This post was at the very top of the page and I clicked the link. I’m familiar with Mr. Starving’s posts, and knew that whatever point he thought he had would probably be refuted down-thread. But I did do him the courtesy of clicking the link without first reading the prejudicial responses.
I did not watch the entire comedy routine (in fact I gave up at 3x3) and am unlikely to ever click a Starving Artist link again. Perhaps he should re-post his link in the Thread Games forum, with a thread title like “Let’s find the stupidest YouTube on the Interwebbies!” — that would be a fun thread in which I might participate.
Give Mr. Starving credit for one thing — identifying a segment of the American population likely to continue to vote against their own interests for stupid reasons. Namely, that segment who thinks such a comedy clip provides insight into American problems.
More comedy! I guess any review by me would be even more ‘abridged’ than that of Kimstu — I clicked X after the answer to 3x3. But I heartily encourage Dopers to view as much of this comedy clip as they can stomach. It will give insight into Starving Artist’s mind, and therefore the insidious ignorance that brought us D.J. Trump.
I appreciate you trying here, but I don’t think that’s really the answer because most people are inherently self-interested and
Saying “You should give up things you enjoy and which make your life easier because reasons!” really isn’t compelling and is going to meet a lot of resistance.
Ending slavery, for example, was morally the right thing to do but in Britain the government still had to pay slaveowners a fuckload of money to compensate them, while I believe you lot across the Atlantic had a fairly substantial war to resolve the issue.
Obviously this issue isn’t comparable (because owning people like property is abhorrent and also a tangible wrong), but the wider principle of “What’s in it for me?” isn’t answered when discussions about giving up something an nebulous as “privilege” are involved.
Well, because that way it would be clear that you weren’t simply projecting a ridiculously overblown strawman caricature onto a drastically different reality.
This board doesn’t actually have any liberals claiming that the answer to 1+1 is “multiculturalism”.
You may have your own mental picture of some actually occurring real-life behavior that you think that sketch is “parodying”, but the sketch itself is so hyperbolically, unrealistically absurd that it’s impossible for anyone else to know exactly what you think it refers to.
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
Most of the people in this country can recognize very clearly the behavior being mocked in that video, and believe me, they don’t see it as much of a stretch at all.
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure that inside your own head that statement makes tons of sense.
In the real world, on the other hand, “most of the people in this country” who voted in fact voted for the “liberal” (i.e., not-Trump) candidate. And “most of the people in this country” now, voters or not, are outright contemptuous of the President that you claim was swept into office by their antipathy to alleged “liberal behavior”.
Turns out that in the real world, the majority of Americans do not in fact support a crass, hate-filled, incoherent, incompetent egotistical blowhard merely because he disdains “political correctness” and also annoys liberals. Well well, whodathunkit.
I suppose it will. But those resisters don’t then get to turn around and declare that they’re in favor of equality of opportunity for all people. They’ve made it abundantly clear, by selfishly clinging to the inequalities of opportunity that happen to benefit themselves, that they’re not.
Let’s say you are running a race with a nice cash prize for the top 5. Who in their right mind would not exploit any legal advantage in training or genetics to win? Life is a race is it not? We are all biological organisms.
And who is actually for strict equality of of opportunity? Different parents, different schools, different cultural environments, different brains all make it impossible to have strict equality of opportunity.
Well, that’s one of the extremely simplistic metaphors expressing one of the many diverse aspects of life. It’s also said that life is a dance and that life is a game, for example.
[QUOTE=octopus]
And who is actually for strict equality of of opportunity? Different parents, different schools, different cultural environments, different brains all make it impossible to have strict equality of opportunity.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think anybody’s actually claiming that it’s necessary, or even remotely possible, to have absolute equality of opportunity, in the sense that everybody starts out with exactly the same advantages and disadvantages.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible or undesirable to strive for greater equality of opportunity, in the sense of trying to even out the systemically unfair advantages and disadvantages left over from a state of society that was openly discriminatory and anti-egalitarian.
I know it’s natural for people to selfishly want to continue benefiting from advantages they obtained merely be being lucky enough to be born into a favored group that achieved its advantageous position through oppressing a disfavored group. I just don’t think it’s very morally consistent with claiming to support principles of equality.
