Did you at least skim the bullet points? Human centered appears to mean putting people over money. One can take care of the people doing the work and still make money.
I don’t think that is true of many jobs, and it doesn’t have to be true of any. Capitalism with an eye only on the bottom line will strive to drive wages as low as possible. Capitalism seeking a balance won’t. There isn’t just one way to use capitalism just like there isn’t just one way to use socialism. Otherwise all those anti-socialism memes would have merit.
Still, color me surprised that a chief complaint about a guy who is proposing UBI he is labeled as too capitalistic ETA - I mean even Bernie isn’t suggesting we get rid of capitalism entirely.
automation might indeed radically change the available jobs. maybe already is. and we may indeed need some ubi or something to account for it.
i think it misses though how really bad climate change will be. even if we stop emissions today, the world will change in fundamental ways. other changes - like automation - might just be icing on the disaster of a cake.
climate change makes prognostication hard. it has to be a top priority. along with recognizing the need to start at the bottom and bring everyone up to safety, rather than trickle safety down through the existing wealthy and white power structures.
The average person could understand the difference between an economy focused on “growth” and one focused on “sustainability”.
Due to many decades of propaganda. But heaven forbid a candidate try to educate them on alternatives, right?
“Human-centred capitalism” is a vague buzzword term. A conservative would argue that the term can be applied to the current system, with capitalism serving “deserving” and “job-creating” humans first and foremost.
Warren and Sanders are the two current candidates who’ve used plain words and put forward sustainable economic policies.
I think I’m less concerned with the “right” words and am more concerned with the right ideas. I’ll have to read that later and comment on his solutions specifically, but we have the historical knowledge about the last major shift (to an industrial economy) and we’re just letting the same thing happen again. We’re letting the foxes run the hen house, and that’s not helpful.
With out listening to the pod cast, what is it, specifically, they are attracted to among Yang’s proposed policies?
Is it the UBI? Or is it the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants? Or the support of the DREAM act? Legalizing Weed? Support of LGBTQ rights? Medicare for all? Right to privacy with abortion and contraception? Automatic voter registration? Combat Gerrymandering? Campaign Finance Reform? Carbon fee and dividend?
I am just curious which one of these clearly “liberal” or “left wing” policies that alt-right scum are “left-curious” about. Maybe that is the wooden horse that opens them up to other ideas.
And also - preppers are a different category than “alt-right scum”. There is some overlap, of course, but your comment makes it feel like the two are usually together.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I hadn’t heard of Yang, and I was curious. I did a couple of google searches- and was pretty surprised! Here’s what I dug up:
I first became aware of Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang when I saw him on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If that doesn’t sound strange enough, the clip itself came to my attention when it was tweeted out approvingly by a former colleague of white supremacist Richard Spencer. In the tweet, Yang was referred to as “pro-white” because the video shows Yang claiming that the suffering of white men is “diminished” in American culture due to their racial identity, a concept that he finds “destructive.” In recent months, notable alt-right figures have continuously retweeted Yang’s tweets and interviews, as well as tweeted pro-Yang endorsements. They’re part of a growing trend of Yang praise among other racists, white supremacists, and problematic media personalities including the The Daily Stormer ’s Andrew Anglin, white nationalist James Allsup, and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
The Daily Stormer ’s current background image depicts a bikini-clad anime girl wearing a Yang2020 hat. His heavily online supporters call themselves the Yang Gang, a term that encompasses his fans on the racist right, who appear to like him mostly based on his plans to give them a free $1,000 each month, and several instances where Yang has used language that is familiar to them in his concerns for the plight of white Americans.
There are multiple Twitter accounts run by alt-right trollies dedicated to the cause, as well as several anime-themed YouTube videos (reinstilling the right’s racism towards minority Americans) and articles on The Daily Stormer and popular alt-right blog Occidental Dissent . Appearances on both Rogan and Sam Harris’ podcasts as well as Carlson’s show don’t help Yang’s case for avoiding the attention and ostensible support of delusional, racist, and privileged white dudes, but he’s clearly found support in a strong politically-minded, doomsaying base that helped a fellow outsider win in 2016.
