Every once in awhile, YouTube’s brilliantly designed algorithm will recommend me videos to watch that have no tie-in whatsoever with what I’m actually watching. I will never understand why such a massive company that has a budget ludicrous enough to serve small & forgettable countries is incapable of writing the software back-end properly so that it does what it’s supposed to do, but then I remember all the recent news surrounding Alphabet and Google and how they’re full of middle-managers and diversity hires that only have seats to meet employee quotas and not because they can actually write proper loops and switches, and I laugh heartily. Sometimes, that incompetency works out in my favor. I just recently found channels like PostContent, CallMeCarson, TheHatedOne, and rSlash through the algorithm’s efforts. It could be that the system is designed to send you to random shit when you’ve gone down a rabbit hole, or it thinks you have, to keep your brain from entering a mental echo chamber, but considering that Google has been fairly politically outspoken on certain issues, and has been pushing to make content as ‘child-safe’ as possible, despite a unhealthy bent towards social ideologies pushing truly harmful notions towards children (looking at you, channels that push transitioning and intersectionality at toddler-age kids), I’m going to stick with the ‘they’re dipshits’ sentiment.

Instead of enjoyable content, YouTube sent me a video made by Ian Danskin. Ian runs a channel titled ‘Innuendo Studios’; I’m not linking it because, like all the other shit I go cover, his channel doesn’t deserve traffic. I’m sure some people reading will stop at this point, scream, ‘SEE?! SAHLTINES IS OFFENDED AND ALT-RIGHT AND BIASED AND A MASSIVE HATER! BAN!!’, or something to a similar effect. I’m not linking his content not because he’s anti-Alt Right/pro-Neo Left (or whatever other randomly prefixed socio-political monikers you want to use), it’s because his content is click-bait, lowest common denominator garbage. How do I know this? He only makes videos about current hot-button topics of that time period.

Take his Phil Fish video, which came out after all the FEZ controversy had finally died down and Phil had ousted himself and his company, Polytron, from the gaming industry. The entire conceit of the video essay is to say that the hatred surrounding Phil Fish mostly existed because it was fashionable, and less to do with actual criticisms of his behavior, mannerisms, comments, attitude, and how he carried himself in public. This sentiment, towards the end of the saga of Fish’s dramatics, carries some weight, because I certainly knew more people who didn’t like Phil than did that came out of the woodwork and had no grounding on his origins or FEZ at all. However, that doesn’t erase the fact that caricatures aren’t born without impetus, or that people who didn’t like him five years ago when he was still a nobody suddenly don’t have valid reasons to not like him. Here’s a segment directly from the opening minutes of Ian’s Phil Fish video effectively owning that Phil was a mouthy jackass and then squarely placing the blame on Phil’s ‘public’ (read: open detractors and not the complete & general public) [timestamps 00:56 to 01:13):

He was one of dozens of strong personalities he had a tendency to fly off the handle, though rarely unprovoked, even if it didn’t seemingly take much provocation. You could most easily set him off by talking about who was and wasn’t really indie, the point being he wasn’t a shit talker, he was a guy who called out shit stalkers, though where you place that dividing line likely depends on your opinion of Phil Fish.

Reformatted for readability since YouTube’s transcription/translation is still fucking awful.

If you were to listen to the video, it’s very clear that Ian is, as I stated earlier, trying to paint Phil in a very generous light. The real message behind Ian’s words is that Phil Fish had a massive temper, was easily enraged even by the most innocuous statements, and talked mad amounts of shit to anyone and everyone, especially to people who considered him not ‘indie’, or who doubted he’d get his game done. However, this masked by wrapping the statement up dressing Phil up as someone who ‘called out shit talkers’, and then placing the blame on whomever would disagree with this assessment, even though such a take is stupidly hot and incorrect by the mountains of evidence surrounding Fish that portray him as a short-fused man-child. I could go through the rest of the video, because it’s deserving of it’s own diatribe since Ian states at the outset that the video is ‘not about Phil Fish at all’, and then goes on to mostly prop him up while simultaneously shitting on people who have that oh-so-problematic negative viewpoint of Phil as that ‘public’ I mentioned earlier, but we don’t have all day.

