The subject is a fair one to investigate. The video itself comes off like one big ad. Vague and noncommittal enough in its investigations to avoid being accused of giving wrong information, while also specific enough to steer the viewer toward the sponsorship. (I’d be more interested in a study on the impact of sponsorships shoved into every faux social connection between viewer and performer.)

I’m also just suspicious of the focus on TikTok. They did use the term short form video some of the time, but in general TikTok has been vilified in association with Cold War style hatred of China, so any time people start separating out TikTok from other social media like it’s distinct gives me pause. It’s like when people say China is going to steal their data, but they leave out the fact that western design has already done so.

That said, I’m sure that the things we do regularly have an impact on us. Question is what is that impact and what is the worldview behind how people feel about the impact. Why is the focus on studying short form video, but not on studying what causes poverty? Might sound unrelated, but one of those has a more obviously damaging impact and we don’t need fuzzy studies to understand that poverty sucks. I think we here know the answer as to why it’s the one and not the other. TikTok has been one way people have gotten info beyond the controls of legacy media and helped them formulate views that make the imperialists sweat. Associating such platforms with harm can potentially scare people away from using them and put them back in the hands of legacy media. It’s one of those things where bias is so important to understand. A study can produce factually accurate information by some metric while being biased on what is being studied. The western media sphere is rife with this kind of faux neutrality. Meanwhile, if we properly study a thing like poverty, it leads us to anti-capitalism.

My suspicion on this subject in general (which needs concrete investigation, but there is some reasoning to it) is that a lot of what this is sort of orbiting around is energy levels and rested vs. not, and the reason the information on it is so vague is because the prevailing status quo has a motive against promoting the value of rest. Even the way things like meditation get framed in the self help, self improvement sphere, is as another tool for optimizing the human experience, human capability, etc. There is something that I recall from before and I don’t know how well studied it is, but it’s called “decision fatigue” and the general idea is that making decisions takes energy, so if you have to do a lot of it, the later decisions in the day will probably become less thoughtful, more “just get this done with.” Swiping is a decision and if you’re doing that a lot, that’s a lot of decisions. So I can see how that could wear a person out as decision-making is concerned and then if they are faced with a question that requires taking a step back and doing deeper analysis, they may feel more wearied about it and appear more impulsive and make more mistakes as a result.

So in the context of short form video, my hypothesis would be that the most distinct to its form kind of factor is quantity of decision-making and the more general factor is one that applies to all of the content-bloated internet, which is that novel input takes energy to process and being able to shove it into your brain constantly could wear you out (but this could also apply to flipping through TV channels too and that’s been around a ways before high speed internet).

Who said anything about “begging men not to join the far right” as the solution? Edit: Like I would actually agree that asking people questions that challenge their assumptions is a generally good approach to at least starting them on the path to considering something different. So I’m not sure what this has to do with what I said, that you are saying it’s “infantilising.”

that they refuse to mature and handle

Was trying to figure out what rubs me the wrong way about this. I think it’s twofold. One reason is that it sounds little different from the pro-patriarchal line “man up” and two is that it sounds like rugged individualism solution to systemic problems.

But part of the problem is some of them do try to “mature and handle” it, and without proper guidance, what that leads them to sometimes is being even more toxic masculine. The problem people in question are not just the “incel” types who are complaining about women, they’re also the hyper-masculine types who are turning to hyper masculine ideas to feel less out of place. As the video touches on, this is self-defeating, as it makes them even more lonely due to going deeper into the isolating patriarchal model. But they may feel a certain amount of short-term companionship being around other men who are doing similar and this combined with the hyper masculinity and the imperialist socializing base is going to be a breeding ground for fascist organizing.

So it’s important to interrupt that pipeline and lead men toward alternatives to being bitter and/or hyper masculine. Being compassionate, for example, does not need to be seen as a gendered trait. Or being understanding, or thoughtful, or even gentle. There is a time and place for boundary setting, and in societies and struggles there is a time and place for organized militant action in order to be able to set certain kinds of boundaries and enforce them. But these things are not mutually exclusive with compassionate and thoughtful word and deed. In other words, compassion does not have to mean pacifism. Gentle does not have to mean defenseless. Understanding does not have to mean fawning. Etc.

White men may be better positioned to get drawn into this pipeline over others, but patriarchal issues afflict far more than them. Patriarchy, with some cultural variation to it, is a global level issue in scope and needs investigation into it on that level.

