Youtube comments of Ryan Chapman (@realryanchapman).

  1. As you can probably tell, this was not a small effort. I spent eight months on this video: five across 2023 and also the first three months of 2024. I hope that it was time well spent. I say this on all of my videos but cannot emphasize it enough here; the only reason I'm able to take on a production like this is because of people who choose to support me either on Patreon or through the membership program here. It's the only way I was able to make a living doing this work throughout the quiet production months. So as always, a huge thank you to all of you doing that. If that's not possible and you still want to support me, consider sharing this with someone who you think might appreciate it. I'm sure criticism will come in and that I'll have notes to add, but for now that's all. Enjoy! Edit: I just wanted to say that I'm touched by the outpouring of support for this video so far. I feel it's best to not be on here constantly replying to comments, but I do see and appreciate it. Thank you. Checking back about 6 months later: as a last note, judging by some comments, videos like this seem to attract - in relatively small numbers, but still - a certain type of person. A type of person who is keen to proclaim that Hitler has been historically wronged, and even that the Second World War should be blamed instead, one way or another, on Jews, and perhaps on democracies. Anything that says otherwise, no matter how well sourced or reasoned, is lies and propaganda. They use slogans like 'history is written by the victors' and perhaps posit a theory that bankers actually started the war. Bankers started the war (?).. bankers are Jews (?).. therefore Jews started the war. I don't think it convinces anyone besides the ones already saying it, and to me is sort of like a historic version of Flat Earth Theory. It falls apart quickly with even some basic questions (in this model.. financing comes in place first... then people find reasons to fight? in Japan, Italy, and Germany...? financing from... private banks?... none of it works at all). Basically I think it's more like a cult of thought than a serious academic theory. I don't know if it's worth making a video about, but I thought I'd mention it here. It seems like virtually all the people saying this refuse to actually watch the video and turn it off after the opening sentences. I doubt they're reading this here either. But if that is you and you are reading this, I'd just say maybe consider actually watching the video, and try to be open-minded about learning something from it. - Ryan
    5400
  2. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can, and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. If anyone is wondering how the networks stayed in business at the time, they had other programming that easily offset the losses that their news divisions took. Similarly, the NYT had other sections to their paper (sports, finance, culture), and when people bought the paper for those sections, they got those news along with it, regardless of how neutral their news was. Still, the NYT was the least profitable of the major three American papers at the time (The LA Times, The Washington Post & The NYT). They didn't care though. For them it was about principles and the prestige that came along with it. - Ryan
    1600
  3. This video took about four months to make and wouldn't be possible without my supporters on Patreon. So I want to start by giving a huge thanks to them. If you'd like to chip in and support me check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below: I designed 'we think with the blood of our nation' to be a memorable phrase that can help people identify fascism. That being said, it's not formulated like a formal definition and needs more nuances to stand as one. So I regret calling it even something that resembles one. The phrasing was meant to invoke a fanaticism behind a singular nationalist mass movement. Fascism does not tolerate other principles conflicting with its nationalism (something that distinguishes it from more moderate forms of nationalism that might be content, for example, existing in a democracy). Fascism's nationalism wants to impose itself on others. Other ways of thinking are obstacles to fascists that need to be removed. Political or economic systems like socialism or capitalism, as stated in the video, are only tolerated if they're believed to be helping the fascist cause. They're dropped, attacked or modified as needed. The 'we' in 'we think with the blood of our nation' means a collective of people thinking together as a political mass movement. Fascism has to be in the context of mass politics. A context where the mass of people (nationals) within a political order are (at least in rhetoric) considered sovereign. It's not something used to describe the orders of emperors or monarchs, who hold themselves to be sovereign - the highest political authority. Fascists leaders, by contrast, hold (again, at least in rhetoric) the nation to be more important than themselves. Everything they do, they say, they do for the nation. They merely have the capabilities to act in its best interests. A tighter, albeit more awkward rephrasing might go something like: 'We think together with the blood of our nation and will tolerate nothing else.' The phrase really just gets your foot in the door for understanding and identifying fascism, similar to how 'the abolition of private property' gets your foot in the door for understanding and identifying communism. Translating it into a formal definition would look something like: 'fascism is a political ideology that conceives ideal political life as being wholly governed by a singular conception of national consciousness.' Another, quicker explanation would be to call it nationalism that aspires to totalitarianism. You could also think of it as the rough right-wing equivalent to communism. Communists want to total political control over their state for a single conception of a socialist cause, just as fascists want total control over their state for a singular conception of a nationalist cause. I also think that Roger Griffin's definition is serviceable, but again it's complex. If you want to remember Griffin's more easily, I think you can do fine reducing it down to the last part: 'populist ultra-nationalism.' To use that, you have to understand what populism is (I've made a video on it). More self-criticism: I simplified the conditions in Germany before Nazi rule down to hyperinflation and constraints from the Treaty of Versailles. There were about 16 years of turmoil between WWI and the Nazis coming into power and I wish I spent at least another sentence or two fleshing that context out. Hyperinflation was a factor behind the early success of the Nazi party and led Hitler to mount a failed coup in 1923, but it only lasted about two years. When Hitler came into power, he did it by riding a wave of despondency coming from another economic crisis: the Great Depression. The Treaty was still seen as a major villainous constraint on Germany at the time, but there was more emphasis on it being a national humiliation and military constraint than an economic constraint. The broad point is that economic conditions were quite bad (in all but a few years in the mid-late '20s), and Hitler (and many Germans) believed that Germany was being humiliated and needed to rise to its glorious potential. Fascism was their means of doing it. If you want to hear a detailed explanation of Hitler's rise to power, I spend about 30 minutes straight talking about it in my 'How World War 2 Began' video. Some commenters also think I claimed that there have only been two fascist movements: interwar Italy and Germany. What I actually said is that they are the only two movements that have remotely uncontroversially earned the label (a point widely accepted among fascism scholars). You can make the case that other movements have been fascist. My point was that the fascism described in this video (which stuck close to our accepted scholarly understanding of it) should be the basis for identifying fascism elsewhere. Spain under Franco is the next 'fascism' people tend to pick, but that label tends to come from foreigners and not the Spanish themselves (at least from that time period). Most professional analysis I've seen rejects the label and argues that Franco's fascism was superficial. They claim he adopted fascist imagery and slogans to (successfully) get war support from Italy and Germany, and if you look at what he believed, his movement, his rule, then you'll see it wasn't fascist. More of a conservative military dictatorship. I might make a video on it at some point. I saw some people say Hitler wasn't a Catholic or take offense to the passing remark I made about his Catholicism. I think it's safe to say that he wasn't a Catholic in the traditional sense, but he was raised Catholic, claimed he believed in God (shown in the video), and also claimed to be a Catholic fairly late in his life. As he put it to his army adjutant Gerhard Engel in 1941: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" (from Engels' diary: 'At The Heart of the Reich'). I called it 'his Catholicism' and left it at that. One last thing: it seems a lot of people think 'National Socialism isn't Fascism,' which gets some basic things wrong and I think is a message being spread by other YouTubers. My response to that is in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gfYbEk6rBY&t=2s - Ryan
    1500
  4. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. This video dealt with the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the broadest sense possible (historically and geographically). So I was concerned with enduring concepts seen through a global lens. You might have noticed that I didn't even mention the US in this video. The US didn't play a major role in the development of socialism. The most remarkable thing about it, according to my research, was actually the lack of socialism developing there. It was the major country that seemed to defy the trend when the rest of the world was somewhat turning towards socialism (around 100-140 years ago). The US has the Democratic Socialists of America now, but they are small players in both American politics and socialism abroad. From my understanding they're currently closer to Marx and Fabian socialism (having an end goal of 'complete socialism') than democratic socialism typical elsewhere, like Europe. So they, to some extent, defy the generalizations I made of democratic socialism in this video, but they still generally insist on operating in properly democratic political spaces. Categorizations are historically pretty messy within socialism (socialists often claim labels mean things that conflict with other labels that other socialists use, both in other movements and other points in time), and like I said at the end, democratic socialism means different things to different people. If you're looking for one modern authoritative statement of democratic socialist thought, the DSA is not the association to provide it. The Labour Party's updated Clause IV is a better bet (which I read in the video), and yes the Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. Tony Blair (who oversaw the change to Clause IV): 'The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party.' For those who want to read more about Marx's theory of historical development, he saw it occurring through the lens of 'dialectics,' (a Hegelian idea) which is when you interpret the world through conflicting, opposite forces that resolve into a greater, more perfect whole. That's why both Hegel and Marx thought the world was becoming more perfect over time. 'Stages of the dialectic' were being passed through, and things were being resolved into greater and more perfect wholes over time. That's also why Marx's analysis was framed almost entirely through the conflict of two classes: the bourgeoisie and proletariat. He saw them as two opposites in conflict that would resolve into a greater whole: the dictatorship of the proletariat, bringing forth communism. So Marx believed dialectics provide some sort of penetrating insight into the world, even giving him insight into the inevitable future of humanity. He thought Hegel's dialectics were too mystical by being based in Spirit, and he thought he corrected that by basing his theory in matter. Both dialectics and Aristotelian essences are ideas that modern philosophers (like Russell) call 'scholastic.' They're inherently vague but nonetheless treated as precise by academics/theoreticians. That being said, I recently read an excellent biography on Marx by Jonathan Sperber, and he claimed that Marxists historically overemphasize the importance of dialectics to classical Marxism. That's something I've thought myself and I agreed with him. Marx himself rarely and usually only indirectly discussed them. I think the aspects of Marx that I covered in the video are the more important points and dialectics is the next level of detail if you're interested in understanding his underlying logic. You might have also noticed in Lenin's quotes that he used the term 'social democracy' for his style of socialism. It's a term that Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and democratic socialists all claimed to describe their style of socialism, making it pretty meaningless in the context of socialism at the time (why I ignored it). I think there's more agreement now that it means something akin to what I described as democratic socialism here, but that in turn has led to endless fighting about whether or not there's a difference between social democracy and democratic socialism. Bernie Sanders, for example, announces himself as a democratic socialist, and it leads to fighting over whether he's a democratic socialist or actually a social democrat. I think it's an unnecessary and messy distinction, and think democratic socialism covers the concept well enough. If you ask the question: 'what single term covers all socialists who vow to work within properly democratic systems?' The answer is democratic socialists. The term social democracy is too fraught to be that single term. It's been used historically in too many loose and contradictory ways. That being said, you can use 'social democrats' to describe democratic socialists and people will now generally understand you. Others say social democrat means you specifically want a mix of capitalism and welfarism, which seems like it's a line socialists further left have taken to claim that any socialists that endorse any privatization aren't actually socialists (they argue that they're correctly called social democrats). By that logic the Labour Party and Swedish Social Democrats aren't socialists. Why? Because they don't want to completely abolish private property. The same goes for Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and Venezuelan socialists, again, because they all endorse some amount of privatization. So this paints socialism in a pretty tight box, which defies the overwhelming trend in socialism in the last 100 years or so. From there your perspectives are 1) the one I laid out in this video, which most socialists around the world more or less agree with, or 2) socialism is now a small movement (made up of those who still want 'complete socialism') with few modern political successes, who have to somehow claim that all these self-described socialists around the world (like Bernstein and those in Europe) are in fact labeling themselves incorrectly. To me this is akin to saying that the only 'true' liberals around the world are classical liberals (wanting small government), and anyone who deviates from classical liberalism isn't actually a liberal. You have to let political philosophies evolve with the times, and socialism has done that (as has liberalism). On that note, democracy wasn't consistently used as a meaningful term by socialists until democratic socialism came around. Before then, it mostly was used by socialists to indicate a claim that their policies represented the 'will of the people,' a legacy that came from Rousseau's Social Contract. For one, that alone doesn't work as a conception for democracy. Even for a basic definition of democracy, power needs to be broken up beyond just the commanding majority. Think of what can happen if a majority can do whatever it wants to a minority. The other problem is that socialists at the time didn't tend to articulate a method for proving that their policy actually represented the will of the people. They just said it. The only methods that I'm aware of to date for establishing public opinion are polls and elections, and for either to work as a gauge for public opinion, they can't be held in a context where the population is under political duress. If disagreement or criticism is punished, then you can't expect to learn what people actually think. It was democratic socialists that insisted the word 'democratic' be used meaningfully in the context of their socialism, (meaning political opposition isn't suppressed, elections are open, and freedom of criticism is secured) making them the first to consistently use the word correctly in the tradition, at least to my knowledge. Last note - some say the video became biased when it covered Lenin, apparently thinking I was too harsh on him. He is heavily propagandized in some circles and is heavily villainized in others. In such circumstances it can be hard to tell who he really was and what he was really about. For our purposes here I wanted to give a straightforward explanation of his main contribution to socialism (Marxism-Leninism). If you think the way he came off was too harsh, I'd recommend researching the period I described in the video when he set the standard for repression in the Soviet Union shortly after coming into power. It's called the 'Red Terror.' I tried to give Lenin some humane nuances but that's the man we're dealing with. He used authoritarianism to bring about socialism, making it suddenly and for the first time an official ideology for a major world power. That was his main contribution to the subject. - Ryan
    1300
  5. A bunch of comments on this one asked why I didn't deal with categorizing the Nazis or Fascists as just plain 'socialists' over being nationalists or generic fascists. The reason why I didn't address that directly in this video is because I didn't see anyone commenting that on my last one. People either claimed that 'National Socialism isn't Fascism' or that we should just call them 'National Socialists.' I also dealt with the socialist label to some extent in my first video. Calling the Nazis socialists (and not nationalists or fascists) seems to be getting popular, and I might make a video to address it. For now, I'll do it here. The claim has a little weight but ultimately doesn't work. First of all: the main ideological pillar of Nazism is nationalism. All Nazis were fervent nationalists, from the beginning to end of the movement. Nationalism was what drove their action and policy far more than any other ideology. Nazism was a direct result of German nationalism that had been developed since the late 18th century. Read Herder, Fichte, Arndt. They were the thinkers who set up a peculiar brand of nationalism in Germany. The Nazis carried that brand of nationalism to an extreme conclusion. What I just said is a point that is unanimously agreed upon by all scholarship I have ever read, and also confirmed by my own research. Understanding that will make far more sense out of the Nazis than any kind of attempt to connect them to socialism. Getting into it anyway: If we're assigning a primary label to a movement, we're assigning it based on what drives them, and as I said, the Nazis were primarily motivated by nationalism, both in theory and in practice. Their nationalism drove their politics and overrode everything else. Hitler: 'For me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland.' (at 26:34 in my longer fascism vid). You can find endless quotes of him saying that everything he does he does for Germany. That his goal for politics is to make Germany rise again and establish it as a great power. It was a goal, he said over and over, that he'd dedicate his life to, that he'd die for. It's not subtle. Going further: the Nazis were obsessed with the idea of Germans coming together as a national unit (the 'German race') and winning a Darwinian battle against the other nations, Germany strong again and expanding its living space. For them, economic policy was whatever it needed to be to fulfill that goal. It could be a socialistic policy if they believed it was good for their nation. Or it could be capitalistic. Or they could act like socialists if it meant that it would help them get into power, but then perhaps at that point socialist policy would not be practical, and in that case they'd pursue something else. This is an important point that is often taken out of context. From the very earliest years of the Nazi party, Hitler told other Nazis not to listen to the platform. The platform is unimportant. The only important goal is getting power. Power for what? German national rejuvenation. They had to be flexible to reach that goal, which meant they could be found saying any number of things. This fooled very few in Germany (or in the world) at the time, but has since meant that people can take aspects of Nazi history, present them out of context, and make them seem like socialists. They never stuck to the platform for the sake of socialist ideology, but they were rigid about sticking to their nationalist goals. Their 'socialism' in other words was subservient to their nationalism. There were some in the party that were further left and wanted to see a genuinely socialist angle for the sake of ideology in the party, and Hitler actively fought against those people. If they ever seemed to pose a threat to his power, he acted out against them. He either converted them (like in the case of Goebbels), or exiled, marginalized, or even eventually killed them. Hitler's take on the party was always far to the right. His views were so far right that as he gained popularity, he pushed German politics on the whole to the right. Again, this is not just a modern understanding. It was the dominant understanding in Germany and in the world at the time. When Hitler ran against Hindenburg, for example, in the presidential election in 1932, Hitler was understood as the right-wing candidate, and Hindenburg was understood as the left-wing candidate, who gained the support of the German left to prevent Hitler from winning. Hindenburg was an old-fashioned conservative from the military. Him being branded left-wing was considered an absurd shift in German politics, but that was how far right Hitler was. They did lean into socialist language and spoke as socialists at times on the campaign trail, but that was cynically done when they believed they were speaking to audiences who would be won over by it (working class audiences). Hitler himself ideologically pivoted depending on the audience. As he put it, before he went before a crowd he asked 'what record must I use? The national? The social? Or the sentimental? Of course, I have them all in my suitcase.' (quoted in Toland's 'Hitler' biography). If you quote him or the Nazis out of context, they may appear to be socialists at times, but that's quite literally falling for cynical Nazi campaign tactics. If you understand what was happening in context it's obvious that the socialist angle was largely cynical, and certainly subordinate to nationalism. This was widely understood at the time (and still today). The Nazis, on the whole, were far-right nationalists, not left-wing socialists. Richard Evans in 'The Coming of the Third Reich' called the Nazi's socialism 'pseudo-socialism' and I think that's appropriate. We could go further to answer who socialists are. Socialists are primarily concerned with egalitarianism. They want a more equal society. That's the distinguishing trait that motivates them. Inequality outrages them. Private property is typically seen as the cause of inequality, and centralizing the means of production was simply a popular method for socialists to achieve their goal of socioeconomic equality (for a while anyway). Now let's look at the Nazis. To put it mildly, they weren't egalitarians. The main principles they were overwhelmingly concerned with were nationalism, totalitarianism and, for the Nazis, racism (in a nationalist context). All three of those concepts are based in hierarchical thinking. Hitler also promoted a social Darwinian view when it came to labor - that hard work leads to success and should be appropriately rewarded (and also backed by private property). The Nazis, on the whole, were especially (even outrageously) inegalitarian. They claimed unequal human worth as a principle, and said that due to lesser worth, many in their society didn't even deserve to live (that included Jewish people and various other 'undesirables.' A point made explicit at 28:50 in my longer vid). In the very least they believed that many 'less valuable' Germans (like cripples) didn't deserve welfare. All of that makes calling the Nazis socialists - if you're trying to use the word meaningfully - misleading at best. Really just wrong. So why do people believe the Nazis were socialist? They did implement many economic policies that we relate with socialism. But they implemented those policies for reasons that little to do with commitment to socialist ideology, and everything to do with commitment to nationalist ideology. Others point to the largely superficial connections the Nazis had to socialism, like the word 'Socialist' in their party name. Again, that came from their early years when socialists were more prominent in the party, and also was part of their effort to win over more of the electorate. Saying they're socialists simply because they have the word 'socialist' in their name is akin to saying North Korea is democratic simply because they have the word 'democratic' in their country's name. It's absurd if you're knowledgeable about the subject. The Nazis openly framed socialists and communists as their natural enemies and held a general attitude of murderousness towards them. In short: the people who call the Nazis socialists - and not nationalists/fascists - have not discovered a deeper, more penetrating understanding of Nazism. It's the opposite. They're being fooled by the Nazi's veneer of socialism. Their 'socialism' was superficial and subordinate to their nationalism/fascism. As you spend time with Nazism, the thinness of that veneer becomes more and more obvious, which is why people at the time who lived with Nazism weren’t tricked by it, and professional historians and academics are also not tricked by it. To me, hearing that the Nazis were socialists and/or leftists is similar to hearing the claim that the '69 moon landing was faked. It's interesting to consider why people think that, but if you spend time learning the subject outside of solely consuming media bent to sell that one angle it falls apart. If you want to relate fascism to socialism and point to similarities in some tactics and economic policies, and maybe even call the Nazis economically socialistic in a loose sense (roughly referring to some of their economic policies, even though others conflicted with it), without putting much weight on that word, then that works to some extent, but overall, they weren't socialists. They were nationalists and fascists who sometimes used socialist policy and terminology for those purposes. - Ryan