The video I was recommended was The Alt-Right Playbook: Always a Bigger Fish, which is part of series Ian started doing about a year ago; I guess he realized that making politically charged and poorly researched bait was a great way to get back in the spotlight when making actual commentary videos on video games wasn’t cutting the mustard. Before the video even began, I was greeted with this:

The bray of a person who has nothing of substance to say.

To all three of my readers: if you ever go on to make video content, written content, fuck, any content at all, never open your video with a ‘trigger’ warning. When you do this, you are saying, ‘I am going to pander to your emotions as hard as possible, and every argument I have will be heavily emotionally tinged, because I have no other way to present my side or myself as I lack the intelligence to form arguments that can be substantiated without emotional appeals. In other words, I am a moron and should not be listened to.’ The last thing we need in society right now, and going forward, is brazen dipshits who revel in their inability to converse in a cogent and comprehensible manner. I don’t give a shit which side of the political field anyone lays on; don’t be fucking dumb.

Within the first minutes of the video after the fagacious warning card, Ian bukkakes the audience with stupid:

Opening minutes and Ian spitting hot takes; name a better duo.

To give some context to the argument in the video, here’s the fictional flashpoint:

No, to all of it.

Quick tangent: I’m getting sick of modern cartoon art being rounded and soft. It’s like a physical manifestation of all these nu-people that were born around my time and after that have this desire for everything to be covered in bubble wrap before they even consider standing near it. Life isn’t soft, and not only that, rounded corners are fucking unoriginal at this point. Give me an edge, a face, a fucking vertex for crying out loud.

Anyways, there are two main issues with Ian’s argument here:

1. The reason why free higher education works in other countries is because their countries were built around this idea centuries ago. Take the UK education system, for example. They have their analog for K-12, which is basic education all the way up to Fifth/Sixth form, and for post-secondary they have college and university. In the United States, we have the aforementioned K-12, then we go straight into university. UK students are in higher education at age sixteen, while US students aren’t halfway done with secondary education by then. Plus, there is no stigma with college in the UK as there is with community college, which is the closest analog to what UK citizens would call ‘college’ that we have in the US. Our education system is much closer to the Japanese/Chinese education system, however, the Sino-Nippon educational systems and societies are far more structured, rigid, demanding, well-organized, and focused on honor and family where poorly performing students and children speaks ill of society on the whole. The way their countries are structured is one where it isn’t accepted and even expected for you to goof off for the first quarter of your life like it is here in the United States. When you factor all these differences in, it makes perfect sense why it’s so difficult to finagle free public higher education at this juncture, especially when most public US institutions still can’t hold a candle to what private institutions offer, and when modern US culture is focused on the self versus the community. The money to make free education happen doesn’t come out of nowhere, and it certainly can’t appear if the very people who want their time to be written off and forgiven adamantly refuse to also pay in.
2. You don’t need a degree to get a good job. This ‘a degree will set you free’ is propaganda that both older and younger generations bought into without a second thought, namely the thought that if a ton of people go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper in the hopes of skipping over entry-level positions, such a process would devalue those intermediate stations to the point of being entry level and simply leap-frog the issue from the guy who mops the floors to the desk jockey that monitors the books. I personally know carpenters, landscapers, mechanics, and specialized machine repairmen that all make more than I would as a licensed Civil EIT who has half a graduate degree completed and years of expertise working in both non-profit and office settings. Heck, my earnings right now as a delivery/sales contract worker end up at an average of $15-$20 an hour, which is on par with a forty-thousand dollars salary. If you can make good money doing work as an electrician, construction, service, or repair, then why aren’t these people doing that and are, instead, telling us that college needs to be free and their debts need to be forgiven?The reason is because the whole ‘a degree will set you free’ also implies that a person with a degree is of a ‘higher intellectual quality’. This idea is no longer true because college entrance admissions are so easy to pass that kids who perform poorly on standardized testing (an out-dated means, for sure, but until someone makes something better, it’s all we have) by statistical measures still get in thanks to the myriad of alternative entrance paths. This leads to a watering-down of basic degrees and a lack of intellectual boundary pushing that is the entire purpose of college/university; it’s why every kid now has to do two years of ‘general education requirements’, even if some of them have completed them in high school or worked with community colleges to earn credits to supposedly bypass these requirements (I should know, I was one of these students). You can’t have ‘higher quality’ when people who only get in because they’re black or latin or brown or female or poor or trans or whatever and not because they crushed the admissions baselines. These people who want free college and no debt aren’t just stupid, they’re entitled, and to the point that they, as I said earlier, will not pay in to the system they complain needs to be built, but will also not work decently paying jobs on the grounds that such work is ‘beneath them’.

