That's weird! It's there, I don't know why it would not be showing up? It shows up for me and you are definitely NOT in the list of banned users. I checked the list just in case I had accidentally put you in there but you're not there! Maybe is there a drop-down selected by default and it is only showing certain comments and not all comments? KZbin has sometimes been changing their algorithm and default settings for presenting comments. I will look into this, I don't want it hiding comments by default, I sometimes experiment with changing the comment order listing between "Top" and "Recent", because on some videos I don't want it showing Top comments and on others I do...depending on the overall vibe or sentiment. Did you get my reply to the comment? I also wrote out a long reply! I appreciated your comment; it gave me some ideas for things I might want to talk about in the future.

@@AlexZorach I got the reply - thank you. I think KZbin's AI must have shadow or partially banned it or something. Sometimes I think it's just using certain words together that will cause it. But I don't know - I've yet to find anyone who knows what YT does when it autobans comments. I've been looking at it a little bit just looking at channel comments from signed in my account and not signed in and see some strange things. I also know that there are people who simply report any comment they don't agree with.

Thank you so much for this reply, this is exactly what I am talking about and it's great to see you connecting with what I said. I also would experience this sort of self-doubt after being cut off or ghosted after any sort of interaction. I didn't go into it as much in the video but it's a topic I want to talk about more in the future. I do think it's good to reflect on whether or not you've done anything wrong. There have been times in the past where I have said or done things I regret, either being too pushy, saying something disrespectful, or otherwise doing something that might hurt someone. The odd thing to me though is that, when I've reflected like this, the cases where I think I did something clearly wrong, don't correspond neatly to the situations where people cut me off or withdrew. And I definitely have had enough women open up to me about how they felt afterwards. And I have been in situations where people had the self-awareness and decency to tell me: "No, you didn't do anything wrong, I am just having trouble with this because of how I was raised." And it was largely those conversations that led me to have the realizations I conveyed in this video. I have been active in feminist groups and movements for years and one thing that has really frustrated me about the feminist discourse around male-female interactions in dating and sex, is that almost 100% of it centers around the men doing something "wrong". I almost never encounter any of the discussion of these other phenomena I've experienced, like women ghosting men who didn't do anything wrong, and how this can be hard on men. I also find it very refreshing when someone asserts clear boundaries. I agree that it makes it much easier to get over emotionally, and it also makes it easier to maintain a normal friendship (or at least acquaintanceship) with the person. And similarly, whenever someone DOES something that is problematic, whether it's being pushy, overstepping a boundary, or saying something that comes across as rude or offensive, clearly communicating it helps the person learn. The taking of offense is subjective, anyway, like what is offensive varies a lot by culture and subculture so it's not safe to assume that something is obvious to the other person just because it's obvious to you. About the topic of women approaching you or being more sexual with you when drunk, one thing I strongly recommend trying, if you are out and you encounter someone flirting with you and she seems drunk or at least tipsy, you can enjoy the flirting to a point, but I recommend stopping the person before it gets too explicitly sexual. Obviously if the person is very drunk, there is a consent issue, but more than that, even if the person is just tipsy, continuing with things in that setting often leads to the scenario you described, the person enjoys themselves and then cuts you off later. You can tell her something like: "Hey, I think you are really hot / this is really hot, but I would rather you be sober if we're going to be doing anything more than this, how about we exchange numbers and we can meet up another time?" When I've said this kind of thing, I've found that the most common reaction is embarrassment. But this gives you an opportunity. If you can work through that embarrassment right there and then, it steers things in a healthier direction. I think the reason is that in a sex-negative mindset, seeking sex outside relationships (sometimes even just seeking any physical connection like making out) is something to be ashamed of, like it's associated with being less-desirable in a "serious" sense. By stopping someone and asking for their contact info, but telling them that you DO want to connect with them this way when they're sober, you communicate several things: (a) you care about consent and want to make sure the person really wants to go through with whatever they're doing and aren't just doing it because of primal urges that don't fit with their value system (b) you have some self-restraint and are thinking more long-term (c) you establish that you like the sexual energy and DO want to continue the connection later (d) you establish that you see them as someone you want to maintain ongoing contact with and want as part of your life (at least in the short-term), not just an anonymous one-time hookup. This combination of things can kinda throw a wrench in the purity culture narrative. Like...the person is clearly trying to hook up at a party...and you're clearly into them sexually. But...you also are seeing them as a person and wanting something longer-term. It can get people to question their views. You still might have an issue with people wanting to later steer things towards a serious relationship, but in my experience the connections that start in this sort of way, are more likely to go into those in-between areas. Like I can think of two in particular: in the one case we ended up hooking up once, and then deciding we were better off as just friends, and I ended up dating one of her friends and she ended up dating one of my friends and it was all amicable all around, not an ounce of weirdness. In the other scenario, we ended up just becoming friends, no sexual relationship even if we may have had some sexual energy, but it was a good and meaningful friendship and we were able to talk about a lot of these issues and that friendship was actually a key one that led to some of the realizations I made in this video. And thank you for subscribing, I always really appreciate it!

