You don't like it? Write a new constitution.

we're living through a period of time in
the 21st century when most of the major presuppositions built into mainstream politics are proving to be false now I'm not a radical I'm not a revolutionary I'm not a communist I'm not an anarchist if you stick around and watch some more videos on this channel you'll see I'm and I'm a critic of all of those tendencies all those organized political factions however I'm a mainstream moderate pragmatist who's willing to admit that most of the political assumptions that seemed unassailable and sacrosanct 200 years ago are now revealed to basically be nonsense think about as an easy example the separation of powers doctrine that was what revolutionary France was built on that was what the United States of America and it's constitutional tradition were built on and if you think about what it's supposed to promise what it's supposed to deliver what it's supposed to protect what it's supposed to ensure it's just nonsense and nobody even debates it nobody even cares right now the streets of Portland Oregon a city of only 2 million people have been on fire for 40 days continuously we're having debates at various levels of profundity and shallowness about policing not only in the United States of America but also interestingly in France to countries that are very much linked by their revolutionary tradition by their their first constitutions of that era in the 18th century have you read the French Constitution it was written after World War 2 it's not ancient but it reflects and continues ancient errors do you think you're gonna find anything about the relationship between the police and the average citizen on the street in that Constitution again read the American Constitution which has more recent amendments but the document itself dates back to the American Revolution we're gonna find anything about the relationship between the police and members of the public I've comment on this in in other videos um and when you actually look at the ideology that surrounded pervaded and underpinned the writing those Constitution for example the philosophy of the separation of powers doctrine found in the bar on the Montesquieu's book let's read it la nobody is talking about that on the streets of Portland Oregon in 2020 nobody's talking with that in the in the black lives matter movement and from my perspective the greatest tragedy of all is that all of the phony radicalism of the year 2020 is destined to rise and fall and be forgotten without changing a goddamn thing we have several recent parallels in Western politics and I am NOT saying this to ridicule the pious intentions of the protesters involved but as a pragmatist to learn from their failure extinction rebellion occupied the streets of London England cost millions and millions of dollars in damages with a so-called peaceful protest that from my perspective was not terribly peaceful from their perspective was maximally disruptive these term disruptive rather than peaceful protest I just know enormous cost to the taxpayer and of course some people went to prison and some damage done to property so that that can be evaluated the the pious good intentions of the protesters can be debated the outcomes cannot extinction rebellion rose and fell and not a goddamn thing changed nothing was accomplished point to one piece of legislation point to one positive outcome from their movement and what are they trying to do now with their little YouTube channel they're trying to rub their magical associate social media sticks together and get a spark of public interest again to just repeat exactly the same strategy over again to the same methods and notice they're now using more explicitly Marxist rhetoric of class warfare they're now claiming they're going to organize the working class against other classes before they tried to claim they were above such petty political distinctions but I guess times change anyway they're they're trying to rile up the masses once again to have the same kind of quote disruptive unquote protests however much you might sympathize with the outcomes that the protesters involved in black lives matter or the particular anarchist groups in Portland all right if you sympathize with the outcomes they say they're pursuing you have to admit yourself this is not the way to get there now in the case of X Nisha rebellion I don't sympathize with the outcomes they're pursuing I don't sympathize the methods I I reject the whole thing entirely I I questioned the whole thing entirely I think I've questioned it truthfully I think I quite accurately predicted what would happen with that movement in my assessment of what it was staged by by stage and we can now sit back and see the outcomes and if you were one of the people who devoted hundreds of hours of your time just as a volunteer or who ended up spending thousands of hours of your time in prison you might look back on your life years later and wonder about the opportunity cost about what could have been done what you could have accomplished just as one person with those hundreds of hours of those thousands of hours if you've done something more productive and then you scale it up you think about all the other protesters who had hundreds of hours and thousands of hours and what they could have done it what you collectively could have done if you worked on something positive rather than slinging destruction wrath is there something destructive or disruptive with that with that time and of course there's the other question of cost if you're looking at the millions and millions of dollars that were cost to the taxpayer there's a loss there too that can be measured now so all these same things I don't think I need to repeat myself if we can look at the rise and fall of extinction rebellion in England and then we can take a glance the United States of America and the rise and fall of public outrage following after the murder of George Floyd all the same questions can be asked and tragically I mean I say this tragically we have to come to the same conclusions is this the way to arrive at a better organization of police or of the polity in the United States of America the answer is