Matt is working on mastering grillpill philosophy. (At least he now owns a grill, albeit a little one.) But practicing grillpill philosophy doesn't require activity operating a grill to work.
As a teenager in the early 70s I came to the realization that people, especially those in a position of relative power, are basically self interested jerks. As a young man I slowly resigned myself to this reality and scratched out a minimally decent living for myself taking full advantage of the privilege I was born into. Cooperated with The System just enough to live and retire in relative comfort. Throw out a meaningless contrairian vote at polling time and consider my part done. Really don’t know what else you could expect a poor middle class Southern white boy to do. I guess I could have done otherwise, but that would have meant poverty and jail. This generation is at the point where they have a lot less to loose. Get done what you can while you can folks. Good Luck!
I played a lot of pin ball in my day and just learned that I was an artisan(sounds less booshy than entrepreneur) as I was a free lance sign painter/muralist. Computerization and city ordinances more or less put an end to that. I squeaked by in the final days of using the same basic tools as the guys who wrote the Hieroglyphics in the pyramids. A long tradition killed by the microchip. My window air conditioner is noisy and next to useless and every time I turn around someone is trying to steal my social security from me. I marched to hell and back against wars and sabotaged logging equipment for trees. My back is shot so I aint a marchin' anymore But... Go kids go! Get out of the door and light up and look all around!
"Abolish the police" generally doesn't mean no-one does any if the things cops did. But the historical foundations of the police mean that, by using that particular institution to fill those roles, we are constantly patching an obviously flawed system.
Looking backwards in hindsight... I've been paying too much attention to Internet trolls instead of working together with people from my direct environment wanting a better world for themselves irl ✌️ We're always better together... Despite our differences 👊🏼 Solidarity Forever! Volunteer for any perceived just cause and at least you're trying to make a difference Be the example you want to see... Put it into practice... Give it a shot at least This coming from someone who's consistently been denied a voice in spite of perceived white privilege... 30+ years and something... I haven't forgotten the main goal of equality I won't give in... I won't give up
Not sure where you're getting at with Connolly. He was a deeply devout Catholic and wrote about the theological implications of his nationalism and socialism very often. He certainly saw his political agitation as an expression of his religiosity. He was very clear in his belief that the atheism of much of the Western left was a product of individualist capitalist enlightenment thought, and should be made obsolete. "We are not concerned to champion or to deny the morality of such a cause in anticipation, we are simply attempting to read the lessons of the past into the future. And, we modestly submit, this forecast has infinitely more of probability in it than the dreams of those who tell us so glibly of a coming Armageddon between the forces of socialism and Catholicism. Such dreams are not the product of modern socialist philosophy, they are a survival from the obsolete philosophy of the days preceding the first French Revolution." -Connolly, 1908: "Roman Catholicism and Socialism"
Back in the days of ancient Egypt, the world hardly changed from birth to death. Cycles of oppression that lasted centuries in the old times last decades or even a few years in these modern times I see hope in this
If nothing else, I hope the people here find socialist orgs or coalitions to join or work with to give them some guidance and support. It's a hell of a lot easier to join a protest when you have comrades watching your back, than when you're socially isolated from your community. I've been geographically isolated from my comrades since the quarantine started and have been too afraid to go to the sort of protests that I would have joined confidently under pre-covid19 conditions. The past few months have been extremely frustrating and I don't know whether it's worth pissing off family members who've been kind enough to give me housing during this crisis.
The healthiest way to live is to assume you essentially know nothing about what will happen. You may have emotional responses based on past experiences but you do not know - the anecdotal evidence of your life is nowhere near enough to be certain of anything. So, treat each moment of life like an experiment. Find out what will occur when you act.
Any given decision May have originated from the necessity of a microbe dwelling in your gut! That's why uploading" consciousness" to a computer program is a non starter on the face of it. We are context driven organic entities and all this introspection is a very late development.
We don't have civil war re-enactments in Finland as far as I know. I think it would be too much of a bummer since the war was mostly just massacres. The memory of it is still pretty painful for us actually.
Nice one Matt 👍 Great synopsis of the Easter Rising and what the Republic turned into afterwards till about the 90s things slowly started to change.... on Twitter someone said the current protests should link up with Gilles Jaunes and Hong Kong etc ... would be interested in your take .... Anyway, thanks again brother , love the vlogs , solidarity ✊
Lol people who see dialectical materialism is the right framework but don’t actually understand it: “You mentioned language affecting things! What are you, an idealist?” God some people are dumb... IMO this mindset is a holdover of the assumptions of dualist thought- this naive Cartesian belief that the human mind & body can be seen as these completely distinct, separate, disconnected phenomena. In a truly dialectical, monistic philosophy, it’s really obvious that the concrete beliefs in people’s minds (unlike abstract concepts or, if you want, Platonic ideals) are continuous with the rest of the material world, & that there is an interplay where the material conditions external to the mind shape the beliefs internal to the mind, which in turn guide people’s actions, which are capable of influencing the material conditions external to the mind. Nothing else makes sense and historical/economic determinism which pretends people’s beliefs & theories & action have no capacity to shape conditions is absolute fatalistic, defeatist poison.