So there’s this thing, and I think it applies to myself to some degree, where even when men want to be more caring/supportive/just not care as much about gender role ideas stemming from patriarchy, there’s a degree of holding back because of the policing for toxic masculinity. If a man acts distinctly “feminine” (or more like, what patriarchy calls “feminine”), a not-insignificant amount of men will act like they are “lesser” for behaving this way because patriarchy sees its idea of feminine as the “lesser gender.” Naturally, people don’t want to feel put down by peers, so even when well-intentioned and striving to not fall prey to the walls of role expectations, there can be some holding back.

For example, I can go “aww” about something being cute, but still struggle to cry in front of other people. This isn’t to say you need to be able to cry in front of others to shed patriarchy, but just to give an example of how there can be partial movement without fully challenging the “chains.”

Incidentally, I think this is one reason I like the sketch comedy channel Chris and Jack. They like to do this thing where their sketches go in a direction that challenges the normal “tough guy” male friendship dynamic in some way. And it’s refreshing to see a perspective on it that challenges the norm.

It would help if you have a source. Though in fairness, the OP’s only source posted is a tweet, so that isn’t great as a source either. Not sure what you mean by dogmatic though.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. If these are indeed US-linked tankers and they are involved in “smuggling diesel out of Iran”, would that not be a win for anti-imperialism for Iran to be guarding against the US violating its sovereign rules?

In order to understand properly, I think we need to look at where and why colonialism originated and then proliferated. Not something I know enough about, admittedly. I more so know it’s a thing and that it has done unfathomable amounts of harm, less so why. But in the scientific socialist view, there should be material conditions that helped set the stage for colonialism to develop.

That makes sense to me, thanks for your thoughts on it.

What’s the revolutionary optimism kind of perspective on this? Cause I have a hard time integrating this kind of info from a perspective of not having organized political power; wanting to either feel doomer about it or ignore it in the hope it won’t be as immediate problem as they say because it’s so terrifying to grapple with. Or does the revolutionary optimism perspective only come from organizing itself (the knowing that you are making headway somewhere)?

Generally speaking, don’t take it at its word and consider it like it’s an assistant, or even just an ideas machine.

Example: I’ve used an LLM before when there’s a term I can’t think of the name for. I describe what I can remember about the term and see what it comes up with. Then, if it gives me something concrete to work with (e.g. doesn’t go “I don’t know” or something), I put that into a web search and see what comes up. I cross-reference the information, in other words. Sometimes the AI is a little bit off but still close enough I’m able to find the real term.

Cross-referencing / sanity checks are important for LLM use because they can get deep into confidently wrong rabbit holes at times, or indulge whatever your train of thought is without having the human capability to extricate itself at some point. So whether it’s a web search or checking something it said to you against another real person, you can use this to ground yourself more so on how you’re engaging with it. It’s not that different from talking to other real people in that way (the main difference is I would recommend having a much stronger baseline skepticism of anything an LLM tells you than with a person). Even with the people we trust the most in life, it’s still healthy to get second opinions, get perspective beyond them, work through the reasoning of what they’ve said, etc. No one source, computer or human, knows it all.

South Koreans and Japanese are not occupied

Yes, they are. There’s a reason people here tend to say Occupied Korea rather than South Korea. You need to learn about Korea’s history evidently. They faced enormous violence and repression, first under colonial Japan and then under US occupation, and the US occupation continues to this day. The whole designation of North and South Korea was literally drawn up by the US military.

Japan’s situation is a bit more complicated because of their part in colonialism and imperialism prior to and during WWII. But it would still be racist and reductionist to imply that Japanese people are a monolithic entity deserving of suffering because of their governance.

indigenous and black people as I said before they’re not considered citizens

Black people absolutely can be citizens of the US. They still face systemic racism on top of that. The Civil Rights Act was more of a diffusion of revolutionary energy than it was a solution to problems of racism, but it did further the rights of black people in the US and normalize them more so into the US culture as other regular people. If you’re thinking of what’s going on right now with ICE and all, that’s more of a broader violence of white supremacy and the institution of whiteness, and it’s not as simple as “everyone is going along with it” or something.

With indigenous people, it’s complicated by the fact that they wouldn’t necessarily want to be a citizen of the US. There are still indigenous nations who want their sovereignty respected. I can’t speak to the exact details of it, but I feel confident in saying that they are not generally interested in assimilation into the US project that genocided their ancestors and continues to treat them as less than.

That said, I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with excusing a lack of empathy. Regional barbarism, as I said before, is not a controlled implosion. And as we can see with what’s going on in the US right now, the mask off stuff with ICE is primarily hurting historically marginalized groups, not those who people would tend to be most disgusted with and have a harder time feeling any empathy for. I don’t think the liberal mask is really “better”, but I also don’t think accelerationism tends to hurt the people you think it will. The contradictions are what they are and we have to deal with them as they are, not turn up our noses because we don’t personally love everyone around us. You don’t have to be burbling with love to do a good strategic analysis, but if you aren’t motivated by compassion, it leaves one to wonder what you are motivated by. If there is one thing I take away from successful AES projects, it’s that they tend to have a great love for the people and a great interest in serving their needs. This desire alone does not make them successful, but it sure is a helpful motivator.