no and of course you know I also am horrified by the murder of George Floyd there are many ways in which I also can say I cry out for justice and I'd like to see very fundamental changes in the organization of society and that should probably start with discarding the Constitution you've got and writing an entirely new one but that brings us to the most dangerous and difficult question of all who who among us would write that Constitution I've already had several videos devoted to the question of who are the leaders of black lives matter as an organization black lives matter has a catchphrase or as a hashtag is something very different from black lives matter as an actual organization with actual leaders and by the way an actual bank account and actual donations and they actually make money selling t-shirts so I mean I don't mean black lives matter as the concept or the hashtag on Twitter if we're talking about the leaders of the actual group as its formally incorporated its three founders and so on I've got to tell you my conclusion is they are absolutely the wrong people to be asking those questions answering those questions researching what the solutions are or writing new legislation and I think you can tell I don't say that with any contempt in my heart it's just you take a look at who they are II take a look at their educational background you take a look at the books they've written or contributed chapters to take a look at their interviews you evaluate what they say themselves and it's interesting to note when leaders of black lives matter are interviewed and they're asked tough questions we is rare they're normally asked a lot of softball questions like isn't it just wonderful to think that you started with this Twitter account and now you can change the world they're asked a lot of questions of that but when they're asked difficult questions like if you defund the police then you call 9-1-1 because you have an emergency who answers the phone they very often will give answers along the lines of look I'm not an expert I don't have questions precisely phrases the problem of who are the experts or who is going to do the research who is going to have it hits us those questions I think again there's a very close parallel between extinction rebellion in England and the disorganized protests and riots that erupted after the death of George Floyd we can call them the black lives matter protests of the year 2020 one of the most fundamental things they have in common is this a pouring of anger dissatisfaction disruption but fundamentally what the protesters are doing is saying here's the problem now we want the government to solve it now we want the government to fix you know extinction rebellion are actually explicit in articulating this explicit extinction rebellion one of the reasons why for example they don't advocate veganism they don't encourage your vegan diet is because they say they do not advocate any particular solution they merely advocate the importance of the problem and demands that the government do something to solve it that's it that's their jente so they're not going to get into veganism they're not going to get into water quality questions or particular power plants or solar power versus wind you know no details no just have the riots make the difference then something else is gonna solve the problem and this is ultimately a very childlike attitude towards politics the attitude is throw a tantrum and the grown-ups they'll respond to your tantrum and solve your problems and we as the children throwing the tan apparently don't have to be worried about the solutions and that's what the demands to defund the police really are they're a tantrum right now in Portland in miniatura this is playing out again with even greater levels of absurdity people seem to think that they have the civil right to literally assault the police and burn down police buildings and attack federal agents using fireworks and they up they ought to be able to do so with impunity as a quote-unquote peaceful protest somehow don't the authors of the Constitution had this in mind under the definition of a peaceful protest and apparently federal agents have have no right to respond with force this is truly surreal in a country where if someone steps on your lawn you're allowed to shoot them dead for trespassing I mean the rights of self-defense normal citizens have compared to these policemen and federal agents who were stuck inside a courthouse that was being assailed by explosives you know mostly fireworks and people trying to light it on fire or they were inside looking at it at this yeah so as I say the the generalized absurdities of the protests of 2020 were repeated in miniature and with greater intensity in Portland just in the last few weeks and in the last few days so my overall theme for this video is to draw your attention to the extent to which means stream Western politics not the left-wing fringes of communism anarchism and not the right-wing fringe is either not the right-wing libertarians or something but the absolute center of pragmatic mainstream politics in the West is really based on a lot of completely false assumptions that rarely go examined or discussed in any profound way whatsoever and force it's times like this it's when you have real problems that they should be examined and we should start to come up with new solutions and we should start to reject those assumptions in the past in my prior video the one uploaded immediately before this what I was indirectly doing was questioning the Consensus gentium that's really attached to the intellectual legacy of John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill was an author he was a philosopher he was also an elected politician and what I'm saying now is what's attributed to John Stuart Mill you might say it's Mill ism I'm not so much directly quoting Mills own works himself and I know if you get into the details on this you can find John Stuart Mill some time saying one thing and some time saying the exact opposite he was a he was a human being he was a politician it's not like quoting the 10 commandments put it that way the overall concern John Stuart Mill had throughout his life