    1000
  6. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can, and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. Many are questioning the 'rule of law in the USA' section of this video after the July 1st 2024 SCOTUS ruling, which said that presidents are presumed to be immune from prosecution for official acts as outlined in the constitution. Frankly I don't disagree. It does seem to throw the concept of rule of law in the USA into question. We're in an unprecedented moment in American history, and the best I can say here is that we'll have to see how it plays out in practice. But it's also worth saying, for all of those who seem to think the United States is basically a lawless state when it comes to restraining its leaders, it might help to gain some perspective by noticing that since the publication of this video Xi Jinping has consolidated China under himself and apparently abolished term limits. He was able to do that with officially zero disapproval from the CCP. The United States may be going down the same path, but law still does hold power over its leaders, and dramatically so compared to the situation in China. Moving on, I want to add some clarity to my statement at the end about China not being a warlike country. I was feeling pressure to wrap up the video and was probably too brief there. 1) I was referring to the last, say, 2000 years of Chinese history, roughly since China unified under the Qin dynasty. 2) I'm talking about a historical great power, and was considering it nonaggressive in that context. You can point to plenty of tiny powers, especially with short histories (say, Ecuador), with no real aggression to speak of at all, but it's much more novel for a major power with a long history to have so little aggression. China has, throughout most of those 2000 years, mostly kept to itself. It has been aggressive on occasion, particularly to countries bordering it, but those instances are rare when comparing China to other great powers. Also, like I said in the video, that might be changing. China might be becoming more aggressive in the 21st century. That's yet to be born out in a hot war, but many argue that we're seeing signs of it. Hopefully that added some clarity and nuance. I saw many comments taking issue with me saying the CCP is above the law. Most seem to be coming to the conclusion that the law is above the CCP by pointing at cases where members of the CCP are tried by the court system (like when members are tried for corruption). If that's your view, it seems that you're not understanding the concept of rule of law. I made a follow-up video elaborating on that: https://youtu.be/RK5X-tIA_AI Lastly, if you're wondering why I didn't cover Legalism in this video, I saw that as being one 'ism' too far for an introductory video. The basic dynamic between Legalists and Confucians was that Legalists tried to push China towards a country governed by law (though this never translated into rule of law, where even the highest political authorities are constrained by law), and the Confucians tried to push China in a direction where elders and leaders ruled via their discretion, not law. Influence from Legalists meant that China had a fairly strong legal tradition from fairly early on, but never rule of law, which is still true to this day. - Ryan
    985
  7. I want to start with a big thanks, as usual, to everyone who thanks and supports my work. Watching this back a bit later, there's one concept I wish I brought up in this video. The salary of presidents is not very high (around $400,000) considering the importance of the job. It may seem like a lot of money to the rest of us, but if you're really the best and brightest of your generation, you could make far more money elsewhere. Why risk your career going for the job of president if it pays so much less than top-tier American jobs elsewhere? It's just one more deterrent in a long list of deterrents already laid out here. Of course you can make a lot of money by being president, or even running for president, but through means that are typically seen by the public as unsavory, which further hurts the relationship between the institution of the presidency and the public. So what type of person would go for this job in the state that it's in? Something to think about. It seems the only other thing to address here is concept of money in politics more generally, and the people who think that the problem can be boiled down to the influence of big money over politicians. I think it's safe to say there's a case for that, to some extent, but some presidents rely on that kind of money and are more prone to that kind of influence than others. Some presidents really do have principles, morals and goals that they sincerely try to stick to throughout their tenure. Many even see themselves, and try to be leaders, who can represent the interests of Americans in a more pure fashion than, say, congressional representatives, who have big money more inherently tied into their work. The more you study individual presidents, the more obvious that is. So if you want to make the case that presidents are corrupted by money in politics, I think you have to make that on a more case-by-case basis, while this video tried to cover problems in a more generalizable fashion. - Ryan
    906
  8. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can, and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. Notes: I saw this as being a quick introduction to the psychology of political division. If you want something that covers it in more depth, I'd recommend The Righteous Mind. Haidt reads the audiobook himself and does a fantastic job, if that's appealing to you. I'm obviously not being paid to say that. I just think it's a great book. Edit: It also seems a lot of people misunderstood what I said in the video. To clarify, I didn't say that everyone is partially right about everything, or that we need to find a middle ground on all subjects. I said: try to consider the other person's point of view and the possibility that opinions besides ours might actually be right, and be aware that we have our own biases that tend to make that process difficult, narrowing our perspective. - Ryan
    583
  9. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. Notes: I didn't talk about fraud in this video. Here's the scoop: We think we lose around 50-70 billion a year from fraud, most of it healthcare fraud. That's significant. But it's easier to measure losses from fraud than losses from inefficiency or from waste related to lobbying and interest groups. It's also the easiest to understand. If the government has a big pot of money and relatively loose security around that pot, people will take advantage and steal some (by claiming disabilities they don't actually have, for example). Increasing security helps solve the problem. I watched a podcast by The Office Of Inspector General that said - as of 2019 - we have 1600 people working for the OIG to 'root out fraud, waste and abuse' related to healthcare. That seems like a low number to me. I also suspect that if we made reforms that made our government more competent and brought more talented people into government, they'd be more motivated to stop fraud and would find more elegant ways to do it. This video did not go into why governments are more wasteful than private organizations (no profit incentive, not spending their own money). My focus was more specific. I said: given that it is a government (which assumes we're not thinking about privatizing whatever the government is doing), these are aspects of that government, and things that are happening in that society that are causing inefficiency and waste. I considered this a subject that most people do not want to spend long watching (books about budgeting problems, for example, don't exactly fly off the shelves), so I had to made decisions about what to include and what not to include in order to keep the runtime down and reach a broader audience. It's also worth saying that I didn't mean to imply that other governments around the world aren't wasteful, or that the US has the most wasteful government on the planet. When I said things like 'X makes the government uniquely wasteful,' I meant that the government is highly wasteful in a manner that's distinct to the US. Not that the US is more wasteful than anywhere else. I try to make my phrasing as clear as possible and anticipate how I might be misinterpreted, but I'm still learning. Another point that I wish I brought up: politicians are also incentivized to be friendly and accommodating towards lobbyists because they (in the last 50 years or so) tend to seek work in the lobbying field once they're out of office, which is called the 'revolving door.' If politicians, while in office, develop friendly relationships with lobbying firms, one would think that would facilitate finding work there upon retirement. Again, there could be a temptation to pass legislation suggested by the lobbying firms that isn't necessarily a good use of money or in the public interest, if it seems like it will give said politician a path to a lucrative career once they're out of office. It's something that's hard to prove, but is regardless widely seen, even within Washington, as a big issue. One last thing: if you want to do your own research on what I talked about in the second half of this video, I'd suggest looking up 'rent-seeking' and 'the logic of collective action.' - Ryan
    571
  10. I think it's important to remember that the shift towards partisanship in the media was catering to audience demands. As the media moved left and right towards the end of the 60s and throughout the rest of the 20th century, audiences lapped it up, encouraging other media sources to also become more partisan. The (more or less) neutral news in the period before then actually lost money or barely made profits because it was so tepidly consumed by Americans. So blaming the media alone only gives you half the picture.
    570
  11. I thought I'd return with some follow-up thoughts. One thing that needs to be said is that Marx & Engels wrote a lot. Their writing was consistent, but not perfectly consistent. Stances on violence, war, and the preconditions for revolution fluctuated. Marx also wasn't the clearest writer, favoring emotional language over technical precision. On top of that, there were holes in their theory, or at least spotty parts, sometimes on important points (ex. what exactly does the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' mean? How can the dictatorship of the proletariat rule 'democratically?' What did Engels mean when he said the State would 'wither away?'). As a result, there is no universally agreed upon understanding of what classical Marxism actually is. Circles tend to form around different interpretations of it, each circle believing they hold the correct understanding of Marxism. That has led to a long history of disagreement on Marx and fighting among Marxists. Within that, I tried to stick with the closest we have to a standard understanding, using both primary and secondary sources. I tried to put as little of my own opinion into it as possible and to flag where I did, like my interpretation of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his means'. I think the part that rubbed the most people the wrong way was the claim that Marx's communism is essentially totalitarian. In my experience that's the standard explanation, and I did flag that some disagree with it. But I think it squares quite fully with his writing. There's no one sentence you can point to where he says 'this is a totalitarian society' (the word didn't exist yet), so you have to analyze what he said to get there. The communist society he described was one where communism was forced on the whole population. Just reading the Manifesto makes that clear, and the passages I cite in this video flesh that out more. They describe a society entirely permeated by communism, with no opposition, with communist politics heavily encroaching into the lives of all. Communists and Marx called that a 'free' society. That conception of a free society seems to have come from Rousseau's idea that society should be ruled by the 'general will,' which he laid out in his Social Contract. Once the general will of the people is determined (Rousseau did not say how that process should work, something he shares with Marx), then that general will needs to be forced upon the rest of the public. The general will is a monolithic guiding power that rules all, and that allows nothing to conflict with it. Everyone is 'forced to be free' as Rousseau put it. It's a peculiar conception of freedom. Rousseau acknowledged that, and quickly gave up trying to articulate what actually makes it a form of freedom. But that's the 'free' 'democratic' society Marx was describing that the dictatorship of the proletariat would create. Marx named the ruling idea that would guide the general will: communism. I'm describing totalitarianism. A society where communism shapes everything political. Communism is forced upon everyone to the extent deemed necessary by those in power (again, communists), in order to create a society free of class conflict/oppression. You could think about it this way: in a liberal/capitalist society, if you want to live your life as a communist, you're relatively free to do it. If you want to form a business with communist/socialist principles, go for it. If you want to form a commune, have at it. If you want to participate in politics as a communist, feel free to try it. You can really do pretty much whatever you want with your life, and participate in politics however you want (as long as you don't threaten violence). If you don't want to be political, that's fine too. Liberal societies do not have a vision, an end goal, that they try to push everyone toward. There's no utopia at the end of the tunnel. It's more or less a sandbox design for a society, and the people within them get to decide how they want to live their lives. In a communist society, everyone needs to be communist. That includes Marx's communism, which again forces itself onto the public with the goal of entirely shaping politics in order to eliminate class conflict. People are not cattle, so repression would be needed in order to accomplish that. It's possible that if a communist society existed for a long time, and communism was widely accepted by the public, communists would feel secure enough in their position to give political freedom and control over affairs back to the whole people, but as Bertrand Russell put it: 'this is a distant ideal, like the Second Coming; in the meantime, there is war and dictatorship, and insistence upon ideological orthodoxy.' (History of West. Phil. 790) If I'm wrong about what I just said, I've never seen anyone successfully articulate why - in the comments or anywhere in anything I've read. I think it's the closest we have to a standard explanation for good reason. Marx did endorse democratic practices by the Paris Commune, but that was when democracy brought about a result that he liked (voting was restricted to Paris and held at an especially radical time). I'm not aware of any examples of him endorsing democracy that brought about a result that went against his views. If you only endorse democracy that moves society towards socialism, and you condemn all other examples as 'bourgeois democracy,' it's hard to conclude you're in favor of democracy. I've never seen anyone deal with these things and still claim that he was democratic and not totalitarian. Also when socialists in Marx's time said they should spend their time pushing for gradual reforms, like expanding voting rights to the working class, Marx condemned it. He didn't want workers to have more of a say in a pluralistic, democratic society. He wanted class tensions to build until they exploded, ending with communists taking control of everything. I covered that in my in-depth socialism vid. Last point: I offended some by skipping Marx's economics. Some even say his claims entirely depend on his economics. I think that's an oversimplification. Some of his beliefs aren't verifiable or falsifiable by economics, like the claim that capitalism is the last form of society featuring class conflict, and that the next society will be communist. Also his core beliefs existed before his economics developed. He believed that capitalism was exploitative/alienating, that communism will be the next, preferable society, and he believed in historical materialism early in life (his 20s). He then spent the rest of his life developing his economic theory predicting the end of capitalism that we see in Capital. So his own beliefs did not depend on his economics in order to form. His economic theory came second, appearing to affirm beliefs he already had. That said, if you're interested in his economics, you can find explanations all over the internet. He's less politicized there. I may as well quickly lay out his theory and explain what I mean about it having mistakes. First, he thought that the amount of labor put into a product determines its value. Now imagine someone works for 10 hours. The worker creates product worth 10 hours of labor. But the worker isn't paid that amount. Let's say the worker created $100 worth of products in that 10 hours, but is only paid $50 in wages. The other $50 then is 'surplus value' i.e. profit for whoever owns the business. Crucially, the worker is only paid subsistence wages (from Ricardo's 'iron law of wages'), so the worker struggles and has no path to better their position in society through work. Others will take their job, so the worker can't bargain for more. The business owner then uses the $50 profit 'appropriated' (basically stolen) from the worker to expand their business. If that keeps up, the power dynamics in society will become more exaggerated. Workers stay poor, business owners get richer. They compete with each other, buying more machines, which means they need less human labor. Since labor (according to Marx) creates profit, profit rates fall. Businesses push down wages and lengthen hours to stay competitive. People can't buy what's being produced. A series of increasingly severe economic crises occur. Misery increases, a vast underclass forms, revolts, takes power. The two biggest places it goes wrong, afaik, are 1) Labor doesn't determine the value of a product. More goes into it, like supply, demand, marginal utility, factors relating to competition (or lack of) between firms. 2) He underestimates (really vilifies) the role of leaders (like CEOs) and managers. He doesn't appreciate how much work it takes to start and maintain a successful business, and in his theory the workers get credited with doing almost all the valuable work. There were also political assumptions in Marx's thinking, like the belief that 'capitalists' have a monopoly on political power (impeding reforms) which seems to be wrong. It also didn't make much sense at the time (& makes even less sense now) to define class by your relationship to the means of production, something Schumpeter pointed out ~80 years ago. Marx's theory was built on classical models and was to some extent out-of-date even in his lifetime, which is partially why it was slow to get attention (his writing style didn't help). In Marx's defense, he made many think about capitalism in a new way. Most academics that I've seen point out mistakes simultaneously acknowledge it as a work of genius. And some of his mistakes were also made by the best economists until then, like labor determining value. If you wonder why I didn't say this in the video, it's because to do it right I'd have to introduce Marx's terms (like labor theory of value) and thought it would be burdensome on the video, especially since I wasn't sure if the audience really cared about this stuff. - Ryan @realryanchapman
    568
  12. As always, first a huge thank you to everyone who supports my work through Patreon or the membership program here. This video in particular, I suspected, wouldn't make much money through YouTube ads. So it really did make this production possible. For video notes, it seems like most of the controversy has come from the first 10 minutes of the video so I'll use this space to address that. I just sent an email to a pastor who (gently and respectfully) took issue with my claiming Islam, Christianity and Judaism shared the same god, and also (even more gently and respectfully) took issue with my calling the Abrahamic story a myth. A lot of other people have said the same thing. I thought I'd post my response to the pastor here to address those issues: I'm open to a dialogue showing that I'm wrong, but this is my view. I think what's happening is that the people making these claims are close to the subject, and when people are close to a subject they have a magnified view of small differences in beliefs between groups. So perhaps the best thing to do is zoom our perspective out by looking at a different god and different culture entirely for the sake of an example. Let's say we're talking about ancient Greece, and I said various groups around ancient Greece believed in the same god: Zeus. We might all accept that, but different groups around Greece might say 'no our Zeus is different because we believe Zeus had a daughter and appeared on Earth at X time, etc' while another group might have different beliefs about Zeus and say something similar. But looked at broadly they all do believe in the same god: Zeus. It's just that different groups have different beliefs about the same god. They may conceive of him differently, worship him differently, but it's just different interpretations of the same god. That's what I think is happening with Jews, Christians, and Muslims. They all share the same god: the one who they believe spoke to Abraham, but have differing beliefs about how to conceive and worship that god, and different beliefs about what that god did or didn't do. With the word 'myth,' my usage has no necessary bearing on whether or not it's true. It's the traditional meaning of a myth, meaning a story that holds foundational value in a culture which is held above question. I used the word because I considered it the most accurate word in English for what I was describing. I hope that cleared things up. It seems like the other most controversial claim in the video is also from that section, which said that 'the Quran is full of contradictions, making it difficult to discern its precise divine intent.' That offends a lot of Muslims, and they will readily tell you that most Muslim scholars say that there are no contradictions in the Quran. But most Muslim scholars are themselves Muslim, and Muslims don't typically come from a tradition of attempting to present subjects neutrally, as I try to do here. When I said there are many contradictions in the Quran, I'm talking about just the plain words themselves. To claim there are no contradictions requires interpretation. One must say 'this statement here was in X context, so it should be understood with its significance windowed down to Y, so it therefore does not contradict Z' and so on and so forth throughout the Quran. Whether or not that interpretation convinces you is up to the listener. I wasn't referring to the interpreted Quran, just the Quran itself. It's probably also important to mention that the speaker in the Quran actively argues that the speaker is in fact God (the one who spoke to Abraham and the rest of the Judeo-Christian prophets). One argument the speaker makes is that the Quran has no contradictions, and the lack of contradictions proves it is the work of God. So it's important to Muslims to demonstrate that there are no contradictions, because according to the logic of the Quran itself if there were contradictions then it is not the word of God. That also means it would be considered heretical for a Muslim (scholar or not) to say there was a contradiction in the Quran, since it's a universal tenet of Islam to believe that the Quran is God's speech. If you followed all that, it means that according to their religious principles, Muslims (at least in their current popular forms, including Iranian Shias) cannot acknowledge or believe that there are contradictions in the Quran. This isn't to weigh in on whether or not there are contradictions if it's interpreted 'correctly,' but only to defend that if you look at the plain words there are clearly many. I highlighted one in the section of the video that spoke about it. In other news, if you want a glimpse into what's coming up, I'm going to stick with the Middle East for a bit before moving elsewhere. I'm working on Zionism as the subject for the next main channel video, and making a private members/Patreon video in the coming weeks. - Ryan
    425
