Jack Semancik > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 11 attempts to depict the lives of those outside the elite classes (with as much evidence as exists for such). I especially liked the focus on the Roman taverns, dice games, and “Oracle kits” (a DIY divination kit, with pre-written questions and answers).

Chapter 7 is particularly interesting for noting the shift away from openness and oversight at Google’s AI division. This is especially clear with Google censorship of a paper detailing the energy-usage concerns of LLMs, and the impact on marginalised groups (prior to this, Google allowed their research arm to publish work with relative independence).

Chapter 8 focuses on the daily life of the Roman population during the late Republic, with an unintentional focus on the elite (because their lives are the best attested).

Elon Musk keeps featuring in each of the books I’m reading, and in each he appears as rash, naive, and prone to emotional outbursts.

I love the stream of consciousness style that this book takes on. It hooks you!

The appendix contains a reprinting of Zizek’s speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, during which he discusses the context which gave rise to Hamas’ October 7th attack (while simultaneously condemning it, and Hamas as an organisation). The fact that this speech was given a little less than two week after 07 October 2023 led to many of the criticisms that Zizek covers in the second half of this work.

Zizek summarises his journal of thoughts on foreign policy in 2023 and 2024 by restating the need to cut off arms shipments to Israel and continue arms shipments to Ukraine, seeing the two states’ military engagements as incomparable (despite the way that many had linked them at the time). Restates a rather pessimistic view of the state of global cooperation.

Zizek litigates the various reactions to his comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict, originally made at the Frankfurt Book Fair but fanning out from there.

“Death Cramps” sees Zizek cover a wide swathe of foreign policy as it applies to Leftist organisation. Rather than simply supporting those who oppose U.S. interests (China under Xi Jinping, the Taliban, Assad and the Ba’athists, etc.), leftists should more carefully play each of these groups off of each other – variously supporting and opposing the actions of each – to promote common anti-capitalist goals.

In “Heroes of the Metaverse”, Zizek compares the more recognisably feudal aspects of the breakdown of society and government in Libya, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with the neo-feudal economic order that is emerging in the Developed World. Rather than withering away as Marx predicted, Zizek (referencing Yanis Varoufakis) suggests that capitalism is reinventing the feudal order it replaced.

In “Worlds Blown Into Space” (a play on Nietzsche’s phrase from Ecce Homo), Zizek reframes the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a war against the European Enlightenment (or, perhaps more narrowly, as a war against Enlightenment ideals). He depicts Russia as “defending” a fictionalised, mythical Eurasian culture/identity in this war. Whether or not they truly believe their own words, they turn them to action.

“What Hysterics Only Dream About” offers a defence of Lacan and psychoanalysis, posing it as a necessary force in ordering a proper amount of shame and dignity into our lives. Zizek briefly explains the socio-political ramifications of this idea.

Zizek affirms the power of words in the global system, especially in the case of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Zizek advocates the recognition of Palestine and the fulfilment of the ICC arrest warrant against Israeli officials. Zizek concludes with the assertion that the horrors of reality may be used to escape from the futility of fantasy (Zizek’s implied psychoanalysis of the Israeli government’s motives).

Zizek, in reacting to the reelection of Donald Trump, discusses the larger paradigm shift involved in “Trumpian politics”; for example, that the vulgarity of Trump’s political rhetoric masks the anti-populist policies contained within his populist messaging.

The Social War and the Dictatorship of Sulla offer an insight into the sociopolitical position of the Italian cities (the socii) within the Roman Republic.

Hofstadter introduces the three overarching ideologies that largely uphold anti-intellectual strains of thought in the U.S.: evangelicalism, primitivism, and business activism. Evangelicals uphold the heart as virtuous and separate from the mind, primitivists uphold ignorance as a virtue, and business interests tend to find the deliberative nature of intellectuals harmful to the principle of profit.