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Zizek on toilets

Diego Cumplido
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2018–2026 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Mostly posted as a joke in toilet-related threads, especially for the line about German hermeneutic stool inspection.

Slavoj Zizek speaks at an architecture congress in Pamplona about how toilet design in France, England and Germany reflects national ideology. The clip is about four minutes long.

“You might find this short video entertaining (Zizek on toilets)” (HN, 2018)

1 recommendations · 5 jokes · Comedy

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@DonHopkins Jun 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread ‘Smart toilet’ monitors for signs of disease
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According to Slavoj Žižek, Germans love Hermeneutic stool diagnostics. [this video] >Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain. >The German toilets, the old kind -- now they are disappearing, but you still find them. It's the opposite. The hole is in front, so that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know? Use it every morning. Sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's high Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic may be this. [link] >Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.
@DonHopkins Nov 2022 Makes a joke
on HN thread Why some feces float and others sink
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Žižek on toilets: [this video] >The German toilets, the old type -- now they are disappearing but you still find them -- it's the opposite. The hole is in front. So that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know, use it every morning, sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's High Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic for Germans may be this. Žižek: Ideology and Toilets: [link] >"It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology." [link] >Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.
@DonHopkins Dec 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
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That's why German toilets have a Hermeneutic stool inschpektion shelf: So they have something to analyze then talk about all day. [this video] According to Slavoj Žižek, Germans love Hermeneutic stool diagnostics. >Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain. >The German toilets, the old kind -- now they are disappearing, but you still find them. It's the opposite. The hole is in front, so that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know? Use it every morning. Sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's high Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic may be this. [link] >Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood. >“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between thes
@DonHopkins Feb 2026 Makes a joke
on HN thread Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?
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The cursor-mirror skill and cursor_mirror.py script lets you search through and inschpekt all of your chat histories, all of the thinking bubbles and prompts, all of the context assembly, all of the tool and mcp calls and parameters, and analyze what it did, even after cursor has summarized and pruned and "forgotten" it -- it's all still there in the chat log and sqlite databases. [link] The German Toilet of AI "The structure of the toilet reflects how a culture examines itself." — Slavoj Zizek German toilets have a shelf. You can inspect what you've produced before flushing. French toilets rush everything away immediately. American toilets sit ambivalently between. cursor-mirror is the German toilet of AI. Most AI systems are French toilets — thoughts disappear instantly, no inspection possible. cursor-mirror provides hermeneutic self-examination: the ability to interpret and understand your own outputs. What context was assembled? What reasoning happened in thinking blocks? What tools were called and why? What files were read, written, modified? This matters for: Debugging — Why did it do that? Learning — What patterns work? Trust — Is this skill behaving as declared? Optimization — What's eating my tokens? See: Skill Ecosystem for how cursor-mirror enables skill curation. ---- [link] According to Slavoj Žižek, Germans love Hermeneutic stool diagnostics: [this video] >Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain. >The German toilets, the old

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