David Cross put out a stand up album after 9/11 that definitely started me on a path to radicalization when I was in high school. Just like an hour straight of shitting on GWB and Cheney. I don't imagine his politics are amazing these days, but credit where it's due.
same feeling RE shut up you fucking baby. found it years later at around the same time; i vividly remember listening to it with my buddy in his car in the summer, absolutely cackling. very cathartic.
i mean, he's against imperial wars and wants everyone to have healthcare and is very vocal about it. seems like a cool guy to me.
He got mad at me on Twitter for putting snake emojis on a Warren tweet immediately after the info on who was funding her pac came out.
I was not prepared to see David Cross lookin that old. Now I feel old.
How's this for making you feel even older, I'm in my 20s and the only thing my friends and I ever saw or knew David Cross from (at least until we watched Arrested Development when it was revived) was an animated scooby doo short from Halloween 2001 called Night of The Living Doo that we saw on reruns as kids.
Calling
yourselfsomeone an old and not using Mr. Show as the place whereyouthey discovered David Cross:cringe:
Okay, fair enough lol sry for givin ya grief about it in that case
I'd never even heard of Mr. Show. I wasn't yet born when the first season was on the air.
yeah that annoyed me but to be fair i dont think theyre saying Nordic Model = socialism, theyre saying the things that people here CALL socialism all the time like single payer that exist in these places are obviously well liked there, and i dont think anyone would really call those places socialist because of it
I think of him every time I dress up as The Thing and need to get my rocks off.
I mean he keeps calling the Scandinavian countries socialist but the america fucking sucks rhetoric is really solid
well, when your project is entirely about moving the discourse left I can get behind you using the spectrum definition of socialism.
"you" in this context is the Gravel Institute.I'd much rather people start recognizing why and how they are getting screwed by capital than be scared off by severe cognitive dissonance.
Yeah, I think most people will become social democrats first, and only radicalize once the limitations of that project become clearer
To be fair the graphic next to him said "mild social democracy" when he was talking about those countries
he keeps calling the Scandinavian countries socialist
I think he's just using language that your average Yankee will understand. The whole point of these videos is just to be entry level introductions to these topics anyhow
It's a good video. The vibe is a sort of 90's lost future thing, which I don't see people commenting about, but they did it well. People are predictable, they respond well to good production value and faces / voices they know. Cross probably isn't perfect on his own, but who is? He's not a politician. His work as an actor doesn't really influence people's political beliefs, in much the same way that almost no art is effective praxis. This is pretty good. Hopefully people see it and understand that what it says is true.
I'll be honest, I fucking hated this.
It's an argument for a new social contract. A new social democracy. Not for socialism. And it calls Denmark socialist.
Don't fall for the social democracy thing. It was possible to do in a different time under different circumstances. It is not possible now and will not be until a new event on scale with the Russian revolution shakes capitalism. Those of us lucky enough to be born into the vestigial welfare states still enjoys a lot of freedoms but they are being undone as the contradictions of capitalism intensifies and the very social democrats who praise themselves for the class compromise are oftentimes leading the undoing.
Someone else in the comments here described this as a bernie level radicalizer, not theory or accurate or something to strive for, but a great intro to radicalization
I don't buy it. I'm having perfectly good success radicalising Americans with socialism, just socialism. A segue is not required.
My anger might be seriously increased because I'm actually from Europe, and perhaps when I engage with Americans that's partially why they respond fine to socialist arguments instead of social democratic, but whatever it is this bothers me a lot. I do not have any problems convincing people to be socialists.
Breadtube are doing the whole social democratic routine and have you seen what awful fucking audiences it is creating? Radlibs. It creates radlibs. They haven't moved anywhere in 3 fucking years and they're only becoming more and more anti anything to the left of them. They're not good. Trying to go the segue route is a bad idea.
Gravel are doing great pushing actual socialist arguments. They should just continue that. I will stop spreading them if they go down this route because it's legitimately not the right path to go down.
I know what you're saying, but I doubt you're radicalizing those folks with premade speeches that you deliver over and over to each of them, but instead each radicalization is tailor made.
I agree that this is not up to par with individual praxis, but you can't scale that up effectively without concessions. I think this video will do more good in it's current state than if it were more hardline, more radical, and more acceptable to us. I'm sure there's some way to make it work, but videos like this I can show to my parents and them supplement/ correct it myself, where harder stuff would put them off
I think I do pretty much the same routine every time. I typically start with teaching people that all socialists want communism. This blows their brains because they can't believe it, then they learn more and realise it's true. Every segment of socialism whether it's communists, demsocs, syndacalists or anarchists wants to achieve a communist society, it's just a matter of disagreement over how to get there.