I think there are a lot of elements of truth to your narrative here, but I think they contain overgeneralizations. Back when the "tea party movement" came into being, I researched it a lot. I was interested in it, because it was new, and I saw a lot of sometimes-conflicting things being written about it. I actually published a summary of my findings, I haven't updated it recently so it is more relevant to the early days of the movement, but you may find it interesting or relevant here: cazort.net/topic/tea-party-movement The key points are that the "tea party" was not a single unified movement, but rather, a loose coalition of groups, some self-organizing around similar or related sentiments, others more centralized and/or pushed by power interests. For example, you have the "Tea Party Express" which was basically an attempt to funnel "tea party" sentiment into mainstream conservative Republican candidates, and it has often used racism and extremism as a means towards this end, then you have the "Tea Party Nation" which was a scammy group that was probably more about self-serving its founder, but also pushed some really extremist views. Then there is the Tea Party Patriots, a group that has done a better job of keeping corruption out, and stayed focused on issues. And then there's the National Tea Party Federation, which was a loose coalition of unrelated groups, but has done a good job of rooting out racism and extremism. They actually expelled the Tea Party Express. And of course, there are tons and tons more smaller groups and also people who informally organized under the "tea party" banner or using "tea party" rhetoric. So your whole narrative glosses over these distinctions, and as such is I think unfair to the movement. And then there's the additional fact that a lot of the people who are donating to and/or participating in these organizations may not agree with all or even most of it. For example the Tea Party Express basically existed to manipulate, to funnel money into the mainstream right-wing Republican establishment. I think a lot of the people who were supporting it didn't know what direction it was really going in and probably wouldn't have supported it if they did. A lot of groups prey on low-information voters and/or donors, it's always been that way especially anywhere things become close to extremism. I would agree with you that there are a lot of things that people in the US call "libertarianism" that are highly hypocritical. I mostly agree with your analysis of the sort of "tech" "libertarians", whose views seem to be pretty statist-authoritarian in the ways you describe, like allying with big business, banking, military, and police especially when it interests them. I think the "sheep from goats" moments in libertarianism happen when you look at whether or not someone is willing to push libertarian policies even when they conflict with their own personal interests or short-term goals. It's a question of integrity. This is one of the things I want to work on unraveling, in my videos where I talk about small government and libertarianism. I think a lot of people are manipulated through talk of "small government" into supporting things that they actually wouldn't want to support if they fully understood them. However I also think that a lot of people on the left are wrongly dismissive of some of the movements that are loosely allied with libertarianism or small government movements. I think these movements often have valid points or criticisms that the left half of US politics wrongly shuts out without ever considering them.

I wonder...my guess would be that those communists probably are more inclined towards the hands-off, ecologically-sound landscaping practices. In general, even though I am neither anarchist nor communist, I tend to find much more in common with anarchist-communists than I do with the sort of authoritarian-communists that were represented by the Eastern Bloc Communist countries and are often associated with them (i.e. some of the far-left parties in Europe). The authorian-communists tend strongly towards nationalism, which I very much dislike. I am pretty strongly anti-nationalist, which I want to talk about in future videos. Whereas anarchist-communists are anti-nationalist too so I have that in common with them. Also more broadly anarchists and I tend to agree (at least to a point) on the principle of wanting to minimize coercion in society as a whole. So even if I may disagree on specifics here and there, I find it a more compelling philosophy.

