This was an excellent video. This needed to be made and I really hope that people take the time to sit with what you are saying and truly absorb it. As someone with a foot in both worlds this has been an endless frustration for me. I am so far left that I am almost off the political compass chart. I have also spent my entire life in right-wing, semi-rural areas of the US from the mid-west to the west. I have never had to compromise my left-wing values. I have a lot of right-wing friends who would kill for me, and they are well-aware of my left-wing values. It is not a problem because I know that they love me and I know how to interpret what they are saying. I am also Gen X. There are a lot of words that were a MAJOR part of Gen X vocabulary that have been nixed and we have been pretty good about trying to change our vocabulary, but every time that you have to do that calculation in your head to make sure that you are using the right term of the moment it distracts you from expressing your true feelings. Putting all of these rules in place is not solving the problem it is creating new problems where none existed before. I don't care how many degrees someone has, how wealthy and connected they are, if you are actively doing something that is clearly making the problem worse, or adding new problems, you are the one who is being ignorant. Highly educated, extremely well-connected people can be ignorant. The leaders of the far right, including the incoming president, are all ivy-league educated, from wealthy families. Think about that. If you are more educated than someone else you need to be the one to adjust, you need to be intelligent enough to figure out what will get us to the goal the fastest, with the least resistance, considering all of the different obstacles that must be overcome along the way. True intelligence should be able to accomplish that goal without emotional meltdowns, tantrums, name calling, and demands, because none of those things have ever worked and anyone over the age of 5 should know that. I personally question the intelligence of anyone who is so set on the use of a particular word that they can't see the bigger picture of what is being lost and how far we are being set back by their obsession with the way that people speak. If you want people to listen to you, and care about what you have to say, you have to show that you are listening to them and that you care about their existence. If you can't do that, then you are the ignorant one and you are NOT helping improve the lives of anyone.
Thank you for talking about this. Social justice ideology is weird. I remember in college there were white people who didn't like my accent because I'm white and according to them my accent didn't sound white enough to them and therefore I must be culturally appropriating somebody. I grew up with lots of people of many different backgrounds and grew up bilingual from before I can remember since my parents worked in Latin America and many of my friends growing up weren't American, so I have the accent I have, and I would have to put a conscious effort in to sound the way they expect white people to sound. I found their expectation bizarre and insulting, so I just continued speaking the way I always do and absurdly some of the white people didn't want to be friends with me after that because I refused to change how I speak for them. Probably for the best really, but what a strange subculture. They never even asked why I had the accent I have, they just jumped to that conclusion immediately. A lot of these people were walking around every day like they were the protagonist in some kind of crusade.
@@sechernbiw3321 You have experienced a combination of people who suffer brain rot and severe indoctrination with no comprehension of actual truth and virtue.
The sad part is that, sometime in the last decade or so, "Progressive" and "woke" perspectives about our system got appropriated by the system itself, and so the least offensive aspects got elevated and permitted while the underlying classism remains untouched. The First Female CEO of Boeing, for instance. How long til' we get a First Latino Grand Wizard, at this rate? (Jerks appropriated wizardry like a century ago.)
Haha...yeah, there is a sort of twisted irony to it. I have definitely noticed a trend of existing power structures and the systems that support them "appropriating" the language and some of the ideas of various activist movements that started out opposed to them. And yeah, it makes sense that within these existing power structures, the classism and other problematic elements of it would get elevated and permitted, because they are the things that are reinforced by the existing power structures. You see this pattern over and over again with many things in life. This is one reason why I think it would be helpful for everyone to study a little bit of systems theory. The Western worldview, both in Academia, and in everyday society and culture, is very mechanistic and reductionist. So people tend to be blind to the cause-and-effect in these systems that run more on feedback loops. So like, people tend to attribute cause-and-effect to a bottom-up type of causality, like understanding the system as a function of the behavior of individuals, and they don't look as much at the system-level elements, things like incentives, flows of money, top-down power, and such.
I just decided yesterday I'm going to start podcasting similarly to you, who I just discovered this morning. I appreciate that you're trying to do something different, approaching our divided politics from an N-Divergent position, as I want to do. The stereotype of N-D is that we are flakey and scattered with poor attention and maybe talk funny or are quirky, but you are clear, intelligent, self-deprecatory without being mean to yourself, and you have a way of pointing out and explaining key faults on the Left without being too critical. So good luck, I'm subscribing to you, I hope you get more positive reviews like this one. P.S. I'm going to call myself The ADD Shaman.
Thank you! I agree that there are a lot of negative stereotypes of neurodivergent people, and it's sad. As the name suggests, we are diverse and we go in many different directions! I am definitely high on the "attention" scale, like I tend to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from ADHD in terms of how attention is concerned. My neurodivergence is mainly in the form of sensory issues, and also that I tend to make connections between disparate topics more readily than most (and thus have a harder time compartmentalizing things than most people. I want everything to be integrated!) I hope to talk more about it some day, so many things to talk about. That is exciting that you are starting a podcast yourself! Definitely leave a comment somewhere with a link to it when you launch it so I can check it out!
@AlexZorach My attention is much higher than N-Typicals too, but the diagnosis says that my attention is frequently in deficit. The entire diagnosis is bass-ackward, and speaks more clearly about the entire psychiatric community's bias than it does about us; making the diagnosis itself in effect a projection! My ADD-mind simply determines by its own criteria what is worthy of my attention, and what isn't. If someone decides to interrupt me when my attention is on something, there is hell to pay! I have an unofficial project in the back of my mind of coming up with a better name for my condition than Attention Deficit Disorder. Any ideas? P.A. it's on my short-list to inform you when my podcast gets off the ground! By the way, I first noticed internal symptoms of so-called ADD when I was 12, but those symptoms have nothing to do with the criteria in the DSM! The core of the internal. symptoms center around Time Displacement, which I jokingly refer to as "Chrono-Dysplasia." I wasn't formally diagnosed with it until I was 55, when my wife finally told me, "I think you have ADD!" She announced her divorce one year later!
@@AlexZorachLike you, combining disparate elements by intuitive association is another of my internal symptoms! I have a whole theory about that! That's something that other famous Neuro-divergents like Albert Einstein, Marcel Duchamp, and Sherlock Holmes (aka Sir Author Conan Doyle) are noted for. Thanks for the comment!
Classism exists in all social circles, whether in the form of resentment or a sense of superiority, but that doesn't mean it is equally prevalent in all. I suspect many feel as I do, that poor education is a matter of deprivation, not of quality of personhood. It is the system which has failed to adequately educate ordinary people in many of the most important things, such as reasoning and recognition of logically fallacious arguments.
I find both political parties pretty classist in their own way. Both parties seem really out of touch of the average person working 2 jobs to make ends meet. Both parties have used famous celebrities and influencers to support their party line, but again, how is that relatable to regular folks? The republican party also is using identity politics, I've noticed more diversity within the party line in comparison to the past.
We live in an oligarchy where both major parties are funded by a handful of families who own global corporations. These politicians do not represent the concerns and interests of 99% of the population, yet we are told this is the best system available. It’s a government of, by, and for the ‘elite’.
@@Linapolitics he clearly mentions Trump in the video, and refers to his opposition as "the left" as well as calling out the left for its view of the right "as a bunch of hillbillies" .... Did you even watch the video?
Alex, this is so necessary and so well said. First time I've seen a video from you. Instant subscriber. Will definitely be sharing this. Going to leave a couple of other comments on this video about aspects of things you talked about. Thank you so much for putting this out there, this is some of the most commonsense stuff I've heard in a while.
Thank you so much, I am really glad you appreciate my perspective! Back in the day I had a nickname "captain obvious" on this one political site. Sometimes though I think that "common sense" stuff is the most important stuff to focus on. Like if we can all find common ground, and then build off that, we can build a broader consensus than if we start with more controversial points that large portions of the population disagree on. And I think in our times, we need consensus more than ever!
Good analysis. Something I tried to get across to advocates for student-debt cancellation is they had to talk to the folks who never got to go to college and prominently add to the messaging something that helps them. I explained that to some who never got to go to college it felt like asking them to pay for the educations of the college kids who treated them poorly. For example, people who are or were serving staff at restaurants who've dealt with obnoxious college students out partying. To a person, all the responses I got from student-debt cancellation advocates were essentially that if those people didn't go to college that's their own fault. ... So, they by and large didn't talk to or hear from those who didn't get to go to college, and then seemed stunned that they rejected the idea of student-debt cancellation.
Yes! That's a great example of a classist attitude I see on the left. I think I would go even farther than you and say that you're outlining the reasons why I am dubious about whether student loan debt cancellation is even a good policy idea to begin with. I have seen some critiques of student loan debt cancellation that, to me, seem completely sound, and they make a compelling argument that those policies don't actually benefit the most vulnerable people, and instead funnel a lot of money into the upper-middle-class. I also think there are a long list of other policies that could help people who are really struggling, whether it's with student loan debt or just overall issues. I have a long list of proposed policy reforms, everything from local zoning reform to reduce housing costs, to progressive tax reform to help the lowest-income taxpayers, to reform of laws governing debt, credit ratings, bankruptcy, and related things, which could also directly affect people who have a lot of debt. I also think that addressing the policies of how and when student loans are Federally subsidized is important, because there's been a problem of escalating costs in higher education and I think the US government may have made the problem worse. So there are many different ways to tackle the problem which are free from the sort of classism or "handouts to wealthier people" that characterize much of the Democrat-pushed student loan debt forgiveness proposals. I see this as a win-win too, it helps the most vulnerable people, probably more, without the classism, and then while also addressing the root causes in society.
Bernie always said the real issue was income inequality but people weren't ready to hear it. I hope more people consider this perspective but the squabbling sure keeps people distracted
Yeah, this is one of the things I like most about Bernie especially from his 2016 primary run. I don't agree with everything he says, but I share his concerns with wealth inequality. Classism though is more than just wealth inequality. You see this with how lot of people look down on the "nouveau riche". I see this in my own social circles, like I and the people I grew up with are by no means as wealthy as Trump and the sorts of people he hangs out with, but a lot of the people I grew up with criticize the sort of fast, sloppy, lavish lifestyles as "nouveau riche". There's a balance of valid criticisms (anti-consumerism, criticism of wasteful spending, etc.) with a sort of classism (people throwing around words like "trashy" to describe not only Trump supporters, but also Trump himself and the sorts of people in top power structures that he associates with.) I wish people could levy the valid criticisms without resorting to the classist slurs and negative labeling. Like there's this idea of people who have that sort of fast, sloppy lifecycle, whether they are rich or poor, as being "morally inferior" to people who live a more restrained, conscientious lifestyle. And there's a delicate balance. Like I genuinely believe that careful and efficient use of resources is a virtue, it's something to be elevated, and I want our leaders to embody those qualities. And it's a major reason I dislike Trump. But I don't think it's useful or constructive to adopt a moralizing and judgmental approach to the topic. Rather it's something that needs to be approached in terms of education and helping people. I think when people come to learn good financial management skills, they will naturally shy away from people like Trump because they'll see the red flags, like how he has gone through multiple bankruptcies, has a chronic problem with not paying his contractors, has wildly opaque finances, etc.
So you like that Mr. Sanders speaks for the aggrieved white working class who have been voting against themselves since passage of the civil rights movement! Wow! Just wow! Weren't you guys saying you wanted history taught like 2 minutes ago?
@@andreabrown4541 What does this mean: "Mr. Sanders speaks for the aggrieved white working class who have been voting against themselves since passage of the civil rights movement"?
Thanks for pointing that out. I have been snob to people that don't know information that I find basic and I need to work with myself on this. On the other hand anyone can be like this regardless their class. Maybe there is a widespread lack of soft skills knowledge all over the board.😅
I think there are a lot of factors operating in our society that make it harder to empathize with people who don't know information that we think is easy or basic to access. Like a really simple example is how search engines now show personalized results. We might think: "Oh, this information is super easy to find, just Google such-and-such, and the first three hits all provide this information." This seems all fine and dandy until we realize that a different person might type the exact same thing into the same search engine, and see completely different results. The results can vary wildly from one person to the next. It can be both a question of personalized results, and magnifying subtle differences in how people word their search queries. And, quite horrifically, Google is often telling people what it thinks they want to hear. Here is an article about it: www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear Basically, what we need to take away from this is that the information that WE think is readily available to us, might not be readily available to others.
I agree that it's bigoted to look down on people that are racist/sexist etc.... we don't have great tools in any political party to have these conversations and listen to people with these perspectives.
Generational trauma.... Whose fault is it if a person's parents are Christian fundamentalist zealots or drug addicts? Can we blame those people for believing what they do... or the education they may not get? Misinformed people are just as marginalized as the disenfranchised populations. We are pitted against each other for the sake of keeping poor people down.
The Beverly Hillbillies syndrome: We fight because it's what we do... not because we understand why we are doing it. Yet, both parties, the brokers and the land owners, have the same interests. It's only that the big other (oil industry) controls prices, which incentivizes the two lower class parties to compete with one another over the pitence of value offered to them by the oil company. When the value clearly and obviously resides in the oil alone. The generational lack of education means the land owners need help selling the oil. The brokers just want to get paid. Hence, the drama, which then gets played back on to the situation. This causes the individuals involved to make it personal. All the big other has to do is sit back and fan the flames of personal hatred, and they will never be suspected. Maybe even playing both sides by giving each something useful. Reinforcing the idea of a personal grudge, instead of a price conflict started by those helping you be self destructive.
Yes, it can definitely be a form of generational trauma. And I agree, it amounts to pitting people against each other when we could be cooperating to solve these problems. I don't like the idea of blame to begin with. I think the beginnings of a lot of wrongs happen when we see something bad, and try to place blame. There are always multiple causes of things like this. It's unempowering. Blame ends up looking for an enemy and then trying to attack the enemy. It often leads to or reinforces the us-vs-them mentality. It's a pattern I see play out again and again. Like in the deep south in the US, you have racism used as a "wedge" that causes poor white people and black people to fight against each other, instead of unifying to lift everyone up and tear down oppressive power structures that harm both of them. I think this issue of classism is similar. I want people to see it and then learn to identify it so they can protect themselves from slipping into it. The hope is that if we can prevent this mindset from taking hold in ourselves, we improve our chances of building a bigger coalition and a bigger consensus, and actually solving problems in society by working together, listening to each other, hashing out problems, and coming to better policy solutions and then being able to agree on implementing them. The fighting between groups blocks both of these steps, it blocks the listening, and it blocks the building of consensus. But I do think we can overcome it and achieve both of these things!
@sw3783 And I'm not talking about everyone. That's a little over broad considering I never said anything along those lines. People can disagree. It's more that we need to stop thinking about it in terms of left and right. And start thinking about things in terms of class and opportunity.
We could start by realising this is merely an academic framework and just use critical thinking skills, only using such frameworks, as relevant...as opposed to turning such ideas into dogma.
I think you missed the boat on that one by 12+ years. I would have agreed with you, back then, but these ideas have become an ideology and movement in and of themselves, divorced from the academic framework. So it is no longer "merely an academic framework". It's frustrating. Like in college I read many of the same authors whose ideas are now being misinterpreted, misapplied, and abused. And many of these people are themselves horrified by this stuff. But again, that battle is lost. We now need to engage with this ideology and its widespread practice and embrace in society at large, as-it-in. Just sitting back and theorizing, saying "this needs to stay just as an academic framework" isn't going to "contain" the ideas to the academic sphere. We need a broader consensus that acknowledges at is NOT contained. And we need an approach that acknowledges the reality that it is being used in public activism, it is widespread on social media. I sometimes think a history lesson can help people, but I also think it's important to engage with the ideas and practices on their own level. Not everyone is going to delve into the history and then realize that the ideas have been mis-applied. Sometimes it's easier to point out a plain problem with the ideas as being applied currently, and be like: "Hey, this is messed up and isn't having the effect you intend!" I think it's an easier point to make and a more effective way to guide people out of these destructive ways of thinking, which is why I framed my video in this way.
@@AlexZorach i think any ‘oppression’ that can be identified in 2024 can be easily be debunked if you take one step beyond from the surface. it’s all bogus. example - black women die in child birth birth at a much hiigher rate than white women. and this is where everyone stops - the media, the left, democrats (all 3 of these are the same thing btw) but you take a one step further and it all falls apart. one step further reveals that while black women die at a higher rate than white women is true in the United States - it is also true in every other county around the world. and you also realize that white woman die less often than black women - true - but hispanic women and asian women die less often than white women. so now what do you have? i don’t know. but it’s not oppression.