About @29:30 talking about why the Russian Revolution succeeded. I agree with Matt (of course): It was because of the mess of the Czarist state: it was the "weakest link" in the capitalist chain as the Bolsheviks described it. When the February revolution broke out the Bolsheviks were in total disarray: Lenin and Trotsky in England, Stalin in a Czarist prison...but by the end of the year they were in power. Not even the Bolsheviks actually had what Stalin would later call "bolshevik discipline" when it really mattered.
it’s amazing to look at history, especially environmental history, for the way social relations are forced to contort to them. that’s why history is a weapon - it reveals the contingencies of potential and transformation. neither political party in the us takes seriously the possibilities of any given moment because they hold onto traditions
What I like about history is it also shows us almost everything isn't fixed. Spending every moment in the present you forget what can and has changed over time and instead see every social more and construct crystalized and seemingly eternal.
If Cush could bring his vocab down to about an 8th grade level (and delete everything he's ever published online [especially dat New Orleans patois]🤦♂️) he could win a local election in Brooklyn.
Ah man, I was hoping he'd talk about the book Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy. A great book that lays out how a socialistic society could work in practice.
How the hell do you sound like an abridged version of the Western Civ II textbook I read last semester. Dude, what I'd do to not forget all this cool shit.
Hey hey now mein fruend, das ist pferdesheisse you're sprechen over here! We Germans totally don't have a guttural language and absolutely incoherent sense of "German" history and culture hahahaha love you buddy. Keep grillin'
Lol at thinking that Marx was in a *better* position to make predictions about the future because he didn’t have the internet or decent living conditions. The fact is, Marx wasn’t in a good enough position to make super accurate predictions either; he was wrong in a number of major ones. And that’s not something he should be blamed for- he got more right than most people. But ultimately, if he HAD had the internet & could access the sum total of our collective knowledge & historical documentation, he might’ve gotten even more right. But yeah, I wouldn’t say nobody is smart enough or has good enough access to information to make good predictions just because they’re online. Most people aren’t smart enough to do so in any systematic or halfway reliable way, but it’s not a binary, just like it wasn’t for Marx (he got some wrong, he got some right). Where Matt is very much right, though, is that social sciences (whether it’s economics or political science or what have you) differ from physical sciences in that the decisions people will make are indeterminate. You can’t formulate a simple deterministic equation that will tell you what all the billions of other players in the chess game will do reliably, & the other difference is that our theories about society are part of the subject being studied- our theories & models & predictions about economics or politics or sociological reality can influence what actually ends up happening, how the economic, political, & social realms change. As Yanis Varoufakis explains it, if you are a world famous meteorologist, & you come up with a detailed mathematical model which predicts that tomorrow there will be a tornado that will hit this precise location, & you tell the world, your theory will either be proven right & validated by its predictions, or it will be proven wrong & invalidated. Time will tell- “the weather doesn’t give a damn about our theories about the weather.” But if you’re a world-famous economist & your create a detailed mathematical economic model, & it predicts that next week there will be a catastrophic economic crash, and you report that in the New York Times or otherwise spread that prediction around, then guess what. There may very well be a catastrophic economic crash, whether there would’ve been one otherwise or not, because people might take your model to heart, in which case they may withdraw their money from the market all at once, which could precipitate the collapse you predicted. This feedback mechanism where our theories about the phenomenon feed into the phenomenon under study is unique to the social realm, & Marx understood this (there’s a reason he said that the point of philosophy was not just to explain the world, but to *change it*). We should too, and part of that means understanding that at any time there could be new developments we couldn’t have predicted which could change things in new & unexpected ways. That said, while we should take our models & predictions with that grain of salt & recognize the responsibility we bear knowing that there can be real-world repercussions to the ideas we put out there, I do think it can still be worthwhile to make predictions. We just shouldn’t delude ourselves that we have every variable & can KNOW how things will turn out.
Really appreciate this content. Also, there is no scientific evidence "free will" exists. I think people need to believe in free will because the cognitive dissonance is too great otherwise.
Well drag my new diamond stylus fully across my 180 gram custom pressed Deep Purple Machine Head (such decadence). You pointed out the bad thing. The real world has infected our (your) fully customised virtual world. Did any of us really believe that we would not drag our ills into an ongoing intellectual creation of an alternate reality? But let's get the timeline straight. 1) The Internal CUMbustion Engine 2) Thermonuclear War 3) Das Interwebben. But....something seems to be missing. How about systematically divorcing you from your own biology? To advance the tech, well, some of you salamanders are going to be sacrificed. And then salmon. And then three toed sloths. And then orangutans. And then.... This may be the only quantifiable "progressive" thing that is happening. And it's not a simulation. I did like your throw down with Marx. A verifiable person from the past. But he just doesn't get the same airtime that Jeezuz gets. But that's OK. There is a solution. Overcoming compromised dogma is the same strategy as overcoming destructive technology. You abandon it. Of course there will be chaos. That's why, in anticipation, you load up on Pogues discs. Cheers, Mr. Christman.
I like Matt but these dudes will do the craziest mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they're not privileged upper class. Come on dude, suddenly you're not making 6 figures a year? Even if you don't agree with how did your eyes not roll into the back of your head when he said he was an artisan even though he works maybe 8 totals hours in a week?
Bbbb Gggg Yeah I think that’s one of the most frustrating things about them is the refusal to acknowledge that they are in many ways the people they complain about. Which is fine IMO, we all are that to one degree or another, it’s just a little bizzare that they contort themselves to avoid acknowledging that fact.
yeah agreed. i appreciate what they do, and it is definitely work, but it's also a bit ridiculous to call it artisanal when it's from them and then to turn around and critique everyone else for overuse of the internet for talking politics (as true as this is) when they do the same thing.
The *show* makes six figures through their Patreon, split between the five hosts and the producer. Comes out to between 30k and 40K USD per person, and now less b/c Patreon earnings are under pressure from a growing body of international law to be taxable.
