DocWatts

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.

Basically every service in America, whether that's healthcare, education, or infrastructure, exists as part of a Tiered system. For health care in particular: At the top tier (%10-15) of the population, people here have access to the best services in the world, subsidized at the expense of the rest of the population. Of course everything that exists at this Tier is overpriced, but people at this level are affluent enough to not worry about the inflated costs of these services. The middle Tier (roughly the top half of the country, median individual income here being about $30k a year) generally have access to the services they need, but the inflated costs that the first Tier can shrug off start to become a burden here. Services can range from decent to kind of shitty, but generally these folks aren't having too much difficulty seeing a doctor or getting treatment for chronic illnesses. The main difficulty here is the cost of routine medical services and procedures not covered by insurance, and the risk of losing the Health Care they have if they happen to lose their job, with Health Care being tied to employment. Which would effectively push them down to the bottom Tier. The bottom Tier, which would basically cover the bottom half of the country, is where the vast majority of the horror stories about the American Health Care system are experienced. People not being able to see a doctor if they get sick, people declaring medical bankruptcy, people not being able to afford thier insulin or asthma medication. If you get sick (or heaven forbid develop a chronic illness) your options here are extremely limited. If you're 65 or older, or are legally disabled you have access to medicare/medicaid, but for everyone else you're basically shit out of luck.

Gun culture in the US is a dumpster fire of toxic masculinity, unexamined privilege, corporate propaganda by arms manufacturers, and a noxious soup of fear, suspicion, and conspiricism. So what if anything is a legitimate reason for owning a firearm (outside of hunting)? As someone who's not enamored with guns and finds the lack of firearm regulations in the US to be batshit insane, some pro gun right advocates on the Left like Vaush have made what I consider to be a convincing argument that it would be an incredibly bad thing if the radicalized far Right are the only ones who manages to arm themselves if and when society ever seriously destabilizes as the world deals with catastrophic climate change over the upcoming century.

With midterm elections approaching next year and the Democratic Party poised for a disastrous defeat in 2022, there's a very real possibility that the slow moving coup which failed to achieve its goals in 2020 may actually succeed in 2024. The reason that Trump failed was due to his own incompetence and not having laid enough of the requisite groundwork for a successful coup. But it can't be assumed that this will necessarily always be the case in the future. A radicalized anti-democracy Republican Party has been working hard to strategically put Trump sycophants in key positions in battleground states where they could use baseless accusations of fraud to throw out votes or refuse to certify results that don't go thier way. A majority of Republicans voters believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, so they would have the support of around a quarter to a third of the country in thier coup attempt. Even if things go better than expected in 2022 and 2024, authoritarian Republicans are going to hold a majority in the House and Senate at some point, and will be using every tool at their disposal to accelerate the authoritarian backslide of the US's faltering democracy. If the worst does happen and the US becomes the next Hungary, what's to be done in this scenario? How could democracy eventually be restored if the worst comes to pass, and what's an ordinary citizen's role and responsibility in this scenario?

Well put. It's easy to demonize from a position of privilege. If you happen to have grown up in a stable neighborhood with access to good schools and economic opportunities, its easy to take those things for granted. It's also easy to not understand how growing up in a terrible survival situation damages people in lasting ways. Maybe, just maybe, growing up in a stressful and dangerous environment where young men are treated like failures and criminals from an early age leads to toxic, dysfunctional behavior.

That's because you can moralize and preach to people until you're blue in the face, but until you actually take the time and effort to understand and address the obstacles that are making it difficult for disadvantaged communities to self actualize it's not going to work. At a minimum this would include public investments to provide well funded schools, functional infrastructure, jobs that pay a livable wage, public transportation, affordable housing, funding for public safety, support for at risk teenagers through youth programs and sports, sex education including easily available contraceptives, and an actual path out of poverty and towards a decent life. If the person outside of these communities is advocating for these things in a serious way, then I have no problem whatsoever with advocating for personal responsibility as part of this overall solution. But if your only 'solution' is to moralize at people without addressing any of these underlying systemic issues that are at the root of toxic and dysfunctional behavior, I feel no compunction on calling that behavior out as at best counter productive and at worst as potentially racist (or at the very least aggressively insensitive and ignorant).

The giga-cringe meme that started this thread is more or less a stupid person's idea of Hegelian Dialectics after taking one Intro to Philosophy Class

I kind of liken it to the differing roles and responsibilities for someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, versus how a community should respond to that happening. If you're going through a traumatic experience yourself, it's completely reasonable to look for warning signs you may have missed, what you could have done differently, etc. An outsider's role in this scenario is to provide love and support. Not to punitively criticize and berate that person for what they could have done differently in the bad scenario. Not to parrot thier words back at them to justify not helping that person.

That's totally valid. But at the same time whether this is being said from an insider vs an outsider's perspective makes all the difference. In a way it's a version of saying something similar from below (an outsider parroting discussions internal to that community for self serving reasons) or above (an insider with understanding that comes from lived experience). Similiar to how something like science can be critiqued from either below or above. To someone who's actually living in the bad situation your point can be potentially empowering, because a victim mindset isn't actually helpful for getting yourself out of a bad situation. An outsider parroting some of those same points without an actual understanding of the obstacles that people in a bad scenario will come across as condescending and potentially insulting. Rather than helping anyone, all they're really doing is absolving the broader society of its responsibility to remove external obstacles and barriers that that community is facing.

@Raptorsin7 There's a place for personal responsibility, but people need to be given a fair chance to succeed through external love and support. Moralizing at disadvantaged.communities without doing anything to actually address (or even understand) the obstacles that they face amounts to little more than talking down to people. It's condescending and insulting. Just preaching personal responsibility without advocating for actual policy solutions to address external barriers that make it harder to self actualize is evidence that you're not actually concerned about the well being of the people you're talking down to. Candice Owens is about as interested in the problems faced by disadvantaged communities as Fossil Fuel companies are in 'solving' climate change. Both are Bad Faith actors who are more interested in sweeping problems under the rug than in actually doing anything to solve problems, because both cases involve some amount of sacrifice (in the form of higher taxes, regulations, etc) from those who have isolated themselves from systemic problems

I think the challenge would be to develop a viable alternative to capitalism within a pluralistic democratic framework, while leaving room for other worldviews to co-exist without threatening the survival of the entire system. It's a challenging problem because even in an SD Green society you're still going to have some amount of Blue and Orange that are going to want (and have a right) to express themselves politically. So a relatively high degree of social solidarity around basic egalitarian values seems like a requirement, similiar to how both the Left and Right in many places agree on the basic principle of a national healthcare system.

I don't necessarily disagree, which is why a societal center of gravity at or near Green is a prerequisite for this type of system to be sustainable. Both for the reasons you mention, and because the population needs to be willing to defend it within the framework of a pluralistic democracy. I wouldn't expect someone within an Blue / Orange paradigm to have an expansive enough circle of concern to care about the well being of people in the third world. A social context where ordinary people are secure enough in their livelihoods to not be operating with a scarcity mindset would also seem to be a prerequisite as well. Not at all that surprising when we consider that people in a privileged position have more freedom to self actualize and expand their circle of concern. All this is to say that Green Social Democracy is better suited to measured implementation of aspects of Democratic Socialism than societies at earlier stages of development.