DocWatts

By this point if someone is still stubbornly refusing to get vaccinated, that indicates to me that what I would consider a basic concern for the well being of others isn't an important component of that person's value system. And are in all likelihood probably beyond convincing by this point. In the same way that I'm not expecting a MAGA cultist to be able to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, I'm not holding my breath that short of an existential crisis those selfishly refusing vaccines will seriously introspect and reflect on thier basic beliefs. The point of calling out toxic ideologies isn't necessarily to change hearts and minds, but to innoculate communities from noxious beliefs and behaviors by making it crystal clear that certain attitudes are outside of what's considered socially acceptable.

Value arises from having a sense of meaning and purpose. For happiness to be sustainable it has to be connected to what that person finds meaningful about thier life. Human beings can tolerate many things, but they won't tolerate for very long not having a meaningful answer to why it is they get up in the morning and go do whatever it is they do throughout the day. As to ethics, I wouldn't say it's a neglected part of philosophy so much as its often something that most people's understanding of is implicit rather than explicit. It's something that becomes embodied and expressed in various ideologies and worldviews. Of the three major philosophical schools on ethics (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), virtue ethics seems to me to be the most sensible of the three. Deontology is too restrictive and not practical for the ambiguities of every day life. Consequentialism is easily abused and can be dehumanizing if not applied with a great deal of care. Virtue ethics seems to jibe with whatd we understand about human psychology and development. It's implicit in wisdom traditions such as Buddhism, and for a good reason. It's better suited for the ambiguities of every day life since it's not always practical or possible to run a cost benefit analysis on every decision. Or develop and apply rules that are universally applicable across the wide degree of contexts that decisions need to be made in.

Brutal survival conditions lead to oppressive Red ideologies. Considering the brutal survival conditions of early 20th century Russia it's no surprise that Lenin's authoritarian Marxism (Red/Blue) ended up winning the power struggle over more humane forms of socialism.

Marx was a valuable philosopher and economist whose critical perspective on capitalism deserves to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean he was right about everything though, or that conditions haven't changed in the century and a half since Marx. Can't say anything positive about the revolutionary vanguard-ism of Leninism, as it's an authoritarian version of Marxism born from brutal survival conditions which led to the deaths of millions of people.

As for polarization, the American right wing intentionally chose to politicize a virus. There wasn't such a Left / Right divide on this issue until Trump propagandized his legions of Cult like followers to reject the vaccine along with masks and social distancing, with the help of opportunistic simps within the GOP and right wing media. But nice attempt at gaslighting. This isn't a joke. Close to 800,000 people in the US alone have died of Covid. That's more than all the US deaths in of all the wars of the 20th century combined. The freedumb to refuse a safe and effective vaccine along with refusing to follow basic safety procedures such as masks during a pandemic has caused thousands of preventable deaths. Making a bare modicum of effort to keep others safe during a pandemic is a matter of basic human decency towards other people.

Here in the US, god forbid if you have a heart attack or get in a car accident in Trump-istan where hospitals are at full capacity due to the strain that the unvaccinated are putting on the health care system. Healthy people choosing not to get vaccinated because Trump or Joe Rogan told them not to are prolonging the pandemic and leading to unnecessary deaths. The vaccine has had full FDA approval for a while now. Vaccine mandates are fully justified by this point, and it's completely understandable why the rest of society is running out of patience for people who selfishly are still refusing to get vaccinated.

...at least in the short term (over the next decade or two), that is. Of course on a longer time scale whatever pseudo government emerges from a potential right wing coup is likely to be even more unstable than the rickety democracy that exists right now, but obviously we don't want it to come to that. Other than stalling for time, I've yet to see realistic ways that this democratic backslide can be addressed using the tools we have at our disposal. None of the underlying systemic reasons behind Trump and right wing radicalization have even begun to be addressed. No realistic solutions to widespread feelings of collapsing social solidarity and alienation during the paradigm shift we're living through seem to be on the table as something that can be implemented in a short enough time span. Democratic institutions have proven to be incapable of inoculating themselves from takeover from those who don't abide by democratic norms; for structural reasons a radicalized minority party has effective veto power over reforms which would safeguard democracy and prevent it from collapsing. What are actual pragmatic steps that can be taken at this point which take in to account the limitations imposed by the actual conditions that exist right now?

I'll second this. Understanding where people are coming from is incredibly useful, but that doesn't mean condoning toxic behavior (let alone inviting that behavior in to your social circle) just because someone's at an earlier stage of the Spiral.

Well to be fair there's a difference in opinion / perspective between myself and Leo on this issue, so consider this as just an outside perspective from someone considering this from a different angle. Leo's perspective (to somewhat over simplify for the sake of brevity) is that consciousness is the ontological environment which contains everything else that exists, and that the idea that you have a physical body is a projection of consciousness. My own perspective is that reality as we experience it is a codependent interaction between consciousness that's embedded and embodied within an environment. Your body is a part of this environment, so there's no hard and fast separation between your mind and your body because your body is a necessary part of your mind (and vice versa). Your brain interacts in mutually dependent ways with the rest of your body, and that body-mind both shapes and is shaped by its environment. This view could be called a form of embodied realism, non-reductionist and non-exclusive physicalism, or a form of neutral monism. There's converging evidence for this view both from contemplative traditions such as Buddhism and from second generation cognitive science. But again this is just one perspective with its own strengths, weaknesses, and baked in assumptions (which to be fair are part of every ontological system).