and this is really important his autobiography more than it is in any kind of particular manifesto or his writings about the philosophy utilitarianism his concern was about the ethical status of minorities in a Democratic Society and what did he mean by minorities it is stated incredibly politely and indirectly but one of the things he had in mind was the status of sexual minorities meaning homosexuals gays and lesbians right know the type of biography he cannot even admit this I think it is so strangely censored herself censored you really got to know what everybody knows were and you know he's worried about how a man could lose his job and be kicked out of political office and be kind of hounded out of society and England at that time if for example he should tire of the company of his wife and being unable to get a divorce start living with another woman and you understand John Stuart Mill himself was never in that situation he had a female friend and some people said this was a situation she was married to another man but that was a completely platonic friendship how dare you think it's so he it's interesting note that one type of minority he was interested in today we would be able to articulate very easily as the problem of gay and that was an intensely belligerently homophobic society but also a society of Christian purity or Christian Puritanism you could say where people really did actively want to punish those who dared to cheat on their wives or ended up in these kinds of complex situations they had one marriage that drifted apart they had lived in the same house for ten years and now they're sleeping with someone else these things have always existed but he was very sensitive to that other issues that interest him especially was the status of the British Empire in India so you had for him obvious questions like the status of Indian people who were living in England the status of the British Empire in India and then also for example the treatment of Jews by a Christian majority country all right I say consensus gentium because what came out of these reflections and ruminations from John Stuart Mill and what I was literally taught in the classroom on the chalkboard in a Canadian university department political science was this so the conclusion is in a democracy what you need is poor ilysm is to divide the society up into hermetically sealed self-governing units where the majority does not have the opportunity to oppress the minority problem solved this grand design was followed in England and Canada this grand design leads to Canada having Catholic schools funded by tax payers we don't have separation of church estate where people raise their children steeped in Catholic doctrine and only knowing other Catholics never being exposed for their religion in their worldview from cradle to the grave and just a few blocks away in downtown Toronto there is an Orthodox Jewish school and a few blocks away there's a Muslim fundamentalist school and they're all entitled to taxpayers money in this wonderful vision of a pluralistic society where each each little ethnic my door gets to in some strange way Sokka oh wait except except for the except for the indigenous people right except for it for some reason some reason this logic just never extended to the crazy Ojibwe the Mohawk the den a is called it's sad and it's sick this is you know pluralism meant equal rights for everybody except when it was inconvenient you know forced assimilation colonialism and genocide for the indigenous people but this strange patchwork approach to self-governing pluralistic minorities and then once a now I would say the United States never really brought into pardon me never really bought into this the way that the British Empire did the way that England itself did Canada did I assume Australia on the other side of the ocean did as well um South Africa would be another very interesting story to evaluate I think it's completely obvious in 2020 perhaps much more obvious than the first example I used of the separation of powers doctrine that this promise will not lead to any of the desirable outcomes that have been supposed and indeed looking back historically that it never has been now really simple example evolution okay let's throw into evolution and the Holocaust in the year 2020 this is a real issue in London England right now and in Toronto Canada right now of the government trying to cajole these Muslim only schools to teach kids evolution and to teach them of the Holocaust really happened because these are communities where not just the teachers and not just the students but often the parents they may be deeply committed to a worldview that rejects evolution and rejects the factual history of what really happened during World War two with August right what's what's your vision of this so-called pluralistic society and then conversely if you want to force these people to have a standardized secular education you have to you rope pressing them that's oppression you're taking children away from their parents and you're forcing them to learn about things like evolution and history and politics and condoms and where babies come from think just how to avoid getting hiv/aids how to wash their hands the germ theory of disease and vaccination I mean not easy to think of all the things that really the government and society absolutely wants to coerce minorities however defined religiously define death amid fun wouldn't linguistically define what have you the coercive power of the state is inevitably and inexorably going to be used to demand this of all these communities and the greatest tragedy of all is what this resulted in in England and Canada was not a melting pot Society right what it resulted in was the mutually impoverishing invidious division of the society into tiny islands each island looking across the gulf to the others with a mixture of mistrust hatred and derision if you don't believe me you can go out to suburbs of Canada where there's one apartment building over there where everyone's a Palestinian refugee and like really across the parking lot there's an apartment building where they're all Israelis they would wear this is locky business for me where there