I linked to the timestamp, it’s a long ass video. The front part of the video is great, total normal TC content. Post video though, he gets into his personal politics somewhat, and here I’m thinking “oh, secret Marxist reveal?”, but then he gets into partisan politics and it’s a full-blown crash out about defiling the constitution and how Dems are always trying to make things better, but republicans show up to undo it all. He reads from the declaration of independence, waxes on about the constitution, the whole nine-yards.
It’s really great. Lots of respect. He puts it all out there. If he’s interested, I think Cowbee has a reading list he might be interested in.
When I saw the video and the title I was like “oh no” but the video topic turned out to be the exact opposite of what I was expecting
Holy shit that ending really explained the Albacoa trees in Samholy just a few miles west of SanDiego and how beautiful they are to make energy happen.
I thought it was a great video, very well researched and presented. I appreciate his anger towards the end, good on him for showing it, but I just had to laugh when he was advocating for people to vote for Dems, immediately after laying out all the ways they’ve betrayed and disappointed you. like, come on man, you’re a very intelligent guy. you’ve gotta put the pieces together at some point
Yeah I think he will figure it out at some point. We’ve all been there.
Gonna copy paste from what i said in slop chat
Its nice he is calling out to abolish ICE and tell people to organize
But he still cant picture a USA under anyone other than democrats
Like he correctly points out how dems do nothing to fix the issues republicans did
But still think voting in the dems will some how be able to reverse all the things republicans have done
Haha. I couldn’t get through the crashout section, it sounded like he was getting it and then he started in on how great America is and I just…
I remember being in that place, the “let’s try taking The New Colossus seriously” phase.
You have to power through, it’s very good.
Nah, I get enough lib perversion elsewhere.
Fair enough!
He so close to being very cool it made me wonder if he was tempering his rhetoric to be accessible to people with basically no political education, but I’m just being wishful.
Nah, he apparently goes all in on the pro-democrat rhetoric which is totally incompatible with being politically cool. He simply doesn’t have a good or consistent understanding of politics, which is a shame. He gets so close with the “everything is political” stuff but doesn’t actually understand what that means or appreciate that politics can extend beyond Republicans versus democrats.
The YouTuber I have noticed having some cool political ideas is, of all people, miniminuteman, whose channel is mostly debunking pseudo archaeology and being the world’s most obnoxious zoomer - a definite guilty pleasure of mine. I’ve noticed he’ll occasionally let slip some cool stuff about class etc. I’m sure he’s a baby radlib and not a full-blown socialist but he seems to at least be on the right track.
MMM strikes me as a typical Western anarchist rn
Ooooo okay I watch him and TC and was thinking similar things.
MMM imo has clearly been getting more constructively radicalized over the year I’ve watched him and has gone more from “trump bad” to “I am actually putting the entire system on trial” lately so that’s cool.
TC knows some of the right terms and basically just opened the flood gates.
I feel like both of them are one Kyle Kulinski “never mind, I understand why they built gulags” moment away from accepting the spectre into their hearts
I think what MMM has going for him is that he’s young, passionate, and angry, that he’s a recent graduate, and that his degree was, if not in the humanities, at least humanities-adjacent (modern archaeology is far more about the everyday people of the past than it used to be). All those things I think make people more open to radicalization. I also think that as a student of history he is perhaps more aware that nothing lasts forever, he’s aware of just how many seemingly invincible empires have risen and then fell.
TC is a little bit older and, despite his sympathies with workers and what seems to be a genuinely good nature (he strikes me as an honestly good and decent human being), also a bit of a STEMlord. He is, I think, very stuck on “end of history”-type thinking. I wish I had more hope for the guy, and if class consciousness really starts to spread it could well spread to him, but I can’t imagine him ever being ahead of the curve on this.
Honestly you’re probably right. I hope at least that thing he did where he layed everything out that’s wrong with the system just to conclude that you have to buy into the system does something for someone at least.
like i said, wishful. it would be nice if he could realize how weirdly contradicting the partisanship is with the rest of the rhetoric. a lot of forgiving democrats tepid climate policies. but then a lot of anger that is begging for real political education too. miniminuteman i also agree on, he’s a deboonker that seems like he could really thrive in an org.
miniminuteman i also agree on, he’s a deboonker that seems like he could really thrive in an org.