  13. I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who supports me through Patreon and channel memberships. Without their enduring support, making videos this time and resource intensive would not be possible. If you want to chip in you can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. For those wondering why I focused on France and not the United States, remember that this video was about nationalism. Nationalism was not a significant force in the United States during its founding period. A nation was founded when the United States was created (a newly conceived one American people as a body politic) but it was a nation that emphasized federalism: a federation of states. Political identity and political power, at the time of the revolution was still mostly conceived through those states. In the revolutionary period people still called themselves Virginians, for example, and not Americans. They were generally wary of coming together as one nation, and it was a project that they were generally ready to abandon (for example if the slavery issue was pressed too hard, or if national power was generally seen as being too strong). There was nothing like a single sovereign nation that held virtually unchecked domestic power like you had in France, or a leading popular movement that glorified such a development. Something like Article 3 in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man would have been heresy in the United States. The structure of the American government was actually designed with the premise that such a singular national power was tyranny. They framed their government thinking that national level had to be broken up and constrained as much as possible. I'm describing something like anti-nationalism here. In short, a nation was formed in the United States in the late 18th century, but the nation was a tentative one and you didn't have a clear demonstration of nationalism. Other notes: There seems to be a popular misunderstanding in France that the 'impure blood' line in La Marseilles actually refers to the blood of common French people. They're impure because they're not royal. This interpretation claims that the French were excitedly chanting about charging into battle and watering their own fields with their own blood in a defensive war for democracy. Two main points why it doesn't work: 1) would be a strange army indeed, full of soldiers getting hyped up for war over the prospect of shedding their own blood, not the enemy's, and 2) Lisle (the author) was a royalist and was imprisoned for his beliefs. It doesn't make sense that he would glorify a republican cause as a royalist. It makes even less sense that the republican government would imprison him for royalism if he had just written a popular anthem glorifying republicanism. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like this interpretation is an attempt to make La Marseilles socially acceptable in the modern world and is not based in facts or reality. I believe what I stated in the video about the 'impure blood' being foreign was correct, however unpolitically correct that is now. A note for the Pledge of Allegiance section: some seemed to think that I thought I was reciting the 19th century Pledge and pointed out how it had been modified since then. I considered modifications to the Pledge to be an unnecessary detail considering the scope of the video. I was aware I was reciting the modern version of it, and if you were too, then great. I figured that if people didn't realize that it had been changed, it didn't really affect anything and wasn't worth extending the video to address. Last note - I saw some say I made a mistake categorizing nations in the first section of the video, and say I was actually talking about nation-states. I think if you study the subject and listen closely to what I said you'll find no such mistake occurred. I used the language that is typically used when explaining nationalism. Nations are the broadest unit of the subject and nation-states are the smaller unit within that. When people talk about the spread of nations around the world, they are also talking about the spread of nation-states. When we talk about nations meeting, for example, in the UN, we're talking primarily about a group of people: the nation. When we talk about a representative of the nation of Kenya, we're talking about a representative for a group of people: Kenyans. That nation possesses, or wants to possess, a state. We can also talk about the spread of nation-states, and that's a parallel, closely related story. I talked, for example, about a 'nation of China coming into being,' we're primarily talking about a group of people that politically are recognized as a nation, and also talking about a state that they created. It's correct vernacular. I could have also said 'when the nation-state of China came into being,' but that's a smaller story, specifically referring to China's state. Hope that cleared things up. - Ryan
    328
  14. I thought I'd delete the generic comment I had here and return to this video in 2024 to address the one main criticism that people seem to have of it, which doesn't have to do with the content itself, but I suppose is worth addressing: my body language. I'm not someone who enjoys public speaking. I've never in my life wanted to do it. Doing it on such sensitive issue - issues that are bound to upset a lot of people - is especially uncomfortable for me. I started making these videos, not because I wanted to be a public figure, but because I thought having this content be publicly and freely available was socially important and worth my time and efforts. I also thought putting a face behind the content (and not just narrate to visuals) was the right thing to do, so you could see the person making these claims and judge my character for yourself. What you see on screen is my grappling with all that. In practice that meant I had a hard time thinking while also looking into the camera, so for this video I looked off to the side to gather my thoughts if I had to think mid-sentence. This is also one of the earlier videos, and my later ones are much more comfortable. I've even begun to enjoy speaking on camera on some level, though I'd still rather not. I don't have much to add besides that. Hope you enjoyed the vid! - Ryan
    314
  15. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. I've seen a number of commenters who believe that I crucially left out some details about the cultural and ethnic ties between Taiwan and mainland China. Mainly two details: 1) clarifying that Taiwanese isn't an entirely original language, but instead a dialect from Fujian province (they do call it Taiwanese in Taiwan, so I stuck with their language when telling their side of the story), and 2) stressing the high proportion of ethic Chinese people living in Taiwan. That's fine, if you want to call attention to those facts, but I didn't consider them essential for this video because they don't fundamentally change the arguments from either side. Taiwan's independence argument doesn't weaken because of ethnic and cultural ties to China. China's claim to Taiwan doesn't strengthen either. If you think those details do give China a legitimate claim to Taiwan (against the will of the overwhelming majority of people living there) then you're arriving at something like 'we own you through your blood,' since the shared ethnicity seems to be the pillar of that claim. That's not something I saw my Chinese sources claiming, and that's also obviously something the Taiwanese side didn't say either. Perhaps I should have presented them here anyway since they seem important to Chinese audiences, but again they don't fundamentally change the logic from either side. Many of those who stressed the ethnic ties between Taiwan and China went on to say people in Taiwan are rallying around a Taiwanese identity because they're being propagandized by their government in the education system. I think that's a fair point to get into, but if you want to cover the subject in a balanced way, you'd also have to look at how China's government propagandizes and controls their citizens too. The reality is Chinese people are among the most heavily propagandized and controlled in the world. Taiwan is one of the places with the freest speech (and freest access to information) in the world, and China is one of the places with the most controlled speech and most controlled access to information in the world. Look at any free speech index and it will tell you that. The Chinese government employs massive boroughs of people for the sole purpose of propagandizing and controlling its citizens (look up the 'Golden Shield' for example). So again, I could have covered that side of the subject, but it seems like virtually everyone making those arguments were sympathetic to China's side, and I don't think they'd be happy seeing balanced coverage of that. On that note, this video only covered China's official position on Taiwan. Since there isn't free speech in China, this is pretty much how everyone covers it. In places like Taiwan, it's easier to make distinctions between public thought and official thought. You can poll people or just point to public backlashes against official positions. In China, widespread expression of dissent from official thought (like the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan) is rarely allowed, so we're mostly left with pointing at official thought. That all being said, I don't think there's reason to believe that the public in China doesn't more or less support or believe the official position laid out here. Last note - many think this video tried to create the impression that Taiwan is mostly made up of aborigines, and I'm not sure who would watch this video and actually think that. As I kept talking about Taiwan being colonized by various powers, and even the KMT moving there as an entire party, I assumed people understood (and knew, even by common sense) that the aborigines eventually became a small minority there. I didn't think that was something that needed to be explicitly said, and ultimately I try to trust the intelligence of the viewer and avoid stating the obvious if I can. - Ryan
    307
  16. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below. Some took issue with the notion that the United States was the first democracy following ancient Greece. When I said 'the word democracy wouldn't be linked to another state for more than 2000 years,' that afaik is correct. Democratic practices did exist between ancient times and the American founding, and there were even local elections in America before the founding, as well as some democratic practices in England and smaller societies around Europe, but they almost entirely went by the name of republicanism. These other societies also practiced limited forms of democracy, and that was truer the bigger the society got. You could claim that some viking societies had meaningful (but still limited) democratic practices, for example, but they didn't have a state. That was also before modern nations. Nation-states at the time (with the very controversial exception of England after the 15th century) did not exist. So we're talking about societies that typically had fuzzy borders, a looser idea of who belonged within them and what their roles were as 'citizens,' no modern government state, and where the sovereign political authority is typically divine or an individual/family. Combine that with democratic practices being limited, and you have no state that was being called democratic until the U.S. founding. I chose my wording there carefully. Given all that, the main democratic breakthroughs the U.S. had were 1) Forming a nation (strict borders, concrete and firm law extending to all citizens within) with its own sovereign, secular government that is responsive to the people, 2) Those people were to hire and fire heads of state and top representatives, 3) Practicing this on a scale of a massive nation-state, with significant cultural and ethnic differences, where citizens across the nation have no way of knowing one another, but still had to trust one another with political power. So there was some contemporary precedent for what the U.S. did, but they also significantly experimented and innovated. Democracy and an impersonal secular state were thought to be impossible in a society on the scale of the U.S. It was thought that monarchies were best for large societies and that democracies/republics were controversially well-suited for small societies, and that even then those smaller political systems needed a mixed character in order to be stable (perhaps still a monarch or divine authority). 'Pure democracies' were thought to be entirely untenable, and tended to be associated with mob rule (a judgement that affected the Founders). To go into that last part further - the 'mixed character' model mainly came from Aristotle, through Polybius (Greek/Roman historian), and finally through Montesquieu's 'Spirit Of The Laws.' Aristotle said there were three forms of government: government by one, government by the few, government by the many (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and that a mixed form of government was best - one that blended aspects of those three forms in its institutions. Montesquieu influentially wrote that those institutions should have limited power and have the ability to limit the powers of each other, now known as checks and balances. That influenced the Framers, who made the executive branch roughly correspond to the 'government by one,' the senate roughly 'government by few' and the house of reps roughly 'government by many.' That also inspired the checks and balances seen in the constitution. If you're wondering why I didn't cover mixed constitution theory in the video, I think it's interesting, but the interpretation in America is somewhat loose. It's a bit of a stretch to call the executive branch 'government by one,' I think even more of a stretch to call the house of reps 'government by many,' and it leaves out the judicial. More importantly, Madison's language of politics consisting of conflicting factions was seen as a more realistic update to the classical mixed constitution theory. Basically mixed constitution theory was seen as rigidly ideological, not realistic, and warring factions was seen as practical and realistic. Theory that could be usefully guide policy. I have to make decisions about what to include and what not to include for runtime purposes, and decided to relegate mixed constitution theory to the comments and just include Madison's factions in the video. - Ryan
    301
  17. I almost made one awhile ago on it but other topics seemed more important at the time. I'll get around to it
    266
  18. It became the predominant religion quickly in the sense that it broke Zoroastrian's power base and never gave it back. It was the religion of people in power, even though it did take some centuries to convert the majority of Iranians. Iran was more than half nomadic I believe all the way up until the Qajar period, when that started to change. So the nomads were probably hard to convert, but also were probably relatively irrelevant to the religious conversations Muslims were having. I was painting history in quite broad brushes in that section, basically in 1000 year blocks, and couldn't go into details like that. Perhaps I could have worded it better though. I'll think about writing a correction.
    263
  19. Some follow-up thoughts on this video. I think populism is currently widespread, both on the left and right, and both domestically and abroad. Many (if not most) who I would consider populist probably do not label themselves as such, as it has become a somewhat derogatory term, and the term itself is probably not well understood. I would also guess that many or most of said people would not fully agree with my explanation of populism here. I think the place where they take issue the most would be my claim that populism is anti-pluralistic: that it dramatically flattens the political landscape in its presentation of that landscape, typically simplifying it down into a binary where one side is good and the other is bad. The bad side includes 'elites,' who hold power. If you're someone who disagrees with that, try to reflect for a moment how many different political persuasions there are, even just in America. How many different theories, groups, movements there are, with conflicting ideas about what's going on. Who's in power? How many different groups are in power even? How broadly power is shared? Is it 'hegemonic?' Or is there a spectrum of shared power? What kinds of problems are we facing? What should be done? And so on. Then ask yourself if that kind of landscape is captured in populism. I think many would see my point there, but then scratch their heads trying to figure out what thinkers, ideologies, or movements don't flatten politics. For one, liberals don't. At least not nearly to the extent that populists do. A major purpose of liberalism is to recognize, protect, and even foster pluralism. Realists also try to look at the various sides of issues as they exist in reality, without vilifying or glorifying any one given side. But there are many of other examples. All kinds of progressives, conservatives, anarchists, libertarians, you name it, that recognize and respect pluralism. They don't lump 'the people' together as one identifiable bracket with one identifiable voice, and pit them against one other identifiable bracket, like 'elites.' You can find pluralist politicians on both sides of the aisle saying something like 'X policy represents this group (maybe coal miners), X policy represents that group (environmentalists perhaps), both have legitimate concerns that conflict with each other, and we need to find a compromise by doing X Y and Z.' Those politicians (or thinkers) may not be in the majority anymore, but they're out there. My point is that pluralism exists and is recognized by many types of thinkers. I would never tell anyone to only listen to what I have to say about any subjects I talk about. I encourage you to get out there and listen to other takes on populism (although I do not recommend YouTube as a platform for it. IMO books and college lectures are much better). Maybe the best thing I can do here is articulate my process. I try to seek out the best sources, which means trying to find the most serious academics that have written on the subject, who also bring at least a tolerable amount of professional disinterestedness to their work. I throw out anything nakedly partisan (when it comes to this subject I'd give the example of Thomas Frank). Those kinds of partisan works have a strong point of view, skew their presentation in that point of view and it's nakedly apparent to anyone familiar with the subject. That may be fine if you want Thomas Frank's point of view, but that's not for me. So I looked for the best sources I could find (listed in the description), then tried to impartially convey the nuts and bolts of what they had to say, giving the audience a general take of our current understanding of the subject. That's it. If it turns out to be an unflattering portrayal of populism, I don't see that as my problem. I'd do the same for any other subject. That all being said, I don't claim to have done a perfect job here. If I could do it again, I'd probably delete the passage about how populists tend to dismiss you if you don't agree with them, especially if you conflict with them. I think that was unnecessary and skewed the tone without adding value. But I think the video, as a whole, is a decent enough presentation of my sources. If you reject my sources as being authoritative for the subject, then my video won't hold up either. - Ryan
    248
  20. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. I'll probably add video notes as the piece ages and feedback comes in, but as of now I don't have anything to add here besides saying that I gave a simple overview of the emergence of the inner self in the first section of the piece. More factors contributed to it that I didn't think were appropriate to get into here, namely the emergence of technology like the printing press, which allowed people to circulate their thoughts, get educated, think for themselves. That section on the whole was mostly taken from 'The Rise And Triumph And The Modern Self' by Carl Trueman and 'Identity' by Francis Fukuyama. Of the two, Trueman goes into more depth if you're interested in learning more, but his book also approaches the subject from a decidedly Christian standpoint if that's a dealbreaker for you. - Ryan
    247
  21. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Video notes below: I've been trying to figure out how much evidence to provide on screen for what I say in the video. In the past year or so I've shifted towards showing evidence pretty continuously throughout the entire video. But then it seems like if there are only a few claims left with no evidence shown, and people single out those claims and believe I made them up. Showing evidence for literally every claim, I think, would be exhausting to watch, so I'm not sure how to solve that. For this one, I saw a number of people single out the section where I said according to my research, slavery persisted in the South because white Southerners didn't want to work outdoors in hot climates, and say it's absurd and I made it up. To explain why I constructed that section the way I did, I thought 1) it's not a key point for the piece, and 2) it's common sense. So I thought I'd give the audience a break on reading text for that section. I also showed some supporting text from Gordon Wood on how the philosophy of labor was shifting in both the North and South at the time. I figured that was enough, and if people were intrigued or skeptical on that point they could research it on their own. To address it here I'd start by asking: how else would you explain why the further south you went, the more adamant people became about keeping slavery? Why were those same people so work avoidant compared to people in the North? Why was the Deep South so firm on slavery, while the North gave it up within a generation? I'm curious if people have alternative explanations, because while researching for this piece I literally did not come across one. Every source that covered it said the same thing: climate. That was also the prevailing take when this was all happening. Perhaps some quotes from primary sources will do. In 1804, when senators were debating whether to restrict the importation of slaves into Louisiana, GA rep Jackson said: 'Gentlemen from north & the east do not know that white men cannot endure the heat of a vertical sun - they cannot cultivate and raise a crop of rice - negroes are necessary for that country.' and 'a white man cannot cultivate three acres of rice, and yet Georgia is not so warm as Louisiana. You cannot prevent slavery - neither laws moral or human can do it - men will be governed by their interest, not the law...' Jefferson himself in Notes on the State of Virginia: 'in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him,' after saying blacks are 'more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites.' Some people also seem offended by my use of 'alleged' when talking about Jefferson and Sally Hemings, apparently because they thought it should be treated as fact. From what I can tell the evidence does strongly support the claim that Jefferson fathered children with her. The DNA test only says it was a Jefferson male (of which there were about ten at Monticello) who fathered one of her kids, but Jefferson was with Sally every time she probably conceived, which is considered strong evidence. Generally speaking, there was significant pushback/skepticism from the academic community in the '90s when Annette Gordon-Reed published 'Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings,' which was the work that got this conversation seriously going. The pushback was mostly based on the fact that Jefferson hardly ever mentioned her in his writing (I think 4 times in about 18,000 letters), that it seemed out of character for him to keep his children as slaves, that people around Jefferson hardly mentioned her, and that we know so little about Sally. Then the DNA test came out, and Gordon-Reed published 'The Hemings Of Monticello,' which basically said Jefferson's behavior step-by-step indicates he had a relationship with Hemings, and his silence on her is consistent with behavior of other white male Virginian slaveowners, and that people around him would also understand to keep quiet about her. Now most professional opinion (that I've read) does conclude that he fathered children with Sally, but I still thought it would be wrong to treat it as fact, knowing it's a controversial subject, and knowing I wasn't going to take the time in the video to go through all this. So I just said 'alleged' and left it to the comments in case people disagreed or were offended. Hope that cleared things up. I've seen a couple people flag Ben Franklin's anti-slavery activity to refute what I said about none of the Founders 'risking their careers' to end slavery. Franklin's activity was at the very end of his life, which meant 1) he wasn't risking his career over it, and 2) his activity was after the crucial time window I was talking about in that section, when slavery was being widely debated and the defense of it hadn't solidified. I also didn't claim that the Founders literally said nothing about the abolition of slavery. Only that in the years that crucially mattered they didn't press the issue. They overwhelmingly focused their efforts on other issues, like the formation of the union/constitution, diplomacy, and freedom of religion. From my research, in those years Jefferson was actually the most outspoken against slavery of them all (he attempted three major instances of it afaik), but he cared far more about other issues (like freedom of religion), and his 'anti-slavery' stance also came with his highly impractical deportation clause. Last note - many comments say it was Jefferson's debt that prevented him from freeing his slaves. I have never seen a professional make this claim. The reason why is because Jefferson said what he would do with his slaves if he ever got out of debt. He said he would improve the living conditions of his slaves. Not free them. Also he lived an extravagant lifestyle, for example constantly hosting guests and serving fine wine from around the world, and taking on huge expenses trying to turn Monticello into basically his dream home. He didn't live as someone trying to get out of debt in order to free his slaves. In short, the claim doesn't make sense if you study him. - Ryan
    226
  22. I've seen a number comments say my sources were biased, and say they wanted to see more 'pro revolution' sources. Admittedly my sources probably aren't all perfectly impartial, but they were the best I could find on the subject. My process is to throw out anything that's nakedly partial. In this video that meant throwing out sources that were nakedly against Cuba's government and that dogmatically argued for keeping the embargo without strong supportive reasoning (like work from the Heritage Foundation), and also meant throwing out sources that were nakedly sympathetic to Castro and Cuba's government, and that openly vilified America (like Salim Lamrani's The Economic War Against Cuba). I don't have any illusions about my sources being fully impartial (the subject is very polarized and fully impartial, high quality sources are hard to come by), but this video is my attempt to strip out as much of that bias as I could to get as close as I could, however imperfectly, to impartiality on a politically fraught subject. Take it for what it is.
