalists who unilaterally try to create policies to help people that are also very oppressive and believe in what they say like we should abolish the family for reasons that are not completely false, but they are outside the context of a general project of social emancipation which is the emancipation of civil society, we know that it will just become a kind of Brave New World dystopian Project and um and then the other side of this is just religious tyranny actually um generally enshrined in law and then you know that, uh, yeah, you're dealing with a type of fascism that could also be called communism just as easily most of the time, but there's no clarity real about the forces at work in society and there is certainly no promise of a policy that can go beyond them and it worries me when I listen to someone like Donald Trump.

I kind of make light of it like lol he's going to kick all the Marxists out of the country. Okay, I hope I can videotape it so I can put it on YouTube and get clicks when I get deported, um, but uh, yeah. If there's something menacing about Jameson when he talks that way, it echoes something, it's not crazy to think that these people are precisely what they're trying to criticize, but the opposite is also true, so I find it very interesting. and I think at one point I had an answer for this and maybe I have to write about it so I never forget it, but I started to notice that a lot of the things that Marx talked about were that. would have happened with the transition from capitalism socialism is happening now, but in a kind of nightmare world, so you have like the disappearance of the state, the state is increasingly useless um but and but the idea is in the form uh withering of the the state was like the administration we would just like the administration of things well, that's all the state would do, but now the state is the administration of people that only you know, it becomes more ours, I know that It is an exaggeration, obviously but this is like a trend that can be seen where the good thing about a state was that it could mobilize enormous amounts of resources for infrastructure, something that an individual could not do because he would not get his money back, it would simply take so much time that there would be absolutely no point in the requirement to invest in huge infrastructure like, I don't know, building Bri, huge bridges and tunnels connecting there, it used to be a dream to connect New York and Paris with an underground tunnel. you know, with high-speed rail and that only a state could do it, that historically only a state could mobilize such enormous resources, but a state no longer does that or, like the NHS, moves further and further away on the trajectory of the last few decades, this movement has been towards the neoliberal um kind of neoliberal forms of um governmentality of the body that governs the body of um giving you information that you know and like you and that was a kind of informational approach that reached its kind of apogee in the years 9 and then it became a little more coercive a little more coercive as people supposedly did not accept or adopt the information at least not enough and if you have the idea that the purpose of the National Health Service is not to fix your body when it breaks down but to stay healthy and it's not even like you have this idea, it's often explicitly said that you know people will complain.

Oh, we have a National Health Service, but it's really a national disease service because it's really just curing you. having a health service that keeps you healthy, but then it's about behavior, it's about behavior management, what do you need to do to stay healthy to not use the NHS entitlement and it's a similar thing in Canada, where um We know that they are being moving away from high-tech cancer care, understandably they're not going to move away, they're still offering it grudgingly, but in policy terms they're saying, oh yeah, let's just encourage people to eat healthy. You know, obviously policymakers are open. to that because high tech cancer care is extremely expensive and as populations age, they're going to spend more on it, so if the answer is to encourage people to eat more broccoli, they're obviously going to be on this side, um. but of course you know that populations age independentlyno matter how much broccoli they have, you know that eventually you're going to die of something, um, but there's a kind of frustration with people's rising expectations and I could tell kind of a whole story about how I give a whole lecture on this, but this is interesting because raised expectations, low expectations used to be seen as a barrier that, when you were in a developmental phase, you needed to teach people to have high expectations about their health because when they had raised expectations about their health, they tended to to have raised expectations about their lives and supposedly this would encourage entrepreneurship, so when they went in, you know, when you know, international development agencies went into developing countries, um, they often expressed frustration at the fact that people They tended to have a fatalistic perspective, they tended to see illness as a destiny, as something given by God, like maybe they even punish these kinds of things and that's why they would try to raise people's expectations around health, but now it's like if high expectations were a dangerous thing not only in the developed world but also in the developing world because when those expectations are frustrated then you have a population that knows that their lives can be better we have been promised lives that we are going to be better you know follow us do ours you know they take our loans and you know your lives are going to be better and they didn't get any better, well now there are people leaving and there are dark skinned people going to Europe, when that's the wrong kind of migration, we don't want that and now there's this whole thing to lower people's expectations, uh, etc., on our guy. of health agencies we are trying to lower people's expectations to try to encourage them to accept, you know, why in our culture we have this prejudice against death, death is a normal part of life, well, I'm sure that it is, but the progressive impulse has always been to extend life to extend its value, it's the desire to live it and make it as good as possible for as long as possible, you know, that goes back to the 18th century, when people started . to see the progress and they imagined that, oh my God, we're not even going to die anymore, that, as Condor said, human life expectancy would know no upper limit, you know, that would be like being the dream of progressives now .

We're leaving that behind, so I find it very interesting that these ideas of yours can have this kind of super something that may seem superficially socialist like the withering form of the State that can actually be a horrible disintegration of the State in capitalism. one is um, well, we have one more clip left and we have a few minutes, so we should run the next clip before we jump. Go on, let me finish, I'll let you, oh yeah, only the other one was like abolishing the family, like being anti-family, it has this kind of superficial socialist resonance and people say, oh, there you go, you know, as a socialist, I'm against the family, but, of course, suspicion of the family is also a key aspect of neoliberal government. idea that parents who are idiots cannot be allowed to raise their children.