Yes!!! And I can think of three strongly compelling reasons not to try to "punch up". One is that, in many cases, when you try attacking someone in a "privileged" category, you end up hurting the most vulnerable people in that category. So for example when people attack men, it ends up hurting black men, trans men, neurodivergent men, or poor men most of all. The second reason not to try to "punch up" is that in many cases you might spark group-level retaliation and that retaliation may target others of your group who didn't initiate the "punching". An example would be if you are at a protest with a bunch of mostly unarmed protesters, surrounded by police in riot gear. If someone starts yelling at the police or throwing rocks, the police are likely to retaliate with tear gas or by beating protestors and it ends up hurting people who never threw a rock or never said anything aggressive. This is not a theoretical concern either, it's happened to people close to me. The third reason is that members of the privileged group are potential allies and often, some of the strongest ones. Winning them over is not only beneficial, it is sometimes even necessary. If you're in a small minority, you're never going to attain rights unless you can convince most of the majority that your cause is worth supporting. And attacking people predictably pushes them away. The more you think about this stuff and the more you go out and live in the real world and do activism and see what does and doesn't work, the more you realize that the whole "punching up" thing is one of the most destructive ideas and has great potential to undermine activism and block its goals.

Thank you! I'm moderate and have a mix of views, some quite far left, but you'll certainly find a number of right-leaning takes too, on a variety of issues. Happy to have you here! I know what you mean too about the mainstream conservative views. I feel frustrated with the directions that conservatism has taken in recent years, and by which people and voices seem to get the most attention. This is a topic I'd like to talk about at some point too.

Thank you! I definitely felt more vulnerable making this video than I do with most of my videos, so it's not easy for me. I'm kinda following the "Do it Scared" philosophy haha. That makes sense too that pressure could lead to divorce. I tended to feel more pressure from my partners, and tended to be the one who left past relationships, but I do think I have been guilty of pressuring others in various ways too. It's great when you realize that and can then grow beyond it. I agree with you about the media being one of the big culprits here, and I agree it gets worse in election years. I don't know if you saw it, I made a video recently about mental health in the recent election cycle and I was talking about how the political dialogue can have terrible effects on mental health. I also think entertainment media, like TV and movies, can set bad examples for relationships. The topic of women using sex as leverage is an interesting one. I agree with you both that some women do that, and also that it's a small minority of women. I've occasionally heard women open up about the fact that they do that, though, so I know for sure that it happens, like it's not just speculating from the outside. It's interesting, being the way I am on the gender spectrum, even back before I was gender-non-conforming in any overt way, women would confide in me more than in most men, and some of them would talk about that topic. I get very uncomfortable though in any situation where sex feels like a non-consensual power play (i.e. very different from consensual BDSM where you explicitly agree to have a power play.) At the same time I understand how a lot of women get pressured into doing that. For example one of the people who opened up to me about approaching men in that way, lived with her elderly parent in an economically depressed town in rural Ohio and had tried unsuccessfully to find a job for a long time. To her, a relationship with a man was potentially a "ticket out" of that life. She had no qualms about making a sort of "transactional" kind of relationship, trading sex for a place to live in an area where she would have more access to improving her life. And I can't say that I myself wouldn't do the same in the same situation. People usually try to do the best with whatever options they have. I think this relates to another thing I try to talk about on my channel, which is that I am always trying to give people financial advice and to help them empower themselves. I think that women often are not taught financial management skills as much as men are, and I think a portion of the women might move away from that sort of transactional view of sex if they were in a financially more comfortable spot. Some people might have more wiggle room than they realize. Like I said in the one video, there is a logic to all of these eclectic topics. They all fit together! And we can't fix one of them without working on the other ones too!

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!

