They take "A simple rule that most often turns out to put you on the right side of history is to take the opposite position of what the US government is telling you" and they turn that into "They're just a contrarian who is politically illiterate".
Bruh. They're not telling you that every single thing the government tells you is wrong by virtue of the fact that it comes from the mouth of the government; seatbelts do save lives, vaccines are critical to public health. They're telling you that the US government has a very extensive and well-documented history of lying through its teeth on matters of foreign policy and by extension that fact, if you reject and invert the message of the US propaganda apparatus then you're probably going to be on the right side of history.
That's not saying the same thing as "you will be correct" or "don't learn about history" or "my entire political orientation is anti-Americanism".
That's saying that you are exposed to an astonishing amount of propaganda and you need to critically engage with the world around you instead of reflexively swallowing up the convenient narratives and the absolute glut of propaganda that you consume on a regular basis, willingly or otherwise. That old Cold War era joke about propaganda comes to mind.
The person in the video, Madeline Pendleton, appears to be quite well-versed in history and theory. Enough that I'd take them seriously. Enough that they have to hide their power level on social media.
This is in opposition to the geopolitics expert Va*sh who recently discovered that Cyprus is an actual country that exists, while skim-reading the Wikipedia entry on livestream no less, and then proceeded to opine about a country whose demonym he failed to pronounce correctly multiple times (I guess he didn't bother to skim read the IPA entry for the word "Cypriot"...) and someone who studied sociology at university who, again live on stream, expounded upon Durkheim's concept of anomie (which is sociology 101 stuff) as "being like nihilism and whatever...", completely divorced from the other three parts of the axis that anomie is situated within which is crucial to understanding the concept. Look, I get it - I have ADHD. I forget conceptual shit all the time and I have to look up dates and all of that stuff. I didn't have the expectation that Vaush could just rattle off the whole axis of Durkheim's from the top of his head. (I know I can't - I always forget one.) But the point is that I can look up the image of that axis and then describe what each part represents and I can give examples of each which are easy to grasp. Because I know the concept.
Va*sh, on the other hand, clearly got introduced to the concept and did the classic middle class whiteboy manoeuvre and decided that he actually understood it before he even encountered it and so he just presumed that his towering intellect put him far above starting from a place of earnest ignorance that is accounted for and he just inferred backwards from there.
If you've ever done tertiary study then you know of the "that guy" in class. The one who always speaks up and argues with the professor. The one who has an opinion about everything and, at least in classes like philosophy or sociology, they get their question answered with another question and it goes on and on until they manage to paint themselves into a corner with their answers while completely failing to realise it and everyone else is either completely checked out by that point or they are audibly groaning at their lack of insight.
As an example:
"But the second Iraq War was justified"
"Why is that?"
"Because we needed to stop the terrorist threat from Saddam Hussein"
"What credible terrorist threat did Saddam Hussein pose to the US?"
"Well it's not like the WMDs existed but he was terrorizing his own people and he was a threat to the region"
"Would you say that when a country terrorizes its own people and poses a threat to the region that it's justifiable to invade them and overthrow their government?"
"Of course. We couldn't just stand by and do nothing."
"Would you say that Mexico had a just cause to invade the United States for its campaign of terrorism against native Americans, black people, and Mexican people who found themselves on the other side of the shifting border between it and the US? For posing the most serious threat to the region? And that this would have even been a moral imperative?"
"No, that's different because the United States wasn't actively terrorizing its people like Saddam Hussein was"
"So if a country imprisons its political dissidents indefinitely and engages in systematic torture and that sort of thing then it's justified?"
"Yeah"
"So would it be right for Mexico to invade the US because of the documented cases of indefinite imprisonment and systematic torture in CIA black sites around the world, of Guantanamo bay prison, and while the US occupied Iraq in Abu Ghraib prison for example?"
"No, that's different because it's counterterrorism"
"So it's okay to do these things as long as the government labels its prisoners as terrorists first?"
"Well no, but I'm saying that it's necessary to do these things as a part of counterterrorism"
"What makes you certain that the people who Saddam Hussein terrorized weren't themselves terrorists and that his actions were not a program of counterterrorism?"
...aaaand the next 20 minutes or so gets pissed up a wall on this sort of back-and-forth as one pigheaded idiot is so lacking in insight that they don't realise that all of their arguments are a variation of "But it's okay if we do it because we're the good guys so if we do something bad it's an accident but the other side are the bad guys so when they do it, it's intentional" and they aren't willing to even acknowledge the abject inconsistency in their own position as they proceed to double and triple down.