Did I use that word correctly, you idiots, blah? So yes, Bing doesn't use it correctly. I wanted to make sure I said that correctly because that would be bad, but I probably did Bing idiot um, let's look at a dumb idiot uh according to the well, that's a beer company, the Cambridge Dictionary says um, an extremely stupid person would be a dumb idiot. , so now I'm a dumb idiot, well I didn't say it, go ahead, there is this idea that parents who are like uninitiated laymen who don't have special education should not be allowed to raise their children.

How can we allow them to do something as important as raising the next one? generation of workers, um, and then you have the transformation of father into a second job, right, it's subject to all these key performance indicators, you know, if you screw something up, you screwed up your kid and you screwed him up. their life chances this is the kind of message you get as a parent um and uh because parenting is associated with this kind of web of social problems well that's a key part of neoliberal governance is this control of life everyday um that comes down especially to the family because it's like that, um, this private sphere that is so important, how can private individuals be allowed to do something so important?

If you look at the policy documents, they don't, there is a rejection of the use, particularly in the EU. At the level that you see any EU debate, they say oh we prefer not to use the language of parents, we prefer formal carers or informal carers, so a parent is an informal carer who wants an informal car like bringing it, it's like the informal economy was the black market, right, so this idea of ​​well, it should actually be done better as a job, it should actually be professionalized and paid. I mean, it's part of the trajectory of capitalism as it begins to try to explain its problems through individual behavior. and then it becomes more and more obsessed with the behavior, but because it has a superficial socialist tone, people say oh yeah, yeah, that sounds cool, so what do we have?

This perverse tendency of socialists to look at these kinds of things and say, yeah, hey, that's socialism. they didn't do anything and somehow we're winning hooray and then you have the right to say oh no that's socialism, they didn't do anything and somehow they're winning but what everyone is missing is that it has nothing to do with socialism , it has everything to do with it. With the disintegration of capitalism and its desperate attempt to hold on to itself, did you see I had an exchange with Sophie Lewis? I think it's her Twitter name. I saw it, yes, only briefly and you wrote that she is not a socialist, that is true.

Yes, she was pro-family abolition, but she was writing a series of tweets criticizing Christopher Lash for being revanchist and, you know, pro-family and supposedly racist. I don't think there's any hint of that in her work at all, um, but anyway, yeah, I found her incredibly um, you know what I would have said irritating, but I didn't even find her irritating, she was just kind of an example. prototypical of the confusion around the idea of ​​communism and, uh, the kind of one-sided approach to socialism or communism that confuses the progressive capitalist state with socialism and also gives itself permission to claim that it opposes the bureaucratic deep state , but while every expression she makes, you know it's basically in line with the propaganda of the bureaucratic deep state, so yes, when I was reading Sophie Lewis's, she has some books, but well, she abolished the family book .

I was very surprised by how much she talks about the problems with the family. They remind me of the Third Way talking about family problems, now they say they'll be nice about it, but they'll talk about how, oh, we should have empathy for all these things that happen in families and they'll take like the small number of people who Unfortunately they have really bad experiences and will extrapolate it as a problem with all families instead of the strong association between poverty and those types of problems becoming a problem with the family in general and justifying intervention in all families and the increasing invasion of professionalization in parenting and what is happening now is also as if early childhood education is getting earlier and earlier and the reason is because they want institutions to intervene as early as possible and alter ways of supposedly backward socialization, but the bottom line is: if you don't trust workers to raise their families, you don't trust them to run society.

That's, wait, I mean, that's a given. Workers cannot run society. Hey, let's take a look at the final clip here. between GJ and Piers Morgan, okay again, I did it again, it was muted, okay, so I'm sorry, I'm going to play the final clip on the Patreon stream, the Parrot Room stream, um and uh, with Good luck, everyone will join me. there to remind me when I'm muted and when my microphone is unplugged, so we'll run that final clip on Patreon. People who are watching now and who go to the link to join us or join me on Streamyard can do so.

I wanted to point out that, well, this is really it. I am making excuses for my incompetence today too, on April 16, we will do a live broadcast on this channel, that is Tuesday, that is the day we usually do the live broadcasts. but it will be a 15 hour live stream, it will start a few hours early, it marks the 15th anniversary of the diet podcast, that's the podcast that I started that then took me to zero books and now, um, there will be clips from each year uh and every hour um I may be traveling around New York City and streaming from various locations.

I have invited Dennis Parin to join the broadcast. An old friend of mine named K, who is the first podcaster I started collaborating with, will be there. and there will also be other, um clips of Moy Pastone, uh, TJ Clark, um Margaret Kimberly, a variety, a lot of interesting leftists, uh, from the 15 years of podcasting, you'll be able to listen to it, look it up, it's, you know, REM . Click the Notify Me button because, this is my day to celebrate myself and I want everyone to come to my birthday party, basically, so, yeah, see you on the other side.

See you in the parent room. There will be a link. In the description I will mark it as a comment and thank you for seeing this today in the case of people with nuclear or radiological consequences who live around potential people.