What should my next video be?

Since we’ve gotten a lot of new patrons since my last video (welcome everybody!), I’ve decided to post a new poll to see what people are interested in the most, along with 2 new video ideas. Multiple choice is allowed!

1) This would be a more historical video, like my German Revolution series. Nowadays, domestic terrorism tends to come from the political right, but here I’d like to talk about a period of time in the late 60s and 70s in which left-wing domestic terrorism was common around the world, typically carried out by self-identified “urban guerillas”. From Germany to the United States to Ireland, there were left-wing groups carrying out bank robberies, bombings, and kidnappings. It’s just a really strange and interesting period in left-wing history. I’d talk about the political make-up of these groups, and their historical context. In part, these groups arose from despair stemming from the decline of the historical socialist movement, trying to make a drastic change in the absence of effective mass organizing.

2) There’s an Italian movie about Friedrich Nietzsche called Beyond Good and Evil (1977) that I’d like to talk about simply because of how bizarre it is. This would be a (hopefully) more fun video, and less theory-heavy. The movie portrays Nietzsche as being a lot more sexually active than he probably was in real life, and also as a closeted gay man, which I could use as an opportunity to talk about Nietzsche’s sexual life, and the debate around whether he was gay or not.

3) This is another Nietzsche movie that I’d like to talk about, an American one - When Nietzsche Wept (2007), based on the novel by Yalom. Honestly, I’d like to talk about it just because of how funny it is - really campy acting, awful special effects, weird and out-of-place editing, like a bad 2000s music video. Would be a nice break from the more heavy topics on the channel. I could also use it to introduce and discuss Yalom’s novel itself.

4) There’s a lot of confusion online that needs to be corrected on what exactly constitutes a proletarian, as well as what productive labor is, in Marxist terms. Last year there was a bunch of arguing on Twitter regarding whether Starbucks workers are proletarian or not, with some people (incorrectly) claiming that in order to be proletarian you need to produce a physical surplus of goods, or to produce something essential for society, or some other such standard, which also comes with a misunderstanding of what productive/unproductive labor means. This would be a video clarifying the issue through the works of Marx, similar to my “Marx is not a statist” video. This is also a video that might be shorter but would take me less time to make than any other video on this list.

5) French philosopher Henri Bergson nowadays is to a large extent forgotten, except as an influence on Deleuze. In his time, however, he was highly influential and well-known, on par with Albert Einstein in his popularity. There’s a lot that could be said about his vitalist ontology, his philosophy of time, his view of memory, etc. but in this video I would focus on one of his more amusing works - Laughter - in which Bergson pursues a fundamental understanding of what makes things funny, seeing the comic as stemming from the distinction between the organic and the mechanical, the living and the inanimate, spirit and matter. It’s not often that you see philosophers analyze the basis of the comic, and Bergson’s systematic attempt is quite interesting, even if perhaps outdated today. I would try to find some good examples to illustrate his points as well.

Looking forward to seeing the results. Thank you!