@@AlexZorach I think either you're denying the simple reality that these institutions are set up to gate keep knowledge, or you're not as skeptical as I am. Gender Studies is well known to encourage activism, some profesors are allegedly afraid to speak out against the new paradigm, then there's the long slow march through rhe institutions, a concept that I'm sure someone like you would be familiar with. Going one step further, most media and many legal organisations are strongly woke or Feminist in origin. That's before we get to dei, consent classes, anti bullying programmes and god only knows...what else! So you can minimise their financial resources but I hope you would not be as quick to dismiss their extensive power across institutions and throughout society. Furthermore, my theory is that Feminism releases ideas and phraseology into society like a pilot programme. Then seizes on the most successful fake or quasi grassroots responses to lobby politicians, sometimes. Other times, the most successful tactics tried in the field are funneled upwards for use by politicians, and other powerful people wishing to deflect from their privilege or evade accountability.
@@acc4465Yes. Or the gap in prosecutions being far worse for men as against women, than for black men versus white men. Intersectionality...but only when it suits their narrative.
@@acc4465Short answer: There's a lot to parse from here. tl;dr I agree that eliminating oppression will not necessarily eliminate these differences in childbirth mortality rates between Black and White women. I disagree that oppression is not a contributing factor that Black women in the US have a higher childbirth mortality rate than White women. Why do I disagree? Because the US is one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest, being a first-world country. Our standards of living are higher than the majority of countries you might be thinking of, and childbirth mortality rate should still be lower than the population outside the US. Long answer: Now you might say that the childbirth mortality rate of Black women in the US is still lower than Black women elsewhere; it's just "much higher" (not just higher) than White women in the US. Then the next step is comparing the mortality rate of White women in the specific other countries that you're looking at, and seeing if the ratios of childbirth mortality rates are the same/similar. If there isn't enough of a White population to show a reliable statistic, then we cannot compare those countries with the US. Anecdotally, Black women have had experiences with not being taken seriously enough, causing them great harm/brought them to near-death if they didn't die altogether. Now whether this is racism specifically, or sexism specifically, or both, or something else altogether probably depends on a case by case situation. I mention sexism because women in general aren't given as much credence to men when it comes to getting treatment for their reported pain bc "it's fine and they're just sensitive." (This is the amalgamation of many similar medical experiences from other women so I'm not pulling this out of my ass. If you want further proof of medical sexism, search up the origin of the word "hysteria") Regardless if they are more sensitive to pain than men, they still are suffering and should still be given proper treatment to alleviate said pain. Even if racism/sexism are not the only causes and there may be other forces that we cannot control (like ethnic variations), education/policies to reduce those biases can certainly help to improve the quality of life for Black and White women alike. Even if the majority of women don't have negative childbirth experiences, we can still improve like we improved medical care in general. We lowered childbirth mortality and child mortality since the colonial era (some 300-400 years ago). We improved the lifespan of people in general so they get to live to an older age with better care. Therefore, I don't think we can conclude yet that it's just an inherent biological ethnic difference thing, which may be what you were trying to imply. Concluding that is equivalent to giving up on trying to improve childbirth mortality rates for Black //and// White women; needless to say, regarding lives of other people, we should always try everything we can before giving up. If it is true that Hispanic and Asian women have a lower childhood mortality rate, we should examine why that is the case and see if there is anything we can learn from them that would improve the childbirth mortality rate of Black and White women.
i think the biggest problem is that there is this attitude of "IF YOU SUPPORT BAD THINGS, YOUR A BAD PERSON." not to mention leftists are very bad at handling criticism,
Yes! This idea of "if you support bad things, you are a bad person" is pretty toxic and problematic. I also find it deeply ironic. The left usually claims to be critical of the Western punitive mindset, things like the carceral state (large prison population, over-policing and over-use of the criminal justice system), but there is something that strikes me as very punitive about the idea of labeling someone as a "bad person" and then mobilizing a vigilante mob to publicly shame or condemn (or even doxx) them. There's something deeply authoritarian about it. I sometimes think what is going on is that a large portion of people who have far-left views grew up surrounded by far-right authoritarian views, and they reject them superficially, but while maintaining deeper aspects of the way of thinking associated with authoritarianism, like the idea of "punishing" perceived wrongdoings, using power to bully people into submission when they don't do what you want. So the specific stances (and targets of condemnation) change, but the deep value system doesn't. I myself very much want to get out of and stay out of this mindset. And as your comment points out, a powerful way of doing this is to embrace the belief "It's possible to support bad things without being a bad person." Or more broadly, I'd rather us move away from the idea of trying to label people as a "bad person" or "good person" altogether. We're all just people, and each of us is capable of both bad things and good things. And I would like to do my best to do as much good as possible, and encourage others to do so as well! Thanks for this comment, it was brief, but is giving me some ideas of future video topics.
@@AlexZorach thanks for responding to my comment, I'm happy we can criticize the left in a healthy an intellectual ways, also one of the reasons the left is losing power is that there just not good at making themselves appealing, there terrible at marketing. i do not disagree that fascism is on the rise in America but one of the reasons is that more people are turning to the far right is that progressives are behaving increasingly elitist and obnoxious towards people, little actions and associations are scrutinized, as far as i can tell the youtuber shoeonhead is considered conservative and hated by many purely for mocking annoying leftists, its a vicious cycle of the left becoming increasingly aggressive due to pushing people towards the right through its sheer elitism. a lot of leftist spaces right now is dominated by doomerism because there exhausted by the right they helped create through there aggresiveness.
I am very well educated and privileged in a number of ways, and I spent over a week knocking on a lot of doors in Pennsylvania (not my home state!) for Kamala Harris. But I've been listening. And in my heavily liberal workplace, I've gotten a few colleagues who voted for Trump comfortable speaking to me about how they feel. And I would give the same advice to anyone who is wondering what the next step is: Listen to people. The Trump voters I've talked to, most of them ... they are not racists. They aren't haters. They don't delight in liberal tears. They love their families and have been genuinely nice to me and others. Yes, Trump validates bullies. But we'd be wrong and foolish for thinking that the majority of those who voted for him are irredeemably "gone." He said he'd fix it. Now he has to deliver. Many of these people are going to have voter's remorse once his term starts. They are going to want people they can turn to who will listen. They will want a way out of the MAGA vortex. Alex's point in this video about _not judging people because of the things they didn't get to learn_ is so important here. The success of any resistance to authoritarianism depends on the ability of such a resistance to welcome new arrivals who simply may not have understood what we do about the current political situation. If you're shell-shocked by the election result, that's ok. Take your time, take a moment, until you're ready to come back. But when you come back, do so knowing that the work of reconstructing broader community now looks different than the "anti-" motivated work many of us may be used to doing. You may find that the best resistance will happen from places you might not expect. And that in itself will be motivating.
Thank you for sharing these stories, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about! And it fits with my experiences of talking to Trump voters too.
Granted I live in Britain where the landscape is slightly different (e.g. a common response the phrases "White Culture" or "Black Culture" is "Which one?") but I can see a lot of where you're coming from, something people say to me is "you're really nice for a progressive" despite the fact that I tend to avoid that label and tend to present more as a British patriot (albeit with a Belgian surname which marked me out from the group at a younger age), a Catholic and a Libertarian (in Europe that sounds more left-leaning than it does in North America) but also as autistic and dyslexic. And I had it good with a supportive family and who helped me through the bad stuff to eventually get a good education which I haven't managed to convert into a career but I'm told that's an autism thing. That and being from a family of mixed descents (English, Scottish, Irish, Germanic and Spanish specifically) and mixed class and education backgrounds, values, religions, usw. it allowed me to see a wide variety of people and make normal some of the ideas that seem quite alien to others. And coming back to the "you're really nice for a progressive" is a feeling within a good many I've talked to who feel pushed aside by a "left" that they perceive to see them as nothing but a colonial subject to extract money from for their pet projects and ignore the economic pressures on ordinary working people whose concerns about job losses just get cast aside as "bigotry" and while there might be some who do just hate people who aren't like them, when no-one else appears to care if you are struggling this can encourage the growth in hate and while many of those who aren't responsible for it since there are ethnic, gender and sexual minorities who are also working class and struggle to find housing, work, usw. they get hit because they are seen as part of the problem as opposed to fellow workers held down by a capitalist system of exploitation where the owning class and the working class are distinct from one another and the working class doesn't get to enjoy the profit of their labour. I hope everyone has a better day and it was lovely having you here.
Exactly what I was thinking. Having money = evil; I hear this all the time. Edit after watching video: I thought it was the right punching down, and the left punching up, but this makes me aware. Many voted for Trump so he would fix the economy. (At voting time, I thought he would to, though I did vote Kamala. Hitler basically performed a miracle with the German economy, so it makes sense) Also puts pizzagate into perspective. People are desperate, left is saying they're wrong, they're immoral, and the economy is doing fantastic. Hitler spoke to the problems of the people, as did Trump. All sides are punching in all directions, desperately grabbing onto things in that desperation. I had just assumed ppl were stupid, but they're just desperate.
The classism may be obvious to you, me, and many others, but there are huge portions of people that it's NOT obvious to. Part of why I said "hidden" in the video title is that I want my message to get through to the people it's not obvious to.
The working class needs more access to run in elections and political parties without selling their souls to the donor class, currently both parties seem out of touch.
@mosessupposes2571 I meant the working class needs to be able to run for offices without selling their souls to the donor class and corporations, I edited my comment to reflect this.
This ties into my belief that there is no such thing as free will. I cannot blame a person for being the way they are, after all, we are all shaped by many factors, and we choose none of them. We should work to improve ourselves and others, we must be accountable and hold each other accountable, but we should not judge one another. Like Joseph Margulies says: "There is no them, only us."
That's interesting. I'd be curious how people actually in that community feel about the term. It's not exactly a substitute for Latino/a/x though; it's a noun and not an adjective.
I'd put it the other way around. You are only really left-wing if class is a core component of your analysis. You can (and should) fight for justice for other identities too, but if you're an identitarian who has literally forgotten about class and economic justice, you are no longer "left wing". You are just another right-winger like any other tribalist.
This is sounding a little bit like the no true Scotsman fallacy. One belief I hold to quite strongly is that I like to use language within the range of meanings used in society at large. As such, I don't like to get too stuck up on definitions. You and I could sit here debating the definition of leftism but I think it's off-topic. If you watched my video, I hope it is clear what I am referring to by "the left" -- I'm using the term to describe what is referred to as "the left" by mainstream political discussion in the US. Whether or not this is "true leftism" is kinda irrelevant to any of the points that I'm trying to make here, and if you want to debate that, my channel isn't really the place to do it. I'm here to appeal to a general audience and build as broad a consensus as I can. And, in order to do this, I need to use mainstream language, whether or not I like it. There are times and places to push non-mainstream language, but I don't really see anything empowering or relevant to what this video is about, coming out of the line of reasoning you are using here. Quite to the contrary, your reasoning here sounds a lot like the same sort of logic you hear on the right ("right-wing" here again referring to the right-leaning half of US politics) when people criticize anyone who doesn't agree 100% with the ideology as being a "RINO", i.e. "not a real Republican". I find these sorts of lines of reasoning unproductive because they either devolve into infighting (when no one perspective dominates) or groupthink (when one particular one does.) Because of this, I'd rather not argue about definitions or about who belongs under which umbrella term. I am trying to avoid identity politics anyway. I'm trying to steer the discussion in the direction of specific issues, specific stances. I think we can all agree here that classism is bad. I'm not here to judge or exclude people from the left just because they are saying or doing some classist things. Rather, I'm here to say--hey, you're doing some classist things, and I'm pretty sure you don't actually want to be doing those things because it's contrary to all the things you supposedly believe in. Does that make sense? We can debate definitions all day and get nowhere, but it's easier (and more important) to agree that classism is bad and we can avoid doing it. I want something actionable here. Then we can quickly move on.
I have a high school education. I'm a college dropout. I take issue not with someone's possible bigotry (unless they openly say bigoted things) but with the people they vote for.
I think there's a categorization problem here. You are talking about liberals and while it's true that the "left" in the US is mostly liberals, it's also true that liberalism is a right wing capitalist ideology that is not leftist.The actual left has always been anti-capitalist and class, for most of history, has been its primary focus because it includes all these other oppressed groups. True, they have their own specific issues that need attention but if you transparently virtue signal solely about these groups and have contempt for the class that most of them come from you will never succeed in building any kind of movement, which is fine for liberals, because that's not what they want.
You are the third person who has left essentially the exact same comment about "liberals" vs "leftists". If you're making this point, I think you're missing both the point of this video, and the core philosophy of this channel. I strongly recommend reading my replies in the comment below to the comments by AtropalArbaal-dk8jv and synaesmedia. Quick summary: I'm not here to debate definitions. I use language the way mainstream society in the US does because I want my video to reach as broad a (US-centric) audience as possible. I avoid specialized terminology and subtle distinctions unless they are central to my point. Here I think they'd be confusing to the typical viewer. People say "left" to mean a certain thing in US politics and that is what I'm meaning, not the global, political theory sense. I would hope that what I mean with my video is clear from context, but if it ever isn't, feel free to ask for clarification.
You make a good point about insulting Alt-Right activists and politicians with ableist and blue-collar stereotypes and slurs, harassing innocent white people about "privilege," or "cultural appropriation" for wearing dreadlocks is classist and alienates potential allies. I disagree with you about calling "political correctness," "intersectionality," "identity politics," and "wokeness" "divisive" and classist, because we are all members of various ethnic groups and need to publicly celebrate our cultures, and censor hate speech for our mental health and safety, civil reasonable discourse, peaceful relations, and because our groups contain all classes. The Left Wing is mostly an ethnic coalition movement seeking human rights and peaceful coexistence. Only the Labor, Communist, and Socialist movements are economic. At either end of the Horseshoe Theory of Politics, only riots, terrorism, hate crimes, and dictatorship are "extreme," not drag queens reading to children in libraries, doctors prescribing puberty blockers to transgender kids, with or without their parents' permission, nor pro athletes "taking a knee" at football games to protest police brutality, because all these acts are harmless. Trump won his elections by smearing the Left with hate speech, conspiracy theories, and many of the same complaints you use about the Left. The Left Wing had been discredited since the Russian Revolution for its war crimes against the royal Romanov Family, and Stalin's reign. Cold War McCarthyism weakened the Left by tabooing the Communist, Socialist, and Labor Movements, leaving the New Left, Feminist, Civil Rights, and LGBT Movements a middle class, college-based movement by the '60s. Its current image problems stem from '70s infighting from the Feminist Sex Wars over pornography, prostitution, lesbian, and transgender rights, "Oppression Olympics", or rivalry between marginalized groups for public sympathy, COINTELPRO, and smearing of the Gay Rights and Feminist Movements as child molesters and man-haters by Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafley, Jerry Falwell, etc.
There is a lot of stuff wrapped in this comment, and I've gotten an overwhelming amount of comments on this video so unfortunately I cannot give this one a thorough reply right now. I will say though, I agree with some of the things you're saying but disagree with others. Part of what I am trying to do with my channel is to talk about issues one at a time. One thing I disagree with in your comment is how you say 'only riots, terrorism, hate crimes, and dictatorship are "extreme" '...I don't necessarily think that a riot or even violent or disruptive actions are necessarily extremist. As some examples, you have the Stonewall Riots, or Nelson Mandela's movement to end Apartheid in South America. Both of these involved violence and disruption, but I think they were both, at their essence, acts of self-defense. On the other hand, extremism can manifest as words on a page, or calmly-spoken speech. It is the content of the speech that matters. I have a rather old video on the topic that you might be interested in: th-cam.com/video/zwT3Ilyf2LU/w-d-xo.html I agree with you that Trump and the power interests backing him grossly misrepresented the Democrats and that that was a large portion of why they won. At the same time, the sort of behavior I describe in this video, which I do think amounts to extremism, is so prevalent that I don't think Trump's win can be fully attributed to misinformation. People have valid reasons to dislike the left, and the left has done a pretty poor job of "policing their own". And like I said at the conclusion of my video, you always control yourself more than anyone else, so we would all do well to root these problems out from our own thinking before we start criticizing others.
