probabilityzero [he/him,comrade/them]
It’s hardly the worst thing he’s done, but at one point he decided to start making sweeping declarations about some concepts in Haskell, which he clearly had just looked up and didn’t understand. Didn’t matter how many FP experts corrected him, or tried to explain how words like monoid actually have precise mathematical definitions and he can’t just say they’re exactly the same thing as Unix pipes or whatever.
The mainstream media does lie and mislead us all the time, and it’s probably true that if you just always assume everything they tell you is a lie you’ll often be right, but sometimes there’s a hurricane warning or a pandemic and the interests of the media and their owners line up with yours somewhat. The vaccine is free and works and you shouldn’t take horse medicine you bought at a feed store.
This is the difference between forming your politics around actual analysis, or choosing your moment-by-moment politics purely in reaction to some cultural force you don’t like.
He came on my radar because of a video he did a few years ago with some TERF about how “transgender ideology” was incompatible with communism, and how trans people are delusional and reject material reality and LGBT rights are inherently liberal idpol.
He’s apparently clarified since then that he doesn’t believe that anymore, and he was just ignorant about the issue at the time. I don’t remember him actually apologizing but maybe he did, I don’t know. I decided he wasn’t worth my time. He apparently did a bunch of debates with various liberal debate bros and I didn’t care to watch any of them either. There’s no shortage of communists out there that aren’t shitty about trans people, so I don’t see any need to pay him any mind.
Yeah, I get that. I remember doing the same, and agreeing with a lot of what he said.
I’m just tired of trans people’s humanity being up for debate on the left. That’s a zero tolerance thing for me. If that means I miss out of the insights of this white guy with like 8k followers on YouTube, then so be it.
I mean, the stuff about trans people goes a bit beyond “low level radiation” I think, but I’m glad he’s apparently avoiding actively shitting on marginalized people now. And if all he wants is socialism in the US then great, I want that too, more power to him.
Like I said, he’s generally on my “pay no mind” list, but if other people are getting something valuable out of his content then that’s great.
I know everyone dunked on this when it happened (including me) but in retrospect it makes me kinda sad.
Like, I don’t think she actually had any influence over how the election turned out. Her bizarre bad takes didn’t hurt anyone, I don’t think, except herself. I’d say she needs to go to therapy but she almost certainly is already. She’s not poor, but probably not particularly rich either, and seems to have some genuine pain she’s (failing to) deal with. Her anger just got redirected somewhere totally unproductive, aimed at the anonymous “Bernie bros.”
I guess I can’t really put it into words, but it just seems sad.