okay so I'm warning you on this lecture I'm coming in hot um what that means is I don't I don't get this thing this is genuinely um weird so I don't know what a textbook is supposed to do I would assume that it would be a fair reading of ideas I'm not sure that we've done that in this chapter so in this chapter we're going to talk about radical ideas um so as I've been arguing all along there's a radicalism in liberalism and radicalism and the idea of organizing relations through capitalism it's radical because it's challenging the status quo so if this was in the 14th century I guess I would teach radical ideas as those things if this was you know the turn of the century in the Roman Empire I would teach Christianity as radical um so I don't I don't really know what the point of this chapter is in terms of framing radical ideas as equivalent which it has all sorts of problems in it so I have to add a lot to this chapter because honestly like a chapter on radical ideas I don't know maybe it shouldn't maybe it shouldn't have any radical ideas in it it should just talk about the underlying premise of radical ideas um part of the reason that the Communist Manifesto was a Manifesto was that it could be broadly read that people could read it that it was short and accessible it's a Manifesto because it explains to people kind of clearly why they should be radicalized this chapter talks about historical materialism and all these dialectics it's like it's intentionally trying to de-radicalize the ideas we actually don't really ever talk about any of the arguments in this chapter we talk about the people who talk about them which is the opposite of the last chapter so I I just find a lot of this as a tacit form of the worst kind of liberalism which I guess doesn't want to offend anyone so it doesn't say anything but like it's it's not even clear who it would be offending other than the people who it's assuming to be so it's it's a liberal position it's liberal in that it believes the reasonable discussion of ideas never has any consequence on bodies on practices on the ways that people live and so the lineage of these ideologies makes no sense to me the way they've framed it so I'm going to kind of to deal with that as we go through um I will deal with covet a tiny bit at the end but it's not really relevant so already we have a problem off the offset we want to talk about the similarities between Q Anon antifa which again is just appropriating one group's anti-fascism let's call it that you know the premise of World War II let's equate it with an online movement that sees um president Trump as a secret enforcer of Freedom against a deep state they're the same thing whatever okay so these are framed as all examples of radical ideas so I'm going to begin in this chapter as well talking about capitalism as a radical idea we can talk about religion as a radical idea we can talk about the ways in which any assertion against I guess the dominant group would be considered a radical idea I don't know if there's ever been a dominant group there's just been a series of exchanges between people who choose to listen or not listen to one another so I I start off with just saying this is a poor analysis it treats the content of ideas as equivalent as if language or the capacity to speak doesn't reflect power um and so this is you know spivex assertion that can the subaltern speak which is the idea that if you are so marginalized um you don't even have the capacity for speech because we're not willing to listen to you you don't have the resources to do it back to to Aristotle there's a division of labor in society the people who are doing the the work are not going to have the the the platform or the time to to speak and participate so it also assumes that the dominant groups can understand subordinated groups and so I'm going to deal with this right off we'll just jump right into MLK who fits in this conception of of the problem of respect we would code switching respectability politics when minority groups in terms of population have to engage with majority groups who refuse to listen to um so why we call it respectability is that you know MLK's tradition is framed largely as a liberal one as you know I have a dream rather than actually substantively engaging with his more radical ideas and the efforts by the state to um slight him to uh tarnish his legacy to do all the other stuff around it and the more fundamental question about a radical chapter is do we want the chapter to be pro-normativity or anti-normativity and so for all these radical ideas we don't have any lgbtq plus two spirit right like just two-spirit is a queer radical tradition that predates all of this stuff this modern nation state so it's absent uh we don't think clearly we don't think about kind of there's no feminism here right like there's no there's maybe feminism is not a radical idea anymore I just don't know um and so the question is this chapter becomes a pro normativity chapter about anti-normativity actions which to me makes it very illegible um and so I'm gonna have to provide my own examples now there's a problem with examples we'll get to this with solipsism but there's a problem with examples in the way which we we deal with these things but I do think it's important to talk about the the concept that we'll do here with MLK which is two Americas it's a shorthand that people use to talk about how the experience of America is different there is an argument to be made that the people who chose to come to America are migrants who are settlers who are directly choosing to take the land and that those people who were forced there forced to an Erasure of their history through slavery through forced migration through their growing up without the culture and experience of their history and traditions are are The Real Americans and so that the dominant group that settled America is less American than the group that's only has a context in the history of America and has to reassemble post-slavery their identities in history so there's a fundamental difference about the conceptualization of the