Though you write very well, I still noticed how you smuggled in the assumption...that we, somehow, can legislate for civility! 1 Not necessarily and that's very authoritarian impulse and 2 Using the excuse of civility to exclude disfavored speech is a Right wing tactic. And 3 It's the feminization of dialogue, greatly expedited by Feminism that has done the most to kill off civility. Namely, use of insinuations, smears, guilt by association, and, othering by weaponisimg jargon as described in the video...Not to mention mob rule including doxing and open character assassination, including campaigns aimed at making individuals unemployable!! Very kind. Very civil! ...I'll await your reply complete with only emotional arguments like, "but they deserved it" ...or, "show me one person who didn't deserve to be cancelled"...none of which adequately deflects from the reality of this deplorable behaviour. Which, apart from instantly disqualifying you as capable of good faith civil dialogue, demonstrates zero accountability. Let alone, moral authority, to dictate, never mind to legislate, the behaviour of others and what constitutes civility!
You have a very important and true point, that intersectional analysis is causing leftist neomarxists to judge individuals and thus preventing to understand, respect and attend to a relevant dialogue with them. However, you are making the same sort of mistake as they are since you are also using intersectional thinking and simplifying by judging them to belong to a certain social class, and thus identifying them as belonging to an either true or made up group. In order to dig deep every individual has to be regarded as such, in order to find the root cause of actual behaviour. In any case, I think the main problem is that we are stuck in a post modernist era in which we are taking for granted that we ought to enforce social change upon societies, also referred to as "justice" altought justice ought to be something completely different than neomarxist "diversity, equity and inclusion". Modernism and post modernism must end now, so we can return to a new golden period and Belle Epoque of realism, naturalism and love.
I'm not sure your use of the term "neomarxism" makes sense here. Neomarxism is a pretty esoteric philosophy that few people actually believe in. So like, publications like Spectre, Historical Materialism, New Left Review, stuff like that. It is not really what I was talking about in my video. It's much less mainstream and widespread. I also think you may have understood the point I was trying to make in my video, in which I was criticizing people for criticizing others as "uneducated" while using the leftist language of privilege and marginalization. I was aiming to criticize people who come from highly educated backgrounds, who speak the language and use the terminology of privilege and marginalization, but then who condemn others as "uneducated" without acknowledging the educated backgrounds they come from and unique opportunities they had. I recognize that not everyone who holds these ideologies comes from those backgrounds. You are right that people are complex and the groups are not always well-defined like that. But I have seen enough examples of such criticism coming out of the mouths of people I know well, whom I know to have come from these backgrounds, so I am comfortable saying that there are a lot of people out there acting hypocritically like this. And I want to make clear I don't want to do this myself. Because I come from such an educated, privileged background, I don't want to fall into this mindset. That's my key point here. I am not trying to claim these groups or ideologies or labels are necessarily well-defined and I am certainly not trying to use them as rigid categories. Does this make any sense? As for your comments about justice, I don't necessarily find justice a particularly useful concept myself, and I've moved away from it in my thinking. It often is related to "should statements" which is something I have found to be unempowering, often leading to clouded thought or unclear communication. When I say that I find some things about social justice ideology compelling, I do not mean that I embrace its concept of justice (or ANY concept of justice) as a key goal in and of itself. I merely was trying to emphasize that I don't wholly reject everything about the ideology and that there are elements of it that I find useful at times, and aspects of the goals it pushes for that I am partially or sometimes mostly in agreement with.
@AlexZorach Yes, I agree that they are acting badly, but I am arguing that we are all more or less impacted by a false and dangerous thinking whereby we tend to imagine groups of people that either do not exist or create harmful conflicts between them, because the idea is to force upon them a strive to equalize power. Even if it is not known to most, the actual origins come from Karl Marx with morphed rethinking by postmodernists such as Marcuse and Judith Butler. The end game is to destroy everything. Before Karl Marx there were social orders which were not obsessed with differences in status and privilege, but now we seem more preouccupied than ever before, which obviously creates more conflict and unhappiness.
I have to say, for socialists, the idea of not thinking about class is laughable, how can you look at politics and leave class out of the conversation? I agree with this video for highlighting the importance of class. When Alex says "the Left" I think what is meant is mostly activists who vote for Democrats. When I think of "the Left" I think of socialists, union organizers, communists, people who highlight the evils of American empire, capitalism, etc.
Stand and fight for justice for all, but don't insult or label people as "other." Attack the issues, not the people. Speak for yourself and your feelings. Don't categorize others as one of "them." Attacking an idea as stupid is fundamentally different from calling someone stupid. One is criticism. The other latter is an insult.
A lot of left wing social justice talk just seems like virtue signaling to me. Talk on and on about food insecurity but how many people did i feed today? More talk about the unhoused but who have i taken in and sheltered? As long as folks allow themselves to use pronouns “we” and “they,” no personal action need be taken. ie “They need to do something about this” or “We need to be more compassionate and generous.” The only honest approach when facing tragedy and need is first person singular. What will i do today?
I agree that there is a lot of virtue signaling in some of these circles, but I also think there's a legitimate need and purpose to having the more abstract discussions. For example, through online discourse, I learned a lot about ways in which language I had grown up using and heard normalized, was actually rooted in bigotry. For example this included sexism and sex-negative language inherent in words like "player" and "slut", racism in how black people would be described as "articulate" for speaking standard English, and biological essentialism that was out-of-touch with science, when people use terms like "biological male" and "biological female" when talking about trans people and related issues. Sometimes talking about an issue like food insecurity can be helpful too. It can be useful when it guides people's choices of where to donate money or time (by volunteering). Like if a person learns that food insecurity is an issue in their area, they can donate money or food to a food bank, or volunteer cooking and/or serving free meals. I think there can be a bridge, too, between the more impersonal "we" or "they", and the "I" in your example. For example, I can write to a legislator to urge them to preserve or expand programs like SNAP/EBT. I can go beyond just donating or volunteering, and share an item urging others to do the same. So I can exert pressure to act on the "they" (i.e. government, or larger institutions where I may have some sway) as well as on the "we" (i.e. my community.) And I often think that the best way to approach any sort of action is a "both-and". Work to shape the systems in a good direction, but also work directly as an individual. I think both are important.
When I think of the people in my life that support Trump, they overwhelmingly have the privilege, education and means to know better. But I hear you. I have been guilty of classism on occasion and will try to do better.
I used to be poor and uneducated. I struggle and eventually got a community college degree then a masters degree paid for by my employer. I’m Black. I don’t feel elite because of my education. I do feel that some people are just dumb and I don’t think intellectual curiosity is something limited to upper classes.
That's awesome that you were able to work up into these degrees through your employer. My boss in my one job was like that, he started out as a bus driver, also eventually got a college degree then an MBA. He is also one of the smartest people I've ever met, so many different types of intelligence. And haha...my wife agreed with you about "some people are just dumb". I have moved away from labeling people in this way though because I can be pretty stupid myself in certain situations, and most people are smarter in some areas of their life than others. Maybe it's true but I am not convinced I am able to judge people's intelligence in a simple way like that. But I agree 100% about intellectual curiosity not being limited to upper classes, and I'd add, plenty of "upper class" people can show a total lack of intellectual curiosity too. I had my own share of disillusionment too, when I went to grad school, I was in two Ph.D. programs, and I had expected to find people who were among the most intellectually curious people I had ever met. But I just didn't. They were just...more focused. I went to grad school because I loved learning and scholarship and ideas and I wanted to be in an atmosphere where people constantly sat around and talked about ideas, and it just wasn't like that. I sometimes nerd out with people in the most random places too. Like I had taken my car into the shop to get new tires and I was talking to the one mechanic and he was just an inexhaustible fount of knowledge about auto parts, just a joy to talk to. Or the owner of this one Mexican grocery store was telling me different uses and preparation methods for all the different dried peppers. I love when people are knowledgeable about something and get excited about it and can share it in ways that are relevant and helpful! Now I discovered I love guajillo peppers!
*sigh* Look you're not saying anything new and, frankly, I'd say the past decades have proved this perspective wrong. This same stuff was spouted 8 years ago. And plenty of people ARE reaching out and ARE adjusting language to communicate. And have been for longer than 8 years. So that's not actually the issue. It's tribalism. If your tribe says the other side says a and does b, it doesn't matter how many times the other side actually says x and does y. Our primate brains trust our tribe and will ignore the evidence when strongly entrenched in a group. It's why doomsday cults generally don't break up when the end of the world doesn't arrive on the predicted date. Doubling down avoids embarrassment and keeps us with our people.
It's hard for me to take this comment seriously. You say "You're not saying anything new" but I literally spent the past few months being practically inundated with groupthink and demonization from both sides, and saw very few people voicing perspectives like mine. Furthermore, part of the problem is that when people do voice these positive, inclusive, respectful perspectives, people don't elevate them, and instead they shut them down... ...which is exactly what you are doing. You are here saying I'm wrong and saying I'm not going to fix the issue. Like you say the issue is "tribalism" but what I am saying in my video IS SOMETHING THAT CAN SPECIFICALLY HELP TO BREAK DOWN TRIBALISM. I would hope that is self-evident to anyone who sits and reflects on it? And then you launch into this cynical depiction of human nature, and your comment ends without any actionable point. My video is actionable, and yet you're responding trying to shut me down, but without suggesting any positive course of action. Let me ask you a tough question, if you're still reading and haven't just tuned out because I don't agree with you fully: When you take this cynical a view of things, is it because that's what you WANT to bring into being in the world? Do you WANT people to be all tribalist like that? Or is it because you are feeling depressed and hopeless and you worry that that's just what we're stuck with? Like you dislike it and feel frustrated about it and hopeless to do anything about it? Let me tell you how I see things. Like you, I see all this tribalism around me. I hate it. I think it's a bad aspect of human nature and I think it's something we need to keep in check, and that ultimately, I would like to see us grow beyond and discard entirely. The whole point of this video is that I'm trying to nudge people in a new direction, I'm trying to steer people away from that us-vs-them thinking. Do you not see this? My channel is a place to embrace a more positive attitude and a more positive vision of human nature. I see those "things are just bad and that's the way they are" takes as irrational, they're a sort of collective cultural depression, mental illness speaking. And I see it this way, I see more room for hope specifically because I know numerous people around me who have grown out of these perspectives. Heck, *I* have grown out of these perspectives. I've been there, been in that dark "us-vs-them thinking" place, and I've gotten out. And I want to lead and help others out too. I want to reiterate what I said at the end of my video: change needs to start within. We need to work on ourselves first. I've been in a place like you describe and it's not a pleasant one and it's not particularly helpful for inspiring others or affecting change. The particular problem or challenge you face may not be the exact same one facing others. Maybe you're not in this deeply tribalist mentality, and maybe you're bothered by it. But you seem to have another, equally concerning problem here. I don't know what's going on in your head, but from how your comment was framed and worded, you seem to be bogged down with cynicism and negativity. And this is going to keep you from doing anything about that tribalism, and moving society forward, which is ultimately what matters. Maybe you need to work more on that issue. Maybe I could make another video about this too, who knows? Anyway, thank you for your comment, even if it was not particularly truthful, respectful, or empowering, I do think it illustrates an important point here. It's a mindset that leads nowhere, it leads people to be stuck. Please, get out of it. Realize you need to get out of it. It's not going to lead anywhere good. We need our thought processes to end on actionable points.
@AlexZorach I share my experience. Feel free to dismiss it for yours. Both are just that and, as such, only anecdotal. Please understand that I don't live on social media (though of course I am also in a bubble when on) so I speak of my real world experience working in a red town, living in a blue one, and growing up in a different red one that I return to often. I can say accurately that I have relationships across the political spectrum, and have found one on one conversations helpful only until the tribal mentality kicks in. At that point the vast majority of people whom I try to have conversations with (on either side - I am not a Democrat) revert to tribalism. Perhaps our differing experiences have more to do with age and location than politics.
It's obvious to me and obvious to a lot of people, but I really don't think it's obvious to the people who do it, and to a much larger group of people who tolerate it. This particular video is aimed at the people who most need the message, which is why I used the word "hidden" here. I'm speaking primarily to the people who don't see the problem, and I'm trying to help them see it. If you watch more of my videos, you'll find that I really care about influencing people and getting through to them. I'm not here to create an echo chamber, I'm here to challenge people's beliefs and reach out to a broad range of people and build a consensus around certain key points. If you want a place where people will bash or put down the left (or the right), this is not the channel for you. This is a place for getting outside the groupthink and building a more truthful way of viewing the world.
This video isn't about Marxism at all. I'd love to make another video about it, but...it's tangential at best. The problem I see with Marxism, at least Marxism-Communism, is more economic and structural than cultural and about identity politics. I.e. managed economies are inefficient and prone to shortages and overproduction, an the free market is much more efficient and robust, and there are also problems with centralizing more power in the hands of the state. I tend to support decentralization of power. Did you watch my video or are you just commenting on the title? Because I think if you think it's about Marxism you are totally missing the point. I'm primarily talking about a sort of far-left identity politics and "social justice" activism that you saw a surge of in the 2010's especially. It's not really related to Marxism in any meaningful sense, although you can find some tiny niche subcultures that will say it is and then embrace both, but again, that's not what this video is about.
@@AlexZorach social justace and other leftist ideals are just sub speices of the og speices that is markism u can see its ideals spring up in the US around the 1910s and 1920s. peaked in the 60s with mlk and femisimze. now we are living in the failed ideals
@@AlexZorach Like China's "overproduction" of EVs that Elon Musk is shitting bricks over not being able to compete with? Obviously the Soviet system had problems that weren't entirely external, but at this point with Western countries crying about how they can't compete with China and their "non-market methods," I think it's pretty clear state led development and 5 year plans are pretty much the only way you can reduce emissions and reduce poverty at the same time. Besides, it's not a "free market" when you have to resort to tariffs and protectionism. The US still gives lip service to the idea of "free markets" but that's not really how things have ever actually worked in the US. The next decade will pretty much put the last nail in that coffin and then they'll have to come up with another story about why it's actually good for corporations to dominate the state rather than the other way around.
With the whole latinx thing, I feel it should be more non binary people involved in the discussion not just Latinos and Latinas. Cause that’s really the only people it affects substantially speaking as a Latino myself.
I feel there’s valid criticism, but many times people are educated but choose to continue to use outdated terms. For strangers it matters little but if you’re friends with someone it is an issue if they’re repeatedly acting in that way.
I agree with the attacking the arguments but not the person. Attacking the people causes more separation and it’s VERY difficult at times due to even being insulted in said discussions.
Class consciousness is central to Leftism. It's not a bug, it's a feature. You are describing Liberals (particularly Liberal-Centrists). You are describing a problem with the class divide that is associated with Liberals, not Leftists, in this video. Your misunderstanding of how Leftists view Class is plain to see, and your misunderstanding itself arises from a centrist liberal world view (whether you see that or not). Come to the dark side: shed your Liberal skin. Lol
I'm not really here to debate definitions, the whole discussion of "liberal" vs "leftist" is at best tangential to the point I was making here. I would hope that it was clear from the context in my video, exactly what subset of people I was talking about. If it's unclear, feel free to ask and I will clarify. I have a strong belief in using language within the range of uses of mainstream society, and I want my videos to be accessible to a general audience, because the goal of them is to build as broad a consensus as possible. (And I seem to be doing it! This video has attracted a motley crew including conservatives, moderates, and even outright Marxist-Communists, and I've gotten positive feedback from all of these groups. This is what I want!) Here in the US at least, the term "left" is usually used to refer to anything considered left-of-center in US politics (more-or-less the Democratic party along with various fringe groups that are more progressive) and the terms "left", "leftist", and "left-wing" are often used interchangeably, perhaps with a slight connotation of "leftist" or "left-wing" being more extreme or solidly left than the general "left". I am well aware that this does not map onto what other countries call the left, like many Democrats have views close to what would, for example in Germany, fall under the CDU, a center-right party. And in Germany, "The Left" = "Die Linke" is a specific party that is Democratic Socialist and has a history of growing out of the Marxist-Leninist party of the former East Germany, and as such is farther left than their SPD or center-left party. Here in the US, and in the subset of the global English-speaking community that discusses US politics, some segment of the population makes a distinction between "liberals" and "the left", but it's not a majority and because I want my video to be accessible to as many people as possible, I don't get into this distinction. I also don't think it was particularly relevant to the topic of this video. When a distinction IS relevant to the topic of a video, then and only then will I emphasize it. In this case, I think this distinction becomes more confusing. Like you are here making a distinction between "liberals" and "leftists", and there is an inconsistency which is that in academic and niche activist circles, people often use "liberal" to mean "neoliberal" (which in US politics includes a portion of people within the Republican party, like much of the policies of Reagan and those who supported those policies), whereas in society as a whole, most people, definitely more than half, use "liberal" just to mean "anywhere left of center". So the term "liberal" can mean two largely-contradictory things. So basically, I'm deeply aware of all these distinctions already, and I'm making a conscious choice of how I use language. I'm using the language the way it is used in the mainstream, in trying to make my message easily understood by as broad a group as possible. None of this is really necessary to understand the points in the video. I was just using the term "left" as shorthand to describe the fact that this classism you see in the online discourse usually manifests from people who are broadly perceived as part of the left, and who use language and frame their statements in ways typically associated with the left. There's a point at which if you are going to quibble around language, you're trying in vain to fight a battle that was already lost long ago. It would be a bit like me marching into a Catholic church and being like "You aren't really Catholic." and then giving some well-reasoned and perhaps actually valid argument as to why the mainstream Catholic church were not actually the true and universal Catholic church. Even if my argument were 100% valid, my claim would be silly and would not change the fact that the world sees them as the Catholic church and uses the term "Catholic" to describe them and their members. And then, if we were discussing some sort of thing relevant to the church, the discussion of whether or not the term "Catholic" actually referred to them would be off-topic and irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, people refer to them as the Catholic church and so that's the term we need to use in order to communicate we are talking about them. There is a lot that I don't like about the terms used to discuss politics here in the US, and I do want to change some things. And it might be worth having a discussion about leftism vs. liberalism, or perhaps liberalism as a whole vs. neoliberalism. These are interesting topics. But they're tangential to this video. And overall, on my channel, I'm less interested in defining or applying labels, and more interested in engaging directly with specific ideas, specific practices, and specific policies. So if you want a more definition-focused channel, mine might not be the best place for you!