Yes, I completely agree. It takes a great deal of work and emotional energy, and it can result in negative social consequences, when you question and break outside of established social norms. Part of me publishing this video now though, is to break down the existing social norms and build new ones. Part of human socialization is exposure to ideas. What made it hardest to break out of this binary, back when I was younger, was the fact that I had never heard it discussed in as much depth as I do in this video. And of course my video was in part inspired by listening to others, including people in aromantic communities, people practicing polyamory or relationship anarchy, asexual people, other LGBTQ people, and all sorts of others who clashed with the mainstream, normative culture. So in a sense, many others already HAVE changed their thinking, before me. I'm just yet another step of the process. Yes, there may be some resistance or pushback, I especially have encountered that when I bring up these ideas with older, more conservative people. But I've found that by and large, there isn't very much resistance to these ideas. Rather, the limiting factor is just that people haven't heard them articulated. I think this is because most human relationships don't fit exactly into categories, so most people who have had some experience with sex and/or dating have encountered at least some of this conflict themselves, and so most people feel the struggle and relate to part of it. And even the people who do want to play out one of the extremes or the other can benefit, because it's always better to connect with someone who is doing something that they really want, rather than someone who has been forced into it. This leads to a huge amount of regret, hurt feelings, and other problems that mostly disappear when people are choosing something from a place of security and freedom.

I hadn't thought of the connection between class and capitalism, and views of sex before making this video, but you make a compelling case that they may be closely related. I do think that there can be cultural biases in which certain viewpoints get reinforced if they fit with the dominant economic and political systems, and get marginalized if they don't. Before making this video and before reading your comment, one such connection I made was the way housing in the US is heavily dominated by single-family housing, and in recent decades, single-room occupancy and group housing has been somewhere between banned and severely restricted in most municipalities. This is obviously bad for polyamorous and other non-monogamous people, and I do think it's a factor in pushing younger people into renting solitary apartments because they want privacy. And I could see how this could factor into the economic system, i.e. younger people living in solitary apartments and families living only in single-family housing, together drives higher consumption. And our economic policy has often focused on maximizing GDP, not maximizing real wealth. I wrote a blog post on this topic, years ago: zorach.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/why-gdp-gross-domestic-product-is-a-poor-measure-of-wealth-and-prosperity/ But I have not yet talked about this as thoroughly in videos. One of the end-points of the housing and zoning policy we've seen in the US, is that we now have a housing crisis because we've built on all available land in many metro areas and the zoning prohibits the sort of density necessary to make enough housing to meet demand. This is a point I want to engage in activism around, i.e. the sort that the Strong Towns movement is pushing. I very much agree with this push. Your comment also gives me a lot of other rich connections to think about. I also very much dislike a lot of the classism built into the language people use to talk about this stuff, like your example of "profligate". And I very much dislike the treatment of people, or sex, as commodities.

@@AlexZorach Definitely so, and I can also add a problem of GDP as a measure of wealth since it includes investments and so GDP can be inflated by the moving money around and speculating on the value of shares (what Austrian school economists call 'expansionary credit') without any goods actually being made (or in practice far fewer actual goods being produced in proportion of what GDP figures show). While I'm not entirely with the Marxist historiography is believing that culture is entirely driven by capital I'd say there's some kind of symbiosis which advantages some and disadvantages others. Single family homes being a good example, as a law can be changed relatively quickly but building housing and infrastructure to support them takes a lot longer but forcing developers to only build single family homes (which in my mind is government overreach) will negatively impact those practicing ethical non-monogamy as they'll be stigmatized as poor by having to live in less desirable neighbourhoods despite the fact they would be unable to form their family in an affluent neighbourhood. Hopefully the Strong Towns movement goes well.