relationship between the settlement of America between those two groups between their cultural experiences between between slavery segregation Jim Crow redlining all of the questions that come from the deep racialization of American society which is totally absent from this reading of of the um the textbook so so that we'll just listen to MLK talk a bit about the two Americas issue well I'd like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon the other America and I use this subject because they are all literally two Americans one America is beautiful a false situation and innocence is America is overflowing with the Miracles prosperity and the Honey of opportunity this America is a habitat of millions of people who have food and material Necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds and freedom and human dignity for their spirits in this America millions of people experience every day and the opportunity of having life liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all the bad dimensions and in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity but tragically and unfortunately there is another America and this other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of Hope into the fatigue of despair in this America millions of work starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist in this America millions of people find themselves living in Rat infested Vermin field Sloan in this America people are poor by the Millions and they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity innocent is the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority farming every day in their little mental sky and as we look at this other America we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and Shattered Dreams okay so you get the idea here is the ability to speak or think like listen there's probably three or four or five or six Americas uh indigenous communities in the US you just look at their rates of poverty and um uh access to healthcare voting patterns everything it's just as bad it's the same you know in Canada there's at least three or four I mean there's seven thousand languages and 192 nation states um there is going to be the inability to think and experience your community in these systems and so I mean this is The Little Mermaid 101 right it's the premise of Little Mermaid and it's classic text in in security studies is that um if you want to be able to be heard you have to give up your voice so the premise of the Christian Anderson Little Mermaid is that the mermaid in order to enter Human Society in order for the woman to participate in human society she has to give up her voice right this is this is straight subaltern stuff right and so you know we have seven thousand languages in the world the UN has the official languages of English French Spanish Russian Mandarin and Arabic I just went to Northwest Territories on their website these are the official languages um that are in that in one place in one territory remember territories Artful Province it's going to know the full resources because the patterns of settlement um and that they include uh talagong Spanish German and Vietnamese and so this idea that it is somehow a radical idea to not just experience the majoritarian sensibility to me is a kind of offensive um I mean we can go into this in more detail but this idea of not being able to speak is is or not being able to be heard is exactly what MLK said why riots happen it's the language of the unheard they're they're we're constantly saying hey this is our experience this is our experience and then we're told no that's a radical experience you are being radical and so therefore because you're not being respectable and you're not presenting your ideas in a way that is legible to the dominant group we're not going to listen to you um we're not going to acknowledge that you exist we are going to say that you are less than and therefore you don't have the right to exist and so we can just think about the ways in which language is violence right um and so that the question of how to respond to these questions is so this is Steve Darcy's in philosophy over at Huron so he's on campus specifically taking MLK's framework and arguing that it's good for democracy to have militancy in protest um and this militancy isn't all violence is good which we'll talk about later in the textbook talks about later when it's talking about the black block and anarchism or whatever but what it's framing is is the idea that Force is always going to be framed by what the dominant group says is acceptable so here's three cases he's got in the book um you're pushing a man to to the ground to prevent him from stabbing a nearby child you know we as a dominant group we understand okay no problem pushing a man to the ground to prevent access to the building I am picketing in the context of a strike already we've got a much more complicated situation where we would have to decide or dominant group or or you know the labor side would have to decide whether or not which which form of of force is violence uh push a man to the ground to express my contempt for his religion and so this is also a form of force we would generally depend on which side we're on to what extent we would see it as violence so the problem here and this goes back to the last discussion is that the liberal framing of the tolerance or the respect for ideas says nothing about how those ideas can frame violence and they can also frame who gets to speak how they get to speak what is respectable and then what is not respectable and it is why I say it's offensive to frame these questions as radical is that that's 100 a capacity of privilege right when privilege encounters equality it feels like oppression because you don't get to do what you've always done before and so I I really have substantive questions about why this chapter is the way it is um you know self-defense is considered morally acceptable and we resist seeing it as violence precisely because it's it's to create a a boundary around your sense of self that says it's okay for you to exist right