Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOR4wuiPeEQ
TLDR: Hank Green independently discovers “Techno-Feudalism” and says he has not heard anyone else talking about this. Get Yanis Varoufakis on the phone with this liberal NOW!
Hank Green and his brother have got to be some of the most annoying people out there
I used to listen to their podcast back when I considered myself a socialist but didn’t read theory, now I just can’t anymore
I loved him on Mentopolis and seeing how much of an ultralib he is has been unfortunate
I dont know what that is. But him and his brother have been at the forefront of being ultra liberal for years. They have huge boners for the Gates Foundation
It’s dimension 20, a live play DnD show hosted by Brennen Lee Mulligan, that season was like in a brain city or something and he got to just dump a bunch of bio science facts as part of his character. I haven’t watched it because I find Hank insufferable most of the time because he’s such a turbo lib.
DnD show
Um, Actually, It’s a modified version of Kid’s On Bikes.He’s good in it and I didn’t notice him say or do anything especially egregious
I fucking looooooooove science
Have you heard of the immortal science?“oligarch” is just state-dep-speak for “billionaire in an enemy nation”. How are you gonna have billionaires under communism?
Just want to say that I have hated this guy for a long time.
He’s a landlord and union buster.
I would like to know more about this
We live in the same town and I happen to know people who rent from him and who work for his merch company (they successfully unionized recently). He owns at least 3 properties in a town where those houses sell for $500,000+. I don’t remember if he inherited those through family or not and those are the only residential properties he owns that I am aware of.
His union busting was with DFTBA (Don’t forget to be awesome). You won’t find any of this in the news or Wikipedia because it’s local stuff, low-profile, and he’s treated like he’s some saint by locals. I could drop the address of his house and the rentals he has on the same block.
My main point is that of course these are his takes on economics, he benefits from the system.
And he’s a mediocre stand-up comedian
:punished-bernie:
i am once again asking you to give us a Varoufakis emoji
Yeah why cant we have him showing the finger to germany as a emoji
holy shit this goes hard, whats the context?
At a 2013 talk in croatia, he flipped off the camera to illustrate his point that Greece should defiantly tell Germany “up yours” over austerity.
youse guys, you absolutely could have a socialist oligarchy, oligarchy just means it’s run by a small group of people, not necessarily that they’re rich or capitalists
Socialism can only be democratic (not in the liberal sense) you can’t have a self-serving clique at the top or you just get overthrown super easily
Socialism just means there is social ownership of the means of production and “oligarch is a rich person who runs shit” is post soviet collapse propaganda (as a form of orientalism, their evil oligarchs, our beneficent plutocrats)
If you had a vanguard party successfully seize the MoP and establish a communist state but then understandably manage things within the context of that party and its membership rather than an open electoral system that could and would immediately be abused by foreign and domestic reactionaries that would literally be an oligarchy, and also a good decision
That’s what I meant by “not in the liberal sense” A vanguard party that serves the people is fundamentally democratic, and if a vanguard party doesn’t serve the people they get overthrown by reactionaries because the people won’t support them
I know it’s semantics and shit but usually “oligarchy” is understood as a ruling class that doesn’t deserve to be here and serves its own interets. A better term would be “technocratic” for what you described, and still this would remain democratic if the Party doesn’t fall into revisionism
A better term would be “technocratic” for what you described,
A technocratic oligarchy
Well I tend to prefer using words in their modern context rather than strictly referring to etymology but that’s a valid approach too, so yeah you could say that
You can keep being wrong if you want to not understand the root olig- but that’s on you i guess, I tried. Monarchy is when one dude, triarchy is when three, oligarchy is when the guy is rich and slavic, you got it. An oligomer is when the molecular units come from the kremlin. I too prefer to have language and the meaning of words dictated by the Atlantic council
Not in the sense westerners mean oligarchy though (a bunch of rich russians)
Yeah that’s part of why i spoke up, it’s basically used to do orientalism
Hank Green was one of the few liberals I had some hope for until the knitting episode
The easiest drama to handle and he knitted a scarf that says “I don’t really respect women”
What was the knitting thing?
Implying that knitting is no longer a old-wives idiot manic action now that alpha-male phycicists have written a paper on it. Wiff of reddit off it.