As a second side tangent, I have heard countless debates and arguments from people of this exact cut of cloth in regards to tipping culture in America, and most of them always end up the same way: If you don’t like it, get a better job. These people don’t understand the saying, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans’ because they believe the word ‘service’ equates to ‘servant’, which ties into the term ‘slave’. As a delivery person, I like what I do, and I like that even on days when people are pulling this rude shit, I still do well fiscally. I understand not liking something, and I understand not liking the tipping system in the United States because I don’t like it, either. I don’t like my wages being determined on moral high grounds or how well I bent over backwards to satisfy someone’s ridiculous demands. Unfortunately, until my society sees fit to agree that I should be paid commensurately for my work, which is still in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the United States (even if it’s not inherently difficult work), it’s the system we have. If you don’t want to own up to being a massive cunt and don’t want to lend a hand to those aiming to actually change the system through policy, then fucking tip. Stop being an entitled prick who thinks sweet words and soft promises are enough because they worked before with your friends, family, seniors, juniors, and peers, which they only worked because the aforementioned didn’t want to deal with your sorry-ass, so they simply let it go and passed the buck on to the next person.

Ian rounds off this off with the classic ‘you could pay college before by waiting tables, but now you can’t’, ignoring that this has never been true and that anyone who paid off their tuitions/debts did so by working hard in the classroom and out of it, not because costs were slightly more in line with the average earnings. Such a notion ignores that college used to be for the smart and the wealthy, which is why debt wasn’t a problem back then, or that the average person who waits tables is young and part of a demographic that has a historical precedent for not knowing how to control their finances in a responsible manner. It must be nice coming from an upbringing that can afford to send you to both CalArts and MassArts for long enough to get a degree from both, and to be able to support you while you spent the last decade bouncing from job to job at an average of one every sixth months or so. I love how whenever I cover one of these ‘FREE STUFF’ people, they always have backgrounds & histories rife of instability and red flags as far as the eye can see.

[T.S. 1:50] Uh, yeah.

When I was finishing out my undergrad, I was subscribed to Chegg. I always hated trying to find solutions manuals to make sure I was doing my structural analysis homework assignments correctly, and Chegg was the best repository available for a scrub like me. Chegg consistently bombarded me with emails about scholarships and extra money available to apply, in addition to my university constantly advertising funding money, grants, and small-level scholarships. I never took part in any of these because I had family where I finished out, and was able to get my degree for free, essentially, and most of the scholarships necessitated the appliers to actually have a billable tuition/debt to exist.

Most people don’t find these scholarships because they do not look, and they do not look because, like most useful knowledge like how to invest properly, how to do your taxes on your own, how to create budgets and achievable goals, or how to avoid sub-optimal behaviors that ensure you never attain measurable success, modern schooling doesn’t teach it to you or teach you ways to look for it. This is because modern schooling is not only poorly structured in the United States, but it is inherently structured to get people into paying for higher education and further higher education and private formative education. This is because, despite all the clamoring to the counter, the general public of the US believes education is a commodity that can be bought and sold for the right price, and not something everyone should have access to when they wish to access it.

