Zupancić: "There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person"
While unhappiness used to follow an inverted U-shape, peaking in one's 40s and 50s before improving later in life, it now monotonically declines with age. The change is driven by skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts among teens and young adults, particularly young women. - Midlife Crisis Is Dead
In an annual report published by V-Dem, a leading global democracy index, Israel falls out of the liberal democracy category for the first time in over 50 years. The index attributes the decline, with Israel now classed as an electoral democracy, to the government’s efforts to pass the contentious judicial overhaul last year. Protesters rally against the coalition's judicial overhaul legislation, in Tel Aviv, September 2, 2023. (Gitai Palti) It is now classified as an electoral democracy – for the first time in over 50 years. This is primarily due to substantial declines in the indicators measuring the transparency and predictability of the law, and government attacks on the judiciary,” the report says. “Among other things, Israel’s Knesset passed a bill in 2023 stripping
the Supreme Court of the power to invalidate laws, thus undermining checks on executive power. Indicators that are in substantive decline also include freedom from torture,” the report finds. - Times of Israel
Interpassivity is a concept coined about a decade ago by Slavoj Žižek and Robert Pfaller, to explain how some works of art seem to provide for their own reception. In contrast with interactive works, that can ‘realize themselves’ through participation by visitors, interpassive works are ‘self-fulfilling’. They might be said to ‘enjoy themselves’, or even better, we enjoy ‘through them’; they enjoy, as Žižek and Pfaller insist, ‘on our behalf’. This raises the curious question how and why we could or should ‘believe or enjoy through the other’ (Žižek 1997: 113), or in other words, ‘delegate’ our own belief or enjoyment to others. - Interpassivity Revisited
“Why is it always the Non-Iranians who support the terrorist Islamic Regime in Iran?” she wrote in a widely circulated response to Sa’d’s Toronto video. She added, “This is not the Canada my parents immigrated to in order to escape persecution by the terrorist Islamofascist Ayatollahs.” - National Post
If people aren’t suffering enough, they’re not interesting enough
Whether it is identity politics, concern for public safety, or the new religion of net-zero green economy, such humanitarian rhetoric plays a powerful ideological role for two interconnected reasons: it responds to the need to manipulate and control increasingly destitute populations while also disabling any serious collective struggle against rampant poverty and the physical removal of the superfluous, unproductive “wretched of the earth” (of which the Palestinians are today’s exemplary incarnation). In a nutshell, the critique of political economy is pre-emptively disabled by faux-leftist conservatism serving the interests of the elites rather than the underprivileged and excluded. The result is that oppression has long become anonymous: any sense of class solidarity is lost, while the atomised masses fail to grasp that they have turned into objects of a socioeconomic process that, in a bitter twist of irony, they enthusiastically support…Barbarism originates in this specific zone of dogmatic capitalist interest, which is so ingrained in the modern mind to make the disavowal of genocide possible. - Our Zone Of Interest
For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology. - The Cradle
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IN HIS 2023 FILM Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Romanian director Radu Jude uses improvisation, but not with actors’ performances or lines. Rather, during the film’s many car scenes where protagonist Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives around Bucharest, the actress and the crew didn’t follow a predetermined route. Once underway, Jude provided directions according to traffic and instinct. What emerges from this immersion in city streets is an ironic inverse of the archetypal road movie. In place of the sweeping vistas, wild adventures, and heroic individualism that brand the genre’s most iconic entries are stoplights, lane changes, aggressive drivers, near-accidents, and omnipresent congestion that slows traffic to a maddening crawl. Jude had no need to strategize in order to capture these conditions. The city spoke for itself. - Awaiting Apocalypse at a Red Light
From big cities to small villages, there’s enthusiasm for tile whipping (and a rap from Maashorst last year certainly wins the prize for effort). In Raalte, Overijssel, the first day’s “tile taxi” took away more than 900 stones and gave away 250 plants, according to climate adaptation staffer Maud Weenink. In Rotterdam, John Lingsveld, who runs the “Tegeltaxi” service, expects to pick up from 70 addresses a week. “People think it’s a great initiative and show you everything they have done … although there is the odd one who asks if we also deliver new tiles for them!” he says. - the strangest new sport in the Netherlands: tegelwippen, “tile whipping”, or “whipping away” the paving stones
Th(e) suggestion that pleasure can be had without being experienced as pleasurable has wide-ranging implications for understanding both the foundation of the psyche and the contemporary cultural moment. Another recent book, Aaron Schuster’s The Trouble with Pleasure, has taken up the ways in which the ostensibly discontented practice of complaining might be understood as a pleasurable activity if we understand “that real joy has nothing to do with feelings per se but consists in the devotion” (Schuster 2016, p. 3). For “the truly gifted complainer,” complaining takes on an interpassive structure since, as Schuster puts it, “it is no longer the person who complains but the complaint that complains itself in and through the person” (Schuster 2016, p. 18). - Book Review Essay: “On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners” by Robert Pfaller