You’re not wrong there, I feel like with a bit of political education he could be a real asset. Despite what I said he’s quite charismatic and a great communicator, that episode he did recently where he did a little roleplay as a traveller inviting the viewer to share a meal with him was really, really well done.
I think he just is a person with basically no political education.
max lib political “education” with a dash of that breaking a bit. the
was noticeably dissonant with the tenor of the rest of his crash out.
He said all that stuff about caring about the labor that people have put into things, and I was so ready for Technology Connections Guy to suddenly reveal himself to actually be cool, and then BAM, we all just need to Vote Harder, baby!
I hope you make it over the hump, Tech Connections Guy, you’d make a cool communist.
He’s such a comforting personality sometimes, and I love watching him crash out over LED Christmas lights every year. Because I can be just as obsessive about stuff I care about, and watching someone be like that about bits of technology most people never think about is neat.
That voice and general attitude to tech from a known comrade would be so awesome. I hate when otherwise neat people are lame ass liberals instead of cool commies.
The cool thing is that these kinds of well-meaning, radicalized liberals are the easiest to take to theory and become great comrades.
didn’t even mention venezuela when it could’ve easily fit with all the oil talk. i love him but the crowd has spoken
also forgot to mention he’s a bluesky lib you can check his account. link
I could tell he is a lib because he acts salty whenever he uses metric.
What does one have to do with the other?
It’s for the same unthinking reasons that people defend capitalism and imperial units. Defense of the status quo for no reason other than that it’s the status quo, some thoughtless cliche about it “working on paper” but the transition being too hard, American exceptionalism…so on. They have quite a bit to do with each other, actually. They shouldn’t, but liberals make it so.
Metric is a Fr*nch colonial project and the fact that so-called internationaliSSts line up to defend supplanting indigenous units of measurement with it shows their cultural chauvinism.
this post is a bit
i cannot put into words how much i long for the days when you could ask how far it is to somewhere, and the answer could come in any one of 9 different miles, some of them 4 times the size of some of the others.
same for every unit. europe pre-metric was like if every US state had a different sized mile and pound and gallon.
fuck of ! ! !
It’s a joke… mostly.
cw: Thomas Jefferson, SA
Reminder that the Declaration of Independence was written by a guy who not only was a slave owner, but was confirmed to have regularly SA’d his child slave. Make sure you remind libs about this whenever they start drifting towards “This isn’t America!” nonsense.
Unrelated to the subject at hand, but I always found it incredibly interesting that the Black Panther’s 10-point program ended with a lengthy excerpt from the Declaration of Independence.
I like some of his videos but I knew to stay away from this one as soon as I saw the title on YouTube. I just know it’s full of liberal climate denialism. (Well, beyond the fact that centering on personal EVs is in itself climate denialism)
i don’t think it’s full of that. he’s car-brained but it’s going to take time to build out infrastructure, especially with how incompetent the US is about it, so electric cars are a fine enough stop gap that i don’t think it helps us to be pissy about them.
so electric cars are a fine enough stop gap
They aren’t a stop gap at all. They contribute to climate change more than the obvious, scientifically-supported real solutions. And the actual minuscule difference they make means that presenting it as a meaningful contribution to fighting climate change is actively harmful. It distracts from the harder things that must be done, which is why it’s pushed so hard by Democrats, for example. Denying that we are past a point of no return and that the goal is to minimize devastation is climate denialism. There is no “good enough”.
They are pushed hard because every person buying two tons of metal which sits inertly 5/6th of the time presents bigger opportunity to exploit workers on the way from the mines than dozen ton bus carrying 20 people half the time. It’s doesn’t structurally matter whether they are ev or not, crisis of overproduction comes for all
The real porky solution to overproduction is nuking bavaria, frankfurt and guandong or inducing demand in africa and india, you can see where american and chinese porkies are leaning
(Not that they understand why they are leaning that way, they are thinking of car loans and 50000 minihitlers car salesman, and oil lobby and ethanol lobby and whatever else, but those represent in aggregate that simple fact)
(Now that i think about it, selling 5t apc to consumers also works for that, call it the hummer option)
You should explain what liberal climate denialism is compared to right wing climate denialism.
Should? There’s not really any reason for me to. Are you personally asking me to? If so, you could just actually ask. Or are you doubting that exists? What is “should” about it?