Va*sh typifies this attitude and the thing that really pisses me off about it isn't that he's wrong or that he lacks credibility but that he actively promotes disinfo (not like "his politics are opposed to mine" sort of disinfo either) it's that he encourages his audience to adopt the same attitude of arrogance he has while sneering with derision at them book-lernin' types.
The marsh is Va*sh's rightful place and I don't care about that, but what I do care about all the people who he is leading into the marsh with him.
One of the most striking things is this bit I saw on that thread
In such a chaotic and unstable world, it’s good to know that “America bad” is still what leftism is to smug 40 IQ dipshits. Yea, I’d love to see her “research” as well. Is it just hakim videos?
Leftist YouTube and it's consequences have been horrible for the movement.
Movement? My sibling in sinai you are posting on r/Vaush; you're being told about a real world liberationist movement that's been successful under significant duress for 120 years and you're opining about fellow crackers believing in it. You just replied to someone who said 40 IQ like it's 2014 4Chan and pretended to yourself that anybody would want to be in a space where that's normalized
It's no small irony that the people who engage in such big talk about "the movement" (and especially how communists are and have historically always been destructive to it) are the ones who lapped up every word when Va*sh was on his Vote Blue No Matter Who arc while claiming that they were going to "bully Biden left".
No, you're not.
Your audience, if it was at all engaged in irl organising, still isn't large enough to bully Biden left.
You're going to the negotiation table and your opening move is to hand over your single largest bargaining chip that exists within the confines of liberal democracy before you even make a single demand?
Even if the movement was somehow large enough to achieve this goal, saying as much conceals the truth that politicians are bought and sold in the US and no amount of protests are going to have the same influence as large donors and the interests of capital.
There was no plan. There was never any plan. It was just a slogan to get people hyped up about "the movement" and how vooting is actually the most impactful thing that you can do.
...these are the people who call themselves socialists nowadays.
The marsh is Va*sh's rightful place and I don't care about that, but what I do care about all the people who he is leading into the marsh with him.
Is he leading them there, or were they basically there to begin with and he's the guy they go to to validate what they basically already felt and believed? People choose their own teachers to some extent, and you can tell from the comments there that they have little to no interest in learning anything else, certainly not something that contradicts what they already know about those goddamn anti-american tankies.
I agree with this 100%. If you ask Vaush fans why they like Vaush they rarely say he convinced them of anything, they say they like him cuz he said stuff they already agreed with. They will and do often turn on him when he breaks with the narrative, they don't follow him blindly. His job is to echo their opinions back to them.
I don't think many people who fall for Vaush's grift had much potential to be actual comrades in the first place, if Vaush didn't exist Vaush fans would have to create one.
Vaush and his fanbase really aren't that different from chuds who watch Ben Shapiro and Crowder, ready to turn on them the minute they move away from their preferred narrative.
I definitely agree with the second part of what you said but my position on the first part is that there are very, very few people who are born into a paradigm that isn't liberalism; people arrive at Va*sh by some path and I think that while these people are still liberals, they had been on a path towards a more critical view of the system. And they have managed to end up in the ideological cul de sac that people like Va*sh represent.
Va*sh will die but there are always going to be charlatans. While it's easy to lay fault at the feet of the people who follow like him—and there certainly is a degree of culpability due to them—he plays to biases and exploits the naivete of his audience. If I didn't know about Durkheim from elsewhere and I didn't know Va*sh but he explained anomie like that to me I'd be inclined to accept what he said. I think most people would too because he speaks with a sense of confidence that makes him have the facade of being authoritative.
So you're not wrong that people choose their teachers but I don't think it's fair to assume that everyone is as aware of his parlour tricks as you or I are.
It's a bit like dismissing scam artists by saying that ultimately people choose who they give their money to. That's also true but a scam artist will exploit vulnerabilities in their target audience - the gullible ones and the ones who are easily convinced are their marks - and while there is plenty of information out there about all the different ways that scam artists prey upon people, I can't expect that everyone would be aware of this and I think the blame should be focused on the predators and not the prey.
(I guess the distinction here is that I have a lot of sympathy for victims of scammers and I have a lot of criticisms of people who follow Va*sh. Maybe a better example would have been to use people who are in cults or MLM schemes or who actively promote pseudoscience - something where there's a line between a mark and a person who is both exploited while also promoting the scam itself. But I treat his audience the same way - not every one of his viewers is old or wise enough to know better and for that cohort I'll extend patience and understanding to. But the ones who are wilfully ignorant, who actively perpetuate his brand of disinformation especially when confronted with evidence that disproves their position, I'm pretty ruthless with.)
Counterpoint: no sympathy for Vaushites. It's so blatantly obvious what a pathetic pedo grifter he is, if you fall for his bullshit that 100% on you and it should be a stain on your reputation for the rest of your life. No such thing as as an ex-vaushite.
