Some people don’t believe me when I try to warn them about the content creator grift. I don’t care, I’m coming for all of them if they start spouting shit like this to their audience. They have a responsibility towards their viewers.
Second time I see him tweet shit like this.
At this point he should just stop pretending he’s any sort of leftist. His mental health will thank him.
archive link so he can’t scrub it off the internet: https://archive.ph/XWZD6 (still loading as of posting but should be ready eventually)
I once saw a tiktok leftist saying similar shit (though he had a degree in psychology). I did warn him though in the comments that even if the scientific facts are what they claim to be, we still cant fall or use the same rhetoric as the nazis did. luckily he understood.
I used to donate to the deprogram podcast for quite a while until I realized they have some really fucking bad takes once in a while and they just don’t give a shit about it whatsoever.
One of their biggest errors is their position on the Ukraine war. Like so many western leftists, they have an unfortunate tendency to allow their (legitimate) criticism of modern Russia to cloud their judgement on the nature of the conflict. It certainly did not help that the only Russian they invited to talk to them about the SMO was from a fringe ultra-left group more concerned with opposing the Russian government than with what is actually happening in Ukraine.
For once i want western leftist commentators to invite someone from the KPRF, or someone from the DPR/LPR (there are even some locals from the region who make YouTube videos), or just a journalist who has been to that region on the Russian side during the SMO or the 8 year Donbass war.
I’m not in media like they are but even i could name at least three English speaking journalists off the top of my head who have visited the front line and spoken to people in the region and could educate them on what the people there really think, if they bothered to try and get into contact with them. It is really inexcusable that they haven’t tried to really educate their audience (and more importantly themselves) deeper on the conflict.
And they spend way too much time making cringy, infantile jokes. I get that it’s a podcast and you want to keep it somewhat entertaining, but come on, have some professionalism. At the very least they could add a woman as a regular co-host, because some of the jokes feel really inappropriate sometimes.
And they spend way too much time making cringy, infantile jokes. I get that it’s a podcast and you want to keep it somewhat entertaining, but come on, have some professionalism. At the very least they could add a woman as a regular co-host, because some of the jokes feel really inappropriate sometimes.
Sounds like the problem of becoming more “left” in belief but not interrogating what you grew up in and how it impacts you. I believe it’s very possible to be entertaining and even humorous without going for shock jock level of humor (which is what it sounds like the ballpark of by how you describe it). But you can’t assume that whatever joke comes to mind is fine just because. Sense of humor is informed by the culture like anything else. Figuring out how to be funny in a way that adheres to more newly adopted ideological principles takes more effort compared to the reflexes of the old, but it’s possible to figure out. The way I look at it, a good starting point is to assume that a joke is going to have an ideological bias and go from there, i.e. be conscious about the ideology it espouses. Don’t go into it with the belief that jokes can escape ideological influences, that they are “just a joke.” Jokes can have powerful rhetorical influence.
Just to play devil’s advocate here- Yugo is specifically talking about Americans, not a racial, ethnic or religious group. And dialectical materialism does start with the idea the material conditions play a large role in determining how people think. It sounds to me like he is critiquing the stupidity of America as a whole, not that he is being a na I and saying exterminate because they are all vermin.
He says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and that it’s just his beliefs, in the tweet itself.
He could make the exact same point, while omitting genetics entirely and it’d still land without dipping into eugenics. That’s the issue here.
With that being said I feel equally uncomfortable with how yugopnik’s mental health is told to be in jeopardy because he pretends to be a leftist?
and why is the solution for him to pretend to be one and not to seek out a real life community to engage with instead of this shithole that is X?
I know things are super tense right now everyone is on the edge so we’re gonna be making lots of mistakes, but let’s not start telling people to give up. We’re acting like crabs in a bucket here while the fascists are arming themselves to kill us.
Man people need to go out more often or you’ll eventually talk some dumb shit like this
This but also… I kinda feel the same about people that treat these “influencers” as if they are supposed to be infallible, and then freak out over every instance of imperfection. Has their been a left side “influencer” in history that didn’t say some unhinged shit in their life or have some bad habit or acts? I mean shit, imagine what kind of tweets Marx would have had? He was a great man but he wasn’t a saint. I’ve seen plenty of people on here say we need to not like, worship influencers and treat them as infallible, and yet those same people rant when some influencer shows themselves as having faults. So what is it? Are the supposed to be perfect or aren’t they?