@@AlexZorachI understand your points, but disagree staunchly. In your last line, there's a pretty large contradiction. You talk about being interested in engaging directly with specific ideas, practices, and policies. However, a conversation about these things can't even BEGIN without clear definitions. If you don't define what you're talking about, your points become nebulous. For example, if I were to say "The right wants to take away abortions," it wouldn't be true. There are anarcho-capitalists who advocate for near, if not absolute lack of government. They certainly don't believe a government should take away abortions, despite any other ridiculous flaws in their ideology. The people who want to take away abortions in American politics are the MAGA crowd, who I can only accurately define as economically right wing nationalists. You make this mistake by not even defining social justice clearly and grouping the entire left together. Do you truly think a well read Marxist-Leninist would emphasize focus on race and outward appearance of gender, rather than class, when the ENTIRE ideology is based on class struggle? It makes absolutely no sense. What is social justice? What is the goal of people who preach for social justice? In youtube video format, if these aren't clearly defined, with some reference to the history of the idea, I may as well call it a strawman used to impose a negative connotation on people who don't stand as you represent them, if you can even call that representing an idea. Talking about a specific idea means representing it fairly and defining it clearly. You cannot be unfocused on definitions and interested in specificity, the two are mutually exclusive. There is one point you made that I will give some credence to on the surface, and that is on the academic elitism of the left (in general). (Also in general) the left does tend to be more educated. If there is a group of educated people who is making points about society, and another group of people who is not as educated disagrees with them, regardless of how justified it may or may not be, elitism will form eventually. Ideas of the stupid masses holding us back from societal progress. Understandable as it is to me, elitism gives more power to people like Donald Trump and ideas like anti-intellectualism. In very simple terms, if the left is being mean to you for not reading and the right isn't blaming you for it, the right is going to be more appealing (assuming only two options). This is how the American left digs its own grave. I am a bit morally elitist. Not towards those without formal education, but towards those who would limit access to education. A country that gets this wealthy without sharing all its knowledge, with all the people it can, is a third world country wearing a gucci belt. An easy source of contempt for the left is those who go out and vote for a man in a suit making false promises, but never dare to develop critical thinking skills. The #1 search term on google the day after the US election was "what is a tariff." I won't let myself hate the uneducated, but I can understand those who do. The entire idea is to make access to education universal and a right, yet we have people who DISAGREE with that and then somehow label it as classism when they're called stupid for that belief. It can only, and I mean only be classism in a society that ties education to individual wealth, and that society can only exist with a widely uneducated populace, because the empirical evidence tears it to pieces. We have people who simply have no idea how undeveloped their world view is. That's more tragic than contemptible. I'm a 21 year old carpenter with a high school education. It was never about hating those who don't have institutionalized education. I only hate those who limit access to education, because they've built a simple, vicious cycle that's incredibly hard to break. We will never have enough people who can think critically and honestly assess ideas they disagree with if that cycle remains unbroken. Knowledge should be free. I HATE that that's somehow been made controversial by our corporate overlords. I mostly disagree with you and wanted to objectively, fairly hear your point of view. You need to define your terms or you don't HAVE a point of view.
@@falcononeniner9896 I agree with @AlexZorach more here, not because defining things is unimportant, but because the primary goal of this video is mutual understanding across groupthink bubbles, and not technical rectitude. In fact, I'd argue that a central point of this video is that this very type of conversation (about fighting to microdefine words) is part of the problem.
@Pafemanti GREAT point, you got me thinking for a good while there. Respect. I have questions now, not pointed ones. Is a common, as objective as possible definition not a good way to break groupthink circles? If we define a group of people from the other side objectively, will they not lower their defenses and be more willing to have a conversation?
Social justice advocates have been talking for a long time about the things you are talking about long before you brought this up. We don't care when someone uses the wrong terms as long as they are willing to listen when they are corrected on the appropriate terms to use in their region, and when they're told which less or un-acceptable. It would be classist to suggest that someone would be unable to listen to that based on their social class. The reason that these terms that are and aren't acceptable change over time is because any word that is socially acceptable will inevitably be used by bigots as an insult and as clinical terms by people who are -phobic out of (often deliberate) ignorance. Finally, the idea that we need to focus on changing the minds of the people around us in order to combat systemic discrimination shows a lack of understanding of how bigoted ideas enter the mainstream. People become bigoted (and -phobic from ignorance) because the systems they live in are discriminatory, not the other way around (thanks Kendi). We saw this happen in our lifetime when people became in support of gay marriage after Obergefell. This is why we focus on making systemic changes rather than on changing people's minds.
Wow, it's a rare comment that I find myself liking even though I disagree with it. You are sparking dialogue which is great! I disagree with a lot in this comment. When you say "we" and say "social justice advocates", you're not speaking for everyone. I've seen countless examples of people who launch into criticism and condemnation without ever giving people a chance to adjust their language. In some cases, I've even been targeted by that sort of behavior myself. And I infrequently see peers "policing their own" so to speak, i.e. it's a slim minority of cases where I see people jump in to defend people who are wrongly attacked or demonized in this manner. Secondly, you say "as long as they are willing to listen when they are corrected on the appropriate terms". Here's my problem with this. Who has the authority to decide what is "correct" or "appropriate"? There's a huge difference between terms that are reached by consensus, and ones that are forced into usage by a system of bullying, harassment, and social exclusion. As an example, I will bring this up because I'm trans, I see a lot of use of the terms FtM and MtF among trans people, and language like "I become a woman / I became a man." This is a subjective narrative, i.e. there is nothing inherently objective about whether a trans person decides they were "born as a man and became a woman" vs "I have always been a woman and I merely changed my outward appearance to match that." There are some trans people whose subjective experience matches the one narrative, and some whose experience matches the other. I think it's problematic when people come in and say that the language people use to refer to themselves, the language they have used through their own journey to become comfortable with themselves and life their best life, is "wrong" and needs to be "corrected". And yet I have seen A LOT of this type of arguments. Again, I have sometimes been subjected to it myself. I have had people try to "correct" me saying I was "misgendering" myself when I used "he/him" pronouns to refer to myself in the past, even though I prefer they/them pronouns to refer to myself in the present. I find this frustrating, and I find it, frankly, very invasive. It's very non-consensual. It feels like people are trying to get me to redefine the language I use to narrate my own life, and they're doing it without giving me any agency or choice in it. It's very different, from, say, a white person using the n-word in 2024 and being told that it's inappropriate and not to say that. In that case I'd say, yes, that criticism is warranted. And it would have been warranted decades ago. So there are times when it's okay to correct people in a more direct, forceful way, because there is a near-complete consensus in society that white people using that word is wrong. But when the language is in active flux, when the terminology is new and there is far from a consensus on it, it's wildly inappropriate for people to treat it like their particular subculture is an authority on what sort of language is "correct". It's arrogant, it's condescending. And understandably, it alienates people. I also disagree with what you said, you said "any word that is socially acceptable will inevitably be used by bigots as an insult..." And this is just plain not true. For example with those words FtM and MtF, I don't really see those being used frequently as insults, nowhere near as often as I see younger trans people and LGBTQ advocates criticizing others (whether trans or cis) for using them. I think it's usually clear from context whether someone is using something as a slur or not. If someone is viewing people with disdain or looking down on them, that's a problem regardless of the terminology they are using. This reply has already gotten long so I'll make a separate comment for the other point!
Your last paragraph is interesting. I agree with you that bigotry primarily exists and is reinforced through systems. However, I think you are wrongly separating out "changing the minds of people" from the system itself. A decision like Obergefell would have been extraordinarily unlikely in a society where a significant portion of people had not already become convinced that gay marriage were a valid thing. There were many years of high-profile public debate, and extensive discussion in many different spheres: religious, legal, everyday life conversations. And these things interacted. The Obergefell decision itself cited a lot of reasoning (effects on gay couples from being denied the right to marry) that had been extensively discussed in society in preceding years, and it also cited the fact that gay marriage had been legalized in some states, as with a patchwork of civil union laws. The process leading to the patchwork of some legalization of gay marriage and recognition of civil unions was itself the result of a decades-long process of all sorts of lobbying, grass-roots social movements, and countless individual conversations. And much of it comes down to changing the minds of people. So I think what you are describing here with Obergefell was more of a "tipping point" where there was one key change that pushed the system so far in one direction that it was impossible to go back. People who had been fighting it up until that point basically gave up, and if you look at what conservatives of that time said, that's basically the stance they took, and some conservatives today still say more-or-less the same thing. Lastly...this may be sort of tangential, but I think there is another issue at stake here. I think you are correct that there is some portion of people who think something is wrong because it's illegal and will stop thinking it's wrong when it becomes legal. I see this sort of attitude not just with same-sex marriage but also other issues like alcohol or marijuana use, or even zoning laws. And I have a huge problem with it. The law and morality are not the same thing and I think there is a deep problem with someone's moral system if they equate the two. And I think there is a problem if someone equates the two, even if I happen to agree with the law. In this scenario, there is an "instability" so to speak. I.e. if people equate the law with morality, it leaves open the possibility for bigotry or other social ills to take hold if the law is changed. People aren't actually committed to whatever situation is the status quo, i.e. they aren't supporting it or believing in it "for the right reasons", so an authoritarian or just other bad forces in society are able to push for bad things to happen by pushing for a change in the law. And then people's support for them flips. I think the US is like this in a lot of ways, and I don't think it's a good thing. I think we would be much better off if a greater portion of the population made a clear distinction between the law and morality. I also think that, in general, making these distinctions tends to result both in better policy, and better moral decisions. There are a lot of things that are more the realm of morality and less policy (i.e. "small government" says it isn't the government's role to solve every problem, and I agree with this idea) but also there are things that are more the role of policy or the law and not government (i.e. you might be granted certain rights but more for practical reasons, not because their are some moral or "inalienable" rights. And again I think this is often a better way of approaching rights, because acknowledging their subjectivity can lead to more constructive dialogue and again lead to better policy.) So yeah, that's my take on this. I find this a rich topic which is why this is such a long comment. I hope something in here has been insightful or illuminating! Thank you for your thought-provoking comment, it certainly got me thinking even though I didn't fully agree with it!
Most Trump supporters aren't working class, most of them are petty bourgeois (small business owners and small landlords e.c.t). I'm a working class person from the UK without a degree and I'm not right wing or a Trump supporter, in fact, I'm on the far left. I don't think being 'bigoted' towards bigoted people is a form of classism. I think the idea that working class people are more bigoted and right wing is a dehumanising stereotype and a form of demonisation. I disagree when you say that it's not a moral failing for those who were exposed to more bigotry to be bigoted. Being a bigot is a choice, as a kid, I always knew it was wrong. I became a Nazi when I was 15 years old, all because of peer pressure, but I always knew deep down that I was in the wrong and that I was hurting people. A lot of these bigoted ideas originated within the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the European nobility and later trickled down into the ranks of the working class. Most woke people are not elitist or "middle class", most of the woke people I've known were from working class backgrounds and were some of the most compassionate people I've ever met.
You are giving us tons of personal anecdotes without citing your claims that Trump supporters aren’t working class. Lots of research has been done on educational level and income in relation to political affiliation in the U.S. and it indicates the opposite of what you are asserting here.
@@AllenRosdahl Class isn't defined by educational level or income. It's defined by your relation to the productive forces, this is what working class has always meant, so you can stop with the mental gymnastics. You can stop demonising me and my social class. My social class was responsible for the Paris Commune of 1871 which is a legacy I'm very proud of. The British labour movement during the 19th was very progressive for it's time which is something else I'm proud of. I'm not denying that there is a reactionary and backward section of the working class, but you have to acknowledge that there is also a revolutionary and progressive section of the working class. I'm tired of people assuming I'm a Nazi because of my social class.
Bahahahah 😂 This is why Trump won. Working class doesn’t mean just baristas. How many construction workers you know that need safe spaces? Lol. In all seriousness, I highly recommend you all take some time for self reflection (not an insult just a bit of friendly advice).
Hi there, Just to respond to the education bit. It's less about the educational credentials of someone and more about whether people have critical thinking skills which I feel many people who are conned by bad republicans lack. I am someone who only went to community college (couldn't afford a standard college or university) and have a vocational certificate, however, I still use my abilities to learn and think about what's being told to me.
Yes!!! I agree, at least as it pertains to assessing someone's ability to perform at tasks. There are people with "top" degrees who can show deep flaws in reasoning, or a very narrow worldview without much educational breadth, and similarly, there are lots of people with less-prestigious degrees or even no degrees at all, who have critical thinking skills and may even have great research skills and be extraordinarily well-read. Anyone with access to a good public library system can do it! In many settings it is important to distinguish between these two things. I did not emphasize this distinction in this video because the video was on the long side already, and it seemed perhaps tangential to the point. The main point I wanted to make is that the "social justice" ideology you see online, and more broadly most of the left side of US politics, often looks down on people for being "uneducated". Sometimes it's a commentary on people's real level of education and research skills, whereas other times it's more a commentary on credentials. Often, it's a bit of both. Regardless of whether it's looking down on people for lacking the credentials, or looking down on them for lacking the actual skills and knowledge, I don't like it, and I think both of these forms of judgment or classism are a problem!
@@AlexZorach According to Ellen Key who read almost everthing there was to read said that thinking skills are partly inherited and partly due to the quality and depth of what you have read. She did not go to univeristy, nor did the most influential thinker of the late 1800s: Herbert Spencer. Many or all of histories greatest thinkers have devoted a large part of their lives to reading on their own.
Exactly. Being educated and being intelligent are two very different things. Knuckleheads with some random bachelors degree are often so haughty yet haven’t the critical thinking skills of a child. And we old lowly high school graduates often read much more than the self anointed intelligentsia do.
This was an excellent video. This needed to be made and I really hope that people take the time to sit with what you are saying and truly absorb it. As someone with a foot in both worlds this has been an endless frustration for me. I am so far left that I am almost off the political compass chart. I have also spent my entire life in right-wing, semi-rural areas of the US from the mid-west to the west. I have never had to compromise my left-wing values. I have a lot of right-wing friends who would kill for me, and they are well-aware of my left-wing values. It is not a problem because I know that they love me and I know how to interpret what they are saying. I am also Gen X. There are a lot of words that were a MAJOR part of Gen X vocabulary that have been nixed and we have been pretty good about trying to change our vocabulary, but every time that you have to do that calculation in your head to make sure that you are using the right term of the moment it distracts you from expressing your true feelings. Putting all of these rules in place is not solving the problem it is creating new problems where none existed before. I don't care how many degrees someone has, how wealthy and connected they are, if you are actively doing something that is clearly making the problem worse, or adding new problems, you are the one who is being ignorant. Highly educated, extremely well-connected people can be ignorant. The leaders of the far right, including the incoming president, are all ivy-league educated, from wealthy families. Think about that.