I agree, people seem to universally agree that governments have at least some waste. However I do notice some rather large differences between the right and left in terms of how much of a problem people see that waste as. I consider myself a moderate, and part of why is that when I look at the left-leaning subset of politics, they seem to consistently ignore or downplay the issue of government waste. So it's not that they don't think it exists, it's that when considering policy, they often don't think very hard about the possibility or potential for such waste and the accompanying negative effect of taxation. The right, on the other hand, seems to make the opposite error of judgement: they seem to wrongly assume that too much government spending is waste, i.e. they label things as "waste" that are actually important, often without taking the time to really delve into or understand where the money is going and what might suffer if cuts are made. Hence the right falls into the "penny wise pound foolish" pitfall more. I do agree with you that there is a "optimal size" for government, in that, at least for certain subsets or divisions of it, if you make them too small it creates rising costs. And yes, if you are advancing a goal of optimizing the efficiency of government, labeling "efficient government" as the goal makes more sense. The reason I used the term "small government" in this video is that I'm focusing mostly on the Republican party, and "small government" is the term that they and most of their supporters and politicians use. And I'm pointing out that, even if small government is the goal, they're failing to achieve it. Lastly, I do think I tend towards wanting small government myself. I don't think I would want it so much or so blindly that I would want to get outside the range of "efficient government" though. That's because, to me, small government is not a goal in and of itself, but rather, a means towards other ends such as the overall prosperity of society. I don't seek small government at all costs. I also am not sure that "efficient government" alone is a valid goal worth seeking. An authoritarian state might be brutally efficient and if it is efficient at doing things like cracking down on dissent, stifling the free press, etc. this would be a horrific thing. So in this case, i.e. whenever the government is an agency of harm or evil, the inefficiency becomes an asset, something that stops the government from doing damage or at least limits it. And it doesn't even need to be full-on authoritarian for this to be a factor. Contemporary examples of such benefit of inefficiency could include the Federal bureaucracy in the US limiting harmful actions presidents of either party do, or more serious examples, inefficiencies in Russia limiting what Putin can do, or the great corruption and inefficiency of the Indian bureaucracy limiting the harm that Modi and his party (who have exhibited some authoritarian tendencies) can do. And a contemporary example of a brutally efficient state tending strongly towards authoritarianism would be the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been disturbingly efficient at undermining democracy and stifling dissent while waging an absolutely brutal campaign against Gaza, all of Palestine, and even spilling into Lebanon. So efficiency is not always a good thing. And in this last respect, small government is more effective at limiting harm than efficiency, because an efficient, large government is often the most powerful, whereas an inefficient, small one is often the weakest.

Yes! I think your conversations with me about relationship anarchy were a large part of what inspired me to make this video in the first place!

Thank you so much! I definitely want to keep it eclectic. There are so many different things I think about and want to talk about. I'm never quite sure how to get more attention for my channel. Sometimes I get a flash of inspiration and share a video in a specific community somewhere , and other times, other people just find it on their own and share it themselves, which I appreciate!

@@AlexZorach your welcome

The term "asexual" has been widely used to mean "people who do not experience sexual attraction" for well over two decades now. This definition is widely-accepted by mainstream dictionaries, see 3b in Merriam Webster: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/asexual Or definition 2 on dictionary.com which uses Random House as its source: www.dictionary.com/browse/asexual Or definition 3 of the American Heritage dictionary: ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=asexual These are probably the three best-respected dictionaries, so if you don't like this meaning being accepted into the mainstream, you've already lost that battle. These are as mainstream and authoritative as it gets. Words can and do have multiple meanings. It is clear from context that I am referring to this meaning and not the biological definition. If you continue to post ill-informed takes stated as fact, I will ban you from the channel. I don't know what your intent here, but arguing over semantics in such a way that erases important concepts and identities tends to come across as discriminatory and hostile towards those identities. One of the biggest forms of discrimination asexual people face is erasure, and your comment is a prime example of it. I don't want to assume bigoted intent, but I will point out that comments like this come across as bigoted and they are thus not welcome on this channel. This channel is a place for active discussion and sharing of perspectives. I welcome disagreement so long as people are speaking from experience and doing their best to be truthful in their speech. It is not a place for people to push egregiously untruthful perspectives by stating them as fact. If your perspective could be verified to be untrue in less than a minute by a simple web search, as this comment could, then it is not welcome here.

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.