    183
  23. ​ @etrs  What I've seen of Tik's work fell into the 'selectively pointing at early Fascism' camp. He also didn't seem to distinguish/acknowledge the difference between Fascism and fascism. I skipped ahead and saw him sneering about confused 'Marxist professors' and turned it off. I'd add to that: most material I see on YouTube on both Marxism and fascism is badly partisan and in my opinion low-quality. I don't encourage people to learn about controversial stuff like that on this platform and would really encourage people to look up academics that are respected in their fields if you want a high-quality take. That's why I point to people like Roger Griffin and avoid discussing other YouTubers. If you want other academics on fascism, I'd also recommend Stefan Breuer and A. James Gregor.
    165
  24. Thank you to everyone who supports these projects on Patreon. I wouldn't be able to devote so much time and so many resources to one video otherwise. I'm trying to make the best work I can, and the donations really do make it possible. If you'd like to chip in and support me, check out https://www.patreon.com/rchapman. Notes: I know I put 'liberal right' on the left side of the screen and 'liberal left' on the right. If I flipped it, then 'laissez-faire' would have been on the right of the screen and 'intervention' on the left. I thought the rule of screen direction (reading from left to right) meant having conservative opinions on the left of the screen and progressive opinions on the right felt more natural, so I decided that what I did was the least awkward of my options.
    125
  25. Thanks for your donation! I'm committed to making these videos full-time, so more will be coming.
    109
  26.  @gbabayan  I did listen to him with an open mind. I went back and re-watched it to be sure. He's badly distorting the subject. He doesn't distinguish between generic and Italian fascism, meaning pretty much everyone watching it will come away thinking he was talking about fascism generally, when he spent the video talking about Italian fascism. The Italian fascism he described stuck selectively to early Fascism, again when it was closer to Marx and socialism, and before it developed into the 'populist ultra-nationalist' fascism. Then points to National Socialists rejecting the fascist label as evidence they weren't fascist, not giving the context there that I did in my video. Also his treatment of Fascism's relationship with violence was sketchy to the point where I'd call it misleading and even wrong. He's either misinformed or intentionally distorting it for partisan purposes. To me it's pretty clear it's the second since he's selectively quoting academics like Gregor, who you'd only know if you spent a good amount of time with the subject. Edit: I should say the reason I'm being harsh towards Tik here is because I consider what he's doing a gross ethical violation of your duty as a teacher. Most students of the subject won't go into your presentation with a solid understanding of the subject, so they can't see how you're selectively rearranging and ignoring pieces of the subject, while presenting other pieces out of context in order to make it into something that it's not. So listeners believe what's being presented without realizing they're being told a politically manipulated version of the subject (i.e. distorted). I think that practice should be condemned, unless it's coming from a place of naiveté, which I don't think is the case here. That being said, I think these kinds of partisan takes are common on YouTube (which is why I say don't consume explainers on controversial issues here), so I'd imagine Tik is just acting in a way that he sees as normal these days. I plan on making a video about this at some point to make it clearer.
    109
  27. That's the explanation I saw researching this too, but balanced against their tenacity to defend their territory against the colonialists. Geography alone doesn't explain why the aborigines held the east for so long, especially against an industrialized power like Japan.
    108
  28. Absolutely! I wrote up a pinned comment that included most the points you brought up here. I did try to hammer in at several points how widely criticized democracy as both in ancient times and at the time of the American founding. I also wrote about 60 pages of notes for this video (which translates to about 240 minutes of runtime), and have to decide what to include and what not to include. Of everything you said, the one thing I did want to talk about but just couldn't find a space for was comparing the individualistic nature of American democracy vs the communal nature of Athenian democracy. But how could I talk about that if I didn't talk about Aristotle's mixed constitution theory, or Montesquieu? You said I implied that there was nothing resembling democracy between Greece and America, but I really tried to imply the opposite. I just said that democratic states after Rome mostly went by the name of republics, and there wasn't a nation that called itself democratic until America. With the Thucydides mix-up yeah that regrettably just a mistake. Someone caught that a day after I uploaded this, and it almost made me take the video down and re-upload it to fix it, but I figured that it didn't detract from the main ideas of the piece. Edit: I figured out a way to just chop that line out of the piece. So, problem solved. Plutarch talked about two different people named Thucydides in his chapter on Pericles, and I didn't realize they were different people, which led to a factual mistake in the vid. - Ryan
    106
  29. ​ @NixonThr336ix  If there was a fourth country mentioned it would be the USSR, but their role was more convoluted. They started participating fairly late in the cycle of aggression, they invaded Poland after Britain and France declared war on Germany, and they were soon turned on by Germany. In the section you're talking about I was just naming the basic facts that everyone more or less agrees on (that Germany, Italy and Japan were the aggressors). Their alliance with Germany was widely seen as a last-minute shock before war broke out that did facilitate it, but the war was going to occur either way (as Hitler, quoted in this video, made clear many times). Edit: It's worth adding that the USSR did play a huge role in starting the war by spreading communism and the fear of communism around the world (by just the nature of their existence and also through Comintern), which led to right-wing dictatorships in the aggressor countries, which of course was covered at length in the piece itself.
    89
  30.  @kevinsiu4956  Right, but the question isn't 'why do most people live on the west side of Taiwan,' the question is 'why didn't these powerful colonial powers (like the Qing and Japanese) establish governance over the entire island of Taiwan for hundreds of years?' Geography is part of the answer, but imposing geography didn't prevent colonial powers elsewhere in the world from controlling the entire territory that they set out to control. The Qing and Japanese both tried to take the east from the aborigines and failed due to fierce resistance.
    78
  31. Definitely! I plan on making a video on conservatism that's similar to the one here on nationalism.
    76
  32. Thank you!
    66
  33. Many are questioning the contents of this video and the concept of rule of law in the USA after the July 1st Supreme Court ruling, which said that presidents are presumed to be immune from prosecution for official acts as outlined in the constitution. Frankly I don't disagree. It does seem to throw the concept of rule of law in the USA into question. We're in an unprecedented moment in American history, and the best I can say here is that we'll have to see how it plays out in practice.
    64
  34. Encouraging, thank you!
    62
  35. Hi, thanks for the comment. Your notes strike me more as elaborations than revisions, but they do add helpful context to the video, and for the most part my research aligns with yours. I tried to heavily imply some of that (like talking about the rise of the Tudeh Party and showing all the leftist groups that were part of the revolution), but time constraints kept me from going into any of that. I originally planned on briefly explaining the rise of Marxist influence in Shia thought (which would have brought in Shariati) but thought it was too much in an already quite dense video. The only point I wasn't aligned on is the evidence regarding the dismissal letter. That would have been great to include, and I would have had I known. I'll look into it. Regarding the coup, is controversial how much the Americans/British actually did to make the coup happen, or how necessary the coup actually was, but the fact was they did orchestrate the coup and they bragged about it afterwords. That made Iranians widely hate them (namely Americans) and blame them for the autocracy that followed, which was the point I needed for the purposes of this video.
    61
  36. Hi, here's the link to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rchapman Patreon also changed their policy and now requires pay tiers in order for patrons to see the private content. So I had to set them up. The lowest tier possible is $1, which will give you access to the content I talk about here. - Ryan
    57
  37.  @Explicitly-CJ  I've been seeing a lot of responses like yours and I wonder if it's my explanation or just something about the subject of fascism that's doing this. I just want to make two main points. One is that my explanation of fascism in both videos is basically agreeing with the closest we have to a standard definition of it, just phrased in my own words. The other point is that I'm not saying it's just nationalism. It's a specific take on nationalism, where it overrides all other principles (giving it a thin moral matrix), and where the fascist movement/leader takes that and tries to subordinate an entire nation under it, essentially creating totalitarianism. I see all these people saying I'm just calling it nationalism and that by my explanation all governments are basically fascist, and it either seems like I'm explaining it badly, the subject is just inherently confusing, or people aren't listening.
    54
  38. Hi, just seeing this. I think your point is valid if you believe that everyone should be equally punished and liable to the law, regardless of their ability to plead their case. If you believe that people should have the right to plead their case or hire (talented and expensive) professionals to do it for them, as we can in America, then your point gets convoluted. But even having talented attorneys at your disposal does not make you above the law. If you think it does, I think you're misunderstanding the concepts at play. You remain below it, and it just makes you more adept at getting out from under it. There are many places in the world where people are truly and flagrantly above the law, and America, from the evidence I can find, is not one of them.
    41
  39. Just seeing this comment and it seems worth responding to. Marx was pro democracy in the same way Mao was pro democracy. They both said it here and there, but it doesn't mean anything held up against their actual policies. They imagined that those policies represented the will of most people, but didn't require it. And that doesn't capture the essence of democracy anyway, since democracy means sharing political power across all of society (the idea that everyone gets a voice). Being pro democracy means having an appreciation for political pluralism, since not everyone thinks the same way. That appreciation for political pluralism is not in Marx's writing, rather it's filled with the opposite: hostility towards ideas that don't match his. Rather than calling for pluralism, Marx and Engels called for the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' brought on by the 'overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, (and the) conquest of political power by the proletariat' (from the Communist Manifesto). From there the proletariat would rule and implement communist principles, which I went over in the video. There isn't an emphasis on protecting anyone's speech that disagrees with those principles (protecting unpopular speech doesn't just happen. It needs to be emphasized as a foundational necessity in order to achieve it). There are even hints to the opposite effect. Marx and Engels talked about seizing the property of rebels (from the Manifesto) and putting down political opposition via the power of the state (in a letter by Engels). These are the ingredients for a totalitarian society. They don't say it outright, just as they don't outright say they're against free speech (who does?) but the writing is on the wall. In my opinion it's irresponsible to cover Marx without spelling that out. I try to cover these topics fairly, which means highlighting aspects of Marx that Marxists will appreciate (the first part of this video apparently for many), and also highlight aspects of Marx that people against Marx will appreciate (the second half for many). If you expect a content creator to make you comfortable when watching controversial content like this then you're probably expecting that creator to have a bias in your favor.
    39
  40.  @OverOnTheWildSide  By liberals I mean people who adhere to liberalism, the political philosophy based on the freedom of the individual. Not as a synonym for leftists in America. I made a video elaborating on that point: https://youtu.be/mCPeNXzf7Dw
    28
  41. They were aware of that. They designed a system that limited their own potential power and the potential of those in the future like them.
    28
  42.  @olsterman937  Trust me I watch these videos enough times over before I upload them that I wouldn't miss something like that. With my gestures I was trying to say 'on one hand this' and 'on one hand that.'
    28
  43. Thanks! And glad to see you're still around. I feel like you've been here since day one.
    25
  44. Franco's Spain is controversial. I don't think any of the serious scholars I've read consider it fascist (at least in a clean sense like they consider Italy and Germany). I haven't studied it closely enough yet to put out a stance on it. I will say Orwell's understanding of the movements in Spain around that time was surprisingly loose. I wouldn't put too much weight on his opinion there.
    23
  45. Hi, yes Japan did recover unusually quickly from the Depression, but my statement wasn't referring to its recovery in 1932. I was talking about the 1929-1931 period. The Showa Depression is generally considered to have been severe in Japan (by academics and by Japanese at the time) even though it was short compared to other countries. There are no official unemployment figures so it's hard to be definitive about how bad it was, but from accounts in Japan it does seem like the unemployment level rose by a million, if not several million, which importantly happened in a country with a fairly new government structure and without strong social security nets. A strong and rapid recovery did take place, but it took place after the Depression had motivated many of the young militarists to take extreme action and eventually take Manchuria. Regarding the use of 'especially hard,' I think the rise in unemployment and effect it had on Japanese politics warrants the term, especially compared to other countries in the Asiatic region.
    22
  46. Thank you! I will try to balance everything as best I can.
    21
  47.  @Explicitly-CJ  I think you're still misunderstanding what my explanation of fascism is (again, pretty much the standard one), and how I arrived at it. I thought I explained it well here, but I'm fairly confident my longer video will clear things up.
    19
  48. I chalked that phrasing up to Putin being tired and towards the end of an hour-long speech. I think he was trying to say that security of one country can't translate into a threat of force towards another, but apparently what exactly that means in practice is vague. I'll add a source for that in the bottom of the video description. Here's a line from article 2(4) of the UN Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
    19
  49.  @Explicitly-CJ  This video was just meant to be a supplement to my explainer video. If you haven't watched the longer one, that should spell things out. When I simplify it down to saying something like it's 'the mass subordination of individuals to an aggressive nationalistic consciousness,' that's just to get your foot in the door towards understanding what it is. Similar to saying the abolition of private property gets your foot in the door towards understanding communism. Edit: I realized I spent a significant chunk of this video explaining the 'myth of the nation' playbook behind fascism that lays out the totalitarian aspect of it, while also giving three definitions for it, one containing much of what I just said. I'm not sure how you could watch all that and still think I just am calling fascism 'nationalism.'
    18
  50. Thanks Shauna! Both for your comments on here and Patreon support.
    17
  51. It sounds like you're describing an understanding of democratic socialism that's popular in America, but not in socialism more broadly (both historically and geographically). My video focused on the latter. The term social democracy is also contentious at best. It only makes sense in your context if you stick with your Fabian/Marxist/further left conception of democratic socialism, which again is not how it is seen in socialism more broadly. Democratic socialists are just socialists that insist on operating in properly democratic spaces. Saying anything further would mean surveying what they actually think, and if you look around the world, most of them are not wanting an end goal of complete socialism. Capital is an in-depth critique of capitalism, but if you leave your analysis at there you miss the point. It was an in-depth critique made to show how capitalism will inevitably fall and communism will inevitably rise, which is how I presented it in the video. It's just a basic point of the book that Marx was transparent about.
