drwhat posted:

p.s. i can relate to the arguments about how frustrating the exclusion of actually fucking poor people is from various conversations on/about the left, but i don't see why it's applicable only to class discussions. e.g. a good friend of mine works for ngos trying to provide advice to companies who claim to want to be more conscious of gender and sexism in their work (often other ngos or activist organizations), and sometimes she writes things and i read them and they are full of great ideas and observations but are so completely locked away in an academic linguistic framework that i often want to (and do) take more issue with the fact that she's limiting her potential audience with that sort of thing, far more than with the actual content of the writing.

like yes- of course- if we learn how to discuss these topics inside an academic framework then of course we're naturally going to continue to talk about them that way, but for fuck's sake can we stop. for example bhpn you sound like you are the guys from La Chinoise (i recently rewatched parts of it so it's in my head) who just yell out marxist quotes as though they are bible lines. they are caricatures. you are a caricature. you might even have intelligent points sometimes but it just comes out as BRRRRRRTTT like a vuvuzela (check out that timely ref) every time.

effective communication rests on understanding your audience(s) and choosing imagery, phrasing and vocabulary that conveys your ideas as crystal clear as possible. language's only purpose is to transport concepts from your brain to those of other people, so if you want to use it to its fullest power, start thinking about who you're talking to, why, and how, if you want them to actually engage with what you're saying. the entire idea of communism or anything derived from it is humans actually being human to each other, why is this not also consistently applied to the practice of talking about the idea itself?

why is this hard?

...

BBRRRRRRRRTTT

TED talks for the proletariat.