If you are more educated than someone else you need to be the one to adjust, you need to be intelligent enough to figure out what will get us to the goal the fastest, with the least resistance, considering all of the different obstacles that must be overcome along the way. True intelligence should be able to accomplish that goal without emotional meltdowns, tantrums, name calling, and demands, because none of those things have ever worked and anyone over the age of 5 should know that. I personally question the intelligence of anyone who is so set on the use of a particular word that they can't see the bigger picture of what is being lost and how far we are being set back by their obsession with the way that people speak. If you want people to listen to you, and care about what you have to say, you have to show that you are listening to them and that you care about their existence. If you can't do that, then you are the ignorant one and you are NOT helping improve the lives of anyone.
Thank you for talking about this. Social justice ideology is weird. I remember in college there were white people who didn't like my accent because I'm white and according to them my accent didn't sound white enough to them and therefore I must be culturally appropriating somebody. I grew up with lots of people of many different backgrounds and grew up bilingual from before I can remember since my parents worked in Latin America and many of my friends growing up weren't American, so I have the accent I have, and I would have to put a conscious effort in to sound the way they expect white people to sound. I found their expectation bizarre and insulting, so I just continued speaking the way I always do and absurdly some of the white people didn't want to be friends with me after that because I refused to change how I speak for them. Probably for the best really, but what a strange subculture. They never even asked why I had the accent I have, they just jumped to that conclusion immediately. A lot of these people were walking around every day like they were the protagonist in some kind of crusade.
Unfortunately some woke people don't understand the meaning of being woke. As a working class woke communist, I'm fully on your side.
@@sechernbiw3321 You have experienced a combination of people who suffer brain rot and severe indoctrination with no comprehension of actual truth and virtue.
The sad part is that, sometime in the last decade or so, "Progressive" and "woke" perspectives about our system got appropriated by the system itself, and so the least offensive aspects got elevated and permitted while the underlying classism remains untouched.
The First Female CEO of Boeing, for instance.
How long til' we get a First Latino Grand Wizard, at this rate? (Jerks appropriated wizardry like a century ago.)
Haha...yeah, there is a sort of twisted irony to it. I have definitely noticed a trend of existing power structures and the systems that support them "appropriating" the language and some of the ideas of various activist movements that started out opposed to them.
And yeah, it makes sense that within these existing power structures, the classism and other problematic elements of it would get elevated and permitted, because they are the things that are reinforced by the existing power structures.
You see this pattern over and over again with many things in life.
This is one reason why I think it would be helpful for everyone to study a little bit of systems theory. The Western worldview, both in Academia, and in everyday society and culture, is very mechanistic and reductionist. So people tend to be blind to the cause-and-effect in these systems that run more on feedback loops. So like, people tend to attribute cause-and-effect to a bottom-up type of causality, like understanding the system as a function of the behavior of individuals, and they don't look as much at the system-level elements, things like incentives, flows of money, top-down power, and such.
I just decided yesterday I'm going to start podcasting similarly to you, who I just discovered this morning.
I appreciate that you're trying to do something different, approaching our divided politics from an N-Divergent position, as I want to do. The stereotype of N-D is that we are flakey and scattered with poor attention and maybe talk funny or are quirky, but you are clear, intelligent, self-deprecatory without being mean to yourself, and you have a way of pointing out and explaining key faults on the Left without being too critical. So good luck, I'm subscribing to you, I hope you get more positive reviews like this one.
P.S. I'm going to call myself The ADD Shaman.
Thank you!
I agree that there are a lot of negative stereotypes of neurodivergent people, and it's sad. As the name suggests, we are diverse and we go in many different directions!
I am definitely high on the "attention" scale, like I tend to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from ADHD in terms of how attention is concerned. My neurodivergence is mainly in the form of sensory issues, and also that I tend to make connections between disparate topics more readily than most (and thus have a harder time compartmentalizing things than most people. I want everything to be integrated!) I hope to talk more about it some day, so many things to talk about.
That is exciting that you are starting a podcast yourself! Definitely leave a comment somewhere with a link to it when you launch it so I can check it out!
@AlexZorach My attention is much higher than N-Typicals too, but the diagnosis says that my attention is frequently in deficit. The entire diagnosis is bass-ackward, and speaks more clearly about the entire psychiatric community's bias than it does about us; making the diagnosis itself in effect a projection! My ADD-mind simply determines by its own criteria what is worthy of my attention, and what isn't. If someone decides to interrupt me when my attention is on something, there is hell to pay!
I have an unofficial project in the back of my mind of coming up with a better name for my condition than Attention Deficit Disorder. Any ideas?
P.A. it's on my short-list to inform you when my podcast gets off the ground!
By the way, I first noticed internal symptoms of so-called ADD when I was 12, but those symptoms have nothing to do with the criteria in the DSM! The core of the internal. symptoms center around Time Displacement, which I jokingly refer to as "Chrono-Dysplasia." I wasn't formally diagnosed with it until I was 55, when my wife finally told me, "I think you have ADD!" She announced her divorce one year later!
@@AlexZorachLike you, combining disparate elements by intuitive association is another of my internal symptoms! I have a whole theory about that! That's something that other famous Neuro-divergents like Albert Einstein, Marcel Duchamp, and Sherlock Holmes (aka Sir Author Conan Doyle) are noted for.
Thanks for the comment!
Classism exists in all social circles, whether in the form of resentment or a sense of superiority, but that doesn't mean it is equally prevalent in all. I suspect many feel as I do, that poor education is a matter of deprivation, not of quality of personhood. It is the system which has failed to adequately educate ordinary people in many of the most important things, such as reasoning and recognition of logically fallacious arguments.
You make an excellent point! People can't help how they were taught, only how they treat others.
I find both political parties pretty classist in their own way. Both parties seem really out of touch of the average person working 2 jobs to make ends meet. Both parties have used famous celebrities and influencers to support their party line, but again, how is that relatable to regular folks? The republican party also is using identity politics, I've noticed more diversity within the party line in comparison to the past.
We live in an oligarchy where both major parties are funded by a handful of families who own global corporations. These politicians do not represent the concerns and interests of 99% of the population, yet we are told this is the best system available. It’s a government of, by, and for the ‘elite’.
I came here to say the same, both political parties suck, no matter how they label others or label themselves ...
Liberals are to the right of conservatives, and liberals are nothing more than ghouls.
This video was about leftism, not right wing bourgeoisie parties like the Republicans or Democrats
@@Linapolitics he clearly mentions Trump in the video, and refers to his opposition as "the left" as well as calling out the left for its view of the right "as a bunch of hillbillies" .... Did you even watch the video?
Alex, this is so necessary and so well said. First time I've seen a video from you. Instant subscriber. Will definitely be sharing this. Going to leave a couple of other comments on this video about aspects of things you talked about. Thank you so much for putting this out there, this is some of the most commonsense stuff I've heard in a while.
Thank you so much, I am really glad you appreciate my perspective!
Back in the day I had a nickname "captain obvious" on this one political site. Sometimes though I think that "common sense" stuff is the most important stuff to focus on. Like if we can all find common ground, and then build off that, we can build a broader consensus than if we start with more controversial points that large portions of the population disagree on.
And I think in our times, we need consensus more than ever!
Good analysis. Something I tried to get across to advocates for student-debt cancellation is they had to talk to the folks who never got to go to college and prominently add to the messaging something that helps them. I explained that to some who never got to go to college it felt like asking them to pay for the educations of the college kids who treated them poorly. For example, people who are or were serving staff at restaurants who've dealt with obnoxious college students out partying. To a person, all the responses I got from student-debt cancellation advocates were essentially that if those people didn't go to college that's their own fault. ... So, they by and large didn't talk to or hear from those who didn't get to go to college, and then seemed stunned that they rejected the idea of student-debt cancellation.
Yes! That's a great example of a classist attitude I see on the left. I think I would go even farther than you and say that you're outlining the reasons why I am dubious about whether student loan debt cancellation is even a good policy idea to begin with.
I have seen some critiques of student loan debt cancellation that, to me, seem completely sound, and they make a compelling argument that those policies don't actually benefit the most vulnerable people, and instead funnel a lot of money into the upper-middle-class.
I also think there are a long list of other policies that could help people who are really struggling, whether it's with student loan debt or just overall issues. I have a long list of proposed policy reforms, everything from local zoning reform to reduce housing costs, to progressive tax reform to help the lowest-income taxpayers, to reform of laws governing debt, credit ratings, bankruptcy, and related things, which could also directly affect people who have a lot of debt. I also think that addressing the policies of how and when student loans are Federally subsidized is important, because there's been a problem of escalating costs in higher education and I think the US government may have made the problem worse.
So there are many different ways to tackle the problem which are free from the sort of classism or "handouts to wealthier people" that characterize much of the Democrat-pushed student loan debt forgiveness proposals. I see this as a win-win too, it helps the most vulnerable people, probably more, without the classism, and then while also addressing the root causes in society.
Bernie always said the real issue was income inequality but people weren't ready to hear it. I hope more people consider this perspective but the squabbling sure keeps people distracted
Yeah, this is one of the things I like most about Bernie especially from his 2016 primary run. I don't agree with everything he says, but I share his concerns with wealth inequality.
Classism though is more than just wealth inequality. You see this with how lot of people look down on the "nouveau riche". I see this in my own social circles, like I and the people I grew up with are by no means as wealthy as Trump and the sorts of people he hangs out with, but a lot of the people I grew up with criticize the sort of fast, sloppy, lavish lifestyles as "nouveau riche". There's a balance of valid criticisms (anti-consumerism, criticism of wasteful spending, etc.) with a sort of classism (people throwing around words like "trashy" to describe not only Trump supporters, but also Trump himself and the sorts of people in top power structures that he associates with.) I wish people could levy the valid criticisms without resorting to the classist slurs and negative labeling.
Like there's this idea of people who have that sort of fast, sloppy lifecycle, whether they are rich or poor, as being "morally inferior" to people who live a more restrained, conscientious lifestyle. And there's a delicate balance.
Like I genuinely believe that careful and efficient use of resources is a virtue, it's something to be elevated, and I want our leaders to embody those qualities. And it's a major reason I dislike Trump. But I don't think it's useful or constructive to adopt a moralizing and judgmental approach to the topic. Rather it's something that needs to be approached in terms of education and helping people. I think when people come to learn good financial management skills, they will naturally shy away from people like Trump because they'll see the red flags, like how he has gone through multiple bankruptcies, has a chronic problem with not paying his contractors, has wildly opaque finances, etc.
So you like that Mr. Sanders speaks for the aggrieved white working class who have been voting against themselves since passage of the civil rights movement! Wow! Just wow! Weren't you guys saying you wanted history taught like 2 minutes ago?
His ideas is what has gotten Vermont to do weak compared to other states. His words can not work in reality
@@andreabrown4541 What does this mean: "Mr. Sanders speaks for the aggrieved white working class who have been voting against themselves since passage of the civil rights movement"?
@@wtf1a1a Vermont is small and relatively insignificant compared to other states that have more people and more resources
Thanks for pointing that out. I have been snob to people that don't know information that I find basic and I need to work with myself on this.
On the other hand anyone can be like this regardless their class.
Maybe there is a widespread lack of soft skills knowledge all over the board.😅
I think there are a lot of factors operating in our society that make it harder to empathize with people who don't know information that we think is easy or basic to access.
Like a really simple example is how search engines now show personalized results. We might think: "Oh, this information is super easy to find, just Google such-and-such, and the first three hits all provide this information." This seems all fine and dandy until we realize that a different person might type the exact same thing into the same search engine, and see completely different results. The results can vary wildly from one person to the next. It can be both a question of personalized results, and magnifying subtle differences in how people word their search queries.
And, quite horrifically, Google is often telling people what it thinks they want to hear.
Here is an article about it:
www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear
Basically, what we need to take away from this is that the information that WE think is readily available to us, might not be readily available to others.
Very interesting video. Thanks for posting.
Mark Fisher "exiting the vampire's castle" talks about this.
I agree that it's bigoted to look down on people that are racist/sexist etc.... we don't have great tools in any political party to have these conversations and listen to people with these perspectives.
Generational trauma.... Whose fault is it if a person's parents are Christian fundamentalist zealots or drug addicts? Can we blame those people for believing what they do... or the education they may not get? Misinformed people are just as marginalized as the disenfranchised populations. We are pitted against each other for the sake of keeping poor people down.
The Beverly Hillbillies syndrome: We fight because it's what we do... not because we understand why we are doing it.
Yet, both parties, the brokers and the land owners, have the same interests. It's only that the big other (oil industry) controls prices, which incentivizes the two lower class parties to compete with one another over the pitence of value offered to them by the oil company. When the value clearly and obviously resides in the oil alone. The generational lack of education means the land owners need help selling the oil. The brokers just want to get paid. Hence, the drama, which then gets played back on to the situation.
This causes the individuals involved to make it personal. All the big other has to do is sit back and fan the flames of personal hatred, and they will never be suspected. Maybe even playing both sides by giving each something useful. Reinforcing the idea of a personal grudge, instead of a price conflict started by those helping you be self destructive.
Yes, it can definitely be a form of generational trauma. And I agree, it amounts to pitting people against each other when we could be cooperating to solve these problems.
I don't like the idea of blame to begin with. I think the beginnings of a lot of wrongs happen when we see something bad, and try to place blame. There are always multiple causes of things like this. It's unempowering. Blame ends up looking for an enemy and then trying to attack the enemy. It often leads to or reinforces the us-vs-them mentality.
It's a pattern I see play out again and again. Like in the deep south in the US, you have racism used as a "wedge" that causes poor white people and black people to fight against each other, instead of unifying to lift everyone up and tear down oppressive power structures that harm both of them. I think this issue of classism is similar.
I want people to see it and then learn to identify it so they can protect themselves from slipping into it. The hope is that if we can prevent this mindset from taking hold in ourselves, we improve our chances of building a bigger coalition and a bigger consensus, and actually solving problems in society by working together, listening to each other, hashing out problems, and coming to better policy solutions and then being able to agree on implementing them. The fighting between groups blocks both of these steps, it blocks the listening, and it blocks the building of consensus. But I do think we can overcome it and achieve both of these things!
@sw3783 it can be both. But even evil people are human. So...
@sw3783 And I'm not talking about everyone. That's a little over broad considering I never said anything along those lines. People can disagree. It's more that we need to stop thinking about it in terms of left and right. And start thinking about things in terms of class and opportunity.
On my scale, left is anyone lower than those who own 90% of wealth.... so, like, everyone.
We could start by realising this is merely an academic framework and just use critical thinking skills, only using such frameworks, as relevant...as opposed to turning such ideas into dogma.
I think you missed the boat on that one by 12+ years. I would have agreed with you, back then, but these ideas have become an ideology and movement in and of themselves, divorced from the academic framework. So it is no longer "merely an academic framework".
It's frustrating. Like in college I read many of the same authors whose ideas are now being misinterpreted, misapplied, and abused. And many of these people are themselves horrified by this stuff.
But again, that battle is lost. We now need to engage with this ideology and its widespread practice and embrace in society at large, as-it-in. Just sitting back and theorizing, saying "this needs to stay just as an academic framework" isn't going to "contain" the ideas to the academic sphere. We need a broader consensus that acknowledges at is NOT contained. And we need an approach that acknowledges the reality that it is being used in public activism, it is widespread on social media.
I sometimes think a history lesson can help people, but I also think it's important to engage with the ideas and practices on their own level. Not everyone is going to delve into the history and then realize that the ideas have been mis-applied. Sometimes it's easier to point out a plain problem with the ideas as being applied currently, and be like: "Hey, this is messed up and isn't having the effect you intend!"
I think it's an easier point to make and a more effective way to guide people out of these destructive ways of thinking, which is why I framed my video in this way.
@@AlexZorach
i think any ‘oppression’ that can be identified in 2024 can be easily be debunked if you take one step beyond from the surface.
it’s all bogus.
example - black women die in child birth birth at a much hiigher rate than white women.
and this is where everyone stops - the media, the left, democrats (all 3 of these are the same thing btw)
but you take a one step further and it all falls apart.
one step further reveals that while black women die at a higher rate than white women is true in the United States - it is also true in every other county around the world.
and you also realize that white woman die less often than black women - true - but hispanic women and asian women die less often than white women.
so now what do you have?
i don’t know.
but it’s not oppression.
@@AlexZorach I think either you're denying the simple reality that these institutions are set up to gate keep knowledge, or you're not as skeptical as I am.
Gender Studies is well known to encourage activism, some profesors are allegedly afraid to speak out against the new paradigm, then there's the long slow march through rhe institutions, a concept that I'm sure someone like you would be familiar with. Going one step further, most media and many legal organisations are strongly woke or Feminist in origin. That's before we get to dei, consent classes, anti bullying programmes and god only knows...what else! So you can minimise their financial resources but I hope you would not be as quick to dismiss their extensive power across institutions and throughout society.
