DocWatts

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.

@Fleetinglife Awesome and informative write up. The idea of a revolutionary vanguard is mercifully left in the past, though it's somewhat understandable why it arose within the context it did. Not surprising at all that SD-Red / Blue ended up winning that power struggle, considering the desperation of the Survival Conditions at that time. It's an interesting counter factual to ponder how things could have turned out had Kerensky's Provisional Government been able to build enough of a basis of legitimacy to transition in to a social democracy, or had one of the other ideological wings been better at playing the political game than Lenin.

Also a system that's held afloat by suppressing a large chunk of the political spectrum is going to have substantial negative consequences and necessarily be authoritarian in nature. For Market Socialism to work the population needs to consent to its implementation and be willing to defend it within a democratic framework. Which probably necessitates a societal center of gravity at or near Green to be sustainable. But the attractors in developed countries are moving towards Green, so it's far from an unrealistic or unattainable prerequisite.

Can't see any way how that could be abused *cough* If your proposed system can't be implemented within a pluralistic democratic framework it's probably not worth advocating for.

Those are excellent case studies for the purposing of demonstrating that market socialism can work, but because the system hasn't been adopted on a country wide scale in a large developed nation like Germany or the US, there are still several unknowns and it behooves those of us who see merit in such a system to be honest about that. One can't just assume there won't be difficulties scaling this system up. That doesn't mean it's not worth advocating for, rather that we should use case studies that exist to inform how Market Socialism could be implemented in other contexts. Achieving such a system within a democratic framework is going to different than doing so within a relatively isolated nondemocratic country. Which is why I myself see gradual and measured implementation as a better path forward, most likely within the frame of a Social Democracy.

@LfcCharlie4 Noam Chomsky (a libertarian socialist) had an interesting response when confronted by a self professed Leninist during a Q &A session following one of his lectures.

Multinational corporations directly benefit from keeping the third world from developing, because it's a source of cheap and easily exploitable labor. They can also pay far less than full market share for resources that are extracted from very poor countries. They can benefit from the opening of developing countries as new markets for their goods, regardless of whether its to the detriment of the receiving country whose local industries aren't developed enough to compete with foreign imports. Institutions like the IMF and World Bank use debt as leverage to foster unequal exchange between the developing and the developed world. Multinational corporations lobby state governments to interfere with the development of poor nations, and prevent them from doing things like nationalizing natural resources, erecting protectionist trade barriers, or instituting labor laws. Naomi Klein wrote about this extensively in Shock Doctrine (which is on the book list I believe), and details how countries like Russia in the 90s were devastated by these practices. Even if Social Democracies such as Norway or Denmark don't directly participate in Imperialism, multinational corporations operating within their borders still benefit from the Imperialist practices and institutions put in to practice by countries like the United States. Consumers benefit from a flow of cheap goods made by people in countries with incredibly low wages and non-existent labor laws. In countries like the United States, this flow of cheap goods is used to 'subsidize' and let people survive to some degree on poverty wages payed by huge employers like WalkMart and McDonalds. Corporations are allowed to do this because the current way of running a large business is as a completely undemocratic and unaccountable syndicate, which uses the incentive structure of Capitalism to capture political institutions within governments to lobby for their private interests (up to and including imperialism). Generally it's a small handful of people making these decisions, and it's much harder to imagine how an organization that's run democratically and with transparency could condone half of the evil shit that many of these transnationals are up to. A socio-economic system such as Market Socialism where private industry is far more democratic and not given the opportunity to capture political systems by amassing enormous amounts of wealth and influence, would be far more limited in the ways it could motivate States to interfere in the developing world.