Yes, I with you.

For a friend, DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) in addition to group therapy helped a lot with their burnout and related symptoms. The first is especially helpful, if emotional regulation is part of the problem. Personally, I started meditating after my burnout.

I admit my knowledge about this subject is patchy, but wasn't the main impact of Kurdish activity in Syria on the US empire two things? US military bases build in Kurdish held area and Syria's oil fields exploited lucratively by US firms. And aren't these exactly the main goals of US imperialism? Odd coincidence, that the second another, stronger group provides the exact same services to the empire and they are no longer needed, they self disband.

And maybe the real potion was the therapy we went to along the way along the way

That would've looked great!

When he was fighting guerilla wars, he probably didn't have much time to shave.

Well the whole article could be read as an argument for more military funding.

The only kind of revolution, that you really need in America is a cultural revolution

To prevent misunderstandings: He's saying there will never be a [political/economic] revolution within "American" culture. He's drawing the conclusion, that US-Americans need to do a cultural revolution first to kill and replace their culture. He's saying, this is a prerequisite for a real revolution that would do something about the injustice. And his argument is, that levels of injustice in the US are already so high, that other cultures would long have revolted.

I find this argument quite powerful, but some theories of social change would argue, that this revolutionary cultural process of self education can only really take place in the context of an actual revolution. In fact, Bolsen himself goes to great length explaining the tight grip, that the ruling class has on culture, so it's unclear how he imagines this cultural revolution taking place. Also, movements, that aim to change material circumstances have an effect on culture too. Experiencing the feeling of actual power, that comes with taking part in a (even partly, temporary, limited) successful social movement can boost cultural change and class consciousness. Emphasizing the role of ideology is fine, but I don't think we could really want people to say "No, thank you" to any kind of political action and organizing that isn't totally centered around culture. That would just be going into Frankfurt School levels of "cultural critique only". Which is exactly the kind of controlled opposition that Bolsen criticizes.

Another answer to the argument could emphasize the role, that a catalyst could play in radicalizing others - to stay in the chemical metaphor from the video. Depending on the theory of change, the catalyst could be a vanguard, or unions or grass root movements etc. but most theories have them. Even US culture is not a monolith and in real life, people have different levels of class consciousness.

Though, I have to say, beautifully poetic speech and spot on on many individual points.

Inshallah

Not yet, maybe getting a little closer though.

Imus power is scary! I feel sorry for the giants. Imagine if one of the straw hats gets turned.

I like how reading Marx helps you understand your software job and I love the colorful metaphors. For some friendly nitpicking:

While Marx is describing the production of history that is a productive force, it is also in a class of meta-productive forces. These are productive forces that do not directly produce material goods but affect the productive forces that do create physical goods and services. This is literally the same metaphor as tech-debt. Software has many parallels because the production of software is also a meta-productive force.

Is it really necessary to use the term meta-productive force here? I get, that software seems immaterial, but it's still a commodity, just like a table or some wheat or linen. Even software services are commodities that are like any services consumed while being produced. So software workers are workers and part of the productive forces, exactly like engineers or mechanics. So with tech-debt you are thinking about a problem in the realm of production, the base of society.

What Marx is describing here seems at first to be in the realm of ideology: how revolutionaries talk about themselves and style their movements. So it's more about the superstructure than the base. So it seems to be about a totally different realm and not applicable to tech-debt at all. Though, I get that the similarity is still helpful. And there might be an actual similarity on another level, that explains it:

Mentioning Hegel, Marx hints at the underlying dialectic at play in history. And dialectical thinking might actually help a theoretically sound analysis of tech-debt. Without going to the trouble of fully doing one, I can sketch it out with Engels three laws:

• The law of the unity and conflict of opposites: There is a contradiction between short term profit interests leading to the accumulation of tech-debt on the one hand and the need for software as a commodity to have actual use-value on the other hand. This contradiction can not be fully resolved within capitalism. (Edit: it actually goes back the classic contradiction between use-value and exchange-value)

• The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes: Accumulation of quantitative changes (tech-debt) pass into sudden qualitative changes (software becomes unmaintainable profitably and is dropped).

• The law of the negation of the negation: The negation of proper methods and maintenance sooner or later negates the use of the software and thus this very way of managing it.