Furthermore, my theory is that Feminism releases ideas and phraseology into society like a pilot programme. Then seizes on the most successful fake or quasi grassroots responses to lobby politicians, sometimes. Other times, the most successful tactics tried in the field are funneled upwards for use by politicians, and other powerful people wishing to deflect from their privilege or evade accountability.
@@acc4465Yes. Or the gap in prosecutions being far worse for men as against women, than for black men versus white men. Intersectionality...but only when it suits their narrative.
@@acc4465Short answer: There's a lot to parse from here. tl;dr I agree that eliminating oppression will not necessarily eliminate these differences in childbirth mortality rates between Black and White women. I disagree that oppression is not a contributing factor that Black women in the US have a higher childbirth mortality rate than White women.
Why do I disagree? Because the US is one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest, being a first-world country. Our standards of living are higher than the majority of countries you might be thinking of, and childbirth mortality rate should still be lower than the population outside the US.
Long answer: Now you might say that the childbirth mortality rate of Black women in the US is still lower than Black women elsewhere; it's just "much higher" (not just higher) than White women in the US. Then the next step is comparing the mortality rate of White women in the specific other countries that you're looking at, and seeing if the ratios of childbirth mortality rates are the same/similar. If there isn't enough of a White population to show a reliable statistic, then we cannot compare those countries with the US.
Anecdotally, Black women have had experiences with not being taken seriously enough, causing them great harm/brought them to near-death if they didn't die altogether. Now whether this is racism specifically, or sexism specifically, or both, or something else altogether probably depends on a case by case situation. I mention sexism because women in general aren't given as much credence to men when it comes to getting treatment for their reported pain bc "it's fine and they're just sensitive." (This is the amalgamation of many similar medical experiences from other women so I'm not pulling this out of my ass. If you want further proof of medical sexism, search up the origin of the word "hysteria") Regardless if they are more sensitive to pain than men, they still are suffering and should still be given proper treatment to alleviate said pain.
Even if racism/sexism are not the only causes and there may be other forces that we cannot control (like ethnic variations), education/policies to reduce those biases can certainly help to improve the quality of life for Black and White women alike. Even if the majority of women don't have negative childbirth experiences, we can still improve like we improved medical care in general. We lowered childbirth mortality and child mortality since the colonial era (some 300-400 years ago). We improved the lifespan of people in general so they get to live to an older age with better care.
Therefore, I don't think we can conclude yet that it's just an inherent biological ethnic difference thing, which may be what you were trying to imply. Concluding that is equivalent to giving up on trying to improve childbirth mortality rates for Black //and// White women; needless to say, regarding lives of other people, we should always try everything we can before giving up. If it is true that Hispanic and Asian women have a lower childhood mortality rate, we should examine why that is the case and see if there is anything we can learn from them that would improve the childbirth mortality rate of Black and White women.
i think the biggest problem is that there is this attitude of "IF YOU SUPPORT BAD THINGS, YOUR A BAD PERSON." not to mention leftists are very bad at handling criticism,
Yes! This idea of "if you support bad things, you are a bad person" is pretty toxic and problematic.
I also find it deeply ironic. The left usually claims to be critical of the Western punitive mindset, things like the carceral state (large prison population, over-policing and over-use of the criminal justice system), but there is something that strikes me as very punitive about the idea of labeling someone as a "bad person" and then mobilizing a vigilante mob to publicly shame or condemn (or even doxx) them. There's something deeply authoritarian about it.
I sometimes think what is going on is that a large portion of people who have far-left views grew up surrounded by far-right authoritarian views, and they reject them superficially, but while maintaining deeper aspects of the way of thinking associated with authoritarianism, like the idea of "punishing" perceived wrongdoings, using power to bully people into submission when they don't do what you want. So the specific stances (and targets of condemnation) change, but the deep value system doesn't.
I myself very much want to get out of and stay out of this mindset. And as your comment points out, a powerful way of doing this is to embrace the belief "It's possible to support bad things without being a bad person." Or more broadly, I'd rather us move away from the idea of trying to label people as a "bad person" or "good person" altogether. We're all just people, and each of us is capable of both bad things and good things. And I would like to do my best to do as much good as possible, and encourage others to do so as well!
Thanks for this comment, it was brief, but is giving me some ideas of future video topics.
@@AlexZorach thanks for responding to my comment, I'm happy we can criticize the left in a healthy an intellectual ways, also one of the reasons the left is losing power is that there just not good at making themselves appealing, there terrible at marketing. i do not disagree that fascism is on the rise in America but one of the reasons is that more people are turning to the far right is that progressives are behaving increasingly elitist and obnoxious towards people, little actions and associations are scrutinized, as far as i can tell the youtuber shoeonhead is considered conservative and hated by many purely for mocking annoying leftists, its a vicious cycle of the left becoming increasingly aggressive due to pushing people towards the right through its sheer elitism. a lot of leftist spaces right now is dominated by doomerism because there exhausted by the right they helped create through there aggresiveness.
I am very well educated and privileged in a number of ways, and I spent over a week knocking on a lot of doors in Pennsylvania (not my home state!) for Kamala Harris. But I've been listening. And in my heavily liberal workplace, I've gotten a few colleagues who voted for Trump comfortable speaking to me about how they feel. And I would give the same advice to anyone who is wondering what the next step is: Listen to people.
The Trump voters I've talked to, most of them ... they are not racists. They aren't haters. They don't delight in liberal tears. They love their families and have been genuinely nice to me and others. Yes, Trump validates bullies. But we'd be wrong and foolish for thinking that the majority of those who voted for him are irredeemably "gone." He said he'd fix it. Now he has to deliver.
Many of these people are going to have voter's remorse once his term starts. They are going to want people they can turn to who will listen. They will want a way out of the MAGA vortex. Alex's point in this video about _not judging people because of the things they didn't get to learn_ is so important here. The success of any resistance to authoritarianism depends on the ability of such a resistance to welcome new arrivals who simply may not have understood what we do about the current political situation.
If you're shell-shocked by the election result, that's ok. Take your time, take a moment, until you're ready to come back. But when you come back, do so knowing that the work of reconstructing broader community now looks different than the "anti-" motivated work many of us may be used to doing. You may find that the best resistance will happen from places you might not expect. And that in itself will be motivating.
Thank you for sharing these stories, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about! And it fits with my experiences of talking to Trump voters too.
Excellent video. I subscribed. :)
Thank you!
Granted I live in Britain where the landscape is slightly different (e.g. a common response the phrases "White Culture" or "Black Culture" is "Which one?") but I can see a lot of where you're coming from, something people say to me is "you're really nice for a progressive" despite the fact that I tend to avoid that label and tend to present more as a British patriot (albeit with a Belgian surname which marked me out from the group at a younger age), a Catholic and a Libertarian (in Europe that sounds more left-leaning than it does in North America) but also as autistic and dyslexic.
And I had it good with a supportive family and who helped me through the bad stuff to eventually get a good education which I haven't managed to convert into a career but I'm told that's an autism thing.
That and being from a family of mixed descents (English, Scottish, Irish, Germanic and Spanish specifically) and mixed class and education backgrounds, values, religions, usw. it allowed me to see a wide variety of people and make normal some of the ideas that seem quite alien to others.
And coming back to the "you're really nice for a progressive" is a feeling within a good many I've talked to who feel pushed aside by a "left" that they perceive to see them as nothing but a colonial subject to extract money from for their pet projects and ignore the economic pressures on ordinary working people whose concerns about job losses just get cast aside as "bigotry" and while there might be some who do just hate people who aren't like them, when no-one else appears to care if you are struggling this can encourage the growth in hate and while many of those who aren't responsible for it since there are ethnic, gender and sexual minorities who are also working class and struggle to find housing, work, usw. they get hit because they are seen as part of the problem as opposed to fellow workers held down by a capitalist system of exploitation where the owning class and the working class are distinct from one another and the working class doesn't get to enjoy the profit of their labour.
I hope everyone has a better day and it was lovely having you here.
Calling people stupid under the guise of compassion and understanding!!
Hidden?
Exactly what I was thinking. Having money = evil; I hear this all the time.
Edit after watching video: I thought it was the right punching down, and the left punching up, but this makes me aware. Many voted for Trump so he would fix the economy. (At voting time, I thought he would to, though I did vote Kamala. Hitler basically performed a miracle with the German economy, so it makes sense) Also puts pizzagate into perspective. People are desperate, left is saying they're wrong, they're immoral, and the economy is doing fantastic. Hitler spoke to the problems of the people, as did Trump. All sides are punching in all directions, desperately grabbing onto things in that desperation. I had just assumed ppl were stupid, but they're just desperate.
The classism may be obvious to you, me, and many others, but there are huge portions of people that it's NOT obvious to. Part of why I said "hidden" in the video title is that I want my message to get through to the people it's not obvious to.
The working class needs more access to run in elections and political parties without selling their souls to the donor class, currently both parties seem out of touch.
Is your ability to vote being curtailed where you live? That should be reported to the authorities.
@mosessupposes2571 I meant the working class needs to be able to run for offices without selling their souls to the donor class and corporations, I edited my comment to reflect this.
This ties into my belief that there is no such thing as free will. I cannot blame a person for being the way they are, after all, we are all shaped by many factors, and we choose none of them. We should work to improve ourselves and others, we must be accountable and hold each other accountable, but we should not judge one another. Like Joseph Margulies says: "There is no them, only us."
I like the word latinidad which means Latin community in Spanish.
That's interesting. I'd be curious how people actually in that community feel about the term.
It's not exactly a substitute for Latino/a/x though; it's a noun and not an adjective.
I'd put it the other way around. You are only really left-wing if class is a core component of your analysis. You can (and should) fight for justice for other identities too, but if you're an identitarian who has literally forgotten about class and economic justice, you are no longer "left wing". You are just another right-winger like any other tribalist.
Left and right aren't about fucking feels. It's about economics.
Not if you practice intersectionality, which includes class, and all identities, equally.
This is sounding a little bit like the no true Scotsman fallacy.
One belief I hold to quite strongly is that I like to use language within the range of meanings used in society at large. As such, I don't like to get too stuck up on definitions. You and I could sit here debating the definition of leftism but I think it's off-topic. If you watched my video, I hope it is clear what I am referring to by "the left" -- I'm using the term to describe what is referred to as "the left" by mainstream political discussion in the US. Whether or not this is "true leftism" is kinda irrelevant to any of the points that I'm trying to make here, and if you want to debate that, my channel isn't really the place to do it.
I'm here to appeal to a general audience and build as broad a consensus as I can. And, in order to do this, I need to use mainstream language, whether or not I like it.
There are times and places to push non-mainstream language, but I don't really see anything empowering or relevant to what this video is about, coming out of the line of reasoning you are using here. Quite to the contrary, your reasoning here sounds a lot like the same sort of logic you hear on the right ("right-wing" here again referring to the right-leaning half of US politics) when people criticize anyone who doesn't agree 100% with the ideology as being a "RINO", i.e. "not a real Republican". I find these sorts of lines of reasoning unproductive because they either devolve into infighting (when no one perspective dominates) or groupthink (when one particular one does.)
Because of this, I'd rather not argue about definitions or about who belongs under which umbrella term. I am trying to avoid identity politics anyway. I'm trying to steer the discussion in the direction of specific issues, specific stances. I think we can all agree here that classism is bad.
I'm not here to judge or exclude people from the left just because they are saying or doing some classist things. Rather, I'm here to say--hey, you're doing some classist things, and I'm pretty sure you don't actually want to be doing those things because it's contrary to all the things you supposedly believe in.
Does that make sense? We can debate definitions all day and get nowhere, but it's easier (and more important) to agree that classism is bad and we can avoid doing it. I want something actionable here. Then we can quickly move on.
I have a high school education. I'm a college dropout. I take issue not with someone's possible bigotry (unless they openly say bigoted things) but with the people they vote for.
I think there's a categorization problem here. You are talking about liberals and while it's true that the "left" in the US is mostly liberals, it's also true that liberalism is a right wing capitalist ideology that is not leftist.The actual left has always been anti-capitalist and class, for most of history, has been its primary focus because it includes all these other oppressed groups. True, they have their own specific issues that need attention but if you transparently virtue signal solely about these groups and have contempt for the class that most of them come from you will never succeed in building any kind of movement, which is fine for liberals, because that's not what they want.
You are the third person who has left essentially the exact same comment about "liberals" vs "leftists". If you're making this point, I think you're missing both the point of this video, and the core philosophy of this channel. I strongly recommend reading my replies in the comment below to the comments by AtropalArbaal-dk8jv and synaesmedia.
Quick summary: I'm not here to debate definitions. I use language the way mainstream society in the US does because I want my video to reach as broad a (US-centric) audience as possible. I avoid specialized terminology and subtle distinctions unless they are central to my point. Here I think they'd be confusing to the typical viewer. People say "left" to mean a certain thing in US politics and that is what I'm meaning, not the global, political theory sense.
I would hope that what I mean with my video is clear from context, but if it ever isn't, feel free to ask for clarification.
Agree. The left is not a monolith as much is the right is.
You make a good point about insulting Alt-Right activists and politicians with ableist and blue-collar stereotypes and slurs, harassing innocent white people about "privilege," or "cultural appropriation" for wearing dreadlocks is classist and alienates potential allies. I disagree with you about calling "political correctness," "intersectionality," "identity politics," and "wokeness" "divisive" and classist, because we are all members of various ethnic groups and need to publicly celebrate our cultures, and censor hate speech for our mental health and safety, civil reasonable discourse, peaceful relations, and because our groups contain all classes. The Left Wing is mostly an ethnic coalition movement seeking human rights and peaceful coexistence. Only the Labor, Communist, and Socialist movements are economic. At either end of the Horseshoe Theory of Politics, only riots, terrorism, hate crimes, and dictatorship are "extreme," not drag queens reading to children in libraries, doctors prescribing puberty blockers to transgender kids, with or without their parents' permission, nor pro athletes "taking a knee" at football games to protest police brutality, because all these acts are harmless. Trump won his elections by smearing the Left with hate speech, conspiracy theories, and many of the same complaints you use about the Left. The Left Wing had been discredited since the Russian Revolution for its war crimes against the royal Romanov Family, and Stalin's reign. Cold War McCarthyism weakened the Left by tabooing the Communist, Socialist, and Labor Movements, leaving the New Left, Feminist, Civil Rights, and LGBT Movements a middle class, college-based movement by the '60s. Its current image problems stem from '70s infighting from the Feminist Sex Wars over pornography, prostitution, lesbian, and transgender rights, "Oppression Olympics", or rivalry between marginalized groups for public sympathy, COINTELPRO, and smearing of the Gay Rights and Feminist Movements as child molesters and man-haters by Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafley, Jerry Falwell, etc.
There is a lot of stuff wrapped in this comment, and I've gotten an overwhelming amount of comments on this video so unfortunately I cannot give this one a thorough reply right now.
I will say though, I agree with some of the things you're saying but disagree with others. Part of what I am trying to do with my channel is to talk about issues one at a time.
One thing I disagree with in your comment is how you say 'only riots, terrorism, hate crimes, and dictatorship are "extreme" '...I don't necessarily think that a riot or even violent or disruptive actions are necessarily extremist. As some examples, you have the Stonewall Riots, or Nelson Mandela's movement to end Apartheid in South America. Both of these involved violence and disruption, but I think they were both, at their essence, acts of self-defense.
On the other hand, extremism can manifest as words on a page, or calmly-spoken speech. It is the content of the speech that matters. I have a rather old video on the topic that you might be interested in:
th-cam.com/video/zwT3Ilyf2LU/w-d-xo.html
I agree with you that Trump and the power interests backing him grossly misrepresented the Democrats and that that was a large portion of why they won.
At the same time, the sort of behavior I describe in this video, which I do think amounts to extremism, is so prevalent that I don't think Trump's win can be fully attributed to misinformation. People have valid reasons to dislike the left, and the left has done a pretty poor job of "policing their own". And like I said at the conclusion of my video, you always control yourself more than anyone else, so we would all do well to root these problems out from our own thinking before we start criticizing others.
Though you write very well, I still noticed how you smuggled in the assumption...that we, somehow, can legislate for civility! 1 Not necessarily and that's very authoritarian impulse and 2 Using the excuse of civility to exclude disfavored speech is a Right wing tactic. And 3 It's the feminization of dialogue, greatly expedited by Feminism that has done the most to kill off civility.