[T.S. 2:10] It’s not supposed to be for everyone, you mong.

First, yes, there is. It just so happens that, as someone who has worked for years in financial aid, most people who can get financial aid don’t use it for shit that will help you get great grades and do well in your courses. They use it shit like jewelry, expensive food, cars, expensive porn viewing machines, drugs, and other consumerist garbage. It was only recently established that financial aid now functions like SNAP/Disney Dollars and can only be used on certain items at certain retail establishments. When I say ‘recently’, I mean within the last year or two, and the federal government only established these rules after having to crack down on bullshit for-profit institutions like Kaplan University and Strayer University for running a massive scam where they would sign up ‘students’, force them to take on thousands (we’re talking eighty-thousand and more) in financial aid, getting the grant and loan money, flipping the grants to loans, and then saddling the students with the loan and grant-turned-loan money, which they could never hope to pay off. All this was done under the guise of helping people who could otherwise ‘never get a traditional education’, a tagline that has always been a crock of shit, and will always be one in the era of both the Internet and fucking libraries. Seriously, most of the shit you can learn can be learned off the Internet or from your local library. Don’t pay shit-house companies like McGraw-Hill for books; go find a reputable PDF digital library and download old editions. These companies exist to bilk money from morons like Ian who don’t get that free education would exist if idiots stopped paying for it.

Second, not everyone needs to go to college. Shit, Ian, you went for eight fucking years to two supremely expensive schools, and now you make hot button issue videos on YouTube with minimal editing and awful artistic skills. You should know how correct I am. I can only surmise that you are suffering political gambler’s fallacy and keep parroting this horseshit because you’re afraid of losing ‘friends’ and alienating people by disagreeing with it.

[T.S. 2:24] Classic ‘lump funds’  fallacy.

Ian, financial aid is distributed by the Federal government. That means the fuckers in Washington, D.C. who work with the President, Supreme Court, CIA, FBI, and all those mooks in that one building named after how many points it has. Money is raised through the Federal government through excises and taxes. That money is then allocated out through redistribution packages and goes to pay for things like transportation improvements, defense budgets, and, yes, student financial aid. The aid packages through FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) [man, it’s right in the fucking title, how stupid is this guy] and contain grants, typically Pell grants, and Sub/Unsub loans. Grants are money that is essentially free, and has numerous stipulations on it, like being tied to scholastic performance, age restrictions, and others based on the grant type. Loans only require continuous payment on the interest or establishing deferment. Thus, when someone complains about their tax money going to fund some dipshit who uses his/her aid money to pay for a weekend bar binge, they are absolutely within their rights to make this complaint because a portion of their tax payment is directly funding it. The fact you don’t know this despite going to school for almost a full decade just to obtain a Bachelor’s degree in the arts is effectively the nail in the coffin for my previous claims that you come from fiscal affluence and, as such, never had to deal with this horseshit due to non-exposure.

And yes, the Democratic party has, historically speaking, been the party to raise taxes in order to fund the programs it wishes to fund at the Federal level. That doesn’t mean it’s a fact across the board, just that there is a known and accepted pattern for this. Did you ever pay attention in school; seriously, this is high school level Civics/Social Studies shit.

Ian, billionaires are billionaires because they find loopholes in tax law and spend all their time minimizing their tax burden through legal means, like philanthropy, and illegal means, like offshore accounts. You don’t get to have a nine-plus digit bank account number by playing within the means of the system one-hundred percent of the time. That’s also not accounting that being that rich means you have the wealth to buy-out whomever you want, thus allowing you to make the rules and directly fund changes that benefit you. Even thinking the thought that billionaires play the same system the average citizen does shows a lack of understanding of the real issue that plagues most societies: oligarchical classism. For a dude in his thirties, you’re really naive, Ian.

Why is what happens to poor people “not your problem,” but what happens to rich people is? You think you’re gonna be rich someday? Oh please. You’re the one who thinks they’re gonna be rich. [Incredulous laugh] I assure you I do not. 