How Reddit of him
It was a video he made and removed that was about knitting and programming and how theyre connected in some ways. But he spent the entire video making very overt comments on how “simple” and “unimportant” knitting is. Even implying it requires no thought and even kids can do it. Its really fuckin weird honestly. But obviously he got called out for comparing a historically predominantly woman owned skill to something that takes lil to no effort and anyone can do it with no thought.
He then deleted the video and IDK what he said in response. Never liked the guy so idk. There’s tons of videos of people reacting to it.
That’s
oligarchycapitalism. And you could do that in a communist system.
If there’s oligarchs, then we can safely assume that the system they exist in isn’t a communist one.Like, definitionally that isn’t a communist system
Hank Green stick to talking about biochemistry challenge
No no don’t you understand? He’s so smart because he has hyperfixations, but is able to channel them in a healthy way that isn’t just uncritically repeating the last ‘fact’ he read about and never questioning where that information and definition comes from.
And since he is rewarded well for it, the system can’t be that bad, right? Right?
It’s almost like market economies tend to slowly consolidate wealth in the hands of an increasingly small upper class
Have you considered writing a book about this? I think it’s an interesting idea that could be explored in more detail.
Oh I’m trying but it’s taking so long cuz I have to keep pawning my coat and can’t go out in the cold.
my dude, you have twenty yards of linen right there!
Yeah but I don’t have any MEANS to PRODUCE a coat from them.
Damn someone should really write a book about this.
This dude’s whole schtick is taking a ‘closer look’ at something only to conclude that all economic relations are infinitely complex, and while fun to think about, ultimately inexplicable. SCIENCE!
Well, I can’t make sense of where profit comes from without admitting it comes primarily from the exploitation of workers, so it must be horribly complex, because otherwise that would be too simple and someone else would have figured it out a long time ago.
It’s kinda funny how much of economics and political “science” boils down to this.
Ever since Ricardo thesis made literally all honest economists to eventually arrive at some version of socialism (and Marx at scientific socialism), mainstream economy needed to take a step back to serve the bourgeoisie. At this point it’s basically Ouroboros-mammon cult whose main tasks are 1. Demonising marxism and 2. Producing economic theories that sound plausible to a laymen but are contradicting, backwards and ad odds with reality.
Guy trying to independently develop Historical Materialism by reading a copy of the Phenomenology of Spirit upside down.
I think you could, unironically, independently discover the entirety of Marx’s Das Kapital just by reading the Epstein files and getting angrier and angrier at all the rich people in the files.
Every few years an economist rediscovers a single aspect of Das Kapital and they get awarded the nobel prize for it and we all have to pretend they’re very clever
This video has been sitting in my feed for days, begging me to watch it, like the one ring begging to be slipped onto a finger. I can only imagine how fucking libbed up this video is.
It’s terminally liberal. He keeps inching toward observations Lenin made a century ago and then whips right back to “but that’s not real capitalism!”
I watched a little bit of it and turned it off when he said the CEOs aren’t doing capitalism they’re enriching shareholders
If that’s not capitalism then what do they think capitalism is???
Ime these big brain libs tend to define capitalism as ‘dynamic’ i.e. companies are being established, folding all the time, leading to innovation etc etc. So monopoly situations are ‘not-capitalism’ to these people. It’s bad because it’s unstable, and good because it drives innovation, and that duality is great because it allows liberals to feel very grown up and nuanced.
This is also how they manage to convince themselves that China is “the most capitalist country in history” — they see a dynamic market and assume it must be capitalist
China is “the most capitalist country in history”
They still refuse to adopt or study Chinese economic policies BTW.
Good.
Subjects of the Burgerreich have been conditioned to believe capitalism means Freedom™ and Democracy™
I doubt he even defines it. I’m reminded of a response that I think
Antonio Negri (might be wrong)see below had to Thomas Piketty’s use of Capital and Capitalism without ever actually defining the terms. I can’t find it but it was really succinctedit: it was Frédéric Lordon
that was a worthwhile read, ty for linking it
This was great
I turned it off when I saw it was 45 fucking minutes of libbing it up lol I usually don’t mind the Green brothers but holy shit is this one especially smug and grating
i make pop science content therefore my vibes based analysis is correct
Communism is no longer when government do thing, it’s also when big company do thing.
Doesn’t the other brother do Crash Course history? Why isn’t he making this slop?
Petit-borjuazee STEM-lord and whitest person in my recommended videos tab thinks capitalism isn’t that bad actually.