Some people have shit takes. I’m not gonna defend a bad take, but I’m analytical enough to know people aren’t perfect. I sure as fuck am not. So I look at it like this, Yugo and the dudes on that podcast have done more to bring more people into communism, real actual communism, then I have, so I’m not gonna cast no stones. And I’m sure as fuck not calling him a Nazi for having a rage fit over how fucking crazy Americans and chuds in general are. I hear these people every day. If an intelligent and learned communist can hear the things I’ve heard, and not at any point think, even once, “there might be something wrong with these people” , then I’d have to question if that person was real.
I think I kinda get where you’re coming from on this. Yeah, nobody has the “correct” take all the time. I would say one of the problems here with the influencer type crowd is how many of them don’t take the gravity of their position seriously; when they see themselves more as “shitposters” than as columnists, more as memelords than propagandists, more as shock jocks than thought leaders.
Part of this goes back to systemic stuff. The western, english-speaking internet (can’t speak for elsewhere) is such that it’s easier to be seen by being shocking, memey, and ridiculous than by writing long, well-thought-out essays. In fact, by some you can viewed as annoyingly academic and wordy just for writing a couple of paragraphs. So not only is there an incentive to reduce your communication to soundbite shock value stuff, algorithms drive that stuff to the forefront and make those people more popular compared to the more plodding, “boring” ones.
These kind of people do have something going for them, which is an understanding of marketing. But I do think they need more serious communists in their corner, with an in-depth understanding of theory (and preferably practice too) who can help shape their marketing into more pointed propaganda. Rather than them posting every “hot take” they have for the views.
Edit: Also, this problem that Conselheiro outlined comes to mind:
This is what substituting a party for a podcast does to a mf.
I’m pretty sure Marx was actively involved in the struggle along with doing heavy observation of its developments. Lenin for sure was, as was Mao. The kind of people that are thought leaders in marxism are people who put it into practice and learned from that practice. “Influencers” can only go so far if they aren’t out there organizing. But doing so also puts them more in the crosshairs and so would give them more reason to be cautious about what they say. It’s insulation that empowers recklessness.
Hot take…?: Marx having Twitter would’ve been bad…?
But also Marx had bad takes occasionally anyway. That’s the nature of being a person. So what do you do when someone makes mistakes? You criticize them and you work on it. And I’m certainly going to criticize someone who talks about a “sub strata” of humanity. The op didn’t say “yugo is a nazi” they said “yugo tweets nazi shit.” Which…he did. At the very least it’s extremely ableist.
Also, there’s a difference between “something might be wrong with these people” and “there’s a substrata of humans who can’t think correctly.” In any case, it’s just extremely shit logic, and even more shit logic to go “should I post this to my audience? Hell yeah!”
These types of “people are stupid (or any ableist slurs)” talking points always bother me because outside of alienating people by saying shit like that, it’s also incredibly harmful rhetoric that legitimizes eugenics and normalizes genocide against disabled people (well actually people in general, not just disabled people).
I think a lot has already been said about why dehumanizing any group of people is very dangerous, but yeah I agree with you on touching grass. Take some time off the internet and go outside every once in a while. I’m also glad to have not been on twitter for years lol.
I don’t agree but when I look around at the people in this country… I mean, I get where someone might say something like this… I have developed a fear of talking to people because of the crazy shit I hear. The first few times I heard someone say something so crazy that I legitimately thought “no way a person just said this?” I was shocked, but now I’m constantly shocked at how often it keeps happening…
I do, legitimately think a large portion of Americans lacks critical thinking, and have some absolutely bat shit insane thoughts. But in all seriousness, the majority of it is literally just propaganda, brain rotting media, and purposeful failure to teach critical thinking at young ages. Critical thinking isn’t just something that happens magically later in life. You have to teach it, and schools in this country…lol. The system is designed to keep us uneducated and compliant. They don’t want us to think for ourselves, to act for ourselves, and definitely not to question ourselves and by extension, what they have told us. Anyone that argues it’s not is either not paying attention or not here to witness it. Then, when someone lives long enough like that, it just becomes a core foundation of who they are. It’s not some metal disease, it’s just, all they know.
And while shit like pollution can affect the development of the brain, I would say, saying a whole country the size of the US is that way because of it, is a bit of a stretch.
Yikes, that comment reeks of idealism.
Hakim come get your boy jfc.
