One Hundred Years of Vlogitude - 10.28.20

One Hundred Years of Vlogitude transcript.

The appeal is transcendent of race, and the way you experience race can very much be put on a scale with a bunch of other identities and can be found to be by you to be less persuasive to direct you towards something, which is why the standpoint epistemology that undergirds so much identity politics and like, theories of both understanding political reality & formulating praxis is hollow and insane. Because, there is no totalized racial experience that overgirds every other part of a person’s identity and decision making matrix. And so you cannot use that to determine the rightness or wrongness of someone’s fuckin political beliefs.

Because, people specifically talk about like Trump’s horrible stuff with immigration. During the last debate Trump kept saying about immigration to Biden “who built the cages?” and a lot of people were baffled by that because they said “you can’t say that when you’re the one using them” and no! You can, depending on what premise you’re operating from. The liberal premise is that this is a horrible thing, that these are monstrous violations of human rights, and that we need to stop them. The Trump undergirding argument, that a lot of people agree with regardless of race is, look, we gotta have immigration laws, that means you’re gonna have cages, because people are gonna come and you can’t trust them, so what are you gonna do with them? You can’t trust them so you have to keep them in jail. And how do I know that that’s true? Because even Obama, Mr. Whiny Whiny Heartbreak crying about immigrants, ''had'' them, and ''built'' them, and ''put people'' in them. Because we’re ''gonna'' put people in them. And the question is, do we accept that it’s necessary, or do we pretend to be sad about it because we’re literally just virtue signaling to each other. And, that’s a persuasive argument to people! And there’s no challenge to it from the liberals. There’s only a further fake orchestra of pathos that if you think about it and think “you guys built the cages, you put kids in cages too” makes you realize “well this is bullshit, he doesn’t really care, he’s not really sad about this, you’re just using it as a weapon of convenience against republicans because that’s all that actually matters” and therefore there’s no content to any of our political ideology and it’s merely a war of sides and position. And the thing is, is that’s true because they are not on other sides. It’s an internal conflict within capitalism about like, the degree to which you have to soothe your conscience in the pursuit of total market domination of the planet. And that’s, I mean, that’s the way its perceived politically, but that’s an expression of a greater tactical question of how much can we squeeze the peasants before this thing breaks down and we don’t have any system at all. We get that thing that Marx called the “common ruin of the contending classes”. And, that’s the basic tactical or strategic argument between liberals and conservatives about these kinds of things, but it’s expressed politically as a moral question. But it’s all just imperial management. The border regime is a part of that, it’s not going anywhere. Neither party is interested in having it go anywhere, there’s no policies that are gonna be pursued that are going to make it go anywhere, that means you need things like interdiction and you’re gonna have to house people, especially if things keep getting bad in other parts of the world. Those parts that are convenient for us, closer to the equator, more likely to get hot and uninhabitable and flooded than us, and they’re gonna have to go somewhere. They cannot come here under the current regime, they’re not assimilatable, even the liberals understand that cause what did Obama do? He deported a bunch of people and he built the fuckin cages. And that’s what Biden will do and they ''know'' that and there’s no liberal counterargument to it except to further undermine your moral case which you think is so unimpeachable, by highlighting its essential hypocrisy and mercenary use.

I think that one element of like, a successful left immigration policy would be a recognition that a big part of it is gonna have to be helping people stay in the countries they live in. Because that’s where people ''wanna'' live, and the reason they can’t live there is because their countries are largely being destroyed, on purpose, by us. And the thing about that though, is that, you know, it’s a frame that is xenophobic in a way like “this keeps them out of here” but in practice it’s actually the hardest thing you can do which is, if it would work, to get people on board with spending money outside of the United States, which they hate doing. They hate it. There’s a reason that people think that foreign aid is like 25% of the federal budget when it’s like less than 1%? Because they’re just always imagining some foreigner with a big sack of rice living it up on their dime. But on merits, that’s a thing that has to happen. Like the world has to be fucking habitable for people where they live now. Because there’s no situation where the entire world population becoming liquid and just moving across its surface is going to facilitate anything other than a techno-regime of like, essentially mass incarceration beyond anything we could imagine. Just large scale human containment. Because people in flux like that are not able to resist! They don’t have anything! They don’t even have like the confidence of mastery of a geographic area they’re familiar with or access to community resources. They’re at the mercy of just the global tide pole of capital and at the mercy of its technological expressions.