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 disagree, I think small government is a real concept. And I have seen a lot of evidence even just from living in different places. The government is more efficient in some places than others and this is reflected in the ratio of tax rates to services, and also the landscape of laws. Pushing for greater efficiency, streamlined government, and more transparent laws is a valid goal. The topic of the media is complex. "The Media" is not a monolithic entity. There are plenty of media outlets that go into great depth. I read The Atlantic and it's great, and a lot of the great American newspapers cover things in quite a lot of depth too. And then there are think-tanks. On the topic of small government, you see interesting and deep analysis coming out of Cato Institute and lots of others. There are great think tanks with a wide variety of political slants too. NPR also has some fairly deep analysis too. The problem with media is the low-quality media, stuff like MSNBC and Fox News, or even worse, stuff like NewsMax and OAN. And the success of this media I think is related to poor media literacy and poor literacy and research skills across the board. I don't think it's constructive to say "the media is the problem" or "the media doesn't do its job" because there are whole media outlets with big staffs and big readerships or viewerships, which ARE doing their job and doing it quite well. The issue is that there's a lack of media literacy and too many people vulnerable to propaganda, manipulation, and shortcut thinking. It's a more subtle problem to solve but it is solvable because each and every person can get better at this stuff and each and every one of us can help the people around us to become better-informed and better able at navigating the media landscape and over time this will push things more in the direction of good media. This is part of what I am trying to do with my channel!

@@AlexZorach where have you found gov't to be most and least efficient? (if you feel like sharing)

I disagree; I think you are making a lot of assumptions that don't hold if you look at actual voters and what they want, and even some politicians, and certainly if you look at think-tanks and other advocates. There is a lot of waste in government, and I think a lot of people who want small government see the waste, and often see outright stupid or counter-productive things that government does, and that is what motivates them to want small government. I think the problem is that, instead of people getting elected who find ways to intelligently pare down spending and mare government more efficient, there is a mix of bad players who get in there who are just motivated in increasing profits for a particular industry, along with people with a sort of nihilistic attitude of actively wanting to break government. And then there might be some people who have good intentions but don't know what they're doing and make a lot of stupid mistakes. Basically I think it's a crisis of candidate quality and corruption and also to a degree, a crisis of education and information. So a lot of the people who are voting for the "small government" candidates aren't really getting what they want, and they're getting a lot of things that go wrong that they probably wouldn't have wanted.

@AlexZorach what I'm looking at is companies that don't want government oversight because it costs them money in the form of rules, and regulations. Take the food industry as one example. Why do you think that so many countries have banned food from the United States because it's so bad , but our oun government let's them poison us. ?

@AlexZorach if you don't see my point, you just don't want to see it. I wrote a big long story , but it was deleted, so I guess utube agrees with you .

​@@Leslie-es5ij I agree with you that "small government," to me, sounds like a fig leaf for destroying necessary regulations. I prefer the term "efficient" to "small." I think @AlexZorach's argument about the IRS bears that out-they need to not be too small to be efficient. Alex themself uses the term "efficient" several times in their video, and I kind of wish they had simply stuck with that adjective-commenter @edspace. also emphasizes this. However I take issue with your second comment. I know it's frustrating to have your work deleted like this, but don't take it out on Alex, it's not their fault (I just copied my text here so I don't lose all of it!). Plus, I think Alex does have a point that, particularly in rural areas, people like the idea of "small" government because their experience is that they've gotten along fine without lots of intervention from large agencies. The idea of "small government" does have a resonance to many; perhaps this is why Alex sticks with this term, and why it may be a good starting point to reach people who don't feel heard by liberal and/or progressive-identified types.

Shut up. Such closed minded nonsense is the whole point of the video.

@@biohazardbinBecause telling people to shut up makes your point so well 😂

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 calling for deathcamps is pretty serious. I'm not saying you're mistaken, but I haven't heard of it. I would like to know who has called for them as they ought to be exposed.

Totally sane and I think most people want this.

Precisely. Efficient government. Responsive government. Accountable government. Transparent government. These are all adjectives I'd more highly prioritize than "small" government. Maybe that's because I live in a state that generally does have good government, nevertheless with some glaring flaws. Nobody would call the government of my state "small," but there is a feeling here that it's there for the people more often than not.