But then he says something that blows your mind a little bit, something that makes you think you’ve been going about this the wrong way, something that makes all the seeming contradictions of Republican thought maybe make some kind of sense. He says, Yes, you do. Democrats think they’re going to take the money from billionaires and spread it around. Give it to a bunch of poor people so they can go to college. And everyone gets a degree and everyone gets a good job and healthcare is free and minimum wage is eighty bucks an hour. And everyone’s saving lots of money, so what then? Everyone’s rich. Everyone works in tech. Everyone moves to New York and California. And nobody’s a billionaire, and nobody’s broke, and everyone’s great at their job because all they needed was the right opportunity, and no one’s better than anyone at anything. It’s a fantasy and we shouldn’t have to pay you to LARP it. You think you can make everyone the same, but you can’t. There’s always a bigger fish. You say, Did you just quote The Fantom Phucking Menace at me? And he says, I guess I did, lol. And that’s as good a time as any to drop it. 

But, the conversation sticks with you. See, when you talk to your conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions: belief in democracy, do onto others, etc etc. If you didn’t believe your friend shared these assumptions, you’d basically be calling him a fascist or a sadist…

[T.S. 2:42 – 4:01] Holy shit, this video is how long?!

These ‘contradictions’ make sense because they’re perfectly logical, Ian. This hypothetical conservative, a title that has nothing to do with the Alternative Right but because it doesn’t agree with Ian’s party politics he’s going to name it so (and because he wants those sweet, sweet rage clicks), has essentially described the Trickle Down fallacy that as pushed under Ronald Regan. It was used as a societal pipe dream to push his platform, and worked wonders because the average person bought into the idea that business owners and supremely wealthy actually cared about ‘da little guy’ and, if the little guy just bought in, bent over, and let the guy at the top metaphorically fuck them over a barrel, in no time at all, the little guy would be so much closer on the fiscal ladder to the man at the top! Of course, the greatest part of the deceit was politicians knowing that the guy at the top paid their campaign funds, and thus had no intention of helping out ‘da little guy’, so as long as the talking heads could keep pushing this nonsense in new, novel ways, those at the pyramid’s pinnacle could keep fucking over the people making up the foundation and profiting off work that work.

What happened after Regan left was more blatant pushes through Bush the Sr., to the point that people woke up and realized how bought and sold politicians had become in such a short time, and that keeping an arm’s length was the right move. Next came Clinton, who talked a lot of talk, walked no walk, and then got caught doing what every person in an awful marriage/relationship does: cheating. Then, the Revenge of the Bush came, and we had eight years of terrible, senseless policy followed by a milquetoast Illinoisan who waffled more than Waffle House, and now we have The Don, who has done little to none of what he said, and that is a massive relief from Queen Pantsuit who has spent the last three decades pandering to anyone who would listen and succeeding despite those same people constantly complaining of her blatant shilling out. Had everyone kept their goddamn distance after the fall of the Twin Towers and used the leverage of societal pressure to force politicans to hold their word and work for the American people, rather than willing work for the political machine under the guise of patriotism, empty promises, and making things ‘better for the future’, this revised notion of Trickle Down would have died the death it deserved, yet here it is, being pushed again by people who are hoping the same fucks at the top of the ladder give a shit about the guy at the bottom. Life hack: they don’t.

Classism isn’t inherently evil. Heck, it’s a core component of a well-functioning society, and the Big Three Isms are built around it. The issue always comes in when it starts to squeeze portions of the structure unevenly, like wringing the working poor out to dry so the hedonistic leaders can fill their coffers. Everyone can’t be the same, because if that’s the case, then nobody is the same, and if everyone is happy, nobody is; thank you, interchangeable equivalences fallacy. These are ideas that youth buy into, because they’re black and white, no middle-ground, no substance; binary. Age begets experience and nuance, and is why when you get older, you tend to become more conservative rather than liberal. You’ve lived and experienced reality, and that experience tells you binary systems don’t work, even if it would be nice that they did. It tells you that not wanting to pay for people to waste their aid packages on new rims is a reasonable expectation, and nothing to do with facism. Seriously Ian, facism? Do you even know what that means? Pro tip: you believing your friends to be facists just because they don’t agree with you is the textbook definition of the term. You doofs need to open up these books you keep telling people like me to read and read them yourselves. I shouldn’t be able to dismantle your argument by simply saying the word, ‘Dictionary’.

