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Here is video essayist Kidology saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to political polarization and virtue signalling, especially as it applies to the Israel-Hamas conflict. https://youtube.com/watch?v=jz5k6rE-3m4?feature=shared
I understand that she's not everyone's cup of tea and has tried to tow the line of being apolitical while seemingly revolving her content around politics, but for me it was refreshing to hear what I've been feeling about what I see as performative activism and the breakdown in American political discourse.
If the 'quiet' part is merely that performative activism is a common phenomenon in the context of any high profile issue, Israeli conduct included, I think it's actually a pretty widely acknowledged fact.
If the 'quiet' part is that opposition to Israeli conduct is just a hysteria and a performance, therefore illegitimate, then this assumes a consensus that does not exist.
The very first thing she says in the video is that stating her opinion on the conflict 'would make absolutely no difference to anyone'. I consider this a weaker strain of 'let them kill each other', and distrust people pushing it to western audiences. Why is it reasonable and proper for plebs to be neutral if their state supports one side?
There was actually an Israeli who made this point a few years ago:
So I think it's safe to say that it's not an especially new phenomenon. The only thing that's new are the social media platforms.
I feel like if you quoted Jesus to some of the demonstrators or to an influencer, they would denounce you or call you a distractor. That is, oddly enough, how the Pharisees perceived Jesus.
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My view is that while it is performative, their emotions are very real, and the are trying to convey them as loudly as possible, and as such they are incapable of actively listening or being civil.
And to that end, why would anyone participate in a political system that is hostile to people with nuanced opinions?
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I want to like Kidology, and I like that she's tried to position herself atop the culture wall. But Christ is she verbose, whenever I try to watch one of her videos I find myself skipping forward looking for some meat on the bone.
I watched one of her other videos on Speed Dating (with which I have some experience). I agreed with just about all of her points, but they were buried in words words words. Many more than should be required to get her point across.
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Who is kidology and why should we care?
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Could you summarize what she is saying? I'm just not big into watching political commentary.
The woman talks about the absurdity of modern politics - people pretend to care about something because they like the attention or because they want to 'virtue signal', not because they actually care about the thing. She gives many, many examples.
Fixed that For Her. This is about as modern as agriculture. Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky were constantly involved in internecine conflicts over which branch of the revolutionaries were correct and which weren't, which were poseurs, which were just in it for the street cred or to impress chicks or because they liked robbing banks for their own reasons. So were Robespierre and Murat, so were John and Sam Adams; so were Clodius and Julius Caesar. The presence of unserious people doesn't represent a serious criticism of a political movement.
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I'd also add that it can be because they have been conditioned to believe in an ideology.
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Sure. I'll go over her main points. Her position is that:
-College students and folks on social platforms are advocating for supporting their particular side of the conflict mostly for personal gain and/or to force their political ideologies onto others.Their views often lack any nuance, charity, or civility toward those that disagree. It has resulted in hostile demonstrations on college campuses and what may be considered to be "cringey" TikToks/shorts.
-This performative activism is contributing to the continued political polarization in the US and leaves no room for said nuance, charity or civility.
-Governments are also not immune from this kind of virtue signalling. She uses the example of South Africa calling for the prosecution of Israeli leadership before the ICC for genocide and suggests that their demand was purely a political move to help the ANC stay in power. She further opines that this is hypocritical as South Africa refused to arrest then-Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir for the mass murder of 300,000 non-Arab Sudanese people in 2015, and that they even welcomed him warmly. (For what it's worth, Kidology was born and raised in South Africa but is now a UK citizen, and her tone turned markedly more angry at the start of this segment)
-Like governments, institutions of higher education (and their students) have engaged in performative activism for their own gain. The most prestigious of them have billions of dollars in endowments, government and corporate funding and donations from the wealthy that they use not in furtherance of academic missions, but to cultivate a student body that only subscribes to certain matters of social justice. This has resulted in the rise of mass demonstrations for social justice where dissenting voices aren't welcome, where demonstrators prevent uninvolved students from simply walking to class, where it's basically just a mob of people screaming and shouting for a cause they know nothing about and have no experience dealing with.
I think her view is pretty much my view of most protests. Most of the protesters (on any topic, mind) don’t actually know much about the things they protest. Get them off their talking points (something Ben Shapiro is pretty good at), make them defend their position without going back to slogans and references to things seen on video, and they fall apart.
The ICC and the various other countries suddenly “recognizing Palestine”, in my view have mostly their own credibility in mind, especially the ICC. They’re not serious proposals. The states recognizing Palestine have no trade agreements with Palestine. They have no trade deals with Palestine, they’re not recognizing a Palestinian passport. There’s no state to recognize, with no serious government, no exports, it is not a state to any real degree. At best it’s two reservations shooting missiles over a border completely controlled by Israel.
On the ICC side, the gain is legitimacy. It’s a toothless organization issuing meaningless “rulings” that it can’t enforce. They can’t arrest the people they want to try. No state is going to March into Jerusalem and perp-walk Netanyahu. Or nab Putin in Moscow or Biden in DC (if he gets convicted of something). They can issue calls for arrest, they can try leaders in absentia and sentence them to anything they want to. It doesn’t matter, as they cannot enforce any of that. If they sentence someone to death, it doesn’t matter because the person can live as they please within their own country. Sure, maybe if Netanyahu gets drunk and flies to Europe, something might happen. But if he stays in Israel or other friendly states, he gets to remain free and even remain PM of Israel until his base kicks him out.
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Hey fam, for future reference this would have been better as part of your top post. You came in pretty hot with a video link and not that much background information.
Thanks. Will do.
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So does she have any examples of this lack of nuance, charity and civility from people that represent positions she agrees with, or is it a phenomenon curiously concentrated in her opposition? On that matter, is she exhibiting nuance and charity herself in opining on why people she disagrees with advocate for their positions?
If you watch from 3:18 to 17:00 she shows several videos as examples.
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