As a devout capitalist, Yang’s policy ideas and thoughts on libertarian and anti-politically correct figureheads like Rogan — he referred to Rogan as the “the primary voice of reason right now in our society” — are certainly much friendlier than the other Democratic candidates in the field, allowing him to attract questionable if not racist adherents.
Verdin hypothesized that 4chan’s /pol/, a discussion board notorious for being a watering hole of racist and sexist trollies, was responsible for the so-called Yang Gang’s Twitter explosion. Immediately before the hashtag went viral, people boosting Yang flooded the board with absurdist, neon pink vaporwave memesbacking his campaign and its centerpiece proposal to provide every American a monthly $1,000 universal basic income.
While Yang and his campaign have disavowed racist backing, unsavory elements of his online support have seized on tweets he’s sent that raise questions about white demography, and have reframed his central campaign plank as a tool to punish undocumented immigrants living in the United States and deter others from coming. Yang’s campaign has argued that the eruption of support on 4chan took place without their prodding, but it came in the days and weeks after he appeared on actor Joe Rogan’s widely heard podcast, which has hosted multiple guests associated with the alt-right, and Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Both are popular on the message board and in other right-leaning online spaces.
Organized Yang groups have used Discord, a chat service, to stage deliberate raids on 4chan to evangelize for the candidate. The online battles have given rise to real-world harassment after 4chan users doxxed and harassed Carly Reilly, the Yang campaign’s deputy chief of staff, over unproven claims, denied by the campaign, that she led efforts to manipulate 4chan into supporting Yang.
Searching for /pol/ or “4chan” on two pro-Yang Discord servers returned dozens of results, often accompanied by calls for users to create or post in threads about Yang. “OK. The NZ thing has died down. It’s definitely time to spam pol again,” one member of the Yang Gang 2020 Discord server wrote a week and a half after 50 Muslim worshippers were killed in New Zealand. “I’m gonna make a few threads. I’ll link them.”
For all the infighting, there seem to be two areas where Yang’s fringe internet supporters align—in what they see as his nods to white identity politics, which they interpret as his openness to white nationalism, and his plan for universal basic income, which they frame as a tool for white nationalism.
Well thanks for that research. I haven’t walked away with a “pro-white” message from the interviews I have heard, but then again I am not sitting down trying to glean anything I can use as a pull quote to further a white nationalist agenda.
I find it ironic they think UBI could be used as a white nationalist tool, but not something like medicare for all or free college tuition, etc. Who would profit most from these programs, in terms of shear numbers? White people. Does socialism coming from an Asian dude with a pull quote that makes them feel good make it more palatable?
I also find it ironic they stopped reading at the pull quote, because his stance as a pro-Dreamer and giving a path of citizenship to non-documented immigrants is counter to the white nationalist agenda.
I can’t even imagine where the logic begins and ends there. All I know is that I’m still exhausted and scandalized by 2016, and 2020 is ramping up to be even more insane. Tbh, I’m not sure I have the constitution for American politics anymore
That right there would explain why he came to the attention of right-wingers. A lot of the edgelord/ironic hipster ones seem to listen to Rogan and Sam Harris.
Well, there it is. “The successful member of the model minority feels our pain. And how can our pain be based in racism if a non-white guy is saying it?”
Ultra-nationalists are very happy with socialist programmes like that as long as only the right people get them (which they will if they get their ethnostates and the first-class citizenship that goes with it).
Identitarians in Europe regularly brag about their societies’ single-payer universal health insurance systems and tuition-free education but still spout hateful rhetoric. Racism transcends economic ideology for a certain type of bigot.
I sometimes see people saying that you have to go on Fox news and other right wing platforms because you have to reach out to people. Like the viewer base of Fox is not a monolith, and Sanders showed that it’s possible to sell good ideas to them.
But if you go on something like Rogan’s show it feels a bit like you are asking for one of two outcomes:
Death threats; or
Support from racists
I might exaggerate, Rogan isn’t Alex Jones, but apparently that show is at most two degrees of separation from the Daily Stormer.