    17
  52. You'd have to elaborate. Are you talking about corruption involved with having the system in place? And did you know that trying to fully switch to market prices in 1988 caused panic and inflation? The backlash from that was bad enough to cause Deng to temporarily lose power within the CCP. Edit for grammar
    16
  53. I don't think I'm applying a double standard. The difference is both formal and practical in both countries. In China they don't formally recognize the Constitution as a higher authority than the CCP, and it also doesn't work as a higher legal authority in practice. In the United States the Constitution is both formally the highest authority, and also the highest authority in practice. So that is including real world examples in both cases. We do have real rule of law in the United States, so do many countries around the world. That doesn't mean it's flawless in the US and couldn't be stronger, but it is real nonetheless. There's no need to re-evaluate what rule of law means. The term works well enough as-is. Our judicial system is considered strongly independent as well, at least from professional analysis. I looked at corruption indexes there and our judicial system ranked very high. So it's easy to be cynical there but the cynicism seems detached from evidence, at least to me. If people want to loosely use the term 'above the law,' that's of course going to happen. But it's worth having a solid handle on what the term technically means, and that's what this video lays out.
    16
  54. I debated what to do with that and ultimately deemed my approach was the best, so long as it only used historical representations made by actual Muslim artists. I think if people are clicking off from this because they're told to, they're probably not going to be open to the rest of the content that conflicts with their beliefs either.
    15
  55. Hey Grant, thanks for the kind words. I'm just a guy that decided to start making research intensive videos for the sake of political education. I have degrees in English and education but never actually worked as a professor. I don't have a website and am not aware of anything being written about me so there's not much to find at the moment.
    14
  56. Hi, thanks for the respectful and well-written comment on a touchy subject. To respond, most of the issues that you're raising here, I think, come from a standpoint of you wanting me to present Islam in a way that is friendlier, even more deferential to Islam and Muslims. But that's not what I do here. When I present my subjects, I do my best to present the subject neutrally, regardless of the subject. For an example I'll take your issue with my showing Muhammad's face. I don't think there was anything disrespectful in how I portrayed him in any way in this video, including my showing of his face. I only used it appropriately as he was discussed throughout the piece, and only used historical portrayals by actual Muslim artists. It's the same I'd do for any subject. If Muslims (in this present moment in time we're in) want me to present the subject in a way that's friendlier to them by obscuring his facing, I don't really see that as my problem. I don't see myself as being disrespectful or overly respectful in that regard. Instead - I think - I've arrived at a presentation that's as neutral as I can achieve. To broaden the conversation from Islam for a moment, Jews and Christians could (and did, many times in the comments) take the same issue with my calling Abraham's story a myth. But if you look up what a myth is in the dictionary, it's the most accurate (i.e. precise) word I think I could have used there. It's to me, therefore, the correct word, and it's the word I used in the piece. If people take issue with it, it's, as far as I can tell, because they want the presentation to be friendlier to their personal beliefs, but I again don't see that as my problem. It's (if I'm doing it well) just part of the messy process of presenting subjects neutrally that people are used to seeing in a friendlier light to their beliefs. I think the only issues that may not address is your claim that the meaning of a jihad is not controversial, but I presented in the way I did precisely because many claim it just refers to an expenditure of effort and is not necessarily violent or aggressive. Yet many others see it as specifically violent or aggressive. The different passages in the Quran led to those different interpretations. Which brings me to your other issue, which is in saying there are no contradictions in the Quran according to most Muslim scholars. Yes, it's true most Muslim scholars say there are no contradictions. But most Muslim scholars are themselves Muslims, and do not come from a tradition of presenting subjects neutrally. So they - in my view - seem to uniformly present Islam and the Quran in a way that's friendly to Muslims. If you look at more neutral scholars (typically not Muslims themselves) many will readily say yes there indeed contradictions. So many that it takes an expert to make sense of all of it (hence the tradition of Muslim scholars interpreting it for regular Muslims). One of which I highlighted regarding God's stand on aggressive violence. To say there are no contradictions requires interpreting the text in a particular way, so you have to believe the interpreter to believe that there are, in fact, no contradictions. But what is the interpreter interpreting? Contradictions that are inherent, even obviously inherent, in the text. That was my point. Not to present it according to any particular interpreter. I hope that cleared things up. - Ryan
    14
  57. Glad to hear it! I'll take pretty well
    13
  58. I think you're coming to the conclusion that it's not a right-wing ideology because you're ignoring nationalism, which is the core of fascism. Fascists learned from socialists and applied the lessons to nationalism. Making it right-wing. It's the right-wing version of communism.
    13
  59. Thank you for the clarification! I did not see this reply over on his video. I wasn’t familiar with his content and from the first 5 minutes felt like I was watching my own video. It was similar enough that I assumed plagiarism was happening. I’ve since looked at more of his content and realized it was mostly just a coincidence. I tried to reach out to him privately to make amends but he doesn’t have an email address on here or Twitter dms open. If you’re in touch with him tell him sorry for the misunderstanding, and best of luck on his work. I deleted my comment on his vid.
    13
  60. Thanks! I haven't read Cynical Theories but did a bit of correspondence with Helen in preparation for this video. Helen and James both know what they're talking about and are some of the best at communicating this stuff to the public.
    12
  61. You noticed, huh. I kept this one on the shorter side because I figured people wouldn't want to watch material on political psychology for very long. There will be a mix of both long-form and short-form videos going forward.
    12
  62. Hey Kevin, I actually planned on doing that right after the 'evolution of liberalism' video, but the response to the liberalism video was lukewarm and the research process was long and tiring, so I put it on the back burner. I plan on circling back to it (and finishing with a progressivism video), but can't promise anything.
    12
  63. Ah, I suspected I was pronouncing it wrong. I listened to a few different people say it, and most sounded like 'Chong' to me. But admittedly to my ears it was hard to put my finger on exactly how the pronunciations were different.
    12
  64. Hi, I'm aware of Franklin's anti-slavery activity. In the video I said 'none of them risked their careers to end it,' quoting from a Jefferson bio. The crucial period that I was talking about was in the 1770's and early-mid 1780's, when the abolition of slavery was being seriously debated and the South hadn't hardened in their defense of it. Franklin missed that window. Also speaking out at the very end of his life isn't risking his career.
    12
  65. I'm not sure where that would have fit into this video. I thought about including a section about how they are culturally tied together but I figured that was understood well enough already. I did mention cultural ties at one point and how it made Taiwanese feel close to the mainland until 228. That kind of censorship happens on both sides of the conflict, much more heavily on the Chinese side, which I also didn't mention.
    12
  66. Step 1 - Spread awareness (i.e. this video) Step 2 - Provide people a pro-modern alternative (i.e. Coleman Hughes)
    11
  67. Hi, I'm actually not reading anything when I look to the side of the screen. It's just the direction I look when I'm thinking. You're not the first person to think that so I'm going to try to work on it.
    11
  68. Hi, I used AI images in my ancient Greece video and a little in my Thomas Jefferson video but decided to stop using them and haven't used them since. There are no AI images in this video. I do upscale the resolution of almost everything you see, so maybe the artifacts from that are making you think it's AI.
    11
  69. I only focused on positive factors for China in that section, mostly ones that were long-term oriented
    11
  70.  @leburiktarsa2518  I think the answer to that is a different foundational entity. Zeus is a foundationally different entity than Allah in Islam, so they're different gods. Odin, to give another example, is foundationally distinct from Vishnu. Again, different gods. But the God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are foundationally all the same entity, therefore the same god. To go back to Vishnu, different Hindus might interpret Vishnu differently, but it's still the same god: Vishnu.
    11
  71. I took down a few videos down last night. I had small issues with them that were personal, and also some practical and technical issues that might cause me grief down the line. For example, in the steelmanning video I basically said that we should try to frame political positions in a way that people actually holding those positions would likely agree with. But I've since found subjects where that probably isn't the best approach, since (in my opinion) people involved in those subjects typically don't describe their own positions honestly (for whatever reason). So I've since tried to describe everyone's political positions accurately, but not necessarily exactly how people holding those positions would self-describe. I didn't want to preach steelmanning in one video and not practice it in another, so I took down the steelmanning vid. Edited for grammar
    11
  72. It does seem like that is the case, and I am thinking about picking it back up.
    11
  73. Hi, thanks again and that's an interesting idea for a video. Whenever I release these videos I picture getting a mountain of criticism, but so far I've seen surprisingly little, so I've been able to respond directly in the comments section to any halfway decent criticism that I see. There was one case where after sitting on a comment for a while I decided to take a video down entirely, not because I had anything necessarily wrong, but because it made me realize I had missed an area of research, making my argument conceptually misshapen. But so far comments like that have been rare. The channel is still in its early stages, so I imagine if it finds a bigger audience I'll get more robust criticism and I could see making a feedback video at that point. We'll see!
    11
  74. Hey, thanks! I'm looking into the 'impure blood' line. Do you have a reference for what you're saying? I thought the standard understanding was how I framed it in the video. Also Lisle was a royalist, no? Or was at least imprisoned for being a suspected royalist. If the song was understood to be in the point of view of the republicans and glorifying their cause, how does that square?
    11
  75. @Adonis Admirer I don't think I described populism as inherently authoritarian or cultish in the traditional sense of those words. I'd say when populist movements have a leader in charge they tend to become authoritarian, but even then not in all cases. Bernie Sanders' movement I think is a good example of a non-authoritarian populist movement with a leader at the helm. If you're just saying that I emphasized how they can in many cases be authoritarian, then I don't see a problem with doing that. Populism, like you hinted at, is behind both fascism and Marxism-Leninism, and many of the worst dictators out there. I think populism is 'cultish' to the extent that populist movements are mass politics movements, and people think as a group in those kinds of movements. But I wouldn't call a populist movement a cult in the traditional sense of the word. I'm open to arguments that populism isn't anti-pluralistic, but I don't see how your argument gets us there. You're lumping 'the establishment' together as being this hegemonic power, which itself is flattening the complexity of political life. The idea that it can be 'destroyed' by a populist movement is further flattening things. You're presenting a hegemonic elite that needs to be destroyed by a populist movement, bringing you into a black and white, two dimensional political space. That's itself an example of anti-pluralistic thinking. I'm not sure I understand your last point about fanatic in-group preferences masquerading as populism. Do you not think that populists see their views as being superior to the views of elites, and to political alternatives? That's the standard way of explaining populism. They wouldn't be populists if they thought their beliefs weren't better than the alternatives, especially those of elites. I also do think populist groups tend to be passionate about their beliefs in a groupish way, which you can see in all the examples of populism I showed on the screen in this vid. - Ryan
    10
  76. Hi, the main difference is that the Nazis explicitly based their movement around championing hierarchies and nationalism, and the USSR explicitly based their movement around egalitarianism and reducing hierarchies. That was especially true under Lenin. Stalin took more of a hybrid approach, but still was egalitarian enough to be considered a socialist and not a fascist. Think of his campaign to 'liquidate the kulaks as a class.'
    10
  77. Hi, yes but I didn't claim anything in the video to the contrary. I showed two slides of Sun throughout the video, one in the intro and the other when talking about nationalism spreading into Asia. When I was talking about Chiang Kai-Shek in the video I wasn't framing him as the inventor of Chinese nationalism. I picked him because he was a clear case of a man with a hybrid ideology that was nationalist, liberal, and romantic. I think he's clearer in that regard than Sun.
    9
  78. Ah sorry to hear that. That sounds frustrating. I've seen some other staff come forward with similar concerns over the last few months. Have you been tracking that happening on more of a national scale? It seems like there's been a push for anti-racism programs in K-12 and in colleges and it's happening pretty quietly without much research backing it.
    9
  79. I don't follow your first point about me not being consistent with my definition, since the example you picked was actually about seen and unseen power dynamics. So can't comment on that. On the straw man claim, we're talking past each other. I'm pointing to the worst side of critical race theory and radical postmodern thinking, and you're saying that doesn't exist, and then pointing to a more rational argument. There is a side to radical postmodernism (most popularly written in White Fragility, which I showed on screen when I made the example) that is openly racist against white people, and extends negative generalizations to literally all of them, in ways we would never tolerate against any racial population that isn't white. If you have negative generalizations in your mind about one skin color, but none other, then you don't actually think people of all skin tones are equal. Also ironically, Inuit tribes is a straw man but I get you were trying to be funny.
    9
  80. I did not delete your comment. I just checked and there have only been three comments held by YouTube moderation so far. Two just said 'fuck Islam' and the third was just a long string of emojis. None of them were from you. Maybe you didn't post it or lost track of it?
    8
  81. I read probably on average around 6 hours a day (not counting days I record) and rarely take a day off. When I'm not reading I'm often listening to audiobooks, which are a lot of the sources I cite (in this video, six of the books cited I listened to as an audiobook). That being said, I try to actually read the physical book if it's an important source for the video. For example on this one, 'Liberalism' by Edmund Fawcett was an important source, so I sat down and spent a few days physically reading it, and I saw something like 'The Lost History Of Liberalism' by Helena Rosenblatt to be more like bonus material that fleshes out my understanding just a bit more, so that was a good contender for an audiobook. I also don't necessarily read every chapter or finish every book. If a chapter doesn't pertain to the subject matter of the video, or if I feel a book is only tangentially useful, I might put a book down after only reading parts of it. If I do that, I typically skim the rest of the book to hedge my bets that I'm not missing anything important for the video. For example on this video I did that with 'The End Of Reform.' I was looking to learn about FDR's take on liberalism, and how that squared with progressives and other takes on liberalism at the time. I only had to read about half the book to learn what it had to say about that, and reading every word in every chapter would have been an inefficient use of my time (those portions of the book were meant for people picking it up with a different purpose). I think virtually all academics do that. If you see a huge bookshelf behind someone in an interview, they don't always read literally every word on every page, just the material they feel is important to their understanding of the subjects they work in. And again, if a book is directly related to my interests, and if it's substantial enough to use as a source, I'd read it cover to cover. Edit: I should also mention that I had already read four of these books earlier in the year (On Liberty, Democracy in America, Liberalism by Mises, and Capitalism & Freedom by Friedman), so just because I list a book as a source doesn't mean I literally read it during the production of the video. I did brush up on two of them to make sure my understanding of them was correct, and the other two I was confident enough about to not revisit.
    8
  82. I have a few other names I want to get to but I'll add Huxley to the list
    8
  83.  @smferreiro2610  If you don't think nationalism is right-wing it seems like you're in your own world of categorization, which defeats the point of making categories in the first place. Like I said in the piece conservatism is also part of the right-wing spectrum, but so is nationalism. There is left-wing nationalism but it's so rare these days that people hardly ever discuss it.
    8
  84.  @pgvatter  I'm very glad to hear that
    8
  85. I think you misunderstood me. Saying ‘have an open mind’ and ‘don’t assume other people are wrong’ is different than saying ‘everyone is partly right.’ I said the first two and not the third.
    8
  86. Thank you! For the donation and the decidedly unaggressive comment.
    8
  87. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the dislike bar being hidden either. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it. If they do an update that lets creators toggle visibility I'll turn it on.
    8
  88. It seems like you're saying something pretty similar to what I did. Focusing on the people 'as a whole,' which is in opposition to focusing on 'elites.' Even going with this binary you presented, elites should also get a voice in democracy in practice (the point is that everyone gets a voice). If you're saying things should be more balanced, but elites still get a voice, then I don't think you're describing populism. Populism gets a bad rap because it is behind a lot of the worst movements since the 20th century (fascism, Marxism-Leninism, all kinds of authoritarian movements that are seen as historical blemishes). There's no conflation being done there. The movements were straightforwardly populist, even going by a strict definition. So I'm not sure where you're coming from with your second part there.
    7
  89. I think so too. I don't see why we wouldn't be able to wrap our heads around there being two major types of people within each party though, if it were part of standard political education.
    7
  90.  @Gailurin1  Hi, thanks for being open minded! Is the original comment yours? For the sake of the educational purpose of the channel it would be best if the OP could update it to make it factually accurate.
    7
  91. In my experience people don't tend to summarize their thoughts like you're describing it. They simplify it: they were biased, or they were unbiased. It was delivered straight, or it wasn't. When I hear people talk about that time period, I tend to see them simplify it like I said in the video. You can go to old news clips on YouTube and see the top comments pretty much all doing that.
    7
  92. That's a misunderstanding of my video then. Maybe I could have made it clearer. This video was about what distinguishes various types of postmodern thought, and not about progressives in general. There are many types of progressives and 'radical postmodernists' are just one of those types. So this video doesn't try to categorize progressives that don't have postmodern characteristics in their thinking. Edit: To give a clarifying example, it would be like if I made a video criticizing Christian Fundamentalism and you responded saying not all conservatives are like this.
    7
  93. I wasn't saying Islam was sharply unique whenever I described their beliefs. Some aspects of Islam described in the video are quite similar to the other two, at least in how they've been interpreted throughout most of their history. Their stance on women and patriarchy, for example. For another example, you could draw another obvious parallel to Christian's convictions about spreading their religion and then enforcing it within their political domain, at least in the more authoritarian traditions.
    7
  94. To be clear, this is mostly reiterating professional analysis of populism, based on the sources listed. The term populism came from the Populist party in America around the turn of the 20th century. It was more widely used as a label of self-identification until enough time had passed and enough populist movement were widely seen through a negative lens, historically. Fascism, by the way, is a version of populism, as is Marxism (although that one is more controversial). Populism is just the general label for mass politics where it's people vs. elites, and someone gives voice to what 'the people' think and feel. People do still self-identify as populist, but it's more rare. The people over on Breaking Points are an example. 'Us vs. them' has become very popular as mass politics has increasingly dominated politics over the last 120 years or so. That, to a large extent, corresponds with the rise of populism (as voting rights spread). Pointing at the widespread use of something, even if much of it goes outside of populism, doesn't disqualify it from being a component of populism. The same goes for conspiracy theories. I just listed that last part as a notable tendency. So it's not a requirement, but something you shouldn't be surprised to see. Again, it doesn't matter if other types of thinkers engage to some extent in conspiracy theories. Unless you're trying to say that all ism's are equally prone to conspiracy theories, which would make it meaningless. But I don't think that's right.
