me when people say i’m not allowed to exist in a leftist space unless i’ve read all of these five books on theory cover to cover
As someone who has read those 5 books, and the next 5, and the next 5 and so on, those people never go away. There’s always 5 more books. I still recommend those books but in my experience they’re almost always in-group signalling and not coming up with a new synthesis of the material as understood through their own unique experiences as a worker. Actually those people will be the first to tell you that experience doesn’t matter its actually their experience reading books that matters. If you haven’t read them and agree, then that’s fine; if you have read them and disagree then you haven’t read them good enough, or read these other books for the appropriate context.
“The traditions of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” is as true for the left as it is any other tradition.
A reference should contain a timestamp or a page number. That’s always been the standard for citations. You don’t just reference a book.
Also, whatever claim from the original material supports your argument should be quoted or paraphrased by you in your argument.
Citations aren’t the same as bibliography. A citation is just in case a person doesn’t trust your claim that “A said X”; they can follow your citation to check if that’s true.
Bibliography is further reading, if a person wants to know more about what you’re saying.
Been there. Skimmed four fucking Youtube links. Reported back to explain in detail why the other guy was wrong about all of them. Didn’t work.
This is why enforced civility is a failure of moderation. People need the ability to say, “fuck off.” Not just “I strongly disagree and question your motives and blah blah blah.” We must be able to communicate: this is stupid, you’re being an asshole, polite consideration would be lending undue legitimacy.
Otherwise any stupid asshole can blather on about whatever and demand to be treated like they have a point. Mods who don’t remove those people pre-emptively don’t understand their role. Mods who actively protect those people are bastards.
This is my reaction anytime I Google virtually anything. Stop fucking recommending videos, Google. We’re not fucking interested.
You are not fucking interested. We, as Google’s customer base, want everything in video format because we are allergic to reading. If it pisses off 1% of users (which is ten of millions of people), so be it, still profit.
If only there were a way to search specifically for videos. That would be convenient.
Have you met the average user? Have of them are dumber than that.
I’m with you. This shift over the last decade or so to everything being in video essay format is infuriating. Especially when I’m trying to look up instructions for something that could just be a five item bulleted list or a single image but instead is stretched out into a ten minute video.
There have actually been a few times I’ve given up on finding some piece of information or instructions I wanted because I could only find video sources.
There are also the SEO sites, you search for how to write a file in python and you get 20 pages about file writing and why that is used, the history of python and more until you, maybe, get the simple one liner you forgot about.
And I use an ad blocker.
I know it’s so google thinks I’m enjoying myself on that site because I stay there “longer”, and thus thinks it’s a good site, but would it be so hard to have a search engine just straight out exclude large sites? I mean it does clearly not work well.
Fuck, exclude all “dynamic” ones too. Back to pure html! 😺
I use a firefox extension called uBlacklist. It blocks any site you hate from appearing in google search results. No more facebook, instagram, youtube, tiktok etc.
I love everthing about this.
Did we just discover a fundamental force of the internet?
Oh hell yes! I also feel that people who can’t summarise their argument likely don’t understand it
Amen. That’s often what I say to them: if you can’t describe the argument you didn’t understand it.
Perfect response.
I got a YouTube link to a 30 minute mumbler.
This shit happens far too often. Between the YouTube links that “prove” their bullshit, to the thousand-word copypasta essay that doesn’t contain a single original thought.
Yeah. I’m not doing that.
Professional whinging is so hard
Your loss, you would just have to educate yourself on basic shit, here’s a short one for your attention span.
Only video that’s ever made sense to me.
You know links are shown in thumbnails, right?
EDIT: oh shit I get the joke. Man, that’s some meta stuff! You got me there, bud.
Just not in the obvious way
Well done. Only you forgot the /s
The /s would have given it away more easily
Yeah that’s right, disregard the rock solid evidence they laid out!! /s
Or, worse, the essay doesn’t support their argument at all. Because they didn’t actually read it in the first place.
I see we have all independently encountered the same individuals.
I’ve had people link articles to me for their argument that actually substantiated mine.
Sometimes I back up my argument with entire books lmao. Its not usually for the person I am arguing with. Its for the people who see the argument and are curious
Einstein said if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.
Also drag likes your name.
I would’ve loved to hear him explain general relativity to an elementary school kid. No bowling ball on trampoline nonsense either!
There’s no such thing as absolute speed in the universe. But there is relative speed. That’s how fast something is going, from something else’s point of view. The speedometer on your car measures your speed relative to the road. But another car on the road next to you would say your speed is 0, because from their point of view you aren’t moving. That is to say, you’re going the same speed.
We used to think relative speeds just added or subtracted together normally. The same rules you learned in math class. But Einstein figured out that isn’t true. See, Einstein and many others knew that the relative speed of light is always the same. No matter how fast you’re going, light is faster. And always by the same amount. You can never get closer to the speed of light. It didn’t make sense to anyone until Einstein figured it out.
Einstein realised that the faster you’re going, the slower time passes. So even if you’re going at a million miles an hour, you just slow down, and now from your fast/slow point of view, light is still beating your speed by the same amount. You don’t experience time as slower, but anyone looking at you would see you moving in slow motion.
That’s how drag’s high school physics teacher explained it to drag. Drag oversimplified a bit, but all the important bits are there, and anyone could figure out the rest if they spent the time thinking about it. Anyone who thinks relativity is hard to explain doesn’t understand it. That’s what Einstein was saying.
That’s special relativity. General relativity is the theory of the curvature of spacetime as the mechanism for gravity. Large masses curve spacetime more than small masses. Under GR, gravity is not a force.
Good point but why “no bowling ball on a trampoline nonsense”? That’s not a correct analogy, since it deforms “space” different from how gravity transforms space, but it’s good enough to understand how that works, I think
Oh because that incorrect analogy is the most common “lay person” analogy for describing gravitational curvature of spacetime. The most common reply from children is that it’s the earth’s gravity pulling down on the bowling ball so that the trampoline demonstration wouldn’t work in space.
Also the trampoline analogy doesn’t show us how gravitational lensing works, nor does it even touch how different gravitational reference frames affect the passage of time (GR generalizes special relativity, after all).
Affecting passage of time looks like a difficult idea to come up with an analogy.
For the better gravity analogy, I think a rubber sheet that has something pulling together at a “gravity well” and lines drawn on it may work better, but I’m not sure 😅
Agree with that 100 % I have a degree in Philosophy and that’s a reoccurring dynamic I saw with people trying to baffle with bullshit rather than make a cogent argument
You should be able to explicate your own argument, though. “Read this book” isn’t convincing on its own.
Oh for sure, I don’t just say, “you’re wrong read this book” lol.
Yeah, this happens way too often “it’s all in here (link), but I will not elaborate”
Yeah, you need to take specific portions of the book to support your argument. I won’t just say “read Fanon” but will give a a specific example from the book in addition to the more general example of the entire work, plus encourage them to read more.
Honestly such a power move
Just point to the dictionary. “Draw your own conclusions, bro”
plot twist: it’s a Jenny Nicholson video
Fuck it, I’m in!
I watched/listened to her rant about some Star Wars hotel that I didn’t know existed, while it existed, for 4 hours! Wish I had gone to Disneyland while she was a guide.
She and Milo Rossi need to figure out a crossover topic for them to just go full ham on.
I liked the Brony one.
She has a video on the lore of some church’s series of musical theater performances. Highly recommend
I saw that one already, she’s really quite talented at making video essays
That’s brutal.
