Interesting to hear that two of the three think of the foreign policy of China as dog shit and the other one (yugopnik, I think) seemingly disagreeing.
Pretty good episode imo and I am excited to hear more
More evidence that the podcast unfortunately leans to the ultra-left/白左 side.
I am not sure if you have listened to the episode, but that is a very unfair takeaway imo. A large portion of the runtime is spent on debunking ultra-left criticisms.
I’m not sure what the other evidence is that you’re referring to in general. I haven’t really noticed much aside from them not pushing back enough against a couple sus guests, one of them I vaguely remember saying they regretted how it went.
Tangent
While I don’t really listen to it as much anymore, I think the podcast gets treated too harshly here on the 'Grad. It is an ML podcast that is easy to get into, and the hosts repeatedly make themselves very clear to the listeners that they should be moving on to more advanced material and to get organised (while avoiding common pitfalls especially in the west). They speak often about how their listeners should outgrow them and that their strategy is to “move people further down the funnel”.
I’m not going to get too much into it. I actually wanted to make a discussion post about the topic of podcasts, videos, tiktoks, and other “content” at some point because I’ve seen quite a few comments on Lemmygrad over the past year that I believe have a wrong read on this topic.
I’ve said it a dozen times on here and I’ll take the downvotes and say it again, The Deprogram has done more to further communist thought online, and in person then any of the people on here that complain about it. All three of them have some of the best edited and well made videos spreading knowledge and debunking western propaganda. Any one single of them has actually DONE more to spread communist ideals then any of the armchair purity testers on here.
It is legitimately pathetic to me. There is no comparison to good vs bad because they know if they did they would look like pathetic purity testers. It truly feels the same way as when liberals pick the one bad thing some AES countries does and uses it to justify ignoring all the good that has been done.
It really is my biggest complaint about people on this site is their rabid hate for any and every communist influencer out there. These guys have a mountain of good takes but you see so many on here with a magnifying glass looking for the pebbles of imperfection. The hypocrisy is apparent. We will excuse flaws of past communist figures and leaders. And excuse flaws in AES countries. Citing that the good is greater then the bad. And it’s good to do that, it is right to do that, but then we see a communist influencer make one comment of a hundred that’s a bad take, or make one critique of an AES country and we scream to the hills about it? Nah.
It is ok for a ML to critique a flaw in another ML, or an AES country. It is not ok to go full Lib about it and demonize them or use it to distract from the good they have done.
I have no interest in downvoting this, I just think it misses the point a bit of why podcasters/streamers/etc. receive the criticism that they do. There are several elements I can think of off the top of my head:
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The long format makes it hard to keep up with what they’re saying and judge it thoroughly. Like literally, logistically, if you are not a chronic “consumer” of their “content”, how are you supposed to develop a thorough picture of what they’re doing and saying? Doing so can require sinking in hours upon hours of your life and otherwise, you have to trust people at their word who do (which can be a problem when we get to point 3).
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The often casual format of podcasters/streamers is at odds with rigorous, disciplined analysis. It’s more like people shooting the shit than working through things in a detailed manner. The problem here is obvious. It reinforces the belief that we can work through international scale issues with some casual discussions and that rigor is for nerds or whatever.
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The cult of personality that they tend to attract, and the parasocial relationships, makes it all the more suspect to take defenses of them at face value. Are we talking to someone who looks at what they do with a critical eye or someone who brushes aside where they go wrong basically because they like them as people? There are times I’ve said things in semi-defense of Hasan and I know for a fact part of it is because I like how he comes across as a person, not just the details of what he is saying. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to be dishonest in defense of him, but the fact that I like his persona biases how I talk about what I’ve seen of what he says. And there is no guarantee that his persona is even representative of him in day to day life in the first place.
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They are typically not affiliated with any kind of organized/disciplined party effort, so there is nothing to hold them to account other than each other or maybe the audience a tiny bit. On top of this, they hold a power of influence that the audience doesn’t. If I levy a criticism against a popular podcaster or streamer, maybe a handful of people see it. If a popular podcaster or streamer were to do the same toward me, thousands see it easily. There is no parity. This means that if they DO make a significant misstep, what is likely to happen? Odds are, nothing at all. Some audience members might voice discontent, the podcaster/streamer in question may or may not listen, and that’s the end of it. This is not conducive to navigating a shifting world where we need up to date analysis that reflects a rigorous, scientific socialist understanding. (In general, this leads me to believe that podcast/stream style stuff focused on history past is more valuable as instruction than commentary on developing news. Historical analysis can go and sift through what others have already done. Developing news has a lot of fog and psyop traps.)
Some of this may sound like high standards. I know some people get really shy about rigor on the internet, like it’s some kind of srs rl bizness that doesn’t belong here, but I don’t see why we should treat the internet as any less serious in its consequences. We have to learn to take power seriously and part of that means developing organized, rigorous ways of being. That does include being fair to what a podcaster’s analysis may be, where feasible, but it also means pointing out when they are not being rigorous and are encouraging sloppiness in others by way of example.
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