I commented on the thread on hexbear but I’ll say it here for the sake of perhaps starting a conversation, I think linking cognitive capacity to people becoming reactionaries, is itself a reactionary and ableist idea. Has lead/covid/microplastics affected the cognitive capacity of the population? Yes, most likely, but this alone does not turn a population towards reaction. Being “smart” doesnt turn you into a communist, being disabled doesnt turn you into a reactionary.
Mental impairment for physical reasons certainly exists, and there can be little doubt that some (at least) of the unfortunate persons who suffer from it hold absurd views on politics and many other things. But in general, I am not convinced that defects of the physical complex from which arises cognition – which complex we call, without really understanding it, the “brain” – are as common or as all-determining as most persons make out. Such people, having a smattering of what they think is Science, apply it crudely and mechanically, and believe that in reducing everything to a second-hand formula they have realized materialism; when in in their failure to recognize a concept as anything but a withered husk, a conclusion without the living sap of argument or struggle, they merely reproduce in themselves the immediate substantial world of belief. Thus, in a kind of miscarriage of Spirit, they give birth, not again to the living, multifarious world around them, but to a kind of stillborn and distorted image of the same; and their attribution of all opposition to what their stillborn conception of Science considers the most fundamental defect betrays only the poverty of their own conception.
How often have we met persons who, though given every advantage of culture, have yet failed to realize a full and living conception of the world; and conversely, have we not met persons who, though lacking in all the usual advantages toward knowledge, have yet realized in themselves the world as becoming! When the new world is born from the old, and further, its Notion has born fruit in the whole concrete richness of life, its essence is easy to grasp; when the old still exists, externally the same as ever but with the old meaning lost or changing, to grasp the essence is difficult, since it seems, the most real thing, to be unreal, fleeting, and with no genuine relation to substantial life. Who grasps it must do so in struggle, heroic and human, in concrete time; which is to say, such a one must be at the apex of the embodied struggle; and here we find the full essence of what is commonly termed “environment.”
(Apologies for the language. I was trying to crack Hegel last night).
Unfortunate take. There are plenty of rich and powerful people who benefit. There is a really shit education system, failing millions. There is an absurd amount of propaganda.
USA is cringe for sure but I cannot imagine looking at what Americans do and thinking that the country is uniquely worse at critical thinking than the rest of world. Sure, their education system and the people coming out of it are abysmal considering its the wealthiest country in the world. But there are tangible reasons for it, like the underfunded public education system. I look at the people around where I live and most of them are not good at critical thinking either. It is not something that is taught in general.
The other sad thing is what made him surface this thought is the rambling of a weird nazi on X, the everything app. That platform is a cesspool of all varieties of fascists who inhale oxygen just so they are able to make atrocious bad faith posts on it. Now Musk even pays them for it. Content creators cannot fathom leaving that website because a big chunk of their self worth and income is tied to their follower count. Don’t use that website that all. Otherwise don’t use it to survey national mentual acuity. Just be normal.
I think this is a logical conclusion if one believes “brainwashing” on mass is a thing for an explantion of the bourgoisie proleteriat; it will lead to a biolgical determinist rationale for resistance to being “unbrainwashed” and then it’s a short hop from that to eugenicism echoing essentially fascist sentiments.
Instead consider a more dialectical materialist take:
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Ie narratives as a social license for bigotry along imperialist and settler colonial lines because at some level that individual benefits from those material conditions. The material always come before the idea.
(There’s all sorts of other problems with yugopnik’s take - like folks with learning difficulties who don’t lean right wing, removing the agency of the fascist, using ablism to explain fascism, where these Nietschean takes of the untermenschen comes from etc etc)
Very disappointing. The ReProgram.
It’s telling that if you swapped out “right wing” for “left wing” in his post, it would be indistinguishable from eugenics style stuff that the right gets up to. So at a glance, it looks like pushing rightist ideology under the guise of “hello fellow leftists” (I don’t know much about him otherwise, so I don’t know what his other takes look like, if they are consistent with this look).
He’s one of the co-hosts of the Deprogram podcast and this eugenics take is simultaneously consistent with some of the edgy stuff that the hosts of the pod say for humor, and inconsistent because they usually hold the line on some basic things like queerphobia, ableism, misogyny, etc. (in a broad sense, they’ve probably always been flawed)
It’s the second time I’ve seen him tweet shit like this. I can probably dig up the previous time if I go looking in my discords.
I can understand being exasperated esp when you’re an somewhat known figure you probably get a lot of trolls and content of this sort sent your way, and sometimes you just quip something back at them. but to take the time to type out all of this and then decide “yes, I shall now send this. It’s a good idea” is something else.
