Why did these videos get made? Was it an honest attempt at social justice? A grift? Clickbait? Why were they so disliked? As Marxists I think we can get to the bottom of this.
Why were they so disliked?
White people are snowflakes?
https://youtu.be/SBluYsydAVc
Actually, after rewatching the video, I have a much simpler answer: Nobody likes being condescended to.
I'm sure there are some awful comments on this video, but I refuse to scroll down and read them
I mean yeah, that is part of it. I certainly disliked it when I first saw it. I think the reason why I found it so distasteful was because of the way it was edited. There is zero time to think about what the people in the video are actually saying, it's a bunch of quick cuts and an assault on the senses. Basically I find myself agreeing with most of the points in isolation, but when they all get thrown at you at once you can't comprehend it.
The real issue is it's dishonest - it's not earnestly targeted at anybody and is just a clickbait+outrage+debate magnet.
Anyone who would be even remotely receptive to the core substance of the content isn't going around BLUE LIVES'ing at people and saying they have black friends so they can say the N word. Any active racist is going to instantly just get pissed off and marginally further radicalized by the style.
Wow, let's cure this pool supply tyrant of his seething racism by having a gay 17 year old yell at him. Then let's get a white liberal guy to seriously self-assess by telling him to stop... ruling rape cases in favor of rapists? So it's somehow casting false blame AND letting people off the hook, simultaneously.
Who the fuck is "bragging about being woke" holding an All Lives Matter sign? It's incomprehensible.
Big Joel made a video about this. Basically he says all this trend was for clickbait and engagement.
Maybe some theory written by the founder of Buzzfeed can help
Also, I didn't think critical theory was predictive until I found out the buzzfeed founder predicted buzzfeed using it. Now I'm reading deleuz trying to master the secrets of the universe.
Isn't "critical theory" just a continuation of Marxist theory? It was developed by the Frankfurt School which was basically all the Marxists left outside the USSR.
It shouldn't be surprising that it has predictive power being rooted in dialectical materialism/systems and all.
One of my degrees is in a liberal arts thing and my experience was that critical theory is a confused hodgepodge of some Marxist theory blended together haphazardly with liberalism and just...fanciful thoughts that don't go anywhere. Saying it's a continuation of Marxist theory is kind of hilarious because it seems like the entire thing is built on assuming economic class either does not exist or it's just a singular facet of a wildly shifting array of personal details, not one of the main aspects of an individual's experience.
The best way I could summarize the outlook of the professors I had who subscribed to critical theory was something like "if we change how people read books and say certain words in a university classroom environment then inevitably the entire world will have its culture changed for the better." They would tend to place the blame of societal ills like racism or misogyny on some kind of nebulous social power structure built upon individual presumptions taking place entirely within that person's head that had been put there by wider cultural presentations. I had one professor, the most ardent critical theorist I had, mostly talk up how certain words influenced the psychology of racism, like he would say the term "enlightenment" was inherently racist because it suggested dark things are stupid and light things are smart, or he'd say good guys in cowboy movies wore white hats to represent white superiority. I mean there actually are terms that are full of racist baggage, but it seemed like he went out of his way to talk about stuff that didn't seem entirely related.
This is all anecdotal and I went to a college mostly known for training people to work on oil rigs, so take that as you will. If I were a more paranoid person I'd actually claim critical theory is some kind of op to either make leftist theory seem incoherent or to do a university wide gish-gallop of all potential academic avenues that would generate leftist students. Couldn't get rid of Marxism entirely so just flood the whole of academics with incoherent gibberish to drown it out.
I agree. There may be some value in critical theory, but whatever is taught in those classes sounds like liberal nonsense and I would argue a fed op. Ever notice how these classes became much more popular after Occupy? I think it's the feds.
Well, yeah. It's the alternative to the Soviet model. All the other tendencies kinda spring from the post war second international/Frankfurt school which developed critical theory as being explicitly critical of both the USSR and capitalism.
Just because it's a continuation of Marxism doesn't mean it's good, but it does mean that the parts that contain systemic analysis and dialectical reasoning will have some amount of predictive power.
The implicit problem I'd say then is critical theory seems absorbed with tackling problems with capitalism as some kind of intellectual puzzle to solve, rather than a political issue to mobilize around. That just makes it dead before it even starts and deliberately relegated to circular fights between already isolated academics.
Isn’t “critical theory” just a continuation of Marxist theory? It was developed by the Frankfurt School
I thought this was a Nazi conspiracy theory?
The Nazi meme is that the Frankfurt school is responsible for woke culture, but this is false, they just talked about identity a lot
Okay, yeah, it is, but pinning psychoanalysis to Marxism doesn't make Marxism better, it makes psychoanalysis look less bad. It's like mixing shit with ice cream.
That said some of my favorite theorists have put Delueze to good use, so it's whatever
Definitely, all the good parts of critical theory come from the Marxist aspects of it and all the weird stuff is from they psychoanalysis aspects.
As far as I'm concerned anything that gets the chuds mad is cool and good.
But they will find the easiest thing they can attack and go for it and it is an easy scapegoat to go for, you can see how for years Anita Sarkeesian was seemed as literal devil by some rightwing youtubers.
Why do I deserve to be payed less than you?
Gonna call OSHA about this question that is clearly loaded past safe capacity
Holy fuck that vid is an absolute trainwreck. So goddamn accusatory, holier than thou, and filled with bullshit. It reeks of :liberalism:
There's a twitch streamer by the name Will Neff. He's the best friend of Hasan Piker (leftist twitch streamer) and he helped make a lot of the buzzfeed videos.
Here's a 2020 interview of Will, where he talks about what it was like to make videos for buzzfeed.
https://youtu.be/AHIABwiNXOg?t=4085His buzzfeed page
https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamneffIdk what it was but it sucked and I didn't like having them appear every time I forgot to turn off autoplay. That whole era of youtube sucked glad I don't see much from it anymore aside from the occasional "YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT THIS LIBTARD GAMEDEV JUST SAID" in my recommended once in a while.
I think this type of content only appeals to liberals who have even tho they have good intentions just end up turning into hypersensitive hall monitors who make minorities uncomfortable and who's understanding of the problem of racism is basically just individual moral failure on the part of dumb/hateful whites. The people who subscribe to this come in some form of these 3 genres:
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regular lib path: Racism is just a dumb idea in the battle of ideas. Black Panther and government loans for black jetski dealerships in Idaho or something will solve racism.
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cursed lib path: OK if whites are irredeemably dumb & hateful, what if black people just became white? What if they ditched their culture, AKA just started acting like Middle/upper class whites?
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Radlib path: OK if whites are irredeemably dumb and hateful, then all that's left to do is banish the offenders and leave those aware of their sin to ritually self flagellate and put their language/behaviour under constant scrutiny.
None of these are good or healthy World views to have
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why were they made
legitimate grievances
clickbait
anything that gets popular has to be at least a little clickbaity
why were they so disliked
bcoz white guys
