To be even fairer, how many leftists or progressives reading this can name anybody in the photo collage besides Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Malcolm X, and maybe Angela Davis, without doing an image search? And I say this as a guy who has voted progressive all my life. Too many people nowadays seem to get their “understanding” from memes.
I don’t disagree with you on a lot of people getting their information from memes, but the idea that if you don’t know what some arbitrary number of authors look like you have nothing meaningful to say about the subject they write about reminds me of the 90s era “Oh you like the band you have a tshirt of? Name five of their songs or you’re s poser.”
Like, presumably Marx and Engels also didn’t know what most of the people in that picture looked like, because they weren’t aware of their existence at all, but one would imagine they have plenty of substance to say about socioeconomic theory.
Knowing what some people look like isn’t a proxy for understanding communism or capitalism.
Marx and Engels lived their entire lives in the 1800s. For them not to know what other relevant people of their time looked like makes infinitely more sense than someone with today’s incredible information access. IMO someone today who has genuinely studied the material would have seen enough of these people in articles to recognize more than the most famous few I mentioned. I think far too many people get too much “information” from memes and pretend to know more than they know. If all you’ve got is a strawman analogy about band t-shirts, well alrighty then.
I don’t know about you, but when I took classes on this stuff we weren’t like, staring at the pictures of the authors. We were talking about the material. The faces I picture in my head when I think of this stuff aren’t the people who wrote the books we read and discussed, it’s my professors and the people who were in my classes.
Nobody like, stares at the pictures, but if people like, actually studied and digested the source material instead of glancing at amusing blurbs and telling themselves they’re smart, they would be able to express more complex, coherent thoughts about things like politics and economics and post fewer memes and “capitalism bad!” chants that fill most threads. In spite of unparalleled access to information and in spite of educations they’ll be paying for until death, modern liberals are collectively as lazy-minded as conservatives. They just respond to different stimuli to trigger cheering, booing, and pressing BUY buttons.
To be even fairer, how many leftists or progressives reading this can name anybody in the photo collage besides Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Malcolm X, and maybe Angela Davis, without doing an image search? And I say this as a guy who has voted progressive all my life. Too many people nowadays seem to get their “understanding” from memes.
I don’t disagree with you on a lot of people getting their information from memes, but the idea that if you don’t know what some arbitrary number of authors look like you have nothing meaningful to say about the subject they write about reminds me of the 90s era “Oh you like the band you have a tshirt of? Name five of their songs or you’re s poser.”
Like, presumably Marx and Engels also didn’t know what most of the people in that picture looked like, because they weren’t aware of their existence at all, but one would imagine they have plenty of substance to say about socioeconomic theory.
Knowing what some people look like isn’t a proxy for understanding communism or capitalism.
Marx and Engels lived their entire lives in the 1800s. For them not to know what other relevant people of their time looked like makes infinitely more sense than someone with today’s incredible information access. IMO someone today who has genuinely studied the material would have seen enough of these people in articles to recognize more than the most famous few I mentioned. I think far too many people get too much “information” from memes and pretend to know more than they know. If all you’ve got is a strawman analogy about band t-shirts, well alrighty then.
I don’t know about you, but when I took classes on this stuff we weren’t like, staring at the pictures of the authors. We were talking about the material. The faces I picture in my head when I think of this stuff aren’t the people who wrote the books we read and discussed, it’s my professors and the people who were in my classes.
Nobody like, stares at the pictures, but if people like, actually studied and digested the source material instead of glancing at amusing blurbs and telling themselves they’re smart, they would be able to express more complex, coherent thoughts about things like politics and economics and post fewer memes and “capitalism bad!” chants that fill most threads. In spite of unparalleled access to information and in spite of educations they’ll be paying for until death, modern liberals are collectively as lazy-minded as conservatives. They just respond to different stimuli to trigger cheering, booing, and pressing BUY buttons.
Yeah, that’s the part I agree with you on. I just don’t think recognizing pictures is a meaningful metric as far as that’s concerned.