I’ve said most of this in passing before, but there’s an opportunity to kind of pull it all together in one place and I’m taking it.
So you know in large measure who I listen to regularly, and this group of people ranges from "a little to the left of Bernie" (Michael Moore) to flaming green anarcho-primitivists (personally I’d put Scott Carrier here, although he might dsagree).
Compared to the general population, these people are a tiny, tiny fringe sliver of thinking. Yes, Moore has millions of downloads, but those are across many months and from all over the world, and he’s the most normie of the people I’m grouping here. Using conservative math, Jimmy Dore’s subscriber count represents 1 in 500 Americans, and again, a lot of those people might be Finns, or Canadian Inuits.
There are seven million people in this state, less than 7000 of them are registered Green, and the numbers within this fringe party are actually dropping relative to population growth.
The best counter-argument you could make to what I’m saying, I think, would be to note the number of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary earlier this year. That number was 200,000 … out of seven million. You could say, hell that’s one in 35, right? Maybe even pushing five percent if you want to take those not eligible to vote and so on …
Yes that’s right. But Bernie isn’t actually fringe. He’s a Democrat in all but name, and he proved it by rolling over and endorsing first Hillary and then Biden. Definitely the best of a bad lot, which is why I crossed lines to be one of the 200K … but …
He says he doesn’t believe in defunding the po-po and maybe that’s also because he doesn’t want to hurt the chances of his friend Joe. (The link goes to a YouTuber who agrees with Bernie on that defining question, a guy who would be considered a flaming radical by most upstanding middle Americans.)
Anyway. It’s very safe to say that I am among the actual flaming radicals in the woodpile, at least theoretically, spiritually.
I don’t care what David Pakman has to say about anything, so I don’t watch him. He’s just MSNBC with a little more sincere earnestness.
Enough burnishing, bernishing, of my heretic credentials.
What would you say if I told you that I DO watch a guy who said, in a video two weeks ago, that
- The Corona-Chan virus isn’t real, and,
- Hell these days Alex Jones is right about almost everything
It amuses me to admit that and to frame the question that way. But it does require some gloss.
I don’t believe either of those things and I think it’s foolish to even say them ironically (as he probably was, about Alex Jones).
But I definitely do believe, without reservation, every single other thing he says in the video:
Enjoy the Cyberpunk Dystopia of Proprietary Software
Not only do I concur with Mr. Luke Smith on all it save those two statements. I respect the hell out of the guy for his technical prowess, his erudition, and a wide range of his thoughtful positions on everything from Right Technology to what really makes people happy and how to live the good life.
What I enjoy so much about watching Luke’s videos is this same sense of accord and community I get from watching, say, Kyle Kulinski.
But unlike with Kyle, there’s just ten or twelve percent of the time when Mr. Smith and I absolutely could not be more diametrically opposed.
For example. He’s a Christian, unironcally.
Just a pragmatic cultural Christian, to be sure; no creationist fundie–but still, a regularly attending Baptist.
He believes that North Florida is a way better place to live than Tucson.
He’s used Pepe the Frog, an overtly racist meme, in his thumbnails, and has alluded vaguely to pro-white sentiments at times.
Et cetera.
In the end he’s problematic, in an interesting, challenging sort of way.
The part that works for me especially is his advice at the end of the video.
"Abstain from Everything You Can."
I embrace and reject this dictum with equal force, contextually.