I don’t really think he knows this site’s culture at all. No one is dissuading people from reading theory lol
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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How some people put this pseud on a platform is beyond me. He falls into the pit of most Western Marxists where they are either completely idealist and treat Marxism as some literary analysis or completely mechanistic who thinks that even discussing the role of ideology or conscious human activity is "idealist." In other words, his analysis is not particularly dialectical, only instead of erring on the side of idealism like the majority of leftists, he errs on the side of materialism. But you don't get points for being undialectical just because you aren't an idealist.
And he's overall not very bright either. There's that embarrassing thread about why sitcoms don't have school shooter episodes and instead of tying this to the production of sitcoms and how syndication, which forms the lion share of a sitcom's profit, requires sitcom plots to reset back to a status quo at the end of each episode, he had some dumbass contrarian explanation on moralism (another favorite word abused by the mechanists) or some other bullshit. That massive tl;dr blog post on how propaganda shouldn't be characterized as brainwashing falls apart with the trivial observation that Burgerlanders are orders of magnitude more brainwashed than their imperial core peers while at the same time living in worse material conditions. Can't shoehorn in dependency theory or unequal exchange to explain why Burgerlanders are more susceptible to propaganda.
Alright, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. In a world where Western "Marxists" are largely ultra LARP freaks who sell out to Western academia and University Presses to publish anticommunist propaganda, Roderic is a comrade and is a genuine AES-upholding ML.
His work on RedSails is an invaluable compendium of literature given how other leftist writing repository like Marxists.org are hijacked by Trots.
People need to understand that just because someone is a proper ML doesn't mean you'll be best friends with them. Expecting that is the fastest way to being disillusioned in real world organizing and praxis, when you inevitably meet some ideological comrade you don't necessarily vibe with. The history of socialism in praxis is filled with people who both learned, and failed to learn, to acknowledge others who are near entirely ideologically aligned yet clash with on a personal and social level.
Roderic has an abrasive online personality and has made L takes on frankly tangential subjects through his Twitter debatebro addiction. This just makes him another case of the 70%/30%.
Additionally, his thesis on Redsails that emphasizes the buy-in nature of Western propaganda, if that is what you are referring to, is an absolutely cogent interpretation of the dynamics between propaganda and its recipients in the Western paradigm.
As abrasive as he can be, his brainwashing thesis has been proven true right in front of our eyes the past 6 months with Israeli propaganda. It’s so casually lazy and racist, the people who “believe” it are obviously CHOOSING to because it makes them feel good.
It was immediately obvious Israel bombed the Al-Shifa hospital but we (by which I mean westerners broadly) spent like, a week or more debating whether or not it was a misfired Hamas rocket? Give me a break. By all means critique Roderic, he genuinely welcomes it, but that is easily one of his strongest contributions.
I've only read this piece once so should probably revisit it, but I honestly didn't find it all that persuasive. Yes, the ideas presented in it may be applicable to a subset of the western populous but certainly not universally.
It is an interesting thesis that is worthy of consideration though, I'll give him that.
Is this even true though? I assume the "imperial core peers" you are referring to are Europeans, and if so, I would categorically reject the idea that they are "orders of magnitude" less brainwashed. What is your reasoning behind this statement? Because to me, the way europeans talk about muslim immigrants, or the roma, or the legacy of the soviet union, echoes all the same brainrot that seems to inflict the burgerlanders.
We're talking about a population where a proportion thinks Covid is a Chinese bioweapon that's also fake and is only like the flu btw or how Jesus rode on a dinosaur which is why we need to continue to send weapons to the Zionist entity in order to bring about the rapture.
Europeans buy into less straight up crank bullshit because they have a more cosmopolitan society that actually values a certain degree of social cohesion and don't have weird delusions of all being independent frontier petty tyrants who think you can live autonomously on 1/2 acre of land near a Costco, but they are still extremely propagandized western chauvinists in pretty much every other regard.
You are 100% correct, but your explanation is already moving away from "the US is part of the imperial core, so their population is more susceptible to propaganda." The crank shit has more to do with the US being a settler colony with a terrible education system, and I would go so far as to say that even if the US somehow becomes a semi-peripheral country, the crank shit and susceptibility to propaganda will still be there. If US workers earn as much as Guatemalan workers, the flat-earthers who think Jews conspire to hide the filament from God-fearing Christians won't just disappear.
I mean, this is basically what I meant by "frontier petty tyrants".
Well as someone who's sister married into a Guatemalan family, and has been down there twice, there are def already Central American flat earther who think Jews conspire to hide the firmament. So this checks out.