Classic r*dditor bullshit.
They take "A simple rule that most often turns out to put you on the right side of history is to take the opposite position of what the US government is telling you" and they turn that into "They're just a contrarian who is politically illiterate".
Bruh. They're not telling you that every single thing the government tells you is wrong by virtue of the fact that it comes from the mouth of the government; seatbelts do save lives, vaccines are critical to public health. They're telling you that the US government has a very extensive and well-documented history of lying through its teeth on matters of foreign policy and by extension that fact, if you reject and invert the message of the US propaganda apparatus then you're probably going to be on the right side of history.
That's not saying the same thing as "you will be correct" or "don't learn about history" or "my entire political orientation is anti-Americanism".
That's saying that you are exposed to an astonishing amount of propaganda and you need to critically engage with the world around you instead of reflexively swallowing up the convenient narratives and the absolute glut of propaganda that you consume on a regular basis, willingly or otherwise. That old Cold War era joke about propaganda comes to mind.
The person in the video, Madeline Pendleton, appears to be quite well-versed in history and theory. Enough that I'd take them seriously. Enough that they have to hide their power level on social media.
This is in opposition to the geopolitics expert Va*sh who recently discovered that Cyprus is an actual country that exists, while skim-reading the Wikipedia entry on livestream no less, and then proceeded to opine about a country whose demonym he failed to pronounce correctly multiple times (I guess he didn't bother to skim read the IPA entry for the word "Cypriot"...) and someone who studied sociology at university who, again live on stream, expounded upon Durkheim's concept of anomie (which is sociology 101 stuff) as "being like nihilism and whatever...", completely divorced from the other three parts of the axis that anomie is situated within which is crucial to understanding the concept. Look, I get it - I have ADHD. I forget conceptual shit all the time and I have to look up dates and all of that stuff. I didn't have the expectation that Vaush could just rattle off the whole axis of Durkheim's from the top of his head. (I know I can't - I always forget one.) But the point is that I can look up the image of that axis and then describe what each part represents and I can give examples of each which are easy to grasp. Because I know the concept.
Va*sh, on the other hand, clearly got introduced to the concept and did the classic middle class whiteboy manoeuvre and decided that he actually understood it before he even encountered it and so he just presumed that his towering intellect put him far above starting from a place of earnest ignorance that is accounted for and he just inferred backwards from there.
If you've ever done tertiary study then you know of the "that guy" in class. The one who always speaks up and argues with the professor. The one who has an opinion about everything and, at least in classes like philosophy or sociology, they get their question answered with another question and it goes on and on until they manage to paint themselves into a corner with their answers while completely failing to realise it and everyone else is either completely checked out by that point or they are audibly groaning at their lack of insight.
As an example:
"But the second Iraq War was justified"
"Why is that?"
"Because we needed to stop the terrorist threat from Saddam Hussein"
"What credible terrorist threat did Saddam Hussein pose to the US?"
"Well it's not like the WMDs existed but he was terrorizing his own people and he was a threat to the region"
"Would you say that when a country terrorizes its own people and poses a threat to the region that it's justifiable to invade them and overthrow their government?"
"Of course. We couldn't just stand by and do nothing."
"Would you say that Mexico had a just cause to invade the United States for its campaign of terrorism against native Americans, black people, and Mexican people who found themselves on the other side of the shifting border between it and the US? For posing the most serious threat to the region? And that this would have even been a moral imperative?"
"No, that's different because the United States wasn't actively terrorizing its people like Saddam Hussein was"
"So if a country imprisons its political dissidents indefinitely and engages in systematic torture and that sort of thing then it's justified?"
"Yeah"
"So would it be right for Mexico to invade the US because of the documented cases of indefinite imprisonment and systematic torture in CIA black sites around the world, of Guantanamo bay prison, and while the US occupied Iraq in Abu Ghraib prison for example?"
"No, that's different because it's counterterrorism"
"So it's okay to do these things as long as the government labels its prisoners as terrorists first?"
"Well no, but I'm saying that it's necessary to do these things as a part of counterterrorism"
"What makes you certain that the people who Saddam Hussein terrorized weren't themselves terrorists and that his actions were not a program of counterterrorism?"
...aaaand the next 20 minutes or so gets pissed up a wall on this sort of back-and-forth as one pigheaded idiot is so lacking in insight that they don't realise that all of their arguments are a variation of "But it's okay if we do it because we're the good guys so if we do something bad it's an accident but the other side are the bad guys so when they do it, it's intentional" and they aren't willing to even acknowledge the abject inconsistency in their own position as they proceed to double and triple down.