Namely, use of insinuations, smears, guilt by association, and, othering by weaponisimg jargon as described in the video...Not to mention mob rule including doxing and open character assassination, including campaigns aimed at making individuals unemployable!!
Very kind. Very civil! ...I'll await your reply complete with only emotional arguments like, "but they deserved it" ...or, "show me one person who didn't deserve to be cancelled"...none of which adequately deflects from the reality of this deplorable behaviour. Which, apart from instantly disqualifying you as capable of good faith civil dialogue, demonstrates zero accountability. Let alone, moral authority, to dictate, never mind to legislate, the behaviour of others and what constitutes civility!
yes absolutely, also leftists cannot handle criticism, they just can't
@@doctormal-t1i true for "both sides"
You have a very important and true point, that intersectional analysis is causing leftist neomarxists to judge individuals and thus preventing to understand, respect and attend to a relevant dialogue with them. However, you are making the same sort of mistake as they are since you are also using intersectional thinking and simplifying by judging them to belong to a certain social class, and thus identifying them as belonging to an either true or made up group. In order to dig deep every individual has to be regarded as such, in order to find the root cause of actual behaviour. In any case, I think the main problem is that we are stuck in a post modernist era in which we are taking for granted that we ought to enforce social change upon societies, also referred to as "justice" altought justice ought to be something completely different than neomarxist "diversity, equity and inclusion". Modernism and post modernism must end now, so we can return to a new golden period and Belle Epoque of realism, naturalism and love.
I'm not sure your use of the term "neomarxism" makes sense here. Neomarxism is a pretty esoteric philosophy that few people actually believe in. So like, publications like Spectre, Historical Materialism, New Left Review, stuff like that. It is not really what I was talking about in my video. It's much less mainstream and widespread.
I also think you may have understood the point I was trying to make in my video, in which I was criticizing people for criticizing others as "uneducated" while using the leftist language of privilege and marginalization. I was aiming to criticize people who come from highly educated backgrounds, who speak the language and use the terminology of privilege and marginalization, but then who condemn others as "uneducated" without acknowledging the educated backgrounds they come from and unique opportunities they had.
I recognize that not everyone who holds these ideologies comes from those backgrounds. You are right that people are complex and the groups are not always well-defined like that. But I have seen enough examples of such criticism coming out of the mouths of people I know well, whom I know to have come from these backgrounds, so I am comfortable saying that there are a lot of people out there acting hypocritically like this. And I want to make clear I don't want to do this myself. Because I come from such an educated, privileged background, I don't want to fall into this mindset.
That's my key point here.
I am not trying to claim these groups or ideologies or labels are necessarily well-defined and I am certainly not trying to use them as rigid categories.
Does this make any sense?
As for your comments about justice, I don't necessarily find justice a particularly useful concept myself, and I've moved away from it in my thinking. It often is related to "should statements" which is something I have found to be unempowering, often leading to clouded thought or unclear communication.
When I say that I find some things about social justice ideology compelling, I do not mean that I embrace its concept of justice (or ANY concept of justice) as a key goal in and of itself. I merely was trying to emphasize that I don't wholly reject everything about the ideology and that there are elements of it that I find useful at times, and aspects of the goals it pushes for that I am partially or sometimes mostly in agreement with.
"neomarxist scary communist marxist fascist left-wing radical liberal waahhhh"
@AlexZorach Yes, I agree that they are acting badly, but I am arguing that we are all more or less impacted by a false and dangerous thinking whereby we tend to imagine groups of people that either do not exist or create harmful conflicts between them, because the idea is to force upon them a strive to equalize power. Even if it is not known to most, the actual origins come from Karl Marx with morphed rethinking by postmodernists such as Marcuse and Judith Butler. The end game is to destroy everything. Before Karl Marx there were social orders which were not obsessed with differences in status and privilege, but now we seem more preouccupied than ever before, which obviously creates more conflict and unhappiness.
I have to say, for socialists, the idea of not thinking about class is laughable, how can you look at politics and leave class out of the conversation? I agree with this video for highlighting the importance of class. When Alex says "the Left" I think what is meant is mostly activists who vote for Democrats. When I think of "the Left" I think of socialists, union organizers, communists, people who highlight the evils of American empire, capitalism, etc.
Stand and fight for justice for all, but don't insult or label people as "other." Attack the issues, not the people. Speak for yourself and your feelings. Don't categorize others as one of "them." Attacking an idea as stupid is fundamentally different from calling someone stupid. One is criticism. The other latter is an insult.
A lot of left wing social justice talk just seems like virtue signaling to me. Talk on and on about food insecurity but how many people did i feed today? More talk about the unhoused but who have i taken in and sheltered? As long as folks allow themselves to use pronouns “we” and “they,” no personal action need be taken. ie “They need to do something about this” or “We need to be more compassionate and generous.” The only honest approach when facing tragedy and need is first person singular. What will i do today?
I agree that there is a lot of virtue signaling in some of these circles, but I also think there's a legitimate need and purpose to having the more abstract discussions.
For example, through online discourse, I learned a lot about ways in which language I had grown up using and heard normalized, was actually rooted in bigotry. For example this included sexism and sex-negative language inherent in words like "player" and "slut", racism in how black people would be described as "articulate" for speaking standard English, and biological essentialism that was out-of-touch with science, when people use terms like "biological male" and "biological female" when talking about trans people and related issues.
Sometimes talking about an issue like food insecurity can be helpful too. It can be useful when it guides people's choices of where to donate money or time (by volunteering). Like if a person learns that food insecurity is an issue in their area, they can donate money or food to a food bank, or volunteer cooking and/or serving free meals.
I think there can be a bridge, too, between the more impersonal "we" or "they", and the "I" in your example. For example, I can write to a legislator to urge them to preserve or expand programs like SNAP/EBT. I can go beyond just donating or volunteering, and share an item urging others to do the same. So I can exert pressure to act on the "they" (i.e. government, or larger institutions where I may have some sway) as well as on the "we" (i.e. my community.)
And I often think that the best way to approach any sort of action is a "both-and". Work to shape the systems in a good direction, but also work directly as an individual. I think both are important.
Thank you.
When I think of the people in my life that support Trump, they overwhelmingly have the privilege, education and means to know better. But I hear you. I have been guilty of classism on occasion and will try to do better.
I used to be poor and uneducated. I struggle and eventually got a community college degree then a masters degree paid for by my employer. I’m Black. I don’t feel elite because of my education. I do feel that some people are just dumb and I don’t think intellectual curiosity is something limited to upper classes.
That's awesome that you were able to work up into these degrees through your employer. My boss in my one job was like that, he started out as a bus driver, also eventually got a college degree then an MBA. He is also one of the smartest people I've ever met, so many different types of intelligence.
And haha...my wife agreed with you about "some people are just dumb". I have moved away from labeling people in this way though because I can be pretty stupid myself in certain situations, and most people are smarter in some areas of their life than others. Maybe it's true but I am not convinced I am able to judge people's intelligence in a simple way like that.
But I agree 100% about intellectual curiosity not being limited to upper classes, and I'd add, plenty of "upper class" people can show a total lack of intellectual curiosity too.
I had my own share of disillusionment too, when I went to grad school, I was in two Ph.D. programs, and I had expected to find people who were among the most intellectually curious people I had ever met. But I just didn't. They were just...more focused. I went to grad school because I loved learning and scholarship and ideas and I wanted to be in an atmosphere where people constantly sat around and talked about ideas, and it just wasn't like that.
I sometimes nerd out with people in the most random places too. Like I had taken my car into the shop to get new tires and I was talking to the one mechanic and he was just an inexhaustible fount of knowledge about auto parts, just a joy to talk to. Or the owner of this one Mexican grocery store was telling me different uses and preparation methods for all the different dried peppers. I love when people are knowledgeable about something and get excited about it and can share it in ways that are relevant and helpful! Now I discovered I love guajillo peppers!
*sigh* Look you're not saying anything new and, frankly, I'd say the past decades have proved this perspective wrong. This same stuff was spouted 8 years ago. And plenty of people ARE reaching out and ARE adjusting language to communicate. And have been for longer than 8 years. So that's not actually the issue. It's tribalism.
If your tribe says the other side says a and does b, it doesn't matter how many times the other side actually says x and does y. Our primate brains trust our tribe and will ignore the evidence when strongly entrenched in a group. It's why doomsday cults generally don't break up when the end of the world doesn't arrive on the predicted date. Doubling down avoids embarrassment and keeps us with our people.
It's hard for me to take this comment seriously. You say "You're not saying anything new" but I literally spent the past few months being practically inundated with groupthink and demonization from both sides, and saw very few people voicing perspectives like mine. Furthermore, part of the problem is that when people do voice these positive, inclusive, respectful perspectives, people don't elevate them, and instead they shut them down...
...which is exactly what you are doing. You are here saying I'm wrong and saying I'm not going to fix the issue. Like you say the issue is "tribalism" but what I am saying in my video IS SOMETHING THAT CAN SPECIFICALLY HELP TO BREAK DOWN TRIBALISM. I would hope that is self-evident to anyone who sits and reflects on it?
And then you launch into this cynical depiction of human nature, and your comment ends without any actionable point. My video is actionable, and yet you're responding trying to shut me down, but without suggesting any positive course of action.
Let me ask you a tough question, if you're still reading and haven't just tuned out because I don't agree with you fully:
When you take this cynical a view of things, is it because that's what you WANT to bring into being in the world? Do you WANT people to be all tribalist like that? Or is it because you are feeling depressed and hopeless and you worry that that's just what we're stuck with? Like you dislike it and feel frustrated about it and hopeless to do anything about it?
Let me tell you how I see things. Like you, I see all this tribalism around me. I hate it. I think it's a bad aspect of human nature and I think it's something we need to keep in check, and that ultimately, I would like to see us grow beyond and discard entirely. The whole point of this video is that I'm trying to nudge people in a new direction, I'm trying to steer people away from that us-vs-them thinking. Do you not see this?
My channel is a place to embrace a more positive attitude and a more positive vision of human nature. I see those "things are just bad and that's the way they are" takes as irrational, they're a sort of collective cultural depression, mental illness speaking.
And I see it this way, I see more room for hope specifically because I know numerous people around me who have grown out of these perspectives. Heck, *I* have grown out of these perspectives. I've been there, been in that dark "us-vs-them thinking" place, and I've gotten out. And I want to lead and help others out too.
I want to reiterate what I said at the end of my video: change needs to start within. We need to work on ourselves first. I've been in a place like you describe and it's not a pleasant one and it's not particularly helpful for inspiring others or affecting change.
The particular problem or challenge you face may not be the exact same one facing others. Maybe you're not in this deeply tribalist mentality, and maybe you're bothered by it. But you seem to have another, equally concerning problem here. I don't know what's going on in your head, but from how your comment was framed and worded, you seem to be bogged down with cynicism and negativity. And this is going to keep you from doing anything about that tribalism, and moving society forward, which is ultimately what matters. Maybe you need to work more on that issue. Maybe I could make another video about this too, who knows?
Anyway, thank you for your comment, even if it was not particularly truthful, respectful, or empowering, I do think it illustrates an important point here. It's a mindset that leads nowhere, it leads people to be stuck. Please, get out of it. Realize you need to get out of it. It's not going to lead anywhere good. We need our thought processes to end on actionable points.
@AlexZorach I share my experience. Feel free to dismiss it for yours. Both are just that and, as such, only anecdotal.
Please understand that I don't live on social media (though of course I am also in a bubble when on) so I speak of my real world experience working in a red town, living in a blue one, and growing up in a different red one that I return to often. I can say accurately that I have relationships across the political spectrum, and have found one on one conversations helpful only until the tribal mentality kicks in. At that point the vast majority of people whom I try to have conversations with (on either side - I am not a Democrat) revert to tribalism.
Perhaps our differing experiences have more to do with age and location than politics.
hidden? 😂
It's obvious to me and obvious to a lot of people, but I really don't think it's obvious to the people who do it, and to a much larger group of people who tolerate it. This particular video is aimed at the people who most need the message, which is why I used the word "hidden" here. I'm speaking primarily to the people who don't see the problem, and I'm trying to help them see it.
If you watch more of my videos, you'll find that I really care about influencing people and getting through to them. I'm not here to create an echo chamber, I'm here to challenge people's beliefs and reach out to a broad range of people and build a consensus around certain key points.
If you want a place where people will bash or put down the left (or the right), this is not the channel for you. This is a place for getting outside the groupthink and building a more truthful way of viewing the world.
So close to understanding why pushing marxist ideals is not worth the trade offs
It's only Marxist if gulags and reeducation camps are involved.
@@darlalathan6143and starvation, ethnic cleansings, genocide, censorship, you know, like is still is today
This video isn't about Marxism at all. I'd love to make another video about it, but...it's tangential at best. The problem I see with Marxism, at least Marxism-Communism, is more economic and structural than cultural and about identity politics. I.e. managed economies are inefficient and prone to shortages and overproduction, an the free market is much more efficient and robust, and there are also problems with centralizing more power in the hands of the state. I tend to support decentralization of power.
Did you watch my video or are you just commenting on the title? Because I think if you think it's about Marxism you are totally missing the point. I'm primarily talking about a sort of far-left identity politics and "social justice" activism that you saw a surge of in the 2010's especially. It's not really related to Marxism in any meaningful sense, although you can find some tiny niche subcultures that will say it is and then embrace both, but again, that's not what this video is about.
@@AlexZorach social justace and other leftist ideals are just sub speices of the og speices that is markism u can see its ideals spring up in the US around the 1910s and 1920s. peaked in the 60s with mlk and femisimze. now we are living in the failed ideals
@@AlexZorach Like China's "overproduction" of EVs that Elon Musk is shitting bricks over not being able to compete with? Obviously the Soviet system had problems that weren't entirely external, but at this point with Western countries crying about how they can't compete with China and their "non-market methods," I think it's pretty clear state led development and 5 year plans are pretty much the only way you can reduce emissions and reduce poverty at the same time. Besides, it's not a "free market" when you have to resort to tariffs and protectionism. The US still gives lip service to the idea of "free markets" but that's not really how things have ever actually worked in the US. The next decade will pretty much put the last nail in that coffin and then they'll have to come up with another story about why it's actually good for corporations to dominate the state rather than the other way around.
With the whole latinx thing, I feel it should be more non binary people involved in the discussion not just Latinos and Latinas. Cause that’s really the only people it affects substantially speaking as a Latino myself.
I feel there’s valid criticism, but many times people are educated but choose to continue to use outdated terms. For strangers it matters little but if you’re friends with someone it is an issue if they’re repeatedly acting in that way.
I agree with the attacking the arguments but not the person. Attacking the people causes more separation and it’s VERY difficult at times due to even being insulted in said discussions.
Then just pick one and go with whatever or neither. But you don't get to make up words that never existed.
Well Latino is used to describe a lot of peoples from countries that don't use Spanish as their main language. So them too.
@ uh yes I can? How do you think words get existed
Class consciousness is central to Leftism. It's not a bug, it's a feature. You are describing Liberals (particularly Liberal-Centrists). You are describing a problem with the class divide that is associated with Liberals, not Leftists, in this video. Your misunderstanding of how Leftists view Class is plain to see, and your misunderstanding itself arises from a centrist liberal world view (whether you see that or not). Come to the dark side: shed your Liberal skin. Lol
One other point: the class consciousness of the Left is all about economic class--
rich v poor.
I'm not really here to debate definitions, the whole discussion of "liberal" vs "leftist" is at best tangential to the point I was making here.
I would hope that it was clear from the context in my video, exactly what subset of people I was talking about. If it's unclear, feel free to ask and I will clarify.
I have a strong belief in using language within the range of uses of mainstream society, and I want my videos to be accessible to a general audience, because the goal of them is to build as broad a consensus as possible. (And I seem to be doing it! This video has attracted a motley crew including conservatives, moderates, and even outright Marxist-Communists, and I've gotten positive feedback from all of these groups. This is what I want!)
Here in the US at least, the term "left" is usually used to refer to anything considered left-of-center in US politics (more-or-less the Democratic party along with various fringe groups that are more progressive) and the terms "left", "leftist", and "left-wing" are often used interchangeably, perhaps with a slight connotation of "leftist" or "left-wing" being more extreme or solidly left than the general "left". I am well aware that this does not map onto what other countries call the left, like many Democrats have views close to what would, for example in Germany, fall under the CDU, a center-right party. And in Germany, "The Left" = "Die Linke" is a specific party that is Democratic Socialist and has a history of growing out of the Marxist-Leninist party of the former East Germany, and as such is farther left than their SPD or center-left party.