    7
  95. It seems like you don't have room in your philosophy for scaling down military costs as times change. Only maintaining and escalating. Unless I'm misunderstanding. So that's a fundamental disagreement there. If you do acknowledge that we should sometimes scale down spending, then I'd argue that the end of the Cold War was the time to do it, if there ever was a time. But that didn't happen (at least as dramatically as many thought it would). This video at least partially explained why. I've never heard that the Virginia subs cost roughly the same as the Seawolf, and just looked around more and still don't see that. Where are you getting that from? The same with the F35's.
    7
  96. Here's a response to your points: Duranty - This video wasn't about the NYT in that time period. Also it's about the news within those organizations, generally speaking. An exception or two doesn't disprove the rule. McCarthy - He didn't have much evidence when he was investigated, which was why he was essentially rebuked by both political parties. That doesn't mean what he was saying wasn't true. It just means he was making claims without evidence. Cronkite - I've seen him talk about that, and bragging isn't the word I'd use to describe that. The clip I showed was of him saying how he didn't even want to give his opinion and wasn't comfortable doing it. People didn't react to the Tet offensive because they won their fights. The whole point of the reaction to the Tet offensive was that the government had been saying that the North Vietnamese were weak and on the verge of giving up, and then this strong multi-pronged offensive came out of seemingly nowhere that brought fighting even into Saigon. So people realized the government had been lying about how well the war was going. I'm not sure what your point is on the Fairness Doctrine. Are you saying government intervention never works? How would you reconcile that regulating unleaded gasoline? From everything I've seen, the FD seemed to work quite well. In my opinion, the clips in the video are evidence of it, but you can watch old news programs yourself to see it.
    7
  97. I don’t think any of those categorizations make sense, but I have to hand it to you for calling this treatment ‘extremely reductive’
    6
  98. There's basically only been one author who thought that, and his work has been universally panned by historians because he made mistakes like with the Reichstag Fire (basing his analysis solely on testimony at the Nuremberg trials). I'm guessing that's where you got it from. William Shirer's Rise & Fall of the Third Reich.
    6
  99. By this logic the DPRK (North Korea) is a democratic people's republic. Why? Because its name says so. No need to think or look any further, and anyone who says otherwise is a propagandist. The same would go for all other movements in history. Just look at the name and that gives you the ultimate authority on the existential makeup of that movement. On a more serious note, if you watched the video Hitler himself said this movement was fundamentally about nationalism, not socialism. Probably most importantly, the German people themselves (all over the spectrum, not just the German left) considered it a far-right movement, not a leftist movement.
    6
  100. I think you're conflating neo-Marxism with postmodernism. There's a lot of ideological overlap between the two, and someone can be both, but I'd say the difference is that the postmodernists wanted to use critique to soften the hegemonic power that enlightenment era values have over Western civ, and neo-Marxists want to adapt Marx to overthrow liberalism/capitalism/Western civ and force it to transcend to a new form. So a much more concrete goal there with neo-Marxists, and they directly cite Marx as their basis, unlike postmodernists who use a more diverse range of philosophical sources. Also postmodernists lean more towards citing subjectivity in their arguments and neo-Marxists mostly cite oppression.
    6
  101. Not to push my own videos but check out the one I did on memetics if you haven't. It's about how ideas naturally evolve over time into their most potent form, if you measure potency by their attractiveness to the human mind and the rate that they spread from one person to another (like a virus). I think we're seeing that with Marxism in America and how it over time attached to the subjects that Americans feel most guilty about.
    6
  102. I think you’re getting it backwards. If you asked Khomeini and his followers, I’m confident they’d say and believe they were primarily acting from religious convictions, and saw the conquest of power as a means to enact the principles of those convictions, and not the other way around. I don’t think they wanted power first, and came up with religious beliefs to secure that power. But regardless, based on the body of your comment I have a hard time believing you watched the full video
    6
  103. I did not feel I had the space in this video to make an in-depth portrayal of the relationship the USSR had to nationalism. I mostly dealt with it in its early years when it was essentially trying to make something as close to a genuinely communist state as possible. Nationalism came in more heavily after Lenin, and even then it's very controversial (in my opinion because it's wrong) to say it played more heavily than communism in Soviet ideology. I figured nuances like these were not crucial to the picture painted in this video and did not justify the time. On the anarchism note - where did you think I said it meant a power vacuum? I meant it in the strict sense of the term: lack of government.
    5
  104. Their own High Command said they lost the war, and only played into the 'stab in the back' myth after the treaty was signed. If you want to look into it there are many factors behind their surrender, but you can start by looking at their running out of oil.
    5
  105. I explained it in a community post here. I made it private because it wasn't nuanced enough for my standards now. The key information is better portrayed in my '60s Marxists video.
    5
  106. It's literally my next topic
    5
  107. Yeah I remember seeing a poll asking why people were there (I think trying to figure out why it was so hostile) and like 20% responded that they hate Sam Harris and were just there to attack him. To me the number seemed low.
    5
  108. Appreciate it! Yeah I put a decent amount of effort into these thumbnails and I never notice anyone pointing them out. Thanks.
    5
  109. When did you see that anti-liberalism roughly starting? And trust me I thought about putting liberal left and right on the actual left and right, but thought it would have been even weirder to have laissez-faire on the right and intervention on the left. I also think it feels more natural to have conservatives on the left side of the screen and progressives on the right because of the way we read and understand screen direction.
    5
  110. You're missing nationalism in your analysis. The right side of the spectrum isn't just conservatism. Regarding its origins, fascism came out of socialism similarly to how socialism came out of liberalism. It's fine to point out if you want to explore their origins, but then they became their own things. What you're doing here is similar to saying communism should be thought of in terms of liberalism, and refusing to allow the word 'socialism' in your analysis. You'll never understand the subject that way.
    5
  111. Thanks! I consider fascism as being a smaller and somewhat problematic variant within the subject of socialism (problematic because economics wasn't isn't their primary concern, so their stance on economic matters was subject to change, making categorization of them with economic labels messy). That being said, I'm comfortable broadly labeling National Socialism as socialist. It's just not as precise or telling of a label as the fascist one. Imagine if you didn't know anything about the nazis, and I told you they were socialist. It wouldn't fill out the picture of who they were, compared to if I told you they were fascist (assuming you had a good idea of what those labels meant). It seems to me that people who fixate on labeling them as socialist over being labeled fascist are either confused or caught up in partisan thinking. They can be both. The labels aren't mutually exclusive. But the fascist label is the more specific and informative one.
    5
  112. Multiple shirts. The videos take multiple days to film
    4
  113. I think it would be too much to expect three different religions over many thousands of years to not texture their beliefs about their view on God differently, but they all do share the belief in a monotheistic God who spoke to Abraham (and many of the prophets after). Its the same God in all three meaning its not an entirely different entity, like one might expect if you didn't know Allah just meant 'God' in Arabic.
    4
  114. Thank you!
    4
  115. I appreciate that. The tone of the Double Soul track was inappropriate for the Ukraine invasion video, so I looked for something more somber, and that kept being the case for the two fascism videos after that. I haven't made up my mind yet on intro music going forward but I do like how this new track gets to the content faster.
    4
  116. You asked so nicely I have to tell you. Railings by Farrow & Ball. Good luck getting it approved if you live with someone else.
    4
  117. ​ @peterbills4129  As my work standards rose I came to see my treatment in that video as too simplistic and lacking nuance. I portrayed Marxism a dominating influence, even if it was heavily adapted, when it reality I think it should be understood as one among many influences. I also think wokeness as a movement is mostly dead and has been for quite some time now, making revisiting it unappealing. Also, as I've explained elsewhere, I think I've covered adapted Marxism in modern American leftist politics well enough in other videos, namely my New Left video, but also a bit in my CRT video.
    4
  118. Do you think so? I thought with all this context it would make Iran's morality police perfectly understandable, regardless of what iteration they took. Which I think means you learned about the morality police, profoundly so.
    4
  119. Ah sorry to hear that. It's nothing personal against the people in the photos. I tried to find authentic 1800's photos of both the proletariat and the bourgeois that didn't feature any one person's face in particular (i.e. group shot, hopefully with somewhat obscured faces), and also that didn't feature a huge name (like a Carnegie), and that was literally the only photo I found that somewhat fit that criteria for the 'bourgeois.' But having your photo taken back then was a big deal so anyone showing up as 'bourgeois' in that time period is probably exceptional in one way or another.
    4
  120. For 1940 to 1970 Amanat's history of modern Iran is probably the best in English. Axworthy's history of Iran is also very respected and considered rather impartial, but won't go into as much detail. They're both listed in the description. Others like Abrahamian but I think Axworthy and Amanat do the best job for general readers of the people I've found.
    4
  121. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll think about it.
    4
  122. I think I'll write up a clarification, but in short I didn't rule out any government being fascist. I just spent the video focusing on the two least controversial fascisms, so we can then use that as a baseline to judge governments like Franco's and Salazar's.
    4
  123. I was talking about him in the very beginning of the story when he was spoken to by God. I'm curious what other descriptor you'd use of him. He was literally a sheepherder.
    4
  124. I probably could have been clearer because I was laying out both liberalism and classical liberalism at the same time. The classical liberal take on equality was mostly the idea that everyone needed to be equally covered by the same set of rights under law (i.e. everyone gets freedom of speech guaranteed by law, not just certain groups like rich people). Saying that classical liberals value freedom more makes sense if it's defined as freedom from other people intervening in your life. But they don't value freedom more if it's defined as the ability to choose from a range of options on how you want to live your life (I gave the example of a homeless person that's discriminated in the job market against having little freedom in that definition). Modern liberals try to balance both of those conceptions of freedom, and also bring in another idea of equality, understood as more of an equal playing field in terms of social mobility (more welfare and using interventionist policies to increase equality of opportunity).
    4
  125. I said I didn’t cover it because he had repeatedly disavowed it and its director had stepped down from the backlash. Trump was also heavily down in the polls and it was heavily covered by others. Making these videos takes chunks out of my life, and it did not appear to make sense to do that in that moment. Of course you’re free to have your opinions about me but I never said he didn’t know anything about it.
    4
  126. Sure thing, just added a list in the bottom of the description. It would be a pain to include all the articles/journals so I just listed the main resources used.
    4
  127. Hi, I wasn't commenting on how he's perceived by Iranians now. Only that he was popular at the time (which as far as I can tell he was) and was perceived to be overthrown by foreign powers, namely Americans, which caused widespread resentment/anger and also caused a widespread perception that MRS was not quite legitimate by being linked to imperialism and the US.
    3
  128. Hi, can I ask where you're getting that analysis from?
    3
  129. Okay thanks. I'm familiar with Gregor's work. It seems like you might be confusing the two fascisms (Italian and generic). Gregor's work is on Italian Fascism specifically and its intellectual roots. If you're just going off that it's not going to tell you a lot about German fascism (Nazism). Any overview of fascism generally will cover it and will cover all the ways Nazism was indeed a form of fascism. Stanley Payne's History of Fascism is a good one. Also any of Roger Griffin's books on fascism, or histories on Hitler (like Tolands') or Nazi Germany (like Richard Evans'). I'm aware the Nazis didn't call themselves fascist (which I address in this video), but they were labeled as fascist by just about everyone besides themselves. Even Mussolini called them fascist (which I again address in this video). I personally believe the fascist label is quite useful (what else do you call nationalists who want totalitarian rule?), and I'd argue even important to keep around considering its history. If you want to talk about their economic policy then I think the Third Way talk becomes relevant. Lastly I'm not sure what you're getting at with the bit about Marxist historians. They're a relatively uninfluential branch of historical thought.
    3
  130. Did you watch my video? The whole point is that general categories are important things. You seem to be saying something like 'there are important differences between the ideologies of Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, and therefore they cannot both be called communist.' It's a fallacy that insists on resisting generalization for the sake of saying every political unit is too unique.
    3
  131. I think the mistake you're making is not studying/understanding nationalism, which is the base of both Fascism and Nazism. A nation is a group of people with a certain amount of things in common, and when Hitler was talking about the German race he could have just said German nation (which he did interchangeably). Mussolini similarly based his movement around the idea and needs of the Italian race. When he spoke of the Italian race he was talking about the nation of Italians (a unit of people). So yes both rely on 'race' as the word was popularly used back then.
    3
  132. You're thinking of a different context of race in your first example. When they said 'German race' or 'Italian race' they're talking about German nationals and Italian nationals. The difference is that Hitler claimed Jews did not share 'the German blood' and were not part of the German nation or the German race. It's nationalism. As for the last part, you're getting back into the fallacy I was talking about with avoiding generalizations. Stressing a mystical connection over stressing a blood connection does not change that both are based in the nations of their people.
    3
  133. I'm not saying they were racist. I'm trying to help you understand what they meant by the word race. If you're really interested in this stuff, I'd recommend broadening what you're consuming for research and getting away from just Gregor. Maybe study nationalism and fascism both as general concepts.
    3
  134. If you refuse to allow yourself to ground your understanding of the movements in nationalism, they're always going to seem confusing and convoluted. Once you let yourself consider nationalism as the base it becomes quite clear. Again if you let yourself do more research outside of those trying to connect it to socialism you'll understand all these movements and concepts better.
    3
  135. Hi, I think a lot of what's happening here is that you're looking for a certain amount of detail in those sections that I simply can't provide in a video that is not specifically about these subjects and time periods. I told the history of the world before nationalism in a few minutes. Since that's something that the viewers did not click on the video for, I cannot spend 20 minutes on it before I get to the actual formation of nationalism. Saying certain aspects like 'non-monarchical senses of community' were downplayed is criticizing me for something I can't do anything about. Beyond mentioning that people had ties to local communities, and even stressing later in the video that people around the world (like peasants in France) got their identities from local communities, not the nation, there's not much I can do. If you're not satisfied with that then I don't know what to tell you. For the rest of your criticism - saying the Greeks aren't necessarily stand-out... I mean I suppose that's an opinion. I think it's much more difficult to make the case that they were not stand-out than that they were. They were stand-out as a group of people in a number of ways, and that's reflected in their contribution to civilization ever since. I think it's heavily reductionist to reduce their significance to the fact that the Romans wrote about them. Their work survives on its own and was also preserved through other cultures, like in the Middle East, and also exists through their influence on civilizations around the world, including Rome. They were also unusual in how strongly they resembled a united nationality across Hellas, making the Delian League for example. That doesn't mean they were utterly unique, that there was nothing else on Earth that resembled them, but it does mean that they were unusual. Having a problem with me calling them Greeks also seems like a strange nitpick. Do you have that problem with every modern speaker calling them Greek? It's the modern term for them, and if we're going to quickly refer to them, that's the term that should be used. Otherwise you have to spend the time explaining who the Hellens were, which again would be inappropriate in a video about nationalism, not Greekness. Also your last point on dynasties and monarchies being the state being a POV, I'm simply just naming the highest official political authority across all the land. There's nothing subjective about it. It was just a fact. - Ryan
    3
  136. Hi, you've put some effort into this (somewhat condescending) post, so I'll respond with some detail in case you're open to hearing it. If you're truly interested in Hitler and understanding him then you've probably learned enough about him to be aware that you have to place what he said in context, because he said a great many things to a great many people that were contradictory, misleading, and often demonstrably untrue in order to achieve political goals. He put it this way as he campaigned: 'What record must I use? The national, the social, or the sentimental? Of course I have them all in my suitcase.' You could string together a similar bunch of quotes, for example, to make him seem anti-socialist (far more easily) or to make him seem like a lover of peace (which he wasn't). If you read his speeches and listen to what he said, there's one ideology he constantly invokes and it's nationalism. He is Germany, Germany is him, the people need to be one proud, strong German people and think accordingly as one. It's basic nationalism that he reiterated over and over his entire career, which was a philosophy he strongly embodied himself throughout, uncontroversially. Ignoring it will make your understanding of his movement confused. You may also notice in most of the quotes you invoked he only partially invoked socialism, sometimes with an obvious ulterior motive. He had no reservations like that with nationalism. You could also learn about socialism to come to the conclusion (as most people do) that his invoking of socialism was misleading and wrong. He wasn't an egalitarian. I'm also not sure why you dismiss the comparison to the DPRK claiming it's democratic. All major communists starting from Marx and continuing until that time similarly claimed they were democratic at times, and you could string quotes together from them to try to make the case they were, as you just did with Hitler and socialism. Just because a movement or person invokes democracy doesn't mean they're democratic, just as Hitler invoking socialism doesn't mean he was a socialist. You have to look more broadly at the movement and not selectively focus on the parts you want and present them out of context.
    3
  137. Yes the term was invented by the Fascists. No one's denying that. Beyond that, I can't follow you. From early on, fascists encouraged intellectuals around the world to adopt fascism to their own countries, and Germany was widely seen around the world as one of the countries that did it, with some evidence in this video to show for that. Everyone called the Nazis fascists in their time, with the Nazis themselves being a notable exception to that, like I said in this video. So when you say it was 'retroactively redefined' to include the Nazis, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Yes to some extent they're socialist, but that's a messy label. I addressed that in my longer video, and I addressed it recently in a pinned comment here too. Emphasizing them as socialists over being fascists isn't right, if that's what you're trying to get at.
    3
  138. That happened a couple weeks after the events of this video, after world war had already effectively broken out
    3
  139. Thanks! I've been thinking about doing a video on my research process but don't think my channel deserves it yet. The short answer is that I obsess over these topics. I currently almost never take days off from working.
    3
  140. I'll see what I can do
    3
  141. I'm not sure how you're getting to the conclusion that the Nazis primarily organized around race and not the nation. Germany was the ultimate superorganism for the Nazi movement. Within that national superorganism, they were racially exclusionary, but also exclusionary if they thought people weren't contributing to Germany's welfare, or if they weren't sufficiently nationalist.
    3
  142. Hi, I didn't say that what we now call transgendered people didn't exist before modern times. I just said that it wasn't a way that people generally thought about themselves. Instances of it would have been quite rare. The point was that people, generally speaking, did not feel invited to come up with their own interpretation of who they were, outside of any label society placed on them.