Va*sh typifies this attitude and the thing that really pisses me off about it isn't that he's wrong or that he lacks credibility but that he actively promotes disinfo (not like "his politics are opposed to mine" sort of disinfo either) it's that he encourages his audience to adopt the same attitude of arrogance he has while sneering with derision at them book-lernin' types.
The marsh is Va*sh's rightful place and I don't care about that, but what I do care about all the people who he is leading into the marsh with him.
One of the most striking things is this bit I saw on that thread
Movement? My sibling in sinai you are posting on r/Vaush; you're being told about a real world liberationist movement that's been successful under significant duress for 120 years and you're opining about fellow crackers believing in it. You just replied to someone who said 40 IQ like it's 2014 4Chan and pretended to yourself that anybody would want to be in a space where that's normalized
Yep.
It's no small irony that the people who engage in such big talk about "the movement" (and especially how communists are and have historically always been destructive to it) are the ones who lapped up every word when Va*sh was on his Vote Blue No Matter Who arc while claiming that they were going to "bully Biden left".
No, you're not.
Your audience, if it was at all engaged in irl organising, still isn't large enough to bully Biden left.
You're going to the negotiation table and your opening move is to hand over your single largest bargaining chip that exists within the confines of liberal democracy before you even make a single demand?
Even if the movement was somehow large enough to achieve this goal, saying as much conceals the truth that politicians are bought and sold in the US and no amount of protests are going to have the same influence as large donors and the interests of capital.
There was no plan. There was never any plan. It was just a slogan to get people hyped up about "the movement" and how vooting is actually the most impactful thing that you can do.
...these are the people who call themselves socialists nowadays.
Talking about "The Movement" is real Revolution is a Pepsi Away® energy
From the same people who get all of their beliefs from the same 1-3 butt-tube streamers.
Is he leading them there, or were they basically there to begin with and he's the guy they go to to validate what they basically already felt and believed? People choose their own teachers to some extent, and you can tell from the comments there that they have little to no interest in learning anything else, certainly not something that contradicts what they already know about those goddamn anti-american tankies.
I agree with this 100%. If you ask Vaush fans why they like Vaush they rarely say he convinced them of anything, they say they like him cuz he said stuff they already agreed with. They will and do often turn on him when he breaks with the narrative, they don't follow him blindly. His job is to echo their opinions back to them.
I don't think many people who fall for Vaush's grift had much potential to be actual comrades in the first place, if Vaush didn't exist Vaush fans would have to create one.
Vaush and his fanbase really aren't that different from chuds who watch Ben Shapiro and Crowder, ready to turn on them the minute they move away from their preferred narrative.
I definitely agree with the second part of what you said but my position on the first part is that there are very, very few people who are born into a paradigm that isn't liberalism; people arrive at Va*sh by some path and I think that while these people are still liberals, they had been on a path towards a more critical view of the system. And they have managed to end up in the ideological cul de sac that people like Va*sh represent.
Va*sh will die but there are always going to be charlatans. While it's easy to lay fault at the feet of the people who follow like him—and there certainly is a degree of culpability due to them—he plays to biases and exploits the naivete of his audience. If I didn't know about Durkheim from elsewhere and I didn't know Va*sh but he explained anomie like that to me I'd be inclined to accept what he said. I think most people would too because he speaks with a sense of confidence that makes him have the facade of being authoritative.
So you're not wrong that people choose their teachers but I don't think it's fair to assume that everyone is as aware of his parlour tricks as you or I are.
It's a bit like dismissing scam artists by saying that ultimately people choose who they give their money to. That's also true but a scam artist will exploit vulnerabilities in their target audience - the gullible ones and the ones who are easily convinced are their marks - and while there is plenty of information out there about all the different ways that scam artists prey upon people, I can't expect that everyone would be aware of this and I think the blame should be focused on the predators and not the prey.
(I guess the distinction here is that I have a lot of sympathy for victims of scammers and I have a lot of criticisms of people who follow Va*sh. Maybe a better example would have been to use people who are in cults or MLM schemes or who actively promote pseudoscience - something where there's a line between a mark and a person who is both exploited while also promoting the scam itself. But I treat his audience the same way - not every one of his viewers is old or wise enough to know better and for that cohort I'll extend patience and understanding to. But the ones who are wilfully ignorant, who actively perpetuate his brand of disinformation especially when confronted with evidence that disproves their position, I'm pretty ruthless with.)
Counterpoint: no sympathy for Vaushites. It's so blatantly obvious what a pathetic pedo grifter he is, if you fall for his bullshit that 100% on you and it should be a stain on your reputation for the rest of your life. No such thing as as an ex-vaushite.