From that point onwards I teach them what capitalism actually is. I teach them the marxist definitions of classes within capitalism. I teach them the basic function of exploitation under capitalism using landlording as a simple example of a capitalist exploiting a worker with property ownership then extrapolate that out into business owners too.
I send them on their way with the recommendation they get into several communities, they then learn more about it in their own time.
Repeated interactions and touching on international issues as often as possible lead them towards internationalist attitudes. They become proper comrades.
My experience has been that it's easier to convert young people from conservative american families than young people from liberal families. Possibly because the conservative young people have had their parents calling the democrats bad the whole time so you don't have to break that down at all. Their families also intuitively understand that something is fucky with the system but don't understand what it is.
It calls Denmark socialist with "mild social democracy" on the screen
I don't care. Convincing people into the social democracy position first with the belief it will lead them to socialism afterwards has failed in literally hundreds of countries. If the American left goes down this misguided route then the outcome will be a new social contract via reformism, not socialism. Just like it has in literally every other western country that went down this road in the past.
Argue for socialism. Not a fake middle ground. Social democracy is literally the biggest threat to the left movement next to fascism, it is our enemy.
The goal is to counter right-wing propaganda. Considering what most Americans' views are, this stuff is definitely the right direction to be pushing people. I bet if you ran a poll on this site, most of us were SocDems before we were communists.
If you think this kind of content makes the Left worse off than before, you need to log off and talk to Americans.
Hard disagree. Pushing americans to social democracy is literally the opposite of what we want. Social democracy is where movements go to fucking die.
If you create a social democrat movement in the process of building your socialist movement you will NEVER achieve socialism, you will only achieve social democracy, and the outcome of that is setting up some future generation 80 years down the line to fight the same fucking battle you failed at because capitalism will strip those socdem victories as soon as it can.
Learn from the fucking past. The entirety of Eastern Europe rejected social democracy and flipped socialist, not one of them had a socdem movement. The entirety of Western Europe had a social democratic movement and the socialist movement died in every single fucking country.
It should be viewed as being as much the enemy as fascism is. If you do not understand this you are not actually trying to achieve socialism. You are not thinking straight or you are a wrecker who only wants to achieve social democracy and nothing more. I implore you to think this through. Pushing people to ""friendly"" capitalism will not be a victory it will be a massive monumental failure. What do you want? Do you want socialism? Or do you want to just win some basic improvements to quality of life and damn everyone that comes after you to a hundred years more capitalism? Because that's what you're doing if you choose that path, damning 5 generations.
Once again: We could do a poll on this site, and I'd bet my fucking life that at least 50% of this site had socdem views before becoming communists.
20th Century European socdem movements were to their core anticommunist. There were real communist movements with social power behind them, and the socdems fought against them. That doesn't exist in America. Americans don't become socdems because they have an ideological commitment to anticommunism, they become socdems because they see the flaws in our system, but since the political climate here is so right-wing, actual socialism is entirely out of anything approaching the mainstream conversation. Let me reiterate from the first line of this comment, this site is full of American former socdems turned communists.
You're right about 20th Century European socdem movements, but the current political climate of the United States is in no way equivalent, and I struggle to see ANY situation in which it's a bad thing to make people more conscious of class and of the utter failure of the American system to provide for people.
lol at calling me a wrecker
Oh, it's the america can, must, should and will blow up the moon guy
I wasn't expecting the Chipmunks villain to tell everyone why America sucks, but go off King. 👑
No he doesn't explain the other medical systems at all, just that America is absolutely pathetic in every single possible metric
The animation of the angry MURICAN drinking red bull and watching TV all day is real, but also feels a little too on the nose. It's hard to convince someone to watch that whole video if they're obviously the but of the joke, you know? The previous videos of this series felt a lot more like they were trying to get heavily alienated but reactionary working-class people to join in on hating the bourgeoisie, without actually shitting on the audience directly.
I was about to post this, glad I checked to see if someone else did first!
I know Denmark isn't socialist, but overall this is an amazingly effective video.
The video even has "MILD SOCIAL DEMOCRACY" in the background when he says that bit.
