Understanding the News: How Tax Cuts Fuel Police Brutality

06/09/20 • 24 min

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Politicians’ dependence on police as a revenue stream, prosecutors’ dependence on police for convictions, and falling tax cuts on the wealthy combine to give police incredible power. This is a key reason why they’re rarely punished, even for the most egregious abuses.

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tweeter: @worbsintowords

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whatispolitics

https://archive.org/download/bleepbloop01/BLEEP%20BLOOP%2001.mp3

FULL TRANSCRIPT

tweeter: @worbsintowords

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whatispolitics

https://archive.org/download/bleepbloop01/BLEEP%20BLOOP%2001.mp3

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4. How Political Definitions Shape Reality

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Definitions of political terms affect what we see and don’t see in the world around us, and turn us into effective or ineffective communicators and political actors.

The definition of government that journalists and academics use makes us blind to the people who rule over us in our private lives.

Popular definitions of left and right propagated by media and academia (the state vs. the market, big vs. small government, liberty vs. equality), frame the world in right-wing terms, while the historical definition (hierarchy vs. equality) frames the world in left wing terms.

Competing definitions of racism have different consequences in terms of peoples’ ability to discuss racism, and on how we relate to people from different cultural categories than our own.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

tweeter: @worbsintowords

Video version: https://youtu.be/TaFkzIQk-1o

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whatispolitics

https://archive.org/download/04-relativity/04%20-%20LINGUISTIC%20RELATIVITY%20AND%20POLITICSes.mp3

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5. How Do We Know What Left and Right Mean? Who’s who on the left and right: 1789-1917

This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definitions of Left and Right is actually the correct one.

How do we know the left and right refer to equality and hierarchy?

To answer this, we look at who was considered as being on the left and on the right in three different time periods:

The early French revolution in 1789, which is what the whole left-right political spectrum is an analogy to.
The 3^rd republic in France where seating in the National Assembly was first purposefully arranged on a left-right spectrum, analogous to the early French Revolution.
The different branches of late 19^th and early 20^th Century socialist movement: Anarchism, Revolutionary Party Socialism and Parliamentary Socialism.

And we apply all of the junk cold war definitions – the market vs. the state, the individual vs. the collective, big vs. small government, equality vs. liberty – and we watch them all crash and burn, leaving only the equality vs. hierarchy / class conflict paradigm left standing.

Apply this exercise on your own to any historical period from 1789 until the rise of the USSR and the cold war, and you get the same results.

Now can everyone accept it and move on?

Bonus episode to follow shortly to explain why Fascism is on the far right and Communism is on the far left when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR are both archetypical “totalitarian” societies.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

tweeter: @worbsintowords

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whatispolitics

https://archive.org/download/05-left-right-history/05%20-%20LEFT-%20RIGHT%20HISTORY.mp3