I’d like to point out that, even though I did cover the opening minutes of another video in this rant, we’re almost at five thousand words and barely five minutes into the main video I wanted to cover. Say what you will about me being overly verbose, but the fact I’ve written almost six pages worth of original dialogue (excluding written quotes, figure pulled from using a six-letter word across one Word page equating to 672 words per page and about four-thousand fifty words in this rant so far) detailing various flaws in Ian’s argument is, I think, solid evidence that Mr. Danskin’s ideology is, at best, Swiss cheese.

a liberal is someone who tends to think democratically, and a conservative is someone who tends to think like a capitalist.

[T.S. 6:02] No, Ian.

A liberal, in political terminology, prefers the freedom and choice of the individual over regulation and structure of some governing body. A conservative prefers the opposite. A capitalist prefers a system that can lead to the generation of high amounts of personal capital as quickly as possible. Thus, the opposite of a capitalist is someone who prefers a system that can lead to the generation of low amounts of personal capital as slowly as possible, which tends towards practical communism, or the generation of high amounts of public capital as quickly as possible, which tends towards socialism, or the generation of low amounts of public capital as slowly as possible, which is totalitarianism. Honesty, none of these systems are reflections or inverses of each other, because they all function so radically differently that trying to compare them even slightly is stupidly disingenuous. Regardless, the point here is that conservatives act and behave in conservative manners (hence the word), whereas liberals act and behave in liberal manners. A conservative is not the same thing as a capitalist; there are simply some overlaps with some behaviors of the two ideologies. Again, and I’m a broken record here, Ian does not understand the terms he’s using and needs to open a book. This is classic party-line political argumentation, and it falls apart when someone who has even a basic understanding of terminology comes across your stance.

No matter who you are or what you start with, YOU can become a billionaire.

Just a tiny nitpick, but the American dream was never relating to money specifically, only success. That’s why it sold so well and immigration was at its hey-day during the early 20th century. Immigrants came over looking to simply live better, and by busting ass, they did. The dream became a problem when it shifted from the self-establishing, nebulous, over-arching goals and creating smaller sub-steps to achieve those goals, later replacing the first achievement with a new goal, to broader, societally-driven goals that were too vague, vacuous, and maze-like in terms of even approaching a solution. The push for racial equality worked because, while nebulous, didn’t require tons of finessing and even searching just to begin; those in favor simply brute forced it. Conversely, it’s why gender equality has not and will not work, because the people in favor of it are still arguing where to start, and the conceit of the issue is way too ambiguous to even properly outline. It also won’t work because it’s not a real issue and is historically tied to research that isn’t even proper research. Rather, the research it is tied to was conducted by a known sexual predator and pedophile, but don’t let those facts stop the rainbow-hair masses from pushing their ideology on you, even if you ask them politely to not do so and trample your personal agency (*cough* facism *cough*).

Power has to be earned. If it isn’t earned, it won’t be properly wielded, and then society ends up a mess.

[T.S. 10:32]

I don’t know if I’d tie this in with conservatism, because it’s more of a capitalist idea and, as I said before, capitalism isn’t the same thing as conservatism, but it’s an idea that I would mostly agree with, and I think it’s a solid point that Ian brings up. A ton of the corruption that has been plaguing society currently is from nepotistic means, where friends get jobs from friends and are put into places well above their competency level, or people get positions because they have certain amounts of melanin or specific genitals or mental conditions or physical ailments, and they aren’t up to snuff, yet still land there because of systems created with intent to aid, yet no checks & balances for proper backdoors/ripcords when the choice is clearly an incorrect one. They become systems like Sweden’s political system that pushed Articles 11 & 13 through on an accident and, because there is no way to renege them, the entirety of the EU has to live with draconian policies and countries directly harmed by the practices will have to eat their metaphorical balls since the countries who wanted these policies in place will strong-arm them into following suit.