Thank you for saying it

No. Nobody wants to string you up. However, you will probably never get laid with that attitude.

Judith Butler has mentioned in an interview with Owen (search youtube) that her (yes, she is a woman) mission is a new socialist system that would be led by "opressed groups". She has also proclaimed in the Catholic church is her number 1 enemy and that she wants to crush the ideals of traditional pair bonding and family. That would be the end of Western civilization and it is on its way. Birth rates are collapsing already.

Oh yeah, have you not heard of hate speech legislation.. or are you just passive aggressively pretending you don't know it exists? ​@@f0xygem

That's a great idea. I keep a lot of oils prone to rancidity in the fridge, and also hemp seed and ground flaxseed for this same reason!

This comment is packed with generalization about broad classes of people based on labeling them in categories. I know enough people and have enough life experience to know that these categories aren't anywhere near as clean or well-defined as your comment suggests. And more importantly, labeling people in categories is not how I operate, and I don't think it's particularly constructive, so I'm not really going to engage with it and I would say, if you want to engage in this sort of discourse, my channel is not the place for you. This channel is a place where I work to break outside of boxes, break down generalizations, and discuss issues individually, showing the range of human experiences. As such, whenever I use a label such as "left" in the video, please hear that I am using the label only in the most casual sense, I'm trying to use it loosely to make clear what I'm talking about. Like I said in the other comment, if it's unclear, please ask for clarification and I'd be glad to clarify. But I'm not interested in going down the road you are steering people down in this comment. It's off-topic and any further comments that are framed in this way will be deleted and I will hide people from the channel if necessary.

​@@AlexZorach You may not have intended to engender the sort of response, but I can see where this fellow thought that you were going in this direction.

If you're talking about upper middle class left wing whites then you're absolutely correct. I grew up in one of those ultra wealthy subdivisions I remember when they all used to vote Republican. I actually think you're dead on when you mention Ukraine and Gaza

Well said. Your comment was wasted on him. I didn't hear much objection from Feminists about Gaza or Ukraine. Or about terms like "economic reductionist"...because they probably invented it. Furthermore, intersectionality is a blueprint for incremental politics, in contrast to the universal aims of Socialism.

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.

Thanks for the clarification of the spoiling rates of different fats, i.e. polyunsaturated spoiling fastest, monounsaturated intermediate, and then saturated slowest. That pattern makes sense with all the patterns I've seen in oils. I'm aware about the smoke point issue, that was just me mispeaking, flaxseed has a low smoke point, not a high one. I just was lazy and didn't want to re-record a segment and cut / edit it out just for that one mistake. I did correct it in the captions / subtitles if someone has them on!

It's not just taxes that pay for this stuff. It's retirement accounts, and billionaires, and direct donation drives through PACs.

Yeah, I think private prisons are an example of big government that sets up broken incentives. Because of the profit motive, private prisons create an incentive to put more people in prison and/or keep them there longer. And this poses obvious problems for the population. You are right too, that these private corporations are embedded to varying degrees in the finance sector. Interestingly though, exposure to the private prison industry is a bit more able to be compartmentalized if you are a conscientious investor. New York City fully divested their pension funds from private prisons in 2017, and Philadelphia and Portland OR have done so as well. Several prominent universities too, including Columbia and the U. California system have done so too. There has been growing talk in investment circles too, of divestment, like Forbes published a 2021 article aimed at individuals. They highlight the Prison Free Funds analyzer: prisonfreefunds.org/ I am very concerned with this issue and have been for a very long time. The reason I haven't made a video about it yet is that I don't really think I have much to add. There is already a lot of activism on the issue, and it has momentum, and I've supported it myself in a long list of ways. I encourage others to do so. I'm not really sure anything I could say would offer any new insights. Do you think that the audience of my channel might not know some of the things I know about this topic though? If you think it would make a difference, maybe I could talk about this issue in the future. I try to focus my efforts where I think I could make the most difference and I don't always know which videos are going to reach which people. I want to have the biggest positive impact possible!

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?