It was an honest request for an explanation. “should” was the wrong word, I see that now. I meant it more as a “not just for my sake”, I assume others might not know the difference either. To be more blunt, I need it explained to me before I can tell you if that is what the first hour of the video was or not.
Okay, since you liked the video, I honestly just assumed you worded it like that defensively or in a doubting way. I get you.
You can easily compare it to liberal “anti-racism” or any other belief that liberals claim, but communists actually fight for. In this case, “communists” also includes people who just…read the science. Liberals will say the words “I don’t like racism” and then vote into power the most racist person their party could scrounge up. Relevantly to your description of the video, championing a party that is massively contributing to climate change, while whining about it. The words are meaningless as soon as capitalism is challenged. Their commitment is ephemeral. It consists of nothing and it disappears at the slightest push.
Liberal climate change activism is saying with all their heart “climate change is real”, and then with the same vigor, opposing any actual tangibly effective solution that would affect their way of life. Which includes any substantial restructuring of society that is absolutely necessary to fight climate change. So they will fight for things that don’t meaningfully affect their way of life, like the type of propulsion their car uses.
Whenever I press people on this, it is always because they haven’t actually read anything substantial about climate change. Where we are at with climate change, or how much any given “solution” would contribute, etc. Which leads them to only acknowledge solutions within the safe bounds of liberalism, despite what the science says.
Liberals do not deny that climate change exists like the right. They deny that the necessary solutions are necessary, deny that the conditions are actually as bad they are, or deny that capitalism is incompatible with avoiding climate catastrophe.
Yeah that’s interesting because I got the sense from the video is that he does support fundamentally restructuring society, but is also in this place where he has no other frame of reference as to what is to be done in order to actually do it. For example he basically advocated for turning 25% of Midwestern corn fields into solar farms. That’s not his actual solution but one that “by the numbers” simply “makes sense” and by extension building a fully renewable grid makes sense too. As is often the case with these videos though you never get the “how” part. Except, in this video he crashes out after the credits and you kind of do get the “how”, but its clearly muddy water for him at this point.
He seems to think the Democrats will get us there, that they were building this sustainable grid and that the Republicans were the road block. He also seems to think the Democrats are compromised by corporate interests. His support for them at the end of the video was not one of confidence but pure desperation. It was the plea of someone at the end of their political rope. It seems clear to me that the logic of liberalism isn’t working out for this “logic” YouTuber anymore, they might not have fully realized it yet.
So in most ways I think your right, though there is a chance that he could be pushed into a more radical direction as well.
Huh? Its like, super pro-renewable and completely anti-fossil fuel. It comes at it from a “hey making shit that produces energy for years just makes so much more sense than spending all this effort for something we’re gonna burn” angle though.
It’s a bit carbrained I’ll give you that.
Unless you’re producing the renewable energy yourself aren’t you just passing the fossil fuel buck from yourself to your power provider?
Yes but that’s a good thing because they provider uses far less fossil fuels to generate the same amount if energy, and that amount of fossil fuel continues to decrease every year without he having to do anything about it.
I think their main point (complimented by plinky’s reply) is https://hexbear.net/comment/6880003
love his vids but yeah always got turbolib vibes
turbo? idk about that, he says some cool and good things about labor just before this part of the video. I think he’s in that phase of political awakening where it feels like you’re the only sane person in the room, and the people you supported suddenly look and sound like transparent criminals. He says at one point, “Apparently, NO ONE is going to hold ANYONE accountable anymore!”. I think he’s simply a well-meaning progressive liberal who has hit the wall on trying to understand why things are happening. He probably doesn’t have any other frame of reference, any other liberatory or revolutionary language to draw on than those of the founding fathers. Which, is simply how liberal society functions. At some point, though, he will realize that even that liberatory and revolutionary language fails to meet the moment.
I think Marx says it best:
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. […] The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead."
This is why I’ve worked really hard to pull back from calling out blue MAGA when they treat any of the most minor criticisms of a democrat politician like you just insulted 7 generations of their ancestors.
I mean this with sincerity - I think that the people who react like that are one of the most powerful forces for radicalizing progressives over the hump into the radical left. It’s only when you consider yourself a democratic voter through and through but you have a genuine criticism, like why Biden increased funding to ICE and outdid Trump 1.0 in deportations and incarcerations in the border prison camps and continued building the wall, only to get treated as if you’re Trump’s biggest fan, public enemy number 1, and that you’re personally to blame for Kamala losing etc. Just one of these moments is all it takes.