Here in the US, and in the subset of the global English-speaking community that discusses US politics, some segment of the population makes a distinction between "liberals" and "the left", but it's not a majority and because I want my video to be accessible to as many people as possible, I don't get into this distinction. I also don't think it was particularly relevant to the topic of this video. When a distinction IS relevant to the topic of a video, then and only then will I emphasize it.
In this case, I think this distinction becomes more confusing. Like you are here making a distinction between "liberals" and "leftists", and there is an inconsistency which is that in academic and niche activist circles, people often use "liberal" to mean "neoliberal" (which in US politics includes a portion of people within the Republican party, like much of the policies of Reagan and those who supported those policies), whereas in society as a whole, most people, definitely more than half, use "liberal" just to mean "anywhere left of center". So the term "liberal" can mean two largely-contradictory things.
So basically, I'm deeply aware of all these distinctions already, and I'm making a conscious choice of how I use language. I'm using the language the way it is used in the mainstream, in trying to make my message easily understood by as broad a group as possible.
None of this is really necessary to understand the points in the video. I was just using the term "left" as shorthand to describe the fact that this classism you see in the online discourse usually manifests from people who are broadly perceived as part of the left, and who use language and frame their statements in ways typically associated with the left.
There's a point at which if you are going to quibble around language, you're trying in vain to fight a battle that was already lost long ago. It would be a bit like me marching into a Catholic church and being like "You aren't really Catholic." and then giving some well-reasoned and perhaps actually valid argument as to why the mainstream Catholic church were not actually the true and universal Catholic church. Even if my argument were 100% valid, my claim would be silly and would not change the fact that the world sees them as the Catholic church and uses the term "Catholic" to describe them and their members. And then, if we were discussing some sort of thing relevant to the church, the discussion of whether or not the term "Catholic" actually referred to them would be off-topic and irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, people refer to them as the Catholic church and so that's the term we need to use in order to communicate we are talking about them.
There is a lot that I don't like about the terms used to discuss politics here in the US, and I do want to change some things. And it might be worth having a discussion about leftism vs. liberalism, or perhaps liberalism as a whole vs. neoliberalism. These are interesting topics. But they're tangential to this video.
And overall, on my channel, I'm less interested in defining or applying labels, and more interested in engaging directly with specific ideas, specific practices, and specific policies. So if you want a more definition-focused channel, mine might not be the best place for you!
@@AlexZorachI understand your points, but disagree staunchly. In your last line, there's a pretty large contradiction. You talk about being interested in engaging directly with specific ideas, practices, and policies. However, a conversation about these things can't even BEGIN without clear definitions. If you don't define what you're talking about, your points become nebulous.
For example, if I were to say "The right wants to take away abortions," it wouldn't be true. There are anarcho-capitalists who advocate for near, if not absolute lack of government. They certainly don't believe a government should take away abortions, despite any other ridiculous flaws in their ideology. The people who want to take away abortions in American politics are the MAGA crowd, who I can only accurately define as economically right wing nationalists.
You make this mistake by not even defining social justice clearly and grouping the entire left together. Do you truly think a well read Marxist-Leninist would emphasize focus on race and outward appearance of gender, rather than class, when the ENTIRE ideology is based on class struggle? It makes absolutely no sense. What is social justice? What is the goal of people who preach for social justice? In youtube video format, if these aren't clearly defined, with some reference to the history of the idea, I may as well call it a strawman used to impose a negative connotation on people who don't stand as you represent them, if you can even call that representing an idea. Talking about a specific idea means representing it fairly and defining it clearly. You cannot be unfocused on definitions and interested in specificity, the two are mutually exclusive.
There is one point you made that I will give some credence to on the surface, and that is on the academic elitism of the left (in general). (Also in general) the left does tend to be more educated. If there is a group of educated people who is making points about society, and another group of people who is not as educated disagrees with them, regardless of how justified it may or may not be, elitism will form eventually. Ideas of the stupid masses holding us back from societal progress. Understandable as it is to me, elitism gives more power to people like Donald Trump and ideas like anti-intellectualism. In very simple terms, if the left is being mean to you for not reading and the right isn't blaming you for it, the right is going to be more appealing (assuming only two options). This is how the American left digs its own grave.
I am a bit morally elitist. Not towards those without formal education, but towards those who would limit access to education. A country that gets this wealthy without sharing all its knowledge, with all the people it can, is a third world country wearing a gucci belt. An easy source of contempt for the left is those who go out and vote for a man in a suit making false promises, but never dare to develop critical thinking skills. The #1 search term on google the day after the US election was "what is a tariff." I won't let myself hate the uneducated, but I can understand those who do. The entire idea is to make access to education universal and a right, yet we have people who DISAGREE with that and then somehow label it as classism when they're called stupid for that belief. It can only, and I mean only be classism in a society that ties education to individual wealth, and that society can only exist with a widely uneducated populace, because the empirical evidence tears it to pieces. We have people who simply have no idea how undeveloped their world view is. That's more tragic than contemptible.
I'm a 21 year old carpenter with a high school education. It was never about hating those who don't have institutionalized education. I only hate those who limit access to education, because they've built a simple, vicious cycle that's incredibly hard to break. We will never have enough people who can think critically and honestly assess ideas they disagree with if that cycle remains unbroken. Knowledge should be free. I HATE that that's somehow been made controversial by our corporate overlords.
I mostly disagree with you and wanted to objectively, fairly hear your point of view. You need to define your terms or you don't HAVE a point of view.
@@falcononeniner9896 I agree with @AlexZorach more here, not because defining things is unimportant, but because the primary goal of this video is mutual understanding across groupthink bubbles, and not technical rectitude. In fact, I'd argue that a central point of this video is that this very type of conversation (about fighting to microdefine words) is part of the problem.
@Pafemanti GREAT point, you got me thinking for a good while there. Respect. I have questions now, not pointed ones. Is a common, as objective as possible definition not a good way to break groupthink circles? If we define a group of people from the other side objectively, will they not lower their defenses and be more willing to have a conversation?
2/2
BTW my son and I are both Gifted / LDs. So we're not neurotypical either.
Social justice advocates have been talking for a long time about the things you are talking about long before you brought this up. We don't care when someone uses the wrong terms as long as they are willing to listen when they are corrected on the appropriate terms to use in their region, and when they're told which less or un-acceptable. It would be classist to suggest that someone would be unable to listen to that based on their social class.
The reason that these terms that are and aren't acceptable change over time is because any word that is socially acceptable will inevitably be used by bigots as an insult and as clinical terms by people who are -phobic out of (often deliberate) ignorance.
Finally, the idea that we need to focus on changing the minds of the people around us in order to combat systemic discrimination shows a lack of understanding of how bigoted ideas enter the mainstream. People become bigoted (and -phobic from ignorance) because the systems they live in are discriminatory, not the other way around (thanks Kendi). We saw this happen in our lifetime when people became in support of gay marriage after Obergefell. This is why we focus on making systemic changes rather than on changing people's minds.
Wow, it's a rare comment that I find myself liking even though I disagree with it. You are sparking dialogue which is great!
I disagree with a lot in this comment. When you say "we" and say "social justice advocates", you're not speaking for everyone. I've seen countless examples of people who launch into criticism and condemnation without ever giving people a chance to adjust their language. In some cases, I've even been targeted by that sort of behavior myself. And I infrequently see peers "policing their own" so to speak, i.e. it's a slim minority of cases where I see people jump in to defend people who are wrongly attacked or demonized in this manner.
Secondly, you say "as long as they are willing to listen when they are corrected on the appropriate terms". Here's my problem with this. Who has the authority to decide what is "correct" or "appropriate"? There's a huge difference between terms that are reached by consensus, and ones that are forced into usage by a system of bullying, harassment, and social exclusion.
As an example, I will bring this up because I'm trans, I see a lot of use of the terms FtM and MtF among trans people, and language like "I become a woman / I became a man." This is a subjective narrative, i.e. there is nothing inherently objective about whether a trans person decides they were "born as a man and became a woman" vs "I have always been a woman and I merely changed my outward appearance to match that." There are some trans people whose subjective experience matches the one narrative, and some whose experience matches the other.
I think it's problematic when people come in and say that the language people use to refer to themselves, the language they have used through their own journey to become comfortable with themselves and life their best life, is "wrong" and needs to be "corrected". And yet I have seen A LOT of this type of arguments. Again, I have sometimes been subjected to it myself. I have had people try to "correct" me saying I was "misgendering" myself when I used "he/him" pronouns to refer to myself in the past, even though I prefer they/them pronouns to refer to myself in the present. I find this frustrating, and I find it, frankly, very invasive. It's very non-consensual. It feels like people are trying to get me to redefine the language I use to narrate my own life, and they're doing it without giving me any agency or choice in it.
It's very different, from, say, a white person using the n-word in 2024 and being told that it's inappropriate and not to say that. In that case I'd say, yes, that criticism is warranted. And it would have been warranted decades ago. So there are times when it's okay to correct people in a more direct, forceful way, because there is a near-complete consensus in society that white people using that word is wrong.
But when the language is in active flux, when the terminology is new and there is far from a consensus on it, it's wildly inappropriate for people to treat it like their particular subculture is an authority on what sort of language is "correct". It's arrogant, it's condescending. And understandably, it alienates people.
I also disagree with what you said, you said "any word that is socially acceptable will inevitably be used by bigots as an insult..." And this is just plain not true. For example with those words FtM and MtF, I don't really see those being used frequently as insults, nowhere near as often as I see younger trans people and LGBTQ advocates criticizing others (whether trans or cis) for using them.
I think it's usually clear from context whether someone is using something as a slur or not. If someone is viewing people with disdain or looking down on them, that's a problem regardless of the terminology they are using.
This reply has already gotten long so I'll make a separate comment for the other point!
Your last paragraph is interesting. I agree with you that bigotry primarily exists and is reinforced through systems. However, I think you are wrongly separating out "changing the minds of people" from the system itself. A decision like Obergefell would have been extraordinarily unlikely in a society where a significant portion of people had not already become convinced that gay marriage were a valid thing. There were many years of high-profile public debate, and extensive discussion in many different spheres: religious, legal, everyday life conversations. And these things interacted. The Obergefell decision itself cited a lot of reasoning (effects on gay couples from being denied the right to marry) that had been extensively discussed in society in preceding years, and it also cited the fact that gay marriage had been legalized in some states, as with a patchwork of civil union laws. The process leading to the patchwork of some legalization of gay marriage and recognition of civil unions was itself the result of a decades-long process of all sorts of lobbying, grass-roots social movements, and countless individual conversations. And much of it comes down to changing the minds of people.
So I think what you are describing here with Obergefell was more of a "tipping point" where there was one key change that pushed the system so far in one direction that it was impossible to go back. People who had been fighting it up until that point basically gave up, and if you look at what conservatives of that time said, that's basically the stance they took, and some conservatives today still say more-or-less the same thing.
Lastly...this may be sort of tangential, but I think there is another issue at stake here. I think you are correct that there is some portion of people who think something is wrong because it's illegal and will stop thinking it's wrong when it becomes legal. I see this sort of attitude not just with same-sex marriage but also other issues like alcohol or marijuana use, or even zoning laws. And I have a huge problem with it. The law and morality are not the same thing and I think there is a deep problem with someone's moral system if they equate the two.
And I think there is a problem if someone equates the two, even if I happen to agree with the law. In this scenario, there is an "instability" so to speak. I.e. if people equate the law with morality, it leaves open the possibility for bigotry or other social ills to take hold if the law is changed. People aren't actually committed to whatever situation is the status quo, i.e. they aren't supporting it or believing in it "for the right reasons", so an authoritarian or just other bad forces in society are able to push for bad things to happen by pushing for a change in the law. And then people's support for them flips.
I think the US is like this in a lot of ways, and I don't think it's a good thing. I think we would be much better off if a greater portion of the population made a clear distinction between the law and morality. I also think that, in general, making these distinctions tends to result both in better policy, and better moral decisions. There are a lot of things that are more the realm of morality and less policy (i.e. "small government" says it isn't the government's role to solve every problem, and I agree with this idea) but also there are things that are more the role of policy or the law and not government (i.e. you might be granted certain rights but more for practical reasons, not because their are some moral or "inalienable" rights. And again I think this is often a better way of approaching rights, because acknowledging their subjectivity can lead to more constructive dialogue and again lead to better policy.)
So yeah, that's my take on this. I find this a rich topic which is why this is such a long comment. I hope something in here has been insightful or illuminating!
Thank you for your thought-provoking comment, it certainly got me thinking even though I didn't fully agree with it!
thank you for being civil and discussing calmly respectfully, i appreciate it.
Most Trump supporters aren't working class, most of them are petty bourgeois (small business owners and small landlords e.c.t). I'm a working class person from the UK without a degree and I'm not right wing or a Trump supporter, in fact, I'm on the far left. I don't think being 'bigoted' towards bigoted people is a form of classism. I think the idea that working class people are more bigoted and right wing is a dehumanising stereotype and a form of demonisation.
I disagree when you say that it's not a moral failing for those who were exposed to more bigotry to be bigoted. Being a bigot is a choice, as a kid, I always knew it was wrong. I became a Nazi when I was 15 years old, all because of peer pressure, but I always knew deep down that I was in the wrong and that I was hurting people. A lot of these bigoted ideas originated within the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the European nobility and later trickled down into the ranks of the working class.
Most woke people are not elitist or "middle class", most of the woke people I've known were from working class backgrounds and were some of the most compassionate people I've ever met.
british person detected. opinion about american politics: discarded
You are giving us tons of personal anecdotes without citing your claims that Trump supporters aren’t working class. Lots of research has been done on educational level and income in relation to political affiliation in the U.S. and it indicates the opposite of what you are asserting here.
@@SoldierX32 get your head out of your ass. My social class aren't all nazis.
@@AllenRosdahl Class isn't defined by educational level or income. It's defined by your relation to the productive forces, this is what working class has always meant, so you can stop with the mental gymnastics. You can stop demonising me and my social class. My social class was responsible for the Paris Commune of 1871 which is a legacy I'm very proud of. The British labour movement during the 19th was very progressive for it's time which is something else I'm proud of. I'm not denying that there is a reactionary and backward section of the working class, but you have to acknowledge that there is also a revolutionary and progressive section of the working class. I'm tired of people assuming I'm a Nazi because of my social class.
Bahahahah 😂 This is why Trump won. Working class doesn’t mean just baristas. How many construction workers you know that need safe spaces? Lol. In all seriousness, I highly recommend you all take some time for self reflection (not an insult just a bit of friendly advice).
Hi there,
Just to respond to the education bit. It's less about the educational credentials of someone and more about whether people have critical thinking skills which I feel many people who are conned by bad republicans lack. I am someone who only went to community college (couldn't afford a standard college or university) and have a vocational certificate, however, I still use my abilities to learn and think about what's being told to me.
Yes!!! I agree, at least as it pertains to assessing someone's ability to perform at tasks. There are people with "top" degrees who can show deep flaws in reasoning, or a very narrow worldview without much educational breadth, and similarly, there are lots of people with less-prestigious degrees or even no degrees at all, who have critical thinking skills and may even have great research skills and be extraordinarily well-read. Anyone with access to a good public library system can do it!
In many settings it is important to distinguish between these two things.
I did not emphasize this distinction in this video because the video was on the long side already, and it seemed perhaps tangential to the point. The main point I wanted to make is that the "social justice" ideology you see online, and more broadly most of the left side of US politics, often looks down on people for being "uneducated". Sometimes it's a commentary on people's real level of education and research skills, whereas other times it's more a commentary on credentials. Often, it's a bit of both. Regardless of whether it's looking down on people for lacking the credentials, or looking down on them for lacking the actual skills and knowledge, I don't like it, and I think both of these forms of judgment or classism are a problem!
@@AlexZorach According to Ellen Key who read almost everthing there was to read said that thinking skills are partly inherited and partly due to the quality and depth of what you have read. She did not go to univeristy, nor did the most influential thinker of the late 1800s: Herbert Spencer. Many or all of histories greatest thinkers have devoted a large part of their lives to reading on their own.
Exactly. Being educated and being intelligent are two very different things. Knuckleheads with some random bachelors degree are often so haughty yet haven’t the critical thinking skills of a child. And we old lowly high school graduates often read much more than the self anointed intelligentsia do.
Hidden?