I had a friend of mine from college who fell hook like and sinker in to the QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole. It was actually quite sad to see the toxicity of it affect his well being as he grew increasingly isolated and detached from reality. It was almost akin to seeing someone get sucked in to an abusive relationship, or develop a mental illness. I eventually ended up cutting ties with him. And with Roe v. Wade likely to be overturned this year and reproductive rights taken away in much of the country as a result, it should be clear that rather than an abstract concept politics is something that ends up affecting people in thier day to day lives. Not wanting to voluntarily associate with people who are trying to take away your rights or the rights of people close to you, is completely reasonable.

By political violence I don't necessarily mean they themselves are directly participating in violence (indeed only a small portion of people who support violent ideologies actually commit acts of violence themselves), but are either openly or tacitly supportive of political violence committed by their 'side', such as the January 6th insurrection. An armed revolt will never work. What will work is voting in politicians whose aim is to erode democratic institutions and to begin implementing a hybrid authoritarian regime, where the facade of democracy remains but a plutocratic elite has no serious challenge to its authority (similiar to what exists in Putin's Russia). This is the route that's being taken by the Republican Party. The goal is to undermine trust in democratic institutions and build support for authoritarianism among a radicalized minority of the country. At an entry level this includes voting for politicians who use dog whistle rhetoric to signal their support for political violence, as Trump has done on numerous occasions. The fact that the instigator of an attempted coup is likely going to be running again in 2024 with the enthusiastic support of perhaps a quarter of the country is a good indicator of how much things here have deteriorated. Another example of this from where I live (Michigan) involved running in to people who were comfortable giving their vocal support to a foiled assassination attempt by a right wing terrorist group who attempt to kidnap and execute our state's governor. By no means is this movement something that's supported by a majority of Americans, but then again the Nazis were never supported by a majority of Germans in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

The mind is the body. The body is the mind. There's no hard and fast separation between the two. Considering your mind and body as fundamentally separate from one another is a duality and an illusion that can be traced back to the a-priori assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition that go largely unquestioned in our society. Convergent evidence for this can be found not only in contemplative wisdom traditions that use meditation to examine that nature of direct experience, but also in contemporary cognitive science, both of which are in agreement on this point. The only reason you're able to have an inner life with thoughts and feelings is because your mind is embedded within a body that is itself embedded within an environment. If you don't take care of your body this will effect that quality of your direct experience. If your hormones are out of whack or you're in immense physical pain this will have a direct impact on how you percieve reality.

Not yet, but things are moving in that direction. If nothing at all is done to address the growing trends of radicalization and polarization, it's hard to see any other outcome as realistic. By no means does Trump and the Republican Party's authoritarian disdain for democracy speak for all conservatives in America (Trump himself being a reactionary rather than a conservative), but there's a growing anti democracy movement within the right wing of this country that should be extremely worrying. I'd estimate that perhaps %5-10 of the country would openly (and even enthusiasticly) support political violence to achieve thier goals, with perhaps another %15-20 who'd be uncomfortable with it but would consider it the lesser of two evils if it means saving the country from the 'liberal elites'. Roughly a third of the country already believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and in a recent poll one third of Republicans were comfortable with stating that political violence might be necessary to save the country ( https://www.npr.org/2021/02/11/966498544/a-scary-survey-finding-4-in-10-republicans-say-political-violence-may-be-necessa ). Obviously this is just projecting current trends out to the future and any number of things could happen to change this equilibrium, but I don't see American democracy as sustainable if what we've seen over the last 10 years becomes the new 'business as usual' in the upcoming decades.

It's not just that they disagree on virtually every political issue, it's that the necessary social solidarity for democracy to function is breaking down. A democracy can survive societal disagreement over cultural issues as a result of its different regions being at different levels of development. It can't survive when a third of the population ceases to believe in or adhere to basic democratic norms, or when a significant portion of the country supports political violence as a way to achieve its goals.

@Danioover9000 Fair enough, and I could have phrased my response more productively by asking them to articulate their statement in more precise terms before responding.

Hence the paradox of conservatism. Conservatives who aren't close minded, aren't toxic ideologues, and aren't spreading conspiracy theories should be welcome here. Yet at the same time growth pushes people away from conservativism, hence why open minded conservatism is a rare thing. Open minded conservatism is almost a contradiction in terms actually, as conservativism is sustained by a mistrust and skepticism of diverse ideas and perspectives. Conservatism and open mindedness are quite difficult to make parsimonious, and in my own experience some degree of compartmentalization is required for both to co-exist in the same person. I should know, I was a libertarian leaning conservative myself when I was much younger. So I can attest that this worldview is egoicly fragile, and is threatened by outside perspectives which have the potential of sewing the seeds of cognitive dissonance. That's not to say that egoic fragility is exclusive to conservative ideologies, just that it's far more acute there than for ideologies higher up on the Spiral. Liberalism (and many Left wing ideologies) also suffer from this, just to a lesser degree.