Then someone who is self-aware enough like TC is gonna look around the metaphorical room and see all these people who are snarling at him, who don’t give a damn about principles or ethics or that fucking awful constitution or human rights, and they are gonna realize that they no longer recognize the community they exist within, that these people they thought were allies and who shared the same values are just as bad, just as willing to comprise on any values in order to win. And that’s when a person like this has a permanent and irreparable break from liberalism. Just one or two of them telling him “I hope ICE comes knocking at your door and drags you and your loved ones off to CECOT. How dare you make a valid criticism of a democratic candidate like that!? You are dead to me.” and he’s gonna have his road to Damascus moment.
This is why in the lead up to the most recent US presidential election I was riling up blue MAGA on social media in the comments. I legitimately wanted to put them through their own little strategy of (ideological) tension. I wanted them to be in such a siege mentality, in such a terrified political tailspin that they were lashing out at anyone and everyone. I wanted them barking at shadows and treating everyone like an opponent or a clandestine enemy. Because I know that they were turning on their own with that energy too; I can’t agitate within their circles very much but I can foster a mentality in them where they do that work for me and they will be far more effective at it than I could hope to be.
This is why I personally try to cultivate a comradely approach as best I can and why I opt for call-in culture over call out culture. One is corrosive and it harms any sort of movement or efforts to organize. The other builds. If we allow ourselves to be at one another’s throats then we are doing COINTELPRO’s work for it. Some things need to be called out and some things absolutely should not be permitted, of course, but if everyone is constantly on edge, if we extend no grace towards our comrades, then we will bring a sort of belligerence to our work and we will never make progress.
In saying all this, there’s a particular radical comm that exists in the lemmyverse that this brings to mind. You know the one. The head admin of it constantly lashes out and goes on witch hunts. The culture they set is incredibly toxic and corrosive to their politics. If propaganda of the deed is a thing then anti-propaganda of the deed is too. If it’s not clear enough yet, you can find a comment of mine where I mention the phrase petty tyrant for more info. (I don’t actually intend to rile up that particular character btw, although they are on a hair trigger so it just happens. I know very well how I could stoke an ideological strategy of tension with them if I wanted to - I know them better than they think. But that’s not my intention and I have far better things to do. And one of those things is picking quarrels and provoking trouble with progressive libs because I’m getting the backwards to self-isolate while bringing up the intermediate and bringing over the advanced.)
Idk where I’m going with this.
Idk where I’m going with this.
I totally understand what you’re getting at. You could watch this and think “LOL fucking lib” and then just dismiss it. It’s very similar to looking at this and thinking the exact same thing. What’s interesting is the comments in that thread compared to similar threads from about a year ago when the New Kings protests were popping off. When sorted by Top, the comments rank the sentiment by “we’ve all been cringe before becoming radical”, to “whatever gets libs to turn on ice”, to “fuck the constitution”. That’s the road liberals in MN on are in various ways. Direct contact with fascists is doing more than any amount of posting ever could, and it would seem, externally, people are more compassionate to people’s expressions of liberalism in direct response to this contact with fascists.
Like you said, people are going to arrive at their own criticism. People in MN are going to wonder WHY Democrats are voting to give ICE more money, and they will likely encounter people who will tell them they have to shut up and vote or else the Republicans will give them even MORE money. Positioning ourselves to on ramp those people getting attacked is correct. If our reaction was to dismiss people in the kind of limbo state TC seems to be in at the end of this video as “libs” then we miss out on the opportunity to push them in our direction, to build the bridge and help them walk across it.
This group that we’re talking about is standing at the edge of a river without a means to cross it. We can help them cross that river. None of us crossed it on our own, someone, even if it was some dead philosopher from the 1800s, helped us cross that river.
Fair
I just can’t get mad at our soft spoken boy.
Kinda neat honestly. I like technology connections and I think its cool he’s using his platform to try to make a difference even if I disagree with his liberalism
When I say I respect it, I mean that with all heart. It’s a rare case of someone drawing a line in the sand. He’s going to get shit for it, even from fellow liberals. Hopefully he can take the thoughts he has about labor (in the section just before this rant) and link them together into a broader analysis in the near future. I think we could be witnessing a communist awakining, maybe.