But also 4chan racists are trollies by nature. Their support for Yang isn’t sincere. I don’t mean they are lying or they don’t like the sound of Yang’s policies right now, but I just don’t think anything they do is sincere, they can be doing thing for seemingly contradictory reasons. Like genuinely campaigning for Yang while at the same time trying to ruin Yang’s campaign because they know their support is poison for a democratic candidate.
Racists love it when they find “token” non-white people echo something they say, but I don’t think they love it when non-white people become president. Though I guess at this point some white supremacists must be flirting with the idea people that east Asian descent are white (just like they had to include people from Mediterranean countries, the Irish, etc. in the past), especially since there is a weird nexus of white supremacy and weebs/japanophiles on communities like 4chan and /pol.
We recently had that “benefits of ethnostates” thread. I think that a lot of white supremacists try to claim that the success of social programs relies on an ethnically homogeneous population. As if good healthcare springs forth from societies with lower diversity. Again, I think white supremacists are always disingenuous. They support universal healthcare (or whatever) as long as they can somehow tie arguments in favour of universal healthcare to white supremacy. They really don’t care one way or another.
It probably has a lot to do with conspiracy circles being extremely intertwined with Nazi circles. Joe Rogan isn’t convinced there isn’t a Bigfoot and likes to JAQ off on conspiracy theories, and some people treat him as some sort of alt-genius when he just comes across as a typical stoner to me. I don’t know, don’t see the appeal, but there definitely is a lot of far right fans of Joe Rogan.
It also doesn’t help that Joe Rogan is a part of the group of aging comedians complaining about PC cultures.
As long as the guests understand that Fox News is approaching things from a stance of bad faith, sure. It looks like Fox kind of panicked when the audience supported Sanders on single-payer universal, and Tucker Carlson had a meltdown when Rutger Bregman called him on his BS. In both cases the Fox hosts thought they were in control of the narrative and then lost it.
Going on Rogan is a bit different. He’s willing to hear people out on any nonsense, and his interview style is that of the stoned sophomore who’s still finding himself (no doubt that’s why he’s still a Libertarian). It’s entertaining and Rogan can be very funny, but guests who are operating in bad faith can take advantage of that “college bull session” situation because they know a lot of the audience are callow young men who don’t think critically.
Rogan traffics in a lot of conspiracy theories and brings on a lot of cranks and charlatans. For him it’s all in the spirit of entertainment and open inquiry (sort of like @Pesco’s cryptozoology stuff here), but there are a lot of people who take this stuff at face value. As a result, I’ve noticed that various alt-right types see his podcast as a possible gateway in the radicalisation path (e.g. Rogan → Jordaddy → “manosphere”).
That’s their one of their go-to talking points, although the commenter who inspired that topic was too clever/cowardly to say it outright (not that it helped him evade the banhammer). It’s basically a “tell” at this point that the person is a bigot.
You do - or should. How will you ever hope to crack anyone else’s echo chamber if you aren’t willing to confront them? You will never hope to change their minds if they never hear you.
I really, really don’t understand this statement. Granted I haven’t seen every show - he is super prolific - nor do I have an interest in every guest. But it is something I tune in to to pass the time at work.
Rogan is more or less a classic liberal himself. Is he 100% “woke”? Nope. You can certainly find cringy statements he has made. He has made sexist and racist statements as well. He isn’t a saint, but certainly is left of center on most issues. He also has grown and changed as a person. Rogan today is different than Rogan 10 years ago when he was questioning the moon landing and shit.
I don’t know of a show with a more eclectic group of guests, from comics, to sports figures, to drug gurus, to psychologists, to physicists, to politicians, to fucking nut jobs. It really runs the gamut. Not everyone is to my liking, some people I never heard of, but found them interesting. But I am a big boy and can skip guests I don’t have an interest in.
The show is long form where actual full ideas can be discussed, not a 5-10 min 3-5 talking heads rebutting talking points. I feel like one will walk away with a better understanding of a guests topic than most other forms of media (other than like, you know, read a book, and who has time for that.) But unlike reading a book, various points will be questioned and expanded upon. I definitely enjoy the guests on talking about various science topics the most.