were Brazilians from Portugal spoilers there were Portuguese speakers from Brazil and there were Portuguese speakers from Portugal and they lived in mutually invidious separate communities there were Greeks and Macedonians who still those are small communities but still I remember hearing about that right so now obviously in Canada the one that's on the most enormous scale is the division tree francophone an Anglophone right and this has been preserved they have separate schools even in a place like Saskatchewan even in Regina look it's not just Quebec even in regenitive the francophones and the Anglophones are separate and don't talk to other and hatred sir melissa is here off camera Melissa have we ever once had a conversation with had coffee with had any interaction with the French the french-speaking minority oh that's true if you include YouTube I've talked to one francophone in the last 5 10 years in Canada there was one francophone working behind the counter of the hotel once but the mutual isolation is real and by the way in case you didn't know the french-speaking population tends to overlap with being Catholic about 98 percent so also a Catholic versus non Catholic division there so on and so forth okay so this has been treated as the solution it's the blueprint for a multicultural society in the British Empire and I've already admitted to you that what people attribute to John Stuart Mill may only somewhat vaguely and imperfectly resemble the precise words of John Stuart Mill if you want to dig through the footnotes of what he wrote okay this is one thing but the other remember is almost nobody actually reads John Stuart Mill anyway people in power whether in Canada England around the world this is an incredibly influential doctrine mostly they just talk about multiculturalism they talk about globalization they talk about these fee and they have no idea what the history is how this emerged out of the British Empire conquering India and by the way the sincere concerns of John Stuart Mill and a few of his contemporaries about the fact that he lived in a society where it wasn't safe to be a homosexual it wasn't safe that she got your wife it's true it really wasn't safe to be a Hindu living in Anglican England and he saw the way Jews were treated quite badly but Christian majority and he really said whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa this democracy thing which was already quite limited in England at that time maybe democracy needs to be limited precisely because of the problem of the majority oppressing the minority that really was the basis for the creation of multiculturalism as we as we now have it and although again the influence was not as direct I would say it's also underpinning a great deal of what we see today in the United States whether it was employed cynically as it definitely was in the post-world War two period with the creation of redlining policies with the creation of separate schools for black people and white people which was never constitutional it was never even legal but the United States government did it everywhere an amazing kind of government conspiracy created racially saturated schools throughout your whole country and a lot of that happened after World War two I mean obviously some of that goes back to sorry but you you'd be surprised a lot of it's not that ancient separation of you know that this this is pluralism right this is the creation of an invidious divide and it's an invidious divide that in 2020 when all of us can all of us can look into one another's eyes and see you know appreciate one another's Humanity in a way that was perhaps much more difficult in an era when for most people the only black person whose voice they ever heard was Louis Armstrong on the radio that's that's real you got there again if you're if you're not as old as me even when I'm talking to people my grandparents age they really you know what there really was a time when the who black people were was quite hard for them to understand the only interface they had with black culture was through figures like Louis Armstrong and the very strange representation of african-americans in cinema here and there there were a distant mysterious people well everything's gotten a lot less mysterious and frankly I think the political phenomenon of YouTube is a is a crucial part of that and one regular viewer the channel right into me and he said a guy I know he has I know his good attention he said that in my challenging these was the consumptions and my challenging the thought terminating cliche of left-wing people today saying that we should just listen to the voices of black people we should just listen to the voices of transgender people who are the oppressed group is in my taking this rather challenging and defiant yet centrist and pragmatic view of politics in twentieth century he said that I'm wrong because and I know he has good intentions and this because I can't know what it feels like to be an African American in the United States of America in the year 2020 I can't know what it feels like to be a transgender person in the United States America in the year 2020 and this is a situation where I have to say you are correct but what you're saying is entirely spurious if I don't know do you think that through research I could know this kind of knowledge it's not passive right it's acquired it's not innate it's not natural its acquired through hard work and like the whole discipline of social anthropology is based on the premise that by going out and doing research including things like participant observation a white Western outsider can go and live and work amongst tribal people in Papua New Guinea and can start to understand their cultures and start to understand their perceptions let's start to understand what their concerns and interests suffer now if you look at the members of parliament where you live the members of your local state Senate or whatever you've got you may well think none of these people are going out and doing the work for social just like Amin really okay let's talk about Canada's indigenous people which is by far our most impressed minority the Cree the achieve way the den a Mohawk Iroquois