    3
  143. @DrCruel What this is missing is that extreme nationalism is the overriding principle for fascists. There's nothing more important than it. So if having class stratification is deemed as 'good for the nation,' fascists will embrace it. Socialists will have a different set of priorities. Also it's extreme nationalism that wants to essentially brainwash the entire nation and control it.
    3
  144.  @DrCruel  I'll just say it sounds like you're using a definition that's too loose, so as a result you're seeing fascism in all these places where other words would better apply.
    3
  145. Much of the point of this video was to say that generalization means having a certain amount of flexibility with political concepts like capitalism. So if we go with your argument about the US, then almost no countries are capitalist, almost no countries are communist, no countries are fascist, etc. It breaks our ability to generalize.
    3
  146. Hi, you're making some mistakes here that I address in a follow-up video I made to this one. You don't appear to be using/acknowledging 'fascism' as a general concept and instead seem to be talking about Italian Fascism when you say the word. You're also making a mistake saying nationalism cannot be the main pillar of fascism because there are other nationalists in the world. It doesn't make sense, and if you read and study these movements (or even listen to what they say) it's quite clear nationalism is the driving force. Fascism is basically totalitarian nationalism.
    3
  147. I think you're making two mistakes here. One is that the Nazi movement went back earlier than the day they got in power. Hitler was imprisoned and writing MK while reparations were still required, so his beliefs were formed partly in reaction to the treaty, including his view on mass politics as a tool to bring Germany back as a confident power. While reparations stopped and hyper inflation was controlled, the German economy didn't recover until after Hitler came into power, giving him an opportunity to position himself as a savior that would reverse the humiliation of the treaty. The second point is that the military constraint stayed in effect until Hitler violated it while in power. So the treaty was still in effect while he was in power. There's of course historical context missing in my presentation, but that's a necessary concession in order to get through the amount of material that I did in this video. It's a video about fascism as an ideology, not German history.
    2
  148. Hopefully you've noticed some quality improvements since then! Thanks for sticking around all this time Sam. I probably would have given up if people like you weren't encouraging me back then.
    2
  149. Acclaim has value if you're concerned with the professionalism of an academic. They have to run their ideas through the gauntlet of other academics to earn that acclaim. In contrast, anyone on YouTube can upload a video, pretend to be knowledgeable and gain huge audiences because what they say resonates with that audience, regardless of how well thought out or true it is. I mentioned TIK because he says pretty much exactly what you're saying, and I've never seen a published academic say the same thing. The reason why is that it has fundamental problems that are obvious if you've studied fascism, which again my second vid addresses.
    2
  150. You lost me with your first sentence. Lowercase f fascism is very much a real thing, and I find it a little disturbing that you'd brush it away like that. When people talk about fascism as a general word it's a lowercase f fascism.
    2
  151.  @itsanit123  You're still denying that a real thing exists. People all over the world from early on tried to adopt fascism to their own countries and used a lowercase f to do so. Even Italian fascists used the general (lowercase f) term to talk about it in a general way. There's evidence of that in this very video, of Mussolini talking about the German fascist state.
    2
  152. Thanks! This video used a Sennheiser MKH 50. I wanted something with good sound quality that didn't have a mic right in my face.
    2
  153. I planned on doing a quick follow-up vid specifically on neoliberalism after that one, but I've kicked that can down the road ever since.
    2
  154. This made me think and I actually agree with you. I found the Iwo Jima statue in bad shape in an old thrift store, with the flag pole already broken off. In my mind that somehow made altering it when I renovated it more justifiable. I knew I wanted to include both the US and UN flag in the background, and decided to put the US flag on the left side of the screen and UN flag on the Iwo Jima statue on the right. It was trying to say 'the Allied victory in WWII led to the creation of the UN, which in combined effect, has managed to keep us out of a world war ever since.' But I was thinking of broader symbolism and wasn't sensitive to the actual struggle and intentions of Americans at Iwo Jima, and effectively appropriated their efforts for my own purposes. I'll explore other options
    2
  155. Hi, just curious - where are you getting that from? That the Balfour Declaration was the primary reason for the U.S. getting into WW1. I've seen a couple other people claim that and I'm wondering what your source is.
    2
  156. Okay thanks for the response. If we're trying to use professional standards, I wouldn't call either a high-quality source. Neither is a WW1 historian, the Landman book was written almost 100 years ago (so is not up to date with all the research and evidence that has emerged since then), and Weir is a journalist and an activist. So I'd take both of their books with at least a decent grain of salt if you're trying to use them to understand the origins of WW1.
    2
  157. Democratic regimes typically maintain a right to repress actors that are either 1) violent or 2) actors who will end all oppositional freedom if they gain power. The communism you're talking about was understood as the latter variety, inspired by Soviet communism (the dominant form on the planet at the time). Americans didn't want what happened in the Soviet Union to happen in the United States. You're, historically speaking, welcome to be a communist as long as you're not violent or want to take everyone else's political rights. Edit - you also mentioned foreign interventionism. Sure, but that doesn't change what I've said here. It's also important to remember that the Soviet Union typically intervened first and the United States typically saw themselves as the countervailing force to the Soviet Union. Without their intervention, the logic went, the Soviet Union would win. Also you can study where the U.S. failed in their interventions or did not intervene at all and what the results were for democracy in those countries (i.e. North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, China). It tells a story.
    2
  158. It's just me laying the book flat and taking a picture of the page with my phone
    2
  159. Hi! Did you watch this because of the Vietnamese subtitles? Or in English?
    2
  160. Hi, thanks for sharing. I've had almost identical thoughts. I believe I suggested as much in my democracy video, saying machines hadn't been invented yet in Athens so slaves were the solution for producing wealth and providing leisure. Perhaps slavery in the US would have peacefully resolved in the 20th century, but then you would have also had decades more of chattel slavery, and a large human cost would have come along with that. I hadn't thought of the sex slaves angle. It makes sense.
    2
  161. It took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about. You’re looking at news from Dec 4th 2022. The Iranian gov’t has reinstated them since
    2
  162. Thanks. An American vs French Revolution video has been on my longer-term roadmap for a while. I feel this video partially covered it though, and I've been covering the American Revolution a lot lately. So if I do cover it, it won't be anytime soon.
    2
  163. I saw people then using the same misspelling in the comments. I don't want to be adding more confusion into the world, even something as small as a misspelling (not to mention that misspelling hurts my professionalism). Taking the long view, I think the correction is more important than the lost comments or the short-term algorithmic hit the video will take by being a reupload.
    2
  164. Their racism came from a belief that 'cleansing' the blood of the nation would make the nation stronger. So it's driven by nationalism. 'German's' conquering other races was an expression of their 'pure German' strength. It became more irrational towards the end of the war in terms of their resource allocation, but their stance on race is rooted in the nation, and their oppression of the Slavs for instance is still based in German supremacy.
    2
  165. Hi, if you just watch the video before you respond you'll see you've misunderstood me and the points you're bringing up will actually be addressed. I define a nation at the end of the video basically exactly as you said it.
    2
  166. Hi, I don't believe I said anything in this video about antisemitism and Italy. I said it was part of German nationalism from early on.
    2
  167. I meant plainly given your intended audience. If your intended audience if physicists, then plainly means something different than plainly if your intended audience is children. The point is that your intended audience shouldn't have a problem understanding what you're trying to say.
    2
  168. You'd be surprised the amount of times I've tweaked titles and thumbnails and it made the difference between getting few views to blowing up. With the amount of time I invest in making these, I can't be stubborn about sticking with I personally prefer (which is usually the version I originally upload)
    2
  169. I appreciate that, and thanks for the feedback. I actually did several audio passes on this video. I let some spikes stand, to some extent, but thought they sounded natural and weren't jarring. I'll think about this next time.
    2
  170. I don't normally respond to comments like these but I saw this and have time to respond. Actually, even at the time basically no one respected the socialist label, even in Germany. They were (correctly) thought of as right-wing nationalists that appropriated the socialist label in an attempt to win over working class Germans (which mostly didn't work). The term 'nazi' was popularly thrown around outside of the movement as a way of disrespecting what people everywhere saw (again, correctly) as a misleading label. It's similar to saying 'North Korea' now instead of 'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea.' No one believes the terms are accurate, so no one honors them by saying them. So no I don't think they'd be called socialists if they stayed allied with the USSR and won the war, unless they forced that on people. If you just read a history book about their rise to power they'll go through all that. I also covered a lot of that in my 'How World War 2 Began' vid.
    2
  171. Haha yes I'm real and respond to comments sometimes (why not?). Hitler's public statements on socialism have to be taken with a grain of salt. You have to remember he didn't have scruples about saying whatever he had to say to achieve political goals. Also MK was written early in his career when the Nazis were still tiny and took left-wing ideas more seriously. Even with that all being said, you can just consume Hitler's primary sources and will find he obsessively talked along the lines of nationalism and only occasionally brought in an (always qualified) socialism. The longer things went on the more socialism fell away (and even became vilified). There were people in the movement (in relatively small numbers, but still) who took socialism more seriously, and Goebbels was one of them. Hitler tolerated it to some extent but also actively reeled Goebbels in when he felt he was too out of line. Many 'leftists' like Goebbels were just straight up killed, and Goebbels was somewhat of an outlier in that he was left alive and stood for those ideals - to some extent - relatively late in the movement. But even he fell more and more in line with Hitler's (right-wing) thinking over time, and he also obviously had quite limited power in dictating what the Nazi movement was about (compared to Hitler). So using Goebbels quotes to classify the Nazis also has to be taken heavily into context and with a heavy grain of salt. Thank you! Have a great New Years too. I'll keep at it over here.
    2
  172. I usually try a few titles and thumbnails to see how they do with the algorithm.
    2
  173. The trouble is I can't prove that anyone's not real. So I'm not sure what to do about it. I don't want to go around deleting comments from real people who are just nationalistic about China
    2
  174. I took down all my early videos for personal reasons. Not content related
    2
  175. Did you watch the whole video? The thesis was that the period was a messy one, that there was a range of goals and influences, and that it produced a hybridized, even confusing spectrum of opinion on the left. You had reformists who were not Marxist at all, people who occupied some sort of hard-to-categorize middle ground, and revolutionists, who according to their own primary sources were influenced by Marx in one way or another. According to my study the revolutionary wing in all those movements grew too radical for the rest of the left's taste, and in the SDS's case morphed into a domestic terrorism unit (going from 100,000 members to quickly alienating all but a few people). I tried to give a nuanced, accurate take on the period, and I think what I delivered and am saying here is a pretty straightforward presentation of the facts.
    2
  176. If you're interested in learning where you're going wrong.. Allah just means 'God' in Arabic, but it's specifically a name referring to the monotheistic God who spoke to Abraham in the creation story. 'Allah' doesn't appear in the Torah or Bible because 1) they weren't written in Arabic, and 2) they were written before Islam was invented
    2
  177. Hey Najee, 1) Yes if you buy into CRT's claims, but I don't think it would necessarily be considered racist. Just academically 'white.' It would more substantially cross over into being racist if I demanded everyone had those academic standards, because I'd be supposing that 'white' standards are superior. 2) That's a good observation and I've wondered that myself, but haven't seen any critical race theorist comment on it. If they've noticed, I don't know what their position is. I could speculate that they don't have a problem taking influences from white people, as long as they feel they have an authentic, 'non-white' spin on those influences.
    2
  178. I think YouTubers have been spreading the idea fairly recently. Check the comments section on this vid and you should see plenty of people saying it
    2
  179. Thanks! It's funny you say that. I actually added Chinese subtitles yesterday.
    2
  180. Hi, I didn't say that France formed the first modern nation. That (somewhat controversially) typically goes to England. I said the French theorized about nationalism and demonstrated the first instance of a nation formed by nationalism. What I presented in this video is the standard explanation of that (the formation of nationalism, particularly by the French). The U.S. formed a nation, but the concept of an American nation emerged pretty late in the revolution and was a tentative one, something the colonists were ready to abandon. They were highly federalist in their thinking, conceiving themselves as primarily members of a state (like Virginia), not members of a nation. Americans also partially inspired Bolivar, but not Bolivar's nationalism (the subject the video was centered on). Bolivar, from my research, was also primarily moved by European influence, not American.
    2
  181. That's a strong accusation! I'm not sure where you looked, but the full quote is indeed in Hoover's Memoirs (Book 1) on page 437. https://archive.org/details/memoirsofherbert0000unse_g9m1
    2
  182. Hi what comment are you talking about? YouTube may have automatically removed it depending on what you said
    2
  183.  @SJ-co6nk  I don't think you're following my logic. Accurately calling something capitalist doesn't mean it's a perfect encapsulation of Adam Smith, just as calling something communist doesn't mean it's a perfect encapsulation of Karl Marx. Following that to its conclusion destroys knowledge and our ability to talk about these ideas and how they have played out in history. When we call America capitalist, we realize that it's not purely capitalist, and that there is a significant socialist element in there. You could make the argument that we should consider it primarily a socialist country and not a capitalist one, but I'd respond that you're getting the proportions wrong and it's primarily capitalist.
    2
  184.  @SJ-co6nk  Are you saying that generalizing America as capitalist is something I made up and that we don’t use? And going further to say it’s not a useful thing to say? There’s a lot to unpack there but I’d say none of that is right. I’m explaining how virtually everyone uses generalizations. Both experts and regular people. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you’re’ pointing at one of the most capitalist places on Earth (America) and saying capitalism isn’t a useful word to describe it.
    2
  185.  @SJ-co6nk  I tried sticking this out but it seems like you’re just appealing to ambiguity at this point
    2
  186.  @Reptani  Hi, thanks for the thoughtful comment. If you want to have a back and forth about it shoot me an email.
    2
  187. I added a section addressing that in my pinned comment after the SCOTUS ruling
    2
  188. I actually appreciate this feedback. But I don’t know what to do about it. I have to compete against other YouTubers, and putting your face in the thumbnail improves your performance. I started doing it only recently and it’s made the difference between success and failure on my channel. I tried doing more neutral faces and they didn’t do as well. I found doing more confident faces that indicate some emotion do best. I still have tried to be subtle on most of my thumbnails. This one’s probably the most over the top. So yeah. Seems like it’s a necessary concession to make to succeed on here but maybe I’m missing something.
    2
  189. I think that's actually been far more heavily covered than the contents of this video. Why is it that you think I won't cover that?
    2
  190. I've seen a bunch of people say this. This misunderstands Nazism. German fascism was ultimately based in nationality. Mein Kampf has to be a strong contender for one of the most nationalistic texts of all time, Nazism was about establishing the greatness and supremacy of Germany, and Germany was the ultimate superorganism for the Nazi movement. But within all that, they were racially exclusive (and exclusive in other ways).
    2
  191. Thank you!
    1
  192. I know Tik's video seems authoritative but it's very politicized and not a high quality interpretation of fascism. It makes many fundamental mistakes, some of which I address in this video and some more I address in my follow-up vid after this. If you want to learn about fascism (outside of my vid) I'd recommend reading works by fascism scholars, like Roger Griffin and Robert Paxton.
    1
  193.  @matthewpickard6464  It's highly distorted in order to make it more convenient for a certain political point of view. Mostly by ignoring politically inconvenient parts of the subject.
    1
  194. Can you elaborate on how Islam is the ultimate solution to what was discussed here?
    1
  195. I recommend watching the follow-up fascism vid I made after this one where I address exactly what you're saying
    1
  196. If you refuse to listen to people who don't share your views then your own views won't evolve. You're making some fundamental mistakes in your argument that both of my videos talk about
    1
  197. Are you getting your info from TIKhistory? If that's the case I'd recommend reading some acclaimed, more impartial academics on the subject like Roger Griffin or Robert Paxton if you want to get a handle on fascism. I'd also recommend checking out my follow-up vid where I deal with some of what you're saying.
    1
  198.  @itsanit123  You're claiming that a roughly 100 year usage of a term (from all types of people all over the political spectrum) doesn't exist. Spending a few moments on google or opening any academic book on fascism will fact check that for you quickly.
    1
  199. I see democratic socialists as actually returning to the earlier roots of socialism. They do want to mitigate hierarchies, specifically as they relate to liberalism. They just don't have one fixed way to do it. To me it's still pretty clearly socialism, just breaking away from the Marx-dominated period.
    1
  200. Hi can I ask where you’re getting your information from?
    1
  201. You're correct that there were Allied forces sent to Russia during the civil war, but they were token forces with a marginal impact. When I say the Bolsheviks were worried about being 'invaded and overthrown,' I'm talking about a full-scale invasion, which of course never happened. The Allies discussed it at the Paris Peace Conference but no one had the soldiers available or the willpower to do it.
    1
  202. Thanks Shyam, and yes. Shoot me an email (in the 'about' section on my youtube channel page) and I'll send you private links.
    1
  203. National Socialism was just a term Hitler's movement used to brand their version of fascism. By national socialist I'm assuming you mean a nation governed by both nationalist and socialist principles? I think it's unlikely that it wouldn't be dictatorial, but I'd say it's hypothetically possible, and that it's also hypothetically possible that it could simultaneously be fascistic. Some would argue with that though. Both Mussolini and Hitler were explicitly against democracy, and many (even most) believe that dictatorship is a necessary component for fascism. I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's highly unlikely that a fascist movement can be democratic.
    1
  204.  @RogerZerne  Being just 'nationalist' isn't enough to be considered fascist. It has to be an aggressive version of nationalism that subordinates the public to that nationalism. Socialism is optional. Many would say that dictatorship is necessary, and like I said before I think it's highly probable. But it's not the deciding factor.
    1
  205. I chalked that phrasing up to him being tired and towards the end of an hour-long speech
    1
  206. I'd recommend checking out Robin Hanson if you haven't. He thinks there's a disconnect between stated intentions and actual motivations in politics, something he extends to politicians, academics, and regular people, and thinks it's responsible for why we don't seem to be in a rush to think creatively, gather knowledge, and improve our institutions.