I’m sorry, what? You don’t care if peoples who are occupied by the empire suffer? Because the governance does imperialist bidding?

I get that, it’s annoying when someone who seems fine in a particular hobby area suddenly displays awful, barely related politics. Communist video essayists could do this in the same way but in the other direction, where they don’t even advertise their views, but instead just sprinkle it in now and then. Long as they’re serious enough in the delivery that it doesn’t get confused with ironic references.

So you don’t care if indigenous people in the region that gets called the US suffer? You don’t care if children in the imperial core more broadly, suffer? You don’t care if the collapse of the empire harms people outside it in the process? You’re going to turn around and say that people who have not done harm are deserving of harm by association, is that it? What kind of sick shit are you peddling to sit here and tell me that some lives are lesser?

What you’re saying sounds a lot like encouraging barbarism in the imperial core, in the hope it will somehow make it collapse faster. Which is accelerationism and is not how revolution is built. Worsening contradictions don’t automatically translate to socialist revolution, in the imperial core or anywhere. It still has to be built and people in the imperial core can still try to build and prepare locally, while trying to have solidarity internationally as well. It is counter to having an internationalist view to throw local under the bus simply because it isn’t as revolutionary as you’d like. It is counter to having empathy in general as well.

Furthermore, the western empire is not a controlled house of cards confined within a sterilized chamber. If it collapses violently, and there is nothing significant to counter that locally, it’s still an empire with far-reaching tendrils that has nukes and other kinds of militarized violence. Don’t confuse a controlled implosion with a violent explosion, in other words. Even from this point of view of people who live in the imperial core that seems to saying “their lives matter less than those in the ‘third world’”, their downfall is not confined to only them. And if imperialism can get dismantled to the point that that’s no longer the case, the (already flimsy) argument for valuing “third world” lives more also goes out the window, since the “first world” is no longer able to exploit those people in the same way at that point anyway.

Really depends on the situation. I’m not going to insist to someone that they associate with a person who is a drain on them, sans context. But speaking generally, in the imperial core, we often don’t have the luxury to be especially selective on who we associate with, if we want to make any headway on things. Most are not exactly ML and those of us who made our way to that did it because there were people who were willing to associate with us in spite of our ignorance and get through to us over time.

So what comes to mind here is, changes are often not dramatic and take time to formulate, but this doesn’t mean they don’t occur.

Consider it this way: If a single conversation could change a devout liberal into a budding communist, couldn’t a single conversation also change them back from a budding communist into a devout liberal again?

Our belief systems need a kind of process to them in order for us to have some kind of stability to how we perceive the world and how we act in it. So when someone has a belief challenged and when they are open enough to be considering that challenge, they are not just considering the challenge itself; they are also considering what the challenge implies about other beliefs they have, what the newly formed synthesis would imply about them as a person and how they act in the world, what it would imply about other people around them, what feelings it evokes in them, and so on. This is not to say everybody is doing this all consciously for every single challenge to a belief they encounter. But that they are likely going through some form of this process when evaluating information and beliefs and are probably doing it in more conscious detail, the more significant a challenge it is to their existing framework of belief.

So with this in mind and from the standpoint of what we can do as individuals in the world, we shouldn’t expect dramatic, instantaneous change, but instead try to form relationships (where reasonable, I am not asking people to befriend nazis) and be firm on what we believe and why where disagreements come up. Sometimes the first step may simply be the other person accepting that we have dramatically different beliefs and are also not a scary creature from under the bed (notice how some imperialist propaganda specifically tries to get people to consider any and all anti-imperialist dialogue as belonging to a scary faction, such as when people are called “Russian trolls/agents”). Once they’ve accepted we’re not a scary creature from under the bed, then they may be able to start considering what we’re saying. I won’t pretend this is a system-level solution, but when we’re talking about dealing with it in a disorganized manner where we don’t have party power.

I like that, will try to keep this in mind for myself and for the culture as a whole. Thanks for taking the time to go through it.

Thanks for clarifying, makes sense.

Thanks, yeah, that’s a healthy reminder. Reminds me, one way I try to combat it is to reframe my own situation as the result of a lot more than just me. For example, remembering the people who most contributed to my learning about this stuff. Or remembering a place like this and how it has contributed to my growth in it.