etc whoo-hoo on us who in Parliament is going out and living in their communities and seeing their political problems there who's that experience that's a great question I mean who is there in the American Senate who's going out and living in I don't know the slums of Chicago and is going and visiting their schools and looking at what the situation is and the problems the education system and the economic problems and it's looking at the policing problems and it's going to the precinct and talking to criminals and that may indeed be a very fundamental problem with your system of government whether in the United States Canada or in any other particular country however it's nevertheless very much false to say that there are for black people and black people alone should write the legislation that pertains to and governs black people right now a great example is system of education right system education in the States is bad and most people would agree it is especially bad for African Americans it has been for 200 years it's gone through various phases all right and yet we all know that does not mean that for example the leaders of black lives matter are the people who can sign a new and better system of education the people who can design and then then legislate into existence a better system of education are going to be the people who do the research that's it that's the solution to the riddle right the problem with the modern concept of democracy not the ancient Athenian concept of democracy is that it only answers the question of who gets what it presumes that you've got a bunch of greedy children around a buffet table haggling over who's gonna take what food from the buffet no how are you gonna divide up the riches of the state and this is really a false optic this is a misleading way to think about democracy right democracy is and must always be a problem-solving method I completely concede the point that protests can make a society aware of a problem right it can raise the question and as pathetic a method as it is to protest of burning down a Wendy's restaurant I I would not approve of lighting a winning with Wendy's restaurant on fire for a vegan activist you know promoting veganism opposing meat-eating I wouldn't approve it for black lives matter activists so I've been consistent on this through my whole political commentary career on YouTube I'm morally opposed it however if you concede the point that protesters lighting a restaurant on fire and burning it down that this raises the question it still leaves us with this tragedy of the protesters not being able to furnish the answers and we live in societies where the Constitution's we've written and the parliaments we've created are in absolutely no way designed to be research institutions to include or reflect in any way expert opinion how many medical doctors are in your system of parliament how many nurses and all of these countries have these endless negotiations between parliament and the nurses union Parliament the doctors union because there isn't representation for them already and probably could have seats in promise this is doesn't take a genius to think this stuff through right now in Canada can ask question where is the representation in Parliament for the Chiefs of the various tribes for the indigenous people there isn't any it was designed intentionally it was incited entually to exclude them even you know so of course and then you have these ridiculous negotiations between Parliament's and local tribal governments and so on means that you basically anywhere you see negotiations you see something and domestic negotiations it means there's something there you have to write into your Constitution or write an entirely new constitution to avoid these negotiations these are people should be included in the the democratic process not negotiated with as if there are outsiders and opponents of that that democratic process right if you have a system of government that can't even cope with as well organized as will funded a minority as medical doctors how are you possibly going to reflect the opinions of the poor and downtrodden be they African American Native American or otherwise you have a completely surreal farce of a system of government in the United States and the problem has been up till now up to 2020 the most fundamental questions of how to reform that society have only been asked by the lunatic fringe of left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists be they communists anarchists or libertarians there has been an unforgivable lack of concern and imagination from the moderate pragmatic centrist and the truth is sometimes the most moderate and pragmatic thing you can do is to tear the government down and bring you constitution starting from a blank piece of paper the Japanese did it the French did it you know I've mentioned the Portugal tit hit it's it's really not that daunting you guys may not know this this year 2020 trying to even write a new constitution they were they rewrote their entire corpus of law the entire Canon of civic law the Civic code or civil code as you might say was been rewritten all law in China was rewritten this year it it can be done Napoleon did it in six eight months I forgot now all right the Napoleonic Code you can write a new laws you can find fundamentally new solutions to these problems but we're emerging from a long period of pretending that these things didn't matter when you read the Constitution the United States America when you read the constitution of France there is no answer to the question of what the relationship between the police and members of the public ought to be there is no answer to the question how are you going to integrate Muslims and Muslim majority schools into a Christian society or a secular society or an atheist society what is the role of government in relation to governing these ethnic minorities a whole long series of unexamined assumptions crept into and corrupted this system and their effect was so corrosive precisely because the people involved in corrupting the system like John Stuart Mill themselves and like my viewer who wrote in with that suggestion they perceive what they were doing as virtuous