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)
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.
Extremely disappointing take. Comrade Yugo needs to self-crit over this.
We’ve all been wrong and said cringe things. It’s important to acknowledge and correct such behavior whenever it’s pointed out.
If Mao was able to organize the masses who were living in feudal conditions, westerners have no excuse. The ableist thinking from that tweet is pure cope.
Maos peasants weren’t people propagandized from birth to worship capitalism and be good little nationalists that believe every other nation on earth is a shit hole, and taught that communism is the literal devil incarnate. I’d take the peasant over that any day. You could actually talk to those people without the threat of semi-automatic weapons being pointed at you. It’s easier to start with a nearly blank slate then one that’s had this level of propaganda drilled into their being.
Chinese people also lived under much worse conditions, including a century of humiliation and two Japanese invasions. USians aren’t yet living under deprivations anything like early 20th century Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Koreans, or Vietnamese.
Another good point. People still have things to lose. It takes extremes to get ordinary people to be willing to fight. Not only that. From weapon standpoint it takes more and more people willing to fight, in order to combat the technology superiority against us. Literally the entire US military is designed for this. Fighting against a lesser armed foe.
Appreciate that you didn’t double down on it. I think Americans have no excuse, because people living in conditions far worse than anything Americans can even comprehend came together to build a better society.
But I’m no one to speak. I’ve barely done enough to further socialism in my own country. All I’m doing is talking to people and slowly propagandizing then to build class consciousness. Tiring process, but we play with the cards we’re dealt
“A bowl is most useful when it is empty” - Lao Tzu
I think he was almost doing alright until the last bit.
I do think that people who engage in the mental gymnastics required to maintain a right wing or even liberal ideology are doing damage to their brains.
If you don’t use muscles they atrophy, if you over work them they can become deformed, same goes for different parts of the brain. Its called neuroplasticity. If you don’t practice empathy you become incapable of it, the parts of your brain involved in empathy will atrophy and the space will be taken up by parts of the brain that do other things.
The “sub strata” as he calls them are nothing special just a more extreme example of individuals who have ideologically programed short circuits in their reasoning. We all have brain worms some people just have a way larger infestation.
Kinda like how Yugopnic is showing he has an eugenicist brain worm that is confusing cause and effect.
The expulsion of a group, any group, from the category of human beings is extremely dangerous. Below are some passages from Losurdo’s book, War and Revolution. Although I did gather the passages and quickly made this comment, I think it might resonate with some of you.
“At times of acute conflict, we witness a kind of mutual excommunication from civilization (this is the essence of the process of de-specification). The friend/enemy dichotomy tends to coincide with the civilization/ barbarism dichotomy. However, the two forms of de-specification are not equivalent. One of them establishes a politico-moral distance between the self and the enemy, while the other establishes a distance more charged with naturalistic elements, because it identifies the enemy as foreigner and barbarian or, with reference predominantly to revolutionary leaders, as a lunatic, who is likewise alien to a community within which conflict arises not because of internal contradictions, but because of an external pathogenic or ethnic cause. The first type of de-specification refers to a form of conduct which, by definition, is particular and mutable. Going beyond conduct, the second ends up referring to characteristics that tend to assume a naturalistic fixity.”
“The ideology developed to legitimize and celebrate ventures against the barbarians also ends up materializing in the capitalist metropolis. […] In other words, during serious conflicts between members of the civilized community, forms of war traditionally employed against barbarians tend to emerge within it as well.”
But the definition of race/barbarians can be vague. For example,
“Between 1907 and 1915, thirteen US states enacted laws for compulsory sterilization, covering, according to Indiana’s legislation (the first state to move in this direction), ‘habitual delinquents, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’. There were those who proposed extending such legislation to ‘vagabonds’ (for the most part members of an ‘inferior race’).”
However, we on the left usually react to such racialization with moral condemnation.
“We register a paradox. At the very moment when de-specification on a naturalistic basis is indignantly rejected, moral sentiment can result in a different type of de-specification, with the expulsion from the moral (and human) community of a social stratum (in this instance, slave-owners).”
And,
“The most radical representatives of American abolitionism seem to argue in similar fashion. [Condemning] the institution of slavery as a ‘combination of death and hell’, and having branded the US Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. […] Reconstructed via the rejection of racial prejudice, the unity of the human race is once again undermined by moral or politico-moral sentiment or fanaticism.”
Yet,
“In the USA, the ancien régime presented itself in a highly peculiar form. The residues of censitary discrimination were not of much significance. More important was the fact that the aristocracy of class was configured here as an aristocracy of race.”
Finally, there’s the last part of this passage, which I think serves as a prescient warning:
“Tocqueville identified the French and, in particular, the Jacobins as the carriers of ‘a virus of a new and unknown kind’, which allegedly underlay the incessant French revolutionary cycle. Having condemned ressentiment as the motive behind rebellion against the power exercised by the masters and the successful, Nietzsche pointed to the Jews as ‘the people of ressentiment par excellence’. Finally, Hitler prided himself on having finally discovered the source of the disease and the revolutionary infection. It was Jews and Bolsheviks, who were regularly equated, in part on account of the Jewish origin of a significant number of leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement. The process of ethnicization of the revolutionary virus can assume very different forms. But what remains constant is the danger of slippage from the psychopathological paradigm, which refers to mental illness, to the naturalistic paradigm, which refers to the inferior or degenerate ethnicity and race.”