You are one single individual within a system, and it is your job to rise or fall within it on the sweat of your own back. you don’t CHANGE the system. Society’s problems come from the rules being too weakly enforced. The answer’s always more discipline. Your conservative friend thinks you’re naïve for thinking the system even CAN be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation.

[T.S. 11:48] This screams of projection.

I like how Ian is saying here that conservatives believe that citizens are only supposed to navigate within the system already in place, when just minutes ago, he was saying conservatives believe that people end up higher on the ladder if they learn how to ‘get good’, and changing the system successfully for your own personal benefit would be the perfect description of ‘getting good’. It sounds to me like Ian is projecting because he doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about, and it sounds like that because it is exactly that. If it wasn’t, why else would we still be here talking about this?

So any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan horse for something that benefits them. Why would they assume that? Because that’s what they do. The REAL liberal agenda is to put people in the wrong places on purpose, boost liberal allies, hold back liberal opposition. You don’t want to break up the pyramid. You’re just trying to sneak someone else to the top.

[T.S. 12:21] Oh neat, pushing conspiracies.

You know, I’m not surprised that Ian decided to throw in some ridiculous conspiracy-theory level arguments into this video. I mean, when you can’t make any real arguments, what better than to invent a straw-man if not to knock it down yourself that also makes you look like a reasonable human and not a rambling nutter? Ian, none of this makes sense, from either a liberal or conservative stand-point. This is some crazy, NWO-level shit and, considering that you keep going on with it after this point, I have to believe you introduced this because you ran out of anything remotely sensible to argue from, realized people might actually agree with conservative points at this point in the video, and needed to somehow re-hook people back to your side, so you made this shit up. Come on, man.

How can conservatives say 15 an hour is too much for flipping burgers but somehow 11.5 million an hour isn’t too much to run Amazon?

This is why I pointed out earlier how conservatism is not the same thing as capitalism. A conservative doesn’t give a shit how much you earn, they simply want good efficiency/return on investment for money invested. A capitalist wants everything it can get because if it has it, it earned it. Conservatism is understandable hoarding, and capitalism is hyper-hoarding mixed with hyper-consumption and the ability to rationalize both. They are not the same; quit it with this false equivalency.

I’m stopping here, which is too far anyways, because as the video goes on, Ian drops all pretenses of being reasonable and effectively equates those who lean or consider themselves conservatives to be closer to facists, and also tend to be racist, bigoted, and plenty of other ad hominem that isn’t necessary but included because moral superiority or some other social justice crusading horseshit. Watch it if you want to, and you should, not because I said so, but because you should watch content that disagrees with your own viewpoints to understand how people who don’t agree with you come to their conclusions, and to better understand the differences in others, in general. As I said, though, I won’t because I’ve read and heard the same song and dance before, and it always ends the same way: slandering the opposition and ending with an emotional appeal to wave the ‘right’ flag.

To close out, I’m going to leave you two links, one to an archived Tumblr post of Ian’s from years ago where he creeped on some random nobody developer gal and then wrote a public apology that dug that hole even deeper, and the other to a video about Ian and his partner’s open relationship where they talk about being in an open relationship (just like every other poly-amorous ‘couple’) and jealousy not really being jealousy. I don’t know about you all, but the last person I want to hear tell me that what I believe is wrong is someone who has an unstable employment history, has skeletons in his closet, behaves three degrees off-center, is in a relationship style that has a high propensity to being detrimental, and willfully characterizes those who disagree with him in such a poor and biased way that the only logical conclusion is he’s a massive liar.