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Notes -
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.
Could you summarize what she is saying? I'm just not big into watching political commentary.
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.
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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