Perhaps the moral condemnation of the West, and since white people have presented themselves as naturally superior for such a long period of time, can at the same time be a rejection of the Western population as part of the “real” human race by those they have oppressed. It sounds like a reversal of white supremacists’ own self-perceived superiority. This strand of thought admits that a certain kind of white people were born without a way out of said group, but judges them negatively and attributes to the group only bad, eternal qualities.
exactly, the contradictions are internal - or in other words, they’re coming from inside the house!
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.
Add: ygpk is using hateful language and is using the talking points of eugenics in his posts. Everyone itt calling him out on his hateful behavior is correct. I only made my comment because I just don’t feel the need to direct sympathy towards the rich.
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.
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
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.
What he said here is shit and I think it’s worthy of criticism, but I still think that his work is great and what he’s doing is great. Also, I get it. I get breaking down and just having A Moment about America, especially when your country is on the receiving end of imperialism. He certainly should have vented in private but I do get what prompted him to act this way.
I get it also. I don’t entirely disagree with a good bunch of the US population being rabid beyond repair and having the cognitive capacity of an 8 year old, since I have also been on the internet. As a matter of fact, I think these months are proving that the problem is much wider and much deeper than anyone’s ever said. I don’t think leaning into eugenicist bullshit is necessary or acceptable though.
I agree and honestly I think he’s just angry (like we all are) and he’s just saying this kind of stuff in anger.
Don’t drink and tweet, Yugo.
14yo take
Why is he treating it as a mystery? America literally did allow a thought-terminating virus to run rampant. There’s also our deliberately poor education. We have answers to this, Yugo. It’s not some incomprehensible phenomenon.
+ 40 years of cold war propaganda + times of heightened contradictions + living in the heart of the empire itself.
The CW propaganda was wild, someone once told me people in the USSR were “miming” working at the factory line (like the line was empty and they just mimed work) because there was nothing to produce. Like what? How does that even make sense lol. They were older, probably heard this as a kid in school. It was a real generational shock for me hearing this.
Yeah, it’s frustrating hearing this. We need to remember to stay vigilant ourselves. None of us are immune to thought-termination and propaganda.
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.
This isn’t the entire problem, obviously, but this is why I don’t use Twitter [beyond the garbage ui]. It’s basically what happens when you give people a way to say intrusive thoughts completely seriously.
This type of thing isn’t something ive thought specifically, but I’ve had plenty of bad takes in my head that I didn’t spread to an audience with 100% confidence. [For example: Having very strong opinions on the Turkish-Greek conflicts (despite being from neither country). Luckily beyond just disliking Rome and some snide remarks about how much I love that Ataturk renamed Constantinople, i didn’t say anything]. I’m sure there’s plenty of well meaning people who might have had similar thoughts to Yugo here, but didn’t say them.
The other issue is that Yugo should be better than this. It’s like what I said about 1dime recently. If this was a baby leftist then I’d be concerned but the thought would probably just be an impulsive thing that’s easily corrected. Yugo has an audience of thousands and should be well developed, ergo this thought is more concerning in him than anonympus user “libdestroyer9000”
Edit: more seriously, what’s the explanation for this? Taking this argument seriously has its own problems sure, but like…what biological factor would be at play here? Why would one place act like this and another not? Beyond just “stupid people.” Which definitely isn’t ableist at all
more seriously, what’s the explanation for this? Taking this argument seriously has its own problems sure, but like…what biological factor would be at play here?
lead poisoning most likely. despite it being a global issue I’ve seen this take before, ie. the yanks are still working through the generations that had their brains stunted by lead. I don’t claim this take but I’ve seen it a lot in anti-US spaces, though I kind of thought it was a meme tbh.
That wouldn’t be specific to chuds, though. It’d affect people across the spectrum and probably would hit poor people the hardest.
Maybe he’s casting an incredibly wide net over yanks and including most of them as chuds? It wouldn’t be incorrect to describe demographics in general as far more rightward in the states. I’m just trying to make sense of the statement and just seeing what sticks. Yugopnik says some pretty unhinged things and this might just be an utterly underdeveloped, spiteful thought.
You’re giving him way too much credit. If there’s widespread lead poisoning that’s causing cognitive decline for millions of people, there will be communists among those millions of people. To think otherwise is wrong for 2 huge reasons:
- You’re essentializing right wing ideology to the point that it’s impossible to think the people who believe in it could ever change, because based on this worldview the only people who believe in right wing ideology are biologically inferior.
- You’re making the in-group (communists in this case) think that they’re inherently superior to those who have something wrong with them at a biological level.
It goes without saying that leftists need to believe that change is possible; that doesn’t mean being naive about how hard that’s gonna be for American fascists, or even to believe that redeeming every single one of them is necessary. But you at least need to believe that there’s nothing that’s baked into reactionaries that makes them reactionary, or else you’re halfway to accepting an aristocratic and austere worldview where you set out to give comfort only to the sensitive and noble people, and nothing but hard labor to the brutes. In other words, you may as well drop Marx and pick up Nietzsche.
I think its worth dismantling the take, but I think I’m not the person who needs to read this. Still a good write up for the thread.
lead poisoning may or may not explain why boomers are the way they are (and may explain other negatively perceived behaviors that may be considered less political), but something like microplastics could easily ruin the next 100 years.
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).
