I forget which video this was (I mostly watch Vaush for his media/gaming takes/old debates), but I think it was in a recent video where Vaush was talking about criminality (might be the Jacob Geller video).

Anyway, in the video the point that Vaush makes is this:

Point 1: Crime is usually a result of social problems/inequities. That when you have things like poverty and income inequality, or social attitudes that encourage rape (rape culture), etc, then crime will tend to follow those conditions. Which is, you know, the standard leftist/progressive take.

BUT ALSO

Point 2: He makes a point about how many criminals are genuinely terrible or shitty people. He made a point about how "Guys don't kid yourself. You can just get murdered on the subway. These people will rob and kill you and think nothing of it because they don't really think of you as a person."

Which I thought that progressives weren't allowed to say. It was SO god-damn refreshing to hear this take, where leftists will wring their hands and act like every single robber, or murder is actually a really decent person at heart, and if only it weren't for systemic racism or capitalism than they would NEVER have done something so vile. So you know what, if you're mad at this person for killing your brother you should *really* be mad at capitalism for racism for making them do this thing. Pfft.

I don't see any contradiction between point 1 and point 2. The fact that these larger scale tendencies says nothing about the individual morality or character of the people committing crimes. And frankly I think most people would understand this clearly if they applied this same logic to sex crimes.

Yes we live in a rape culture that encourages sexual predation of non-male people, where hell many boys will be raised without even knowing what rape is. But still, every feminist (me included) will agree implicitly that rapists deserve scorn and hatred. If Geller's past crime had of been that he robbed someone, and viciously beat them while doing so, I honestly don't believe that the response would be the same. They'd pull out the "Oh poverty and capitalism is at fault, not Geller. We need to allow for rehabilitation" card.

While I endorse the leftist idea of "people tend to act according to societal frameworks and messaging," I hate what is often an unspoken conclusion of "therefore, people don't really make moral choices that they are responsible for."

This actually touches on something I've always found difficult about politics, since way before I even know what left/right was. And that was that you kinda have to adopt a weird 'double consciousnesses.' That when you consider things at a policy level, you have to think and advocate for things that seem to contradict what you would personally do in an individual, one on one sense. And what I think I like about Vaush is how he walks this line, and has done so for a long time.

You can see it in how he's pro-social security and pro workers rights, but he's also very fine with telling people that they should and do need to work hard. Other progressives will call him a "bootstrapper" for this, but that's disingenuous. It is both correct that

1: We need institutions and norms that ensure everyone can live a life of freedom and dignity

and 2: People should work hard and be rewarded for that work.

This is probably why reactionary politics are so powerful. It's even in the name. Reactionary politics are when your politics are based only on the individual, vibes based reaction to one on one circumstances, and when you ignore the broader empirical reality that you can only access through things like careful analysis.

I found Vaush's channel primarily through his videos on autism, neurodivergency, the pandemic frying everyone's brains, and trying to convince his chatters to be less anti-social. I think the most recent example would be the video on the discourse around bringing an iced latte to a job interview. Admittedly sometimes I kinda feel called out because I don't really have a social life, wish I did, and I kinda just end up hanging out in livestreamer chats a lot. Ultimately I do agree with Vaush's takes on the importance of a social contract and not using neurodivergency as a crutch.

The past year I've been trying to push myself to not be holed up in my room on the weekends and go out and do things. I no longer feel any anxiety talking or chatting with complete strangers and I've gained a lot of confidence and self esteem in that regard, but I'm still struggling with the "making friends" part, and I wish I had more of a support network or at least some close friends. Some examples of things I tried:

-I do like going to cons a lot, and I've tried going to "speed friending" panels and mixers but a lot of the time the other people there are still just glued to their phones.

-Tried pushing myself to voice chat in discord and online games more but end up with a lot of people that are really non-talkative or just stay muted

-Tried organizing DnD games with strangers but everybody kept perpetually cancelling and didn't really seem interested in trying to be friends outside of playing DnD itself.

So, I've been able to learn how to mingle and socialize with strangers better and I have much less social anxiety in that regard however...to put it bluntly, I feel like the more I try to make friends I just keep attracting or running into the type of "learned helplessness" asocial chatters that Vaush tries to help, and I'm not sure what to try differently to improve my social life.

