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Post #1242562

Author
Jay
Parent topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1242562/action/topic#1242562
Date created
23-Sep-2018, 2:56 PM

moviefreakedmind said:

Jay said:

Can you provide some more info on them or point to specific videos so I don’t have to watch all their content in order to figure out what they said that got them demonetized?

There are no specific examples because Youtube doesn’t explain why people get demonitized. The Amazing Atheist is and always has been extremely controversial. He makes anti-religion videos and political content. Secular Talk is a much more professional leftist outlet. He’s part of the Young Turks network and he’s been demonitized for no specific reason. Thunderf00t has been demonitized even though he’s primarily a science channel, but occasionally makes liberal content, including videos against climate change deniers. David Pakman is an extremely professional, not vulgar at all political commentator. Jimmy Dore is pretty extreme and is part of the Young Turks. All these people suspect that they’ve been demonitized for covering controversial subject matter, like war and others. Again, nothing to do with deviating from leftist norms. The woman that shot up Youtube did it because she made no money on the hundreds of thousands of views she got on totally apolitical content like exercise videos. Demonitization has been across the board. I don’t know how else to phrase that. No side of the political aisle has been targeted more or less than the other. For every gun video that gets demonitized, there’s a gun-control video that gets demonitized. Youtube is demonitizing entire subjects, no matter which side of it you’re on. I see a lot of leftists, including Jimmy Dore, that claim demonitization is targeting the left. He, just like the people on the right, is wrong. It’s targeting every independent outlet on the platform. Rightists and leftists should realize that they’re in the same boat here, but they don’t.

I suppose I’ll have to look into their content more. Thanks for the extra info.

Those who are left-leaning but have some views that are traditionally (or even more recently) seen as conservative often adopt the label of “classical liberal” to separate themselves from a left wing that is increasingly irrational and emotionally driven.

Classical liberalism is a laissez-faire, conservative ideology. That’s not a recent evaluation of it. The people using it as a way to separate themselves from the left are misusing it because if they’re actually classical liberals then were never on the left. I also agree that there is an irrational segment of the left, particularly the one that cares more about culture and language than policy and economics, but how is that any different than the right? How is the left more irrational and emotionally driven than Trump’s portion of the rightwing?

It’s not. I’m a centrist, remember? The biggest change in my political views over the last several years is the realization that the left isn’t automatically “on the right side of history”. Both sides have their insane fringes, and the fringes have shifted the boundaries of what’s conservative vs. liberal. The fringes are destroying our ability to meet in the middle and progress as a society. Add dying traditional media who are desperate for clicks into the mix and you have a disaster.

They do, but by that logic you surely can’t deny that the insane fringe is running the right. The Trump crowd controls the White House and Congress. The reason I forget that you’re a centrist is because you have a clear sympathy towards the people on the right doing the exact same thing you chastise the left for. Forgive me for being confused by that obvious bias. I am a leftist. I don’t doubt that my pro-left bias shows and I don’t pretend to be a centrist. If you’ve read this thread, you’d know how I feel about centrists. 😉

I don’t know where you get this idea that I sympathize more with the right than the left. I sympathize with those who present rational ideas and are labeled as extremists by those who disagree with them. When I’m talking about the stuff I see on the left that caused me to walk away, I’m not saying the right doesn’t do the same thing. It saddens me to come to terms with the fact that the left is as bullshit-ridden and disingenuous as the right, which is why I beat on them so hard.

Your defense of their identity politics is a perfect example of sympathizing with them. You don’t present a similarly sympathetic view on leftist identity politics.

Again, I’m not seeing what identity politics I’m defending. When Rubin, Peterson, Owens, etc. bring up race, it’s always to say “race doesn’t matter” or “stop talking about race”. I’m genuinely not following you here.

Rubin consistently brings up his homosexuality to legitimize his opinion. I do get where you’re coming from on Rubin and Peterson, so maybe we’ll just have to have our conflicting interpretations of them, but Candace Owens does not bring up race to say that it doesn’t matter. She brings it up to say that Democrats and liberals are racist. She brings it up to say Democrats were slaveowners as though that means anything now and she brings it up to say that black people need to “get off the plantation” and all sorts of other ludicrous shit.

I don’t see Rubin’s tendency to be self-referential as unreasonable. It’s just a counter to the idea that if you’re gay, you have to think and vote a certain way. He uses his own journey as an example and I don’t see the problem with it.

Owens does call Democrats racists, true, as in “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. She uses the plantation as a metaphor for freeing black people from the traditional mindset that voting Democrat is the only way for them to succeed because Republicans are racists who want to hold them down. It’s provocative rhetoric for sure and I can see how it would be upsetting to Democrats who view themselves as the exact opposite of racists.

I think part of the problem is that you keep referring to the Trump crowd as the fringe when the man got 60+ million votes. That’s not fringe. The fringe definitely supports him, but people don’t become president with only fringe votes. His support among Republicans is insanely high. Seems to me that being on the left and having an irrational hatred of Trump go hand in hand, which makes any Trump supporter “fringe” in comparison.

Trump and his supporters are fringe. Trump voters aren’t necessarily fringe.

Can you explain the difference between a “Trump supporter” and a “Trump voter” in practical terms? He got the votes and in pretty much every poll he has high approval from Republicans across the board. When you talk about Trump and his supporters, you don’t seem to draw any such lines between the fringe (i.e., the minority) and everyone else who voted for him.

I would say that a Trump supporter is different from a Trump voter in the same way that a Hillary supporter is different from a Hillary voter, or any other politician. When I think of a Trump supporter I’m thinking of the conspiratorial, Trump-can-do-no-wrong type of Republican. Not close to all of his voters were like that.

It’s good to acknowledge the difference.

moviefreakedmind said:

Jay, would you be willing to criticize Jordan Peterson’s attempts to shut down critics by the force of the court system?

https://www.thecut.com/2018/09/jordan-peterson-threatened-to-sue-feminist-critic-kate-manne.html

There’s a difference between critique (free speech) and slander (illegal), and Peterson obviously thought this person’s review crossed the line into slander by labeling him a misogynist. I can’t blame him for being fed up with the ceaseless misrepresentation, but it’s not a good look given his constant hammering on free speech as a core value and filing the lawsuit isn’t going to get his critics to change their minds, so I don’t see the point. It comes across as hypocritical and overly dramatic.

I agree with his lawsuit against Wilfred Laurier University. What those profs and admins did to Lindsay Shepherd was way out of line and labeling a brief clip from a Peterson lecture as hate speech is nonsense.