26 AUG 2026 by ideonexus

 The Oppressive System Functions Despite You Seeing It

Para Žižek, este es el núcleo del problema ideológico contemporáneo. El sistema no necesita que no veas lo que pasa, necesita que verlo no te cueste nada, que la conciencia crítica sea una experiencia disponible, satisfactoria y sin consecuencias. Y acá está el punto que cambia todo. Nombrar la trampa no es escapar de la trampa, y decir eso tampoco escapa de ella. Žižek no ofrece receta porque desconfía profundamente de las recetas. En "Viviendo en el fin de los tiempos" es expl...
Folksonomies: politics organizing
Folksonomies: politics organizing
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For Žižek, this is the core of the contemporary ideological problem. The system doesn't need you not to see what's happening — it needs seeing it to cost you nothing, for critical awareness to be an experience that's available, satisfying, and consequence-free.

And here's the point that changes everything: naming the trap isn't escaping the trap, and saying so doesn't escape it either. Žižek offers no recipe, because he deeply distrusts recipes.

In "Living in the End Times" he's explicit: the problem with utopian thinking isn't that it dreams too much, but that it dreams too precisely — that it designs the future before the subject capable of inhabiting it even exists.

What he does point to are concrete experiences where the logic we've described breaks down. Not movements that have the answer, but spaces where the question gets asked differently: Zapatismo, Occupy, cooperatives, local assemblies, grassroots economies. Not because they guarantee anything, or because they fully escape the surrounding system, but because in those spaces powerlessness stops being individual. Discontent isn't dissolved in irony — instead it meets other discontent and produces something different.

Žižek doesn't say organizing guarantees anything — he says staying isolated guarantees failure. And that asymmetry, small as it may seem, is the only thing left after tracing the mechanism all the way through.

23 JUL 2026 by ideonexus

 The Game of White-Must-Win

There are many other ways in which the game of Black-and-White is switched into the game of 'White must win,' and, like the battle for survival, they depend upon ignoring, or screening out of consciousness, the interdependence of the two sides. In a curious way this is, of course, part of the Game of Black-and-White itself, because forgetting or ignoring their interdependence is 'hide' in the game of hide-and-seek. Hide-and-seek is, in turn, the Game of Black-and-White! By way of illustratio...
Folksonomies: perspective
Folksonomies: perspective
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31 MAY 2026 by ideonexus

 Links on the Dark Enlightenment

Conservatives have been upset since the enlightenment. It’s the politics of aristocrats and anything that ever helped regular people to be more comfortable has enraged them. It’s literally a reactionary response to the enlightenment. These current assholes are trying to make a new country that bursts out of the body of the current country. It's called "the butterfly revolution" and yes it does sound absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin It’s why musk was speaking at the ...
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21 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 Medieval Thought and "Monstrous Races"

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”3 Fear of racial difference has been embodied through monsters for centuries, and the idea of “monstrous races” stretches back to the Classical Era. Medieval thought “created strong links between physical and non-physical characteristics among different human gro...
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
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21 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 Conan as White Savior

Conan is a White American hero: self-sufficient and independent, strong, honest, and moral, abiding by his own code of honour. His “dual identity of being a savage, but being white,”72 makes him naturally suited to lead the softer, more decadent and corrupted peoples of the south; he becomes, among other things, king of the southern, medievalist realm of Aquilonia. Pulp adventure stories, a genre in which Howard wrote and of which his Conan stories can be considered a fantasy sub-set, wer...
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
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03 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 The Moynihan Report Characterizes Black Culture as Commun...

Doro is an ideal consumer who is both part of a “race,” “nation,” or “empire” (those terms being as confused and intertwined for Doro as they were for Burroughs) and its predator. This depiction of Doro highlights the ways in which a hyper-extended consumerism and an exceptionalist definition of nation both necessarily bring with them a permanent underclass—without which the empire would collapse—both feeding and being destroyed by those in the dominant position, and who thems...
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03 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 All Utopias Are Conservative

Herbert’s critique of this seemingly countercultural utopia is precisely aimed at its conservatism. In necessarily rendering life static, the utopian vision must deny the instability of signification and that permits for change and development itself. In making this argument, I am aware that I am (or Herbert is) falling into what Kenneth M. Roemer calls that category of “muckrakers (or ‘stuckrakers’) preoccupied with exposing elements in literary utopias that tend toward changeless st...
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03 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 The System of Oppression is Still in Place at the End of ...

o, directly opposing Rebekah Simpkins’ assertion that “By removing the control, Neo sets the prisoners free,” the first film ends with those controls still in place.45 At the end of The Matrix, after all, Neo does not awaken everyone to “the real,” but instead exploits the continued functioning of the Matrix, leaving the illusion intact so that he can fly. As Žižek writes, “all these ‘miracles’ are possible only if we remain WITHIN the VR sustained by the Matrix …: our ‘...
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The Matrix makes many, very clear references to Black oppression. All of the antagonists are white men wearing business suits. Morphius tells one, "You all look the same to me." Later, Morphius is bound and gagged in a historically-evocative fashion.

At the same time, Neo is a white savior. In the end of each film, the oppressors remain in power. The Matrix is never dissolved and its victims remain trapped. The system of oppression remains in place.

03 DEC 2025 by ideonexus

 How the Privileged Need Racism for Profit in "Black No More"

Antiblack racism continues not despite, but because of, the disappearance of blacks; this is only a paradox if the construction of blackness is seen as being essentially related to skin colour as opposed to economics. To bolster this position, Matthew emphasises the discourse of “blood purity”—as discussed in the first chapter of the current study—a form of racial identification that was less highlighted in the Knights’ previous racist rhetoric. He then uses this discourse to reinst...
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08 OCT 2025 by ideonexus

 Race in Tolkien is Reality Rather Than Socially Constructed

In Middle Earth, unlike reality, race is objectively real rather than socially constructed. There are species (elves, men, dwarves, etc.), but within those species there are races that conform to 19th-century race theory, in that their physical attributes (hair color, etc.) are associated with non-physical attributes that are both personal and cultural. There is also an explicit racial hierarchy which is, again, real in the world of the story. Middle Earth is literally a racist’s fantasy la...
Folksonomies: fantasy racism
Folksonomies: fantasy racism
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