While Paris Burns: the Yellow Vests Movement (Gilets Jaunes)
19 March 2019 [link youtube]
Several people wrote in asking me my opinion about the Yellow Vest movement in France: here it is. Please click on the link below to see the full video (about 20 minutes long) on my "main" channel (Active Research & Informed Opinion) —a channel that is still struggling to find its first thousand regular viewers, I might add.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3fLeOekX2yBegj9-XwDhA/videos
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this is precisely the challenge of 21st
century politics technological progress has made it so comfortable for people to conform that demands for radical and fundamental change seem like lunacy every day people in Saudi Arabia and even communist China whatever want to say wake up and say well a revolution is in order but not me not now not today and what we've seen happen in France and it still is happening right now in 2019 is a whole bunch of people who wake up yes ultimately the the spark that set these events in motion is somewhat trivial it was a the rising price of gasoline and tax on gasoline some number of tens of thousands of people woke up and said you know what the system is so fundamentally bad that a revolution is in order and you know what it's it's gonna be me it's gonna be now it's gonna be today [Music] I think what makes the outside world I don't know so uncomfortable with the example of the the jewish-owned is precisely the sense that if this could happen in France it can happen anywhere [Music] if I told you there was an uprising of the disgruntled poor or even the disgruntled middle class in South Sudan anyone would sit there and look at the footage and kind of in a smug way say mmm yes well I told you so I I always saw this coming you know sorry if you just look at footage of what life is like right now in South Sudan people are living in huts in you know they have dirt roads they have objectively very hard conditions and that makes it safer for us to sympathize with their political struggle if they're demanding change and there's a strange kind of irony that the privileged white Western world has a great deal of trouble sympathizing with discontent with really deep discontent and demands for radical political change when it comes from privileged white Western people [Music] however we contrast that to the possibility of a movement that is in a perpetual state of mutiny a perpetual state of directionless nests and leaderless nests a movement that is in a sense always subverting itself and where we can't even measure their success or failure relative to goals because they never did clearly set up the goals [Music]
century politics technological progress has made it so comfortable for people to conform that demands for radical and fundamental change seem like lunacy every day people in Saudi Arabia and even communist China whatever want to say wake up and say well a revolution is in order but not me not now not today and what we've seen happen in France and it still is happening right now in 2019 is a whole bunch of people who wake up yes ultimately the the spark that set these events in motion is somewhat trivial it was a the rising price of gasoline and tax on gasoline some number of tens of thousands of people woke up and said you know what the system is so fundamentally bad that a revolution is in order and you know what it's it's gonna be me it's gonna be now it's gonna be today [Music] I think what makes the outside world I don't know so uncomfortable with the example of the the jewish-owned is precisely the sense that if this could happen in France it can happen anywhere [Music] if I told you there was an uprising of the disgruntled poor or even the disgruntled middle class in South Sudan anyone would sit there and look at the footage and kind of in a smug way say mmm yes well I told you so I I always saw this coming you know sorry if you just look at footage of what life is like right now in South Sudan people are living in huts in you know they have dirt roads they have objectively very hard conditions and that makes it safer for us to sympathize with their political struggle if they're demanding change and there's a strange kind of irony that the privileged white Western world has a great deal of trouble sympathizing with discontent with really deep discontent and demands for radical political change when it comes from privileged white Western people [Music] however we contrast that to the possibility of a movement that is in a perpetual state of mutiny a perpetual state of directionless nests and leaderless nests a movement that is in a sense always subverting itself and where we can't even measure their success or failure relative to goals because they never did clearly set up the goals [Music]