Edit: Im not being serious. please dont feel bad for liking transformers or scifi or whatever. Thanks

  • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    I been thinking recently, notUlyssessT, and i know this is tongue in cheek but i wanna ruminate some. I look around my burgerland home and the people who live here and i can’t hate them for delving as deep into pop culture as they can. Cuz theres no other culture here. Im mullin over an idear in my craw that treat derision or even calling the culture we have “pop” serves the capitalist class.

    It’s not us plebs who destroyed our social clubs and the real connections we had before our time to spend on them was stolen. We didn’t set out to work so hard and so long we had no energy for anything else. The caps fucking took that part of our lives away. Stole it. They also made themselves the only source of entertainment we can afford or have time for (not to mention forcing artists of all types into the service of profit and popularity to make them). What really gets me furious every day is that they also have the only voice we can hear, or at least the loudest voice and they use this voice much like the church used to, using it mostly to blame us for living in the world they fuckin built.

    The worst part of “pop” culture is our guilt for consuming it (hating pop culture is a way of participating in pop culture as well). It is always the way of those in power to cast blame on the oppressed for their indigence.

    It’s no different then the avocado toast shit or any other bull you care to name. The powerful pick on the weak for all they do because they can, and because it works.

    Ill never take guff from somebody mouth-noisin at me about whether i can participate in The culture we have in this god-forsaken desert of meaning that is the US.

    We are all The Cable Guy.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Parenti made this exact point in one of his speeches and I think Inventing Reality. Pop culture isn’t popular culture in the sense of popular being of the populi or of the people. It is pushed top-down by the bourgeoisie to cultivate capital realism and learned helplessness and hopelessness among the masses, to rob them of their sense of solidarity with each other and their spark of rebelliousness directed towards a better world., turning them into completely atomized individuals whose only purpose in life is to consoom.

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          For books anyway, the two books people recommend are Blackshirts and Reds and Inventing Reality. For lectures, there’s Yellow Parenti (just search for yellow parenti on Youtube).

          I also like his series of lectures called Real History. There’s a playlist here (ignore the random Fortnite video at the end): https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLZdjCqT95Peq3KzB0hU2b_BOi5BF2nmkj

          It’s split into 5 parts:
          Part 1: The Myth of the Founding Fathers
          Part 2: The Spanish American War and the Rise of US Imperialism
          Part 3: The Functions of Fascism
          Part 4: The Real Causes of World War II
          Part 5: Psycho-history