Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "HasanAbi" channel.

  1. 6
  2. 6
  3. 5
  4. 5
  5. 5
  6. 5
  7. 5
  8. 5
  9. 5
  10. 5
  11. 5
  12. 5
  13. 5
  14. 5
  15. 5
  16. 5
  17. 5
  18. 5
  19. 5
  20. 5
  21. 5
  22. 5
  23. 5
  24.  @floopsiemcsoops6008  It's like you didn't even bother reading my comment. Conservatives believe in leftist concepts like abolishing private property, dismantling the state, having a commitment to equal protections for social minorities, and reorganizing society on a non-hierarchical basis? Really? Which poll showed that? I must've missed it. Politics isn't merely a matter of shuffling around some signifiers until people's beliefs match their material needs. One has to attend to the meaning behind the word and the long-inculcated, highly propagandized notions of what is necessary for society—competition, hierarchy, ownership, use of force. The people who reject socialism reject it for particular reasons. They may not be good reasons, but they must be grappled with. If anyone's underestimating "the average voter" (not sure why "voter" is the unit of analysis) it's you. That you think some conservatives agreeing with a modicum of social democracy (built on third world exploitation) speaks less to their willingness to budge left as it does to the lengths to which you had to go to put the left within their reach—not by making an appeal to the meaning of "socialism," not by overturning fundamental assumptions, not by dispelling double consciousness,but by bringing socialism more in line with capitalism. Thinking that politics is primarily a matter of branding is a peculiarly liberal way of looking at things, as if we were trying to sell soda or launder a reputation. It doesn't require action. It doesn't require a transformation of personal and social consciousness. Imagine that you had said to people in the black or gay rights movements that their real problem was branding, and if only they used different language and different tactics, the public would be on their side. In fact, people did just that, and they were wrong. People didn't change their minds about these groups because of a change of label. They changed because of repeated, provocative, enduring exposure, violent repression, and because of association with people in their own lives. They had to change the way they thought and related to black and LGBT people. If you start calling socialism "workplace democracy," you're either not really being true to the aims and commitments of socialism, or you're just being dishonest with people. And what's to stop reactionaries from simply associating "workplace democracy" with socialism, just as they've done with countless other terms and subjects regardless of their connection to socialism? If you're not aware of the (by now) centuries of conservative propaganda against democracy, I don't know what to tell you. Just about any Republican would be thrilled to inform you that we have a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
    5
  25. 5
  26. 5
  27. 4
  28. 4
  29. 4
  30. 4
  31. 4
  32. 4
  33. 4
  34. 4
  35. 4
  36. 4
  37. @Jeff Belding Your own critical thinking is irrelevant when it goes against the data. "The left," by which I assume you mean liberals, aren't refusing the vaccine because of spurious connections to Trump. I don't know where you got that idea. Doctors and other experts aren't changing their minds on "a whim." It may look that way, but, aside from some really stupid policies, like the CDC's early discouragement of masking, opinions change when new data provokes a revision. Early in the pandemic, there was less data; now there's more. Nothing to date has shown the vaccines to be unsafe (beyond the normal risks of any medication) or ineffective, exactly the opposite, and the more data has come in, the more confident we are that is the case. Covid is deadly. It's killed 600k+ in the US alone and 4m+ worldwide. It's not a "mild flu," as many conservatives claim. You personally might be okay, but consider the ramifications. Every person who gets sick risks infecting others, must take time off work, and in severe cases, which can occur in otherwise young, healthy people, using up hospital resources. Not to mention that unvaccinated populations are driving virus mutation, leading to new strains which are more contagious, could be more virulent, and reduce vaccine efficacy. If there's another dominate strain after Delta, but worse, the vaccines may not work. We may need new ones, and we're going to have to go through this over and over, never getting to herd immunity because some boomers are on facebook too much. Let's just be done with this shit. The number of people who absolutely cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons is vanishingly small, and of course accommodations have to be made for them. Your typical white evangelical anti-vaxxer is not that person.
    4
  38. 4
  39. 4
  40. 4
  41. 4
  42. 4
  43. 4
  44. 4
  45. 4
  46. 4
  47. 4
  48. 4
  49. 4
  50. 4