    1
  207. Me too, but I think it was too conceptually complex for something that people only spend a couple seconds looking at
    1
  208. I misspelled 'palingenetic' on the Roger Griffin slide in the original upload
    1
  209. The problem with that Mussolini quote is that it leaves out important parts of his theory that he himself (in other quotes) says are vital (like his 'myth of the nation' being his unifying, all-important purpose for Fascism). It doesn't make sense to look at one quote and say that's it. Period. I'm curious though because you seem thoughtful. If you don't believe that the phenomenon that I described in this video is fascism (inciting mass enthusiasms around the myth of the nation and subordinating the public to this aggressive nationalistic consciousness), then what word would you use to call it? Or do you think this isn't a phenomenon that should be described or specifically named?
    1
  210. People have selectively looked at evidence to convince themselves Marx was right for the last 140 years or so. The point is to broadly look at the evidence. Look at how Marx described the capitalism of his time in Capital, then ask yourself if it's gotten better or worse since then. Have more people been lifted out of subsistence wages? Or have more people fallen into that bracket? The answer is the former. Have workplace conditions become more oppressive or less? Again, the former. I think it's very hard to make the case that Marx was broadly correct, and it's much more obvious that things have developed away from what Marx anticipated. That was the point in my video.
    1
  211. I appreciate it, and yeah I get having a problem with Patreon. I haven't figured out YT memberships yet, but I have a Paypal account set up under the email address in my 'about' section if you want to donate through that.
    1
  212. I've seen a number of people say that but haven't seen anyone cite a source. Can you tell me where you're getting that from?
    1
  213. Gotcha. I'd consider Wikipedia a low quality source, especially on controversial and messy subjects like this one. I'm reading the page and its sources for key points are obscure and much of the body text contradicts that main claim.
    1
  214.  @allie7619  Hi, I factored what you're saying into my analysis. You're describing different conceptions of the same core god, the one who spoke to Abraham. 'Allah' just means 'God' in Arabic, specifically referring to that Abrahamic god. The Christian conception just argues that the god should be thought of as having other aspects included (the Holy Trinity). You're still talking about the same fundamental god, just conceived differently. You have to expect all religions to do this over time. They're never going to all agree on conceiving one god the same way. But it's wrong to say it's not the same god. It is (at the risk of repeating myself too many times), just conceived differently.
    1
  215.  @ShogunSquabo  I'm considering the Quran both holistically (what does it say it is? what did it set out to do?) and considering individual passages within it, as anyone must at some point to analyze it. I think where you're making a mistake is not realizing that you need interpretation to arrive at the conclusions that you're arriving at. With the jihad example, different Muslims believe jihad means different things. Why? Because there are contradictory passages in the Quran. If you want to try to resolve them you need interpretation, and different people interpret it differently. There is no one holistic interpretation of the Quran that includes all of its passages that all Muslims agree on.
    1
  216. Hi, thanks for the comprehensive answer, but I don't think you've highlighted any errors here. For the first one, I never said the Quran was expounded all at once and am aware it happened over the rest of Muhammad's life. For the second, saying the Quran and Sunnah provided a complete system of guidance for Muslims at all doesn't make sense, whether it happened before or after Muhammad's death. Just saying it's complete doesn't get you anywhere. We can start with how complicated politics are, and how inadequate a single text or interpretations of a single man's life is to provide 'complete' answers to the question of politics. Or we could look at how both require interpretations, inherently dividing Muslims, seemingly forever into paths of separate understandings of these things without means to resolve them. Anyway, I don't see an error that you've highlighted here either. I didn't say there was an absence of rules by Muhammad's death, just that they were not thorough enough to provide comprehensive guidance for Muslims going forward, which led, necessarily to interpretations and infighting. You seem to be agreeing with that in your critique. With the third, I talked about this in my pinned comment. You're interpreting the text of the Quran to claim there are no contradictions. Not everyone agrees with you, and those passages are used outside of the interpretation you're giving here constantly. There would not be such discrepancy over what jihad meant if you didn't have to interpret the Quran and its inherent contradictions so heavily. That was my point, not that you couldn't interpret it to claim there are no contradictions.
    1
  217.  @JUSTRELAX616  Well you said I made mistakes, so I'm defending my work here, and as far as I can tell you're not able to substantiate the claim that my work does have mistakes. With your view on its being complete when understood in the correct context, that requires human interpretation. So who is to say one scholar or one Muslim, or one group of Muslims has the correct interpretation? Because it relies on human interpretation, and is not complete and perfect within the literal text itself, you're stuck with endless fighting between Muslims, endless disagreement, and ultimately, often violence as a means to resolve it. And of course that started immediately after Muhammad's death.
    1
  218.  @JUSTRELAX616  Saying something has errors is different than saying it's flawed (which is just saying it's not perfect). But regardless you're agreeing that it requires interpretation in order to translate its principles into concrete solutions. That's my point. Where you're going wrong is thinking that it's a concrete solution contained within the text itself. The treasure map is actually incidentally a perfect example of a text that does do that. You either understand a treasure map correctly, or you don't. Did you go to the spot and find treasure there? Then you understood it. It doesn't require interpretation in the sense relying on opinion outside of the text. You can't do that with the Quran, you need human opinion. Then you're stuck with different humans disagreeing with their different opinions, and you have the history of Muslims fighting one another which I'm sure you're aware of, despite all sides believing they purely understand the Quran and the Sunnah.
    1
  219. Hey Elton, I took it down for personal reasons and figured enough other people covered rent-seeking that it wasn't too big of a loss for the YT community. Edit: I left up a private link here for a while but took it back down.
    1
  220. Thanks for the feedback. That's something I started paying attention to recently and I thought I fixed it in this video. Was it still doing it?
    1
  221. I can’t change it tonight but I’ll try it
    1
  222. Hi, can you elaborate? What kind of setup are you using to listen?
    1
  223. ​ @williamcrawford7621  I think there are some good points here, but also some misunderstanding of what I said in this thread and misunderstanding about Nazism. One is fundamental to the movement. It wasn't about primarily about establishing international supremacy of a certain race, which would imply trying to establish international racial cooperation to achieve that goal. It was about primarily about establishing the greatness and the supremacy of Germany. Within that goal, they were racially discriminatory and supremacist (as well as discriminatory in other ways, which I said before). That's written in countless different ways in Mein Kampf and is just a basic point about the movement. On that note, I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say a cursory glance in MK reveals that race is everything (which I think you're implying says that it meant more to them than nation). Hitler establishes his nationalism first in the book, pg 10, and his racism second, around pg 55. His racism is established in nationalist terms (that they were internationalists that were hurting Germany). Nationalism runs so consistently throughout the book that I'm not sure how you'd make the argument that racism is clearly more important to him based on it. Allowing people from other nations to join the SS doesn't disprove what I just said, and I think is clearly something the Nazis felt they had to do to keep the momentum of their aggression going. The same for allowing puppet states, which I'm sure you realize are puppets under the umbrella of Germany. I don't have any issues with your presentation of Italy's stance on race. The only thing I'd say is that while they did deify the state, I think you miss the point if you don't acknowledge that it was a deification for the purposes of nationalism. On that note, the Nazis also deified the state and said quite similar things about it.
    1
  224. Double Soul - Unfinished Sympathy
    1
  225. Hi, my pinned comment addresses what you're talking about. The easiest way to get to the heart of who they are is to look at why they're conducting those policies. The Nazis were conducting them for the sake of national strength and national unity (nationalism/fascism). Socialists do it for the sake of egalitarianism (socialism). The Nazis also, tellingly, deviated from socialistic economic policy if it didn't help their nationalist agenda.
    1
  226. They came out of different political traditions but arrived at strikingly similar ideas within the same time period. Too similar to be coincidental. Their relationship to socialism is more complicated than you're letting on here, and you're focusing on the early aspects of it, not what it developed into. I deal with this in my pinned comment and cannot keep responding to these types of posts at length. Calling them fascists is not 'a simple way to teach it to children.' They're considered fascists by virtually all respected academics that spend their lives researching it, which I'm sure you're aware of if you've researched the subject. For good reason. My longer video goes into why in more depth.
    1
  227. Yes, chapmanqueries@gmail.com. Thanks in advance if you end up donating.
    1
  228. Hi, I didn’t say Nazism was a conservative ideology. I said it was an extreme form of nationalism (fascism). Conservatism is not the only right-wing ideology, just as liberalism is not the only ideology on the left. They were also explicitly anti-liberal for what it’s worth (regarding your analysis).
    1
  229. Hi, can you send me a source for that? chapmanqueries@gmail.com
    1
  230. Can I ask, where are you getting that understanding of Zionism from?
    1
  231.  @DrCruel  I think you misunderstood me, unless you're claiming that these Marxist movements believed nationalism was literally more important than any other principle. That means if nationalistic ideals said to embrace class differences, then that is the correct course of action. Just saying that they were 'hyper-nationalists' isn't enough to make them fascists.
    1
  232.  @DrCruel  I think you're still not understanding what I'm saying. Being strongly nationalist isn't enough to be fascist. I'd say you could still be fascistic, depending on how you embodied strong nationalism, but not a fascist. To be a fascist, nationalism has to be your principle that overrides all other principles, including class. If you're saying these Marxist movements should be described as primarily nationalistic ones, then there's a conversation to be had. Based on what you've said I'm not sure if you're understanding that or what your stance is. I'd disagree with you though if you thought they were primarily nationalists.
    1
  233. Read my pinned comment
    1
  234. You don’t seem receptive to me or to what I have to say, but if you’re interested in learning about fascism, generic fascism is an easy term to research. It’s a baseline term for understanding the subject that I assumed most people were at least in some sense aware of.
    1
  235.  @MrDj232  It seems I can't please everyone. I'm criticized more often for going through too much in a small amount of time (the 42 minute fascism video was cramming something like 13 books into that explanation). The emotional appeal explanation isn't something I made up. It's straight from Mussolini and Hitler, which I lay out in sources in that video extensively. I really don't see much productive conversation happening here, but surely you must understand that 'generic fascism' is the academic term, and most of the public just knows it as 'fascism,' knowing that it's a general idea that applies to multiple movements. If you want to research this stuff, again, you can find plenty of academics explaining the difference between the two, where Italian fascism is capitalized and generic fascism isn't. Roger Griffin is a good start, with his fascism primer. Even just looking at my sources in this video you can see people using one capitalized and the other not.
    1
  236. ​ @MrDj232  I'd just say consider the possibility that you're either misunderstanding my definition (which is basically reiterating most accepted definitions) or misunderstanding the nature of most modern governments.
    1
  237. The power dynamics in mid 20th century America were such that media owners were necessarily the oppressors and the public was necessarily the oppressed? And that the public needed to gain a certain consciousness as a collective in order to band together and gain political power and emancipate themselves? ... That's what you took away from my presentation here? That's the only description of Marxism (that I guess we can call a definition) that I can imagine someone even loosely trying to apply here.
    1
  238.  @Brent-ln9bc  I'm guessing you're getting that from Tik's videos? Your description of fascism is Mussolini's early version of Fascism. So trade union socialism isn't generic fascism, it's specifically early Italian Fascism. So Tik's videos (the one's I've seen anyway) aren't right. They're selectively looking at early Italian Fascism and conflating it with all of fascism (which no academic close to the subject would agree with).
    1
  239. It sounds like you’re conflating fascism as a general concept and Italian Fascism. I made a follow-up vid that addresses this
    1
  240. I think my drawing did end up looking more like a rabbit
    1
  241. I try to explain things as plainly as possible, even if that plain explanation ends up being unflattering for the subject (imagine I'm plainly describing a murder; you'd still condemn the murderer and wouldn't have illusions about where I stood on it). Based on my sources (in the description), this was a plain explanation of it. I avoid sources like Thomas Frank (on all subjects), because to me that's more like partisan cheerleading, and sources like that don't attempt to be balanced. Also keep in mind I'm describing the phenomenon that underlies Marxism-Leninism and fascism, and led to much of the pain of the 20th century (also in other places around the world, like South America). That all being said, I still feel like my explanation could have been better. Do you have any suggestions?
    1
  242. I showed Washington when I said the line about being popular in their time.
    1
  243. Thank you
    1
  244. Thank you!
    1
  245. They see it as natural and/or ideal. They want to see the world in terms of nations. The point is that they're not interested in framing the world another way. Fascism puts its own spin on nationalism and can borrow from other doctrines as well, but in that aspect it's in alignment with nationalism.
    1
  246. You're not seeing them? I'm seeing auto-generated ones in English that are pretty accurate
    1
  247. Generally their own citizens through war bonds. Also other countries. The US was also a major creditor to the Allies in WW1, which I think I touched on in the piece.
    1
  248. There should be Spanish subtitles
    1
  249. Thanks! I'm not comfortable calling myself an expert, but the quick answer to your question is that they're both collectivist, but Nazis cared primarily about nationalism (with a strong emphasis on racism accompanying it), and communism cares primarily about class, and designing a society that brings their class ideals to life.
    1
  250. I can't respond in-depth to every comment that's saying this, but you're misunderstanding my explanation of it. I'm describing fascism as totalitarian nationalism, which is not just 'any kind of nationalism.' I guess this is the hazard of giving a simple, one sentence explanation, that some will misunderstand it. I skip the economic aspect because it was less important to fascists than nationalism. If we don't understand the totalitarian nationalism part, there's no point to going to their relationship with economics, which is a lesser and more subtle aspect of fascism. There are some problems with simply calling them socialist, which I talk about in my pinned comment here.
    1
  251.  @Baamthe25th  the mass subordination of individuals to an aggressive nationalistic consciousness that’s directed and controlled by a totalitarian state doesn’t sound like totalitarian nationalism to you?
    1
  252. Hi, it seems you're responding to all the comments on my video and trying to persuade people that fascism should be understood as a form of socialism. It isn't. If you want to learn more about it my recent video illustrates how it descended from nationalism.
    1
  253.  @Historia.Magistra.Vitae.  It's not a socialist ideology by definition. If you want, you can look up the definition of it and it's explicitly based in nationalism. If you're trying to reduce all of fascism down to Sorel then you're oversimplifying. Both the Italians and Germans were partially inspired by socialists, but they were both also heavily inspired by nationalists that had been active in their country in the 18th and 19th century (for Germany) and mostly the 19th century for Italy. They ended up with a predominantly nationalist product, which is why they're defined as being based in nationalism. This video breaks that down, as does my recent video on nationalism, if you want to expand your understanding beyond Sorel and the socialist influence on fascism. Also the Italian fascists were notoriously inconsistent about defining Fascism and fascism and struggled with it throughout their time in the spotlight. Gentile, for example, would be hired to make an official statement on it, but wouldn't be given much time, and would produce something that would be unsatisfying to just about everyone. So if you cherry pick a quote here and there you can bend them quite a lot to make them into something they weren't.
    1
  254.  @Historia.Magistra.Vitae.  Fascism is bigger than syndicalism, as I've said and you apparently are ignoring. You can't solely define fascism via its influence from the syndicalists, as I've already said and virtually all analysis supports. If you're willing to use evidence and have a rational discussion about these subjects then you're welcome here, but my comments section is not a place for you to spam everyone with your own personal convictions about socialism.
    1
  255.  @Historia.Magistra.Vitae.  It seems like you're deleting or editing your replies as I'm responding to them. It also sounds like you're mostly only familiar with early Fascism, before they came into power and became the thing that the world knows them by (ultra nationalists). If you read a history of Italian fascism it will iron out a lot of what we're talking about here. You're also making a few categorical mistakes and seem to think fascism was a small, uncomplicated movement, which is a bit bizarre considering they controlled two of the biggest countries in Europe and started a world war. It sounds like you're making a pretty big mistake thinking that right wing values cannot be collectivist and are defined by individualism. You can be on the right and be a collectivist. The difference between left and right is the difference between equality and hierarchies. Right wing values call for hierarchies (like within the family, within genders, within races, within nations), which left wing values call for greater equality in all those places. If you want to understand the difference you can look at the difference between the Soviets and the Nazis. They had similar systems, but the Soviets did what they did to create a more equal society, even a more equal world (especially under Lenin). The Nazis, by contrast leaned into gender, racial, and national hierarchies, making them a right wing movement (an especially collectivist one too).
    1
  256.  @Historia.Magistra.Vitae.  You're making so many mistakes that it's hard to respond to all of them. Two of the biggest countries in Europe - Italy and Germany. Ethiopia is not a country in Europe, nor was it fascist. It seems like you're ignoring what virtually the entire world labels as right-wing values in order to make your own point about individualism, then dismissing whatever you don't like that I'm saying as 'American disinformation.' There's nothing American about what's being said here, nor is there disinformation. This is more or less all the standard explanation accepted by the vast majority of professionals that have studied fascism (and the left-right dichotomy) from all around the world and all walks of life. The only exceptions to that classification of fascism which I can find seem to be modern conservatives (almost always nonprofessionals) specifically on social media who are intent on bending fascism towards socialism for seemingly culture war purposes. But my channel is not a place for culture war battles. It's a place for rational discussion. If you're sincerely trying to understand these issues I'd recommend diversifying from whatever you're consuming. If you're not, then that's fine, but take it elsewhere.
    1
  257.  @Historia.Magistra.Vitae.  Again some major problems with what you're saying. The biggest one is that you don't seem to be acknowledging/aware of the general concept of fascism. If you think what I'm saying is just an American leftist thing I'd again recommend getting out there more and looking around. Ultimately, you don't seem interested in having a rational discussion, and seem bent in your own personal convictions regardless of what's going on in reality or what makes sense or what's being presented to you. So I'm going to leave this here and bid you farewell.
    1
  258. Hey Richard, I appreciate that and understand the reluctant to use Google or Patreon. I have a Paypal account linked to chapmanqueries@gmail.com if you want to use that instead. Thanks in advance for any donations.
    1
  259. Some smart people fear so (two were cited in this, Olson more strongly than Fukuyama from what I can tell). I think predicting the future is hazardous and the issues I raised here are concerning but potentially addressable.
    1