@Danioover9000 Well that caused more of a stir than I was anticipating. I'll admit that I was being a bit sarcastic in my rebuttal because I was trying to point out a pretty big potential blindspot in the idea that America is a well functioning democracy whose political process reflects the will of the people, because that view doesn't take in to account serious structural flaws in our representative system. Didn't literally mean it as : "well you obviously meant the following : ....".

That is factually incorrect. The antiquated and undemocratic structure of the US Senate effectively gives a small minority of rural conservatives an outsized and undemocratic amount of political influence, and effective veto power over the political agenda of the rest of the country. Conservatives make up a two thirds majority on the Supreme Court. Not at all reflective of the political makeup of the country (which is loosely one third conservative, one third moderate, and one third liberal). This is compounded by an Electoral College who antiquated structure also benefits rural conservatives at the expense of the rest of the country. If the president were chosen by direct popular vote it's doubtful whether we'd see another Republican become president in our life times. That's leaving aside widespread voter suppression efforts by the Right which further weights the system in thier favor. You are right though that a healthy democracy doesn't have this level of discontent in it. There are several systemic problems that brought us to where we are now, and many of these (such as the decline in living standards over the last half century) are a direct result of increased influence of right wing ideology in both political parties. The Democratic Party abandoning the working class in favor of business interests, and the Republicans becoming a Corporatist party with no regard whatsoever for the well being of the country or its citizens are demonstrations of this.

If America ceases to be democracy in the next decade or two (or more likely becomes a hybrid democratic/authoritarian regime), it will be due to the willful action of a radicalized authoritarian Right That said, while the Right isn't solely responsible for every systemic problem in America, it's absolutely true that the Far Right is opportunistically taking advantage of systemic failures to dismantle democracy. Hitler and the Nazis may not have caused World War 1 or the The Great Depression, but they sure as shit used that as a jumping off point to destroy what remained of democracy in 1930s Germany.

If you mean it's still adhering to antiquated and undemocratic institutions that gives a rural minority far too much influence to dictate policy to the rest of the country, then yeah it's doing a bang up job. You'd almost think this wacky system we're stuck with some two and a half centuries later was designed as a pseudo compromise with rural interests whose primary interest was preserving slavery. Oh, wait....

Any plans to do more political videos about this topic in the near future?

I think you may have misunderstood or misread one of my previous posts, because it was my assertion that keeping a firearm in your home for the purposes of self defense is a completely legitimate reason to own a gun, and not something I have a problem with. My reservations were specifically for open and conceal carry (ie bringing a gun with you to a supermarket, restaurant, public venue etc). Open carrying should be flat out illegal. Conceal carry should be much more restricted than it is now, limited to people with an occupational need to carry a firearm (for example private investigators, security guards, people who transport cash, etc). Barring these need based exceptions, there should be a requirement that legally owned guns which leave your home must be unloaded and stored in a locked container.

The removal of the dislike count was done for the benefit of corporations who weren't happy at having their content being review bombed by unhappy consumers. It's an anti consumer move, but in the grand scheme there are far more important issues to be concerned about.

Two things can be inherently true at the same time; that black communities faced with difficult social conditions are struggling with transitioning out of Red, and also that the existence of Red in these communities is a survival response to oppressive external social conditions. If anything, the existence of communities struggling with the transition out of Red in a wealthy country whose center of gravity is at Orange is indicative of a systemic societal failure. I think you're failing to see how Red can develop as a survival response to a challenging survival situation that's imposed by external oppression. Address the terrible social conditions to which Red is a sensible survival response, and you'll actually make headway in helping these communities transition out of Red Also, there exists plenty of healthy Blue in black communities; look to black history and you'll see the church's role in community life and as a point of social organization during the civil rights movement. Red is by no means a majority, even if it's causing problems. After all, even in bad neighborhoods it's a small minority of people committing violent crimes (something that unfortunately gets associated with black people in general). Namely that of gangs which fight for territory, something that can be directly linked to economic deprivation and the black market created by drug prohibition laws.

Again, we have to ask what are the legitimate roles of firearms within a society. Owning a firearms for hunting, sport shooting, etc. seems like a fairly straightforward and innocuous example. Personal protection is murkier, because in principle it makes sense but the problem is what's considered necessary for 'personal protection' will get stretched to the point where open carrying an automatic rifle in public will be considered by some as necessarily for 'personal protection'. Obviously at a certain this becomes quite ludicrous, as collecting arsenals in one's basement is far and away beyond what can reasonably defended as necessary for one's personal safety. If the role of these weapons is supposed to be for personal protection, than limiting these weapons to one's home/property and not allowing them to be carried in public seems like a reasonable way to facilitate that. If these weapons leave the house, they need to be unloaded and stored in a locked container. Allowing members of the public to open carry is batshit insane. Concealed carry should be limited to people who can prove that they have a legitimate reason for doing so because of their occupation (for example a private investigator, trained security guard, etc). Gun suicides present another difficult challenge, but at the very least lengthy waiting periods and much more thorough background checks should be a no-brainer.