Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]

I wonder about that too. I never watch Twitch or livestreams like that at all, but I do sometimes watch uploads of certain parts getting recapped. It’s just this moving smear of complete unreadable noise it’s so fast and full of emoji spam. But Hasan or whoever the person hosting will still pick out certain comments from it and talk to the person, and I’m like how?? I’m guessing the comments that get chosen must be higher tier subscribers and those show up separately to him or something. But for everyone else, what’s the point? Like you said, just to scream into the void? Maybe on some insignificant chance someone else watching will glance at just the right split second to see what you said in chat?

That is seriously hilarious that the random characters generated for that video url contained a slur. It has to happen that some really terrible and/or funny things do show up in those random characters on super rare occasion (I think v-sauce talked about this in some episode) but that is some crazy weird luck that it happened to this video about a fake a slur award, subsequently caught by the automod here and that we would find out about it because that filter broke the url when you were trying to show off Hasan’s pass for a fake slur.

Yes. I hate to be critical of videos like this, and it’s a nitpick ig but I couldn’t help wincing even in the first 30 seconds, talking about Burkina Faso’s rapidly growing popularity by saying “And it’s all just because of one man.”

Normalizing violence as political speech is a slippery slope,

Taking violence off the table only benefits the ones who already claim a monopoly on violence.

Violence is already completely normalized as political speech, but only in the direction of it being used by the state and against the people. It’s totally normalized for fascist ICE agents to brutally abduct people off the street, for cops to murder people (especially people of color) without consequence, or to go into homeless encampments beating and cracking the skulls of the people trying to survive there while torching their meager possessions, for small armies of militarized police to kettle and gas protesters (those people who aren’t even using violence themselves but are still doing what they can to oppose its use by the state to conduct genocide), and beating them until they’re literally blind. And this isn’t even beginning to get into the utter normalization of the unimpeded mass murder of people in the global south to more easily steal their resources.

What is not normalized is specifically the use of violence by regular people aimed at the state. That is the taboo. That is what the pearl-clutching liberals immediately denounce as dangerous to “democracy” (because it is a threat to bourgeois dictatorship). But it’s a taboo that has to be broken if there is to ever be any hope of positive change happening within the imperial core. If it’s a slippery slope to normalize violence against the state, then let’s get to sliding down it! The statistics presented in this article, if they’re to be believed, are a hopeful sign.

I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that

I’m hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don’t know, I also wouldn’t have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn’t work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment “drug runners aren’t gonna help us do communism dude.” Well, they’re hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.

Even the so called criminal element isn’t properly considered in the traditional view of lumpen. At least from what I’ve seen, there is almost always a failure to understand that large swathes of the lumpenproletariat are simply parts of the proletariat that had no economic recourse, lacking even the ability to survive by legally selling their labor, and became lumpen by necessity. Consider redlined ethnic minorities who are denied even bare minimum legal employment and resort to drug dealing as the only means of survival. Many of them put the money they make directly back into their destitute communities. They absolutely have revolutionary potential and some of them have class consciousness on a level far beyond that of the vast majority of legal working proletariat.

Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we’re all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as “simply how things are.” Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.