What should the next video topic be? (Patreon)

Hi, everyone! I am back from another depressive episode and the script for my Top 10 Books Read in 2023 video is almost finished, so it should be coming out either this week or the next.

While I'm working on that, we can start voting on what my next video should be about. Multiple choices are allowed! Let me know if you have any additional video topic ideas!

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) 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.

5) Punk music and related genres are generally understood to be transgressive, subversive, and opposed to the status quo, which often manifests itself in the form of left-wing politics. However, in addition to all the left-wing punk bands, there are tons of punk bands whose transgression manifests itself in a reactionary way. I’m thinking of relating this fact to the historical movements of romanticism and futurism, both of which had both a left-wing strain and a right-wing strain. I would talk about the material conditions from which various aesthetic movements arise, try to situate punk music (in a very general sense of the term) historically, and show that transgressive art is not inherently emancipatory or progressive. This topic would probably take the longest to make out of all these options, as I only have the video idea in broad outline.

Thank you, everyone!