While I am sure alt-right and right-wing pundits have used his interviews as “gotchas!” and “preach!” moments for their views, I have also seen that from the left. So if Daily Stormer posts a clip about whatever that aligns him with the right? What about when David Pakman posts a clip about him exposing Shapiro’s hypocrisy about his views about homosexuality? Doesn’t that mean he’s aligned with the left? Or maybe it’s too complicated to be pigeon holed as one thing or another.
American centre is conservative in the rest of the world, so I don’t feel particularly impressed by that. Also, left on some issues and right on others isn’t centrism, it’s syncretism. Considering the amount of fascists who fall into that group (Both historic and current), I treat them as suspicious until I know otherwise.
Joe Rogan also doesn’t appear to be a recovering former-right winger, in my experience of people who are.
Politically they usually range from apolitical through to conservative and far-right. The left don’t get heard much on there, beyond recognisable straw liberals. I’m not exaggerating, some of the more popular Breadtubers* have pointed this imbalance out and offered to go on the show to correct this but they got no reply back.
That’s also true of most of Breadtube. One of the criticisms of those youtube channels is that their videos run from 15 minutes to an hour, but they can’t accurately cover the issues they do if they don’t run that long.
* Breadtube is the adopted name for Democratic Socialist and Libertarian Socialist youtube channels. The name comes from The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin’s book on Anarcho-Communism.
I’m not familiar with Breadtube, but sounds like I should check it out.
Out of curiosity, “some of the more popular Breadtubers* have pointed this imbalance out and offered to go on the show to correct this but they got no reply back.”
Who are these people wanting to be on there?
Because he was never right wing, or he is still right wing? I dunno, it honestly feels like it depends on one’s perspective. Other than the fact he likes guns, he seems like a hippy who likes to work out. I can see why people see him as right wing, or left wing. Or a left leaning moderate. I also encounter other people who I view as clearly left wing progressives (and self identified as) being called neo-liberal shills. So there is a shit load of tribalism in politics. Never mind the fact that people who claim to be this or that often times have views that don’t perfectly align with their identity. A lot of conservatives hold some liberal views if they take the time to think about it.
So you have to be socialist to be considered “on the left” now?
When you look at that political spectrum 4 square, what is “the left”? What is “the left” people like Ben Shapiro keep talking about?
Like, Obama, clearly on the left, but I would still say he is pro capitalism. Neo-liberals aren’t on the left?
It just really surprises me as an admitted moderate the number of people that most others would view as “left” on the spectrum are being excluded with that label by others. It feels very “No True Scotsman”. They aren’t pro-whatever, so they can’t be left, when they align on 90% other stuff.
Not just Rogan, but Yang, or like I just saw David Pakman feel like he had to defend his positions so much he showed his political leanings results over three data sets in the last 7 years (showing he actually got more towards the bottom left corner.)
Then again, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The very liberal people I know think I am on the right, and right people I know think I am a liberal hippy. “Libertarian” has become poisoned in some circles to the point I have to describe myself as an anti-authoritarian.
I think my point is - it seems to me in politics, everyone is focused on what makes the others different, not the things they have in common. It can’t possibly be “I actually agree with like 90% of Yang’s policies, even if i think some of them are too xyz.” It was also frustrating that it seemed much of the criticism seen in this thread is from ones’ impression, what they had heard, vs actual stated policies in Yang’s cases, or in Rogan’s from actually listening to shows.
I wrote several different long responses on to this on different topics. Instead I’m giving the bullet point version of all of them:
We’re 50 years into a political zeitgeist that says there is no society and we’re all in it for ourselves so it’s no wonder we have trouble talking things out
We increasingly have the feeling that things are collapsing and that our political choices are about choosing who wins the civil war that is going on, not about haggling out solutions
Sometimes agreeing on 90% but disagreeing on 10% means that you have diametrically opposed plans of action and each think the other is making the problem worse
It might actually make more sense to vote for a politician based on vague signals of their values than on their stated policies since stated policies seem to be bullshit election slogans
ETA - I mean even Bernie isn’t suggesting we get rid of capitalism entirely.
