Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Our Elites Have Lost Their Minds. Western Civilisation is in Danger if We Don't Defend its Values." video.

Part 2 The difference between these traditions is really between Kant's notion of the "problem" of the other, and Hegel's. for Hegel the problem of the other essential concern the self and other as in a struggle for recognition and identity through mutual conflict. This is where the modern left really come in and recognition become an issue and tactic and strategy of "forced" recognition. Thus there seems little difference for them between respect and coerced "respect or coerced recognition and voluntary and consented and responsible recognition and respect. With their main ready to hand contextual tool: the law and positive right they consider the law as forcing recognition or at least keeping people away with respect to its content. The distinction between recognition of someone acting with respect for the other and acting under a legal force is centred around, not whether the agent agrees or has such attitudes with action but just whether they are acting merely in accord with the law. It is primarily concerned with outward behaviour and only concerned with attitudes and beliefs so far as these effect behaviour and can be modified by educational/psychological ordinances. Now it is obvious then that the Hegelian conflict basis is not some philosophy of weakness but the opposite. In this then the discourse of weakness or perhaps its Marxist/Leninist variant of vulnerability, is a ready to hand contextual tool of affordance. For Clausewitz this s a major strategy for Nietzsche I think he sees it both as a powerful tool of the weak but also one perhaps of resentment.
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Part 4 The second point is that following the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity inflicted on the bottom of society, what working class poor people would now want to fight in an army say for a system that privileges the women and minorities and the rich and middle class. The traditional problem for the middle class is to keep convincing the poor to fight for a system that is obviously biased towards those who don’t fight. I believe, but I can’t prove it of course, that they imagine they can so shame men (mixing the semantics of politics law and common morality), that we react by rebelling, and want to claim, voluntarily, that male violence can be a necessary good. We want to react to being accused that traditional males is bad by showing in action that we can fight for the women. it’s a simple psychological trick and a common one at that. You get men to fight by contextual shaming and the residue habit of protecting women. In this way we think we are going to prove the feminists wrong by being heroes for them. The feminists say if you are a real man then prove it. Prove us wrong. I think you are confusing the rhetoric as earnest with the praxis which is contextually sensitive political affordance. That is, if I may, I think you are confusing the handing over of a white flower with the handing over of a white feather. Most ordinary left activists though have no idea they are in earnist, but the middle class elite to various different degrees are not.
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Part 1I too gave up on Question Time many years ago, but i did look at one episode recently and by chance it was the one which had Konstantin Kisin as a guest/panellist. I was familiar with him from Triggernometry, and I did think he great on QT. Now to move onto the content of the discussion, i have noticed here and elsewhere a critique of the left as weakening people, as weakening the West, as weakening democracy, as weakening freedom, and perhaps weakening the state. this has at least two forms: the weakening at the intellectual academic level of perhaps relativism, postmodernism, pluralism, and into politics as multiculturalism, now called diversity, and the philosophy of this as openness to the other, an obligation to the radical other of understanding and recognition. These really emerge out of the Kantian distinction between the schemas of knowledge as representation (presentation) as "phenomena", and the thing in itself, and "noumena". Kant expresses this phenomenal world as subjectively constituted, but under the condition of real objective reference. What happened to this after is Hegel thought Kant's objective schema were working with a mere historical moment and orientation and so subjective here is under the sway of a greater level of historical and social relativism or context dependency. This contextual criticism from Hegel (already inaugurated by Hamman with respect to different languages) has continued in many various manifestations from Nietzsche, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Williams, Robert Pippin and many others. today still in the linguistic context, it has the form of a denial that indexically can be captured in linguistics or that a name and concept can determine future use like rules as rails (from i think Anscombe's reading of the Wittgenstein's Tractatus). These are mostly followers of the Anglo American philosophical tradition and so the relativism is not just a position of the radical left.
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Part 3 So I think your discussion has brought too much into the left propaganda. It’s not “snowflakes”, as they used to say, weakening the nation. These are tough people representing themselves as weak and using say the distinction of men and women as vulnerable and dangerous respectively. This is the key tactic of the feminist and marginality left. It is purely a praxis of affordance. The post 2010 political situation allowed the academic and intellectual left to draw on the context of marginal feminism and Marxism, and to bring this to the for. But the strategy I don’t think is feminist. I imagine in the reified networks of academics they already knew there were going to be crisis and class division and geo political problems. Feminism and the shaming of men, and the demonization of men particularly white men, was something of a long fringe tradition of the feminist left giving the impression that this post 2010 approach was just a continuation of the right direction of history, of progress. But it was I think a tool to divide the losers of the post 1990 consensus against each other and then to first exculpate the rich but over debted world of the middle class from there central place in 2008 banking crisis. Then following a couple of years they can claim to be the saviours of say women and minorities against a “tradition of violence from white men”. To say this is a culture of weakness is too buy into to their rhetoric.
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part 5 The psychological trick turns on the claim that "men are violent and dangerous" it is a bind because they have expanded violence to include argument that does not fully listen and understand them. We are then presented with a false opposition either you are violently disagreeing or agreeing. and now the agreement and understanding is seen really as weakness under the Hegelian opposition. there are only to ways out one is acquiescence and passivity and the abandonment of traditional roles, the other to demonstrate that male violence can be a good thing even necessary, and if you claim this then you are obliged to go and fight. In fact the endless pictures of women and children leaving Ukraine and all their experiences on tv i think is meant to get us to say "what about the brave men?" "you are forgetting the men" "you are silencing the men" etc for fighting but of course to raise this is to fall into the trap they have set, of obliging us to go and fight for what ever cause they select...to prove we have the man hood as the negation of one pole of what they claim to be an absolute binary. my interest lies primarily here in how the left were able to conflate and monsterise their legal political philosophy vocabulary and praxis with the traditional moral and ethical vocabulary they themselves cannot constantly hold except as a device except in their gender war with men. War is politics by other means? I mean having their cake and eating it too can only go on for so long.
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