I'd just laugh at this fucking dork if he wasn't a perpetrator and promoter of sexual violence and slavery. Real monsters exist, and he is one of them.
I'd just laugh at this fucking dork if he wasn't a perpetrator and promoter of sexual violence and slavery. Real monsters exist, and he is one of them.
I am once again asking the "everything is material conditions" people to at least consider that it probably isn't good that there is a fascist human trafficker that encourages domestic violence as a practice to impressionable teenage boys, and that the way his hateful propaganda is received and processed isn't entirely dependent on the pocketbooks/allowances of his audience.
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I didn't say material conditions were not a factor. I said it's a mistake to dogmatically state that it is the only factor for how people think, believe, behave, and act.
EDIT: Oops, I just realized you were agreeing with me. :sweat:
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I'm not even arguing against that and I conditionally agree.
I just don't like when someone gets so knee-jerk about defending the slop they consume that they claim that the propaganda in their slop has no effect on its consumers whatsoever and that people would think, believe, behave, and act exactly the same way without the presence of that propaganda.
Those people either don't have Fox News relatives or refuse to believe that being told hateful conspiracy theory shit all day every day can have an effect on people, because they might feel guilty about something else they themselves watch.
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I would wish for the same but I know it's not the case.
In the past I've been dogmatically told that people would do exactly the same things with or without their entertainment's messaging/propaganda, no matter what, as a sort of material-deterministic absolutist statement. The example I gave in the past was the "fight clubs" that broke out after the Brad Pitt movie became popular. The dogmatic and unprovable claim was that those "fight clubs" would have appeared anyway, out of the aether, all on their own because of "material conditions."
It just seemed like an excuse to consume trash without feeling bad about it.
The alternative I always propose is to consume that trash while being aware of the propaganda and accepting that it's there and that it can influence people. After all, the con artist rulebook states that one of the easiest ways to spot a sucker is to find (or make) someone that believes that they can't be a sucker.
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I agree with you, but it still seems selectively and perhaps deliberately ignorant if someone declares that their entertainment doesn't contribute to those conditions.
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I agree with you there once again.
I believe that the overcorrection makes a similar mistake with a similar outcome, with a similar motive: people don't want to feel influenced by the conditions around them (be they physically material or intangible information) and want to feel independent of such influences.
Yeah Dialectical Materialism, not Naive Materialism. The latter is techbro bazinga brainworms. Ideology exists and is important. heck Dialectical Materialism is an ideology!
There is no escaping the trash can. We can only choose better trash cans. :zizek-preference:
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Unfortunately, yes.
Old arguments, old struggle sessions, but they exist.
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That's a laughably wrong opinion. Generations of documented con artistry techniques indicate that some of the most gullible people are those that think they're immune to being fooled.
Isn't Andrew tate materially real. Thus him talking to you is a material condition
lol, it's more like Andrew Tate's mere ideas do not have the ability to change the world. And it's true, if the young men did not have the material conditions they do that makes them receptive to a fuckhead like Tate, he'd be just some asshole somewhere on the internet no one cares about - and he probably wouldn't exist as the trafficker, abuser, and moronic asshole he is without the material conditions of the 90s and 00s US shaping him. He needs the internet manosphere and redpill culture and rape culture and sexist/homophobic etc US to become who he is and feed into that culture. And all of those exist for material reasons - misogyny, for example, because capitalism needs domestic/reproductive labor to be done for free or cheaply as possible. And his followers needed to be brought up in the 00s and mostly 10s to be receptive, the gen z hopelessness of growing up knowing there is no future for America or the world due to climate change or infinite polycrises with no solution absent revolution and especially when they all got shunted online because of covid for a hot minute, I don't think he was super popular until after 2020.
Ideology and propaganda grow out of material conditions and the “industry” that creates them is based in material reality. Just because it is spread over the internet doesn’t mean it isn’t material.
For instance, in this case there’s a material basis that causes content like this guy’s rises to the top of YouTube and becomes visible.
Sure, call it material and part of material conditions and I won't even argue against that.
What I will argue against is the belief that some have that propaganda doesn't influence people because people would have done the exact same things with or without that propaganda exposure.
Saying propaganda doesn’t influence people is anti-materialist lol, I hope nobody is actually saying that. If propaganda didn’t work it wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. This seems like pretty basic base/superstructure shit that anyone calling themselves a Marxist should understand.
Not yet in this thread, but old struggle sessions way back did make that claim. I won't name names.