Saying “Let’s all run the race now” when you notice you happen to be accidentally positioned closest to the finish line, and then whining “But I enjoy being here, it makes my life easier!” when someone suggests that you should relinquish your unfairly advantageous position and go back to the starting line with everyone else, is not a particularly shining testament to the concept of fairness.
Sure, if winning the race by exploiting whatever unfair advantage you can keep in your grasp is the most important thing to you, that’s your choice. I’m just saying that it would be hypocritical for you to then claim that you support fairness and equality of opportunity because hey, at least everybody’s getting to start the race at the same time, right? Isn’t that enough fairness for one race? :dubious:
No it’s not an amusing little video at all because it’s typical of the simplistic shit that conservatives fall for. Conservatives are intellectually lazy as fuck, which is part of the problem. They’re incurious, so they don’t bother to learn about science, which explains why they don’t believe in global warming. They’re incurious, so they don’t bother to learn about economics, which explains why they continue to vote for policies and people who make the national debt (which used to be a problem for conservative voters) worse. They’re incurious about history, which explains why they advocate militarism with respect to Iraq and Iran having no understanding of the potential consequences. And they’re incurious about their own history, which explains why they don’t understand the complaints that minorities have. Conservatives can’t be bothered to learn out anything outside their own personal experience. That’s why conservative activists make these amusing little vids - not because they’re informative, but because they amuse people who know fuck all about the world outside their own experience. To the rest of us, the video isn’t amusing, just stupid.
Starving artist used the brush when he said that this video is the reason that people voted for trump.
So, if you really need to, confine his statements to “conservatives who would consider a video like this to be in any way reflective of reality, or allow a video like this to color their political perspective.”
Have you never heard of kindness, or bending backwards to be fair? Do you want links to Snooker players calling fouls on themselves in the World Championship with its huge prizes?
It’s a sad world that many right-wingers live in. Please don’t assume we all have only selfish values.
They believe in a world in which there is only competition and that other humans are innately born to be rivals, unless they can find some sort of common ground with which to identify someone (like race, nationality, political party, and so forth). We see this is indeed how they view the economic world: they embrace and promote a worldview of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism, in which there are winners and losers, survivors and the dead, predators and prey. They accept it because they and their ilk have agreed to play and live by those rules. When people are taught to believe that ‘others’ are competitors and that they’re trying to take from you, it naturally induces a state of anxiety and fear. It inevitably leads to clannishness, nationalism, racism, and paranoia.
I accept that humans are naturally competitive in a lot of ways. We compete for sex, food, attention, love – I’m not denying any of that. But what conservatives forget is that humans aren’t just competitive; we’re also naturally cooperative creatures as well. And cooperation is in part how we were able to get here. We’re social animals. Read into that what you want, but a system that promotes competition and ‘winning’ as virtues that are superior to everything else, it’s no wonder why there are many ‘wounds’ in America and they probably will keep getting reopened and with newer wounds opening all the time until we as a nation can modify our value system a bit to include more fairness and respect for people’s basic welfare.
Or you can say “Great, that’s half a mountain I don’t have to climb.”
And regardless of what Mr Wong says, the reality is a lot of people are getting sick of being blamed for things that happened decades or centuries before they were born.
We can all agree doing those terrible things from the past is not cool now, and agree we don’t want to do them and wish they hadn’t happened, but I don’t think it’s realistic to say “Give up the cool stuff you have/enjoy because other people weren’t nice about it.”
There’s “fair” and there’s “making things much harder/worse for yourself for no real gain”.
And kindness means different things to different people; it’s entirely possible to be kind and generous to people you know but still not want to fix the nebulous “privilege” alleged thing.
This is why newly arrived immigrants from Africa cannot see why African Americans complain so much considering how bad they had it back in places like Somalia and Ethiopia.
I invite you to read about Trevor Noah, the current daily show host.
He was literally born a crime. The union of his black mother and white father was against the law, and he was an illegal child. He was kept hidden from authorities, because if they learned of his existence, he would be taken from his family, and they would be arrested. This was the case until apartheid ended when he was around 6.
He has come over here to the united states, and provides a very interesting perspective on the race relations we have here. In some ways, they are better but in many ways, they are much worse.
In any case, even given his background of having been discriminated against much worse than happens here in the united states, he can still certainly see and understand why they complain about being discriminated against here.
Have you never heard of kindness, or bending backwards to be fair? Do you want links to Snooker players calling fouls on themselves in the World Championship with its huge prizes?