Huh. Until right now, I thought rabbit and hare were synonyms.
When I saw my first European Hare, I noted how not-cute and cuddly it looked... and thought to call them "hares" to denote to myself that they were not the cute rabbits I was familiar with. But now I feel dumb because that's literally what it is.
Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health
Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation
Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society's health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don't like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait
It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.
Ok, use Android then. Millions of people don’t care about those things because they have different priorities for their phone which Apple accounts for when they decide which features to roll out.
Every new Android version adds features that have been on iOS forever. Both OSes have different priorities.
Android will often add new features but they are poorly integrated or thought out. iOS tends to add features with a much higher level of refinement the first time around.
It's not how I would have scripted the video, but until/unless I make my own content, I'm not going to bash him too hard. Still consider him a great contributor. I'll leave it at that — thanks for the discussion
I agree that the theory should adapt. Just not in that way. Political climate and popular opinion, in a word ideology, are distinct from material conditions and relations of production.
The historical changes that require updating theory are things like Western financial imperialism that works concurrently to de-industrialize the West while increasing exploitation in the Global South; what Andy Higginbottom calls "super-exploitation". Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai have also discussed this in detail.
It has always been difficult and unpopular to advocate revolution, even in Marx's time. It is not uniquely difficult today even with the Red Scare. There was a time in the early 20th century that there was some modicum of support for revolution in some countries, but in every example it still required a bitter civil war.
There are plenty of Marxists on YouTube who do not concede revolution. Maybe some are too small to grab attention, but there are larger channels like Geopolitical Economy Report who routinely talk about current events from a Marxist perspective, and occasionally talk theory, without such compromise.
The need for revolution is more or less standard Marxism, so it feels backward that I should be explaining that perspective — why do you think we must educate from a social-democratic perspective? Blaming the Red Scare seems like an excuse to me. If someone clicks a video about socialism, they're either open to learning, or they're not. At that crucial point you have to be convincing, not wheel out the usual arguments about fairness that every single Westerner has heard for decades.
Propaganda is no excuse to concede the essential Marxist tenets.
For one thing, 100 years is not a long time.
Secondly, without proving why a theory is now practically obsolete, appealing to the age of theory is a lazy dismissal. For example, many people's knee-jerk reaction to Marx is that he's irrelevant because he lived gasp 150 years ago. So much has changed! Before they had mean wage labor, and now we have nice wage labor!
Reformism was an issue throughout the 20th century. Both PRC and USSR took active measures to prevent reformists from undermining their respective parties. In Finland, the social democrats allied with the bourgeoisie to win the civil war (1918) and then allied with the Nazis to genocide Leningrad during the Continuation War.
The proletariat as a class is materially unchanged, for the most part, since the time of that party. The particular political situation does not change the basic theory and the necessity for revolution over reform.
![quarrk [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7e8d5408-881d-44be-96ed-78f21c878bbb.png?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
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