Like a lot of us, I’ve been thinking about what can be rebuilt long before V-man put the Democratic paradox into an official segment. On the flip-side, setting the poll-test as an explicit barrier to suffrage runs the risk of Jim-Crow somehow returning. As a basic proposal, I’d like to introduce the first draft of what I call the Adhocratic Method:

1) Apply Mandatory voting for any position that needs to be filled to every member of said jurisdiction, especially within any organizations internal structure (Village, town, guild, city, worker soviet, military unit, civil department, etc.)

2) If there is not standardized exam for merit available (Citizenship Tests, ASVAB, SAT, LSAT, MKAT, GaoKao, Social Credit Score, Voir Dire for jury selection, etc.) Have each member of the sample population write a question to crowdsource an exam.

3) Weigh every individual’s vote based on the test score, and select candidates for the single-winner ballot based on the top scorers. Upper-single-digit number of candidates is ideal (6 to 9 or 10). Must be a Condorcet method such as Copeland/Llull or Ranked Pairs.

4) In the case parliamentary systems, can even generate effective political parties. Unicameral Cubed-Root legislature is ideal. Bring top scorers (anywhere between 1% of population and cubed root) into general isolation, allow various policies to be rough-drafted by free association, and have each individual sign their respective party/policy charter.

5) Clip each and every signature from up-to-the-top-10 (by number of signatories) respective charters, and group each set to respective charters to determine party candidates for PM by Sortition. Repeat all steps 1-5 as needed, especially Condorcet Components. For more information on these methods, especially pairing Pairwise voting with sortition, refer to /r/EndFPTP.

6) With the policy charters first and foremost as the “candidates” being voted on, a multi-winner form of Ranked-Pairs should be easy enough to derive, aka Ranked-Shares.

7) Streamlining the nomination and election process to steps 1-6 is the ideal way to separate money from politics, and therefore subject the market to the civil state.

8) Ideal superstructure for application and development is a Triarchy of government branches: Executive (defense and enforcement,) Legislative (comprehensive,) and Judicial (epistemological basis, including both empirical, primitive and theological.)

9) Application of this method to the executive branch is inspired by various elections of officers among historical examples such as Xenophon in the Anabasis, Bernadotte in the French Revolution, Nestor Makhnov in the Russian Civil War, and various Pirate captains in the respective golden age.

10) The most crucial dependent variable, or adjustable parameter, is for a balance between internal and external participants, depending on the institution in question (constituency, jurisdiction, patients, clients, customers, etc.)

11) The secondary goal is to prevent Model Collapse from a lack of sufficient data or outward awareness.

In a sense, the Adhocratic Method determines leadership by who is the best teacher.

Obviously this is a work in progress, and as such I really hope it inspires discourse on how things can be reconstructed from scratch.

Recently, Vaush has argued for the necessity of literacy tests as a way to "save democracy". In theory, it would push the "stupid" (read: Trumpist) voters out of the voter rolls, while allowing the good old educated Democrats to Win..

Obviously, there's issues with this. Literacy tests would disproportionately impact less educated black communities, even "non-biased" tests. To add onto this, it could also restrict the voting of poorer left-wing voters, who we want to be able to hear the voices of (unlike the right wing voters).

Not to mention, this will never be implemented in the way Vaush wants, and is only a "bandaid" measure (what if some regular neolib convinces middle class and upper middle class people?) to...

... Well, to the real problem at the heart of the whole thing:

WE DON'T WANT PEOPLE WE OPPOSE TO BE IN POWER

So, why not go further? Why not, instead of advocating for a literacy test, instead advocate for banning certain ideologies from even running? After all, thats what the literacy test is a proxy for!

Why hold this pretense of democratic principles when we clearly want more than to simply "defend democracy" (don't tell me most of us also wouldn't support preventing neolibs from winning, even if this neolib doesn't really threaten democracy)?

For about 8 months, Vaush has been putting more and more arguments which indeed get him closer to supporting a vanguard party, or at least a "tutelage". I feel like insisting on measures with a democratic pretense just obscures where we all know things will be going towards ideologically for Vaush.

And the simple electoral pluralistic democratic road paved with compromise seems less and less likelyvto succeed for the "socialist movement" now that Mamdani has... Let's say, "ignored" the movement that pushed him to power (he said he won't fire Tisch for crying out loud! The bare minimum!). It seems clearer and clearer to me that a united political party made up of the most advanced part of the socialist movement, united behind an invariant program, is the most likely to succeed in our aims. Of course, im not the first to advocate for this. Marx did also:

"Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development [...] But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution." -Karl Marx

"Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention." -Marx on the peasantry. Without a party, there is no "true class".

If we want the working class to win, we need an INDEPENDENT party.