Believe people when they show you who they are. Anyone can appear however they want when they control the camera, but posts like this are off-the-cuff moments where they feel like they’re talking to their friends around the campfire.
Here was the last time actually (archive):
his defense was the person in the video is a millionaire nepo baby so that makes it okay. Like again there’s a difference between saying “eat the rich” and making an entire eugenics screed over a video.
I know that “Just like le consumer franchise!” is a massive liberal meme, but this is essentially just the Imperial line of thought in Warhammer. If you’re spouting the same rhetoric as a satirically Uber fascist ethnostate, especially as a leftist, then you’ve officially lost the plot.
Yeah, wow, that’s wildly over the top. It also looks very forced from where I’m standing. I don’t look at that and see soullessness or anything, I see a couple of people who actually look very normal and human. And it’s important people understand that being rich doesn’t suddenly make someone a sociopath or something. Sometimes people do sociopath things in order to get rich, or maintain their wealth, but it doesn’t even necessarily mean they lack empathy. They could be very empathic to people in their social circle, while justifying their behavior as defending what they have, or be heavily insulated from the damage of what they do because of the layers of indirection involved in capitalism. There are also degrees of rich. Millionaire in this day and age can mean you had a high paying job, worked for decades, and saved well. Billionaire is you’re basically a king without the title.
That said, one of the most important things to internalize, I’d say, is that the inertia of systems is far more powerful than what a few individuals decide. Which is why the ML line is “seize the means of production” and not “literally eat the rich because they are subhuman”. There’s just nothing beneficial about encouraging that kind of thought. It’s at best wasted energy, directing people more toward fleeting, impassioned rage than long-term strategy. It’s the kind of stuff you say when you want to incite a riot, not organize a revolution.
They could be very empathic to people in their social circle, while justifying their behavior as defending what they have, or be heavily insulated from the damage of what they do because of the layers of indirection involved in capitalism.
These people don’t need to be humanized. They already have so much, too much actually, and will almost always act the way everyone expects them to act when reparations and transfer of means occurs. They will lash out, they will become violent, and they will hate you and every one else that isn’t within their immediate circle. There are so many people that exist inside and outside your country that are barely given a thought. The homeless begging for simple acknowledgment and being denied even that, the unnamed masses (the statistics!) that die every day in the periphery of the empire to preventable illnesses and starvation. The victims of wars that were the lab mice for the brutality that has finally begun to reach the empire’s doorstep.
So many more people deserve that sympathy that you’re giving to people that will treat exactly the way Marx outlined.
Sympathy isn’t a finite resource, just because I acknowledge the humanity of rich people (even tho on a personal level I detest them) doesn’t mean I acknowledge the suffering of poor people less. Like the person above said, being so performative about your hatred towards the rich is ultimately pointless.
I get it, I don’t believe anyone here is giving more thought to rich people than to others.
But if I can be so honest with you: these people probably don’t care about you, so why on earth should you care about them? So they’re at the receiving end of either unsavory or outright hateful rhetoric. Beyond calling out the use of hateful rhetoric, why should anyone go the extra mile and show them sympathy?
My personal opinion: ignore them like they ignore you
I don’t see how I gave them sympathy. The point is that they aren’t all ghouls whose eyes you can look into and see pure evil or something. It’s much more mundane and systemic than that and if people don’t understand that, they will be unequipped to properly challenge power; instead chasing after threats in the same way that liberals view Trump as an embodiment of evil and miss the evil behind the decorum of somebody like Joe Biden.
Rich people will tend to act in their class and caste interests, yes, which can be very blatantly, sometimes cartoonishly evil (more so in the billionaire class than somebody with a few million). That doesn’t mean you can look them in the eye and be unable to find signs of a soul. It doesn’t even mean that if you spent the day with them, you’d necessarily think they’re a bad person. And if you go in expecting it to be obvious that they are evil, you will be confused during the times when they aren’t.
I don’t need to humanize them. They are human. That doesn’t make what they are part of any less horrific. If people want to call em ghouls sometimes or whatever, hell, I’ve done that myself. But I see that more as venting. What I was talking about was a preoccupied screed about how subhuman a couple of random people are.
Your emphasis on the plight of the downtrodden is valuable, both morally and strategically. It needs to be emphasized just how bad it is for the oppressed. But that doesn’t negate what I’ve said, which was directed at a specific context, not meant as some kind of sympathy for the rich.
Don’t drink and tweet, Yugo.
It almost feels like Yogo should go in SRS at this point