just exist right with what you do and so I'm not going to get into too much but but the idea here is that you know militancy in this framework should make sure that it attempts to to take those Grievances and make them substantive so that Elites especially in transit gender Elites can hear them and that militancy should affect those most directly by those actions that it should help them be more autonomous and make systems more accountable and so this idea that these are radical principles um is the weirdest thing because it basically represents the majority saying what is acceptable and unacceptable specifically through the lens of I get to speak um and so back to in The Little Mermaid the securitization premise is that um those who get to speak get to set the agenda for other groups and we'll talk about how this works in populism and we'll talk about how this works for Anarchist groups and Marxist groups and all the rest that as we go through this this week um but securitization this is classic securitization Theory from the Copenhagen school and so this is just a premise that somebody gets to say someone in a position of authority says something it's a speech act they say it out loud and other people hear it so that's already a capacity um it's a securitizing move which says this is a threat to us there's an audience that receives that threat it impacts both policy and the allocation of resources and it can eventually result in desecratization so we've got all sorts of examples of this it doesn't matter who this can happen in all sorts of contexts by all sorts of Frameworks but the idea here is that things like we can declare war on War on Drugs War on Christmas war on terror whatever someone in Authority has to make the claim we have to accept the claim and then we have to dedicate resources because of that claim anything that creates a moral Panic can utilize this but it has to do with the pro privilege to make the first move to make the first claim and an audience willing to hear them so majoritarian audiences if a speech act by MLK is more radical and says something like uh violence is the or um militancy or violence is the language of the unheard this chapter hears that and says no that's unacceptable or says that that violence is not a legitimate form of speech because it says that only respectable legitimate speech that I recognize so if you raise your voice no no if you're angry no no if you have an emotional response no no we have to be rational and reasonable here which I mean Karen's um and so it's really it's it's really weird yes so these securitizing moves are often idiocy in a real sense uh drugs win the war on drugs and so this idea then is that the the chapter is saying they want to challenge the radical ideas of our time we don't actually get any real challenges here we get the idea you go have your little thing and the legibility is so bad like you know I went to York I'm not a Marxist but I was trained by lots of marxists you go to York that's what you get um so there's a way that and passions please are made by them we don't have to agree with them but we can understand why they have the strength of their conviction this chapter's reading of Marxism is the most boring but now understanding that I could possibly conceive of how to do this and so what happens then is that this chapter functions as a tacit liberal reading of radical politics if you're going to do this just be explicit I'm gonna I'm a liberal I'm going to read what these people are saying in ways that are legible to me and as a liberal I only see reasonable respectable ideas that articulate claims in a theoretical way as the foundation of politics which is why at the end of the chapter they simply are like I don't know what populism is and I don't know how it got there and I can trace this back to prior to freaking Plato as to why it's the case it's it's rhetoric it's the sophist there's a long tradition of people making people feel things with their words and those words don't have to have reason they can be anecdotal and they can be emotive and they can be evocative and they rally people to do things and so this is in part what Plato and Aristotle were responding to was the way in which language helps people feel things which makes them act but they don't always do it reasonable so to reduce all of these ideas to reasonable claims that are respectable to a liberal audience is weird it's just fundamentally weird I don't get it I don't know what we're doing I'm not sure how to do it and there's really easy ways to show how you can understand someone else's voice so this has been going around on Tick Tock here I'll just show this one uh apologies a lot of white women in my tick tocks this week there's a filter that shows you what your dog sees and when I tell you I quite literally sobbed for the first 10 minutes of realizing I need we need to go to a playroom I need to see what she sees first of all I look like Fiona from shriek my dog thinks I'm shriek you hi hi okay this is what her ball pit looks like it isn't this moment I am so excited so many blue and yellow on there because at least you can see it okay at least this thing's kind of cute this is her favorite and I understand because it's like that's it without the filter oh my God [Music] are you joking [Music] what am I rude so in the absence of this Tick Tock filter she can't she can't see the experience of someone else and so this is the most simple way to say that maybe your experience isn't the same as someone else's experience who is right next to you experiencing the exact same things who understands them differently because their experience is different in this case it's the cones they are the cones and the eyes of dogs they don't have as many as us so they just see a little bit less color and so their understanding of color is different than our understanding of color which you would not know if not for the filter and so the idea then of radical ideas critiquing Society I think is is an inversion of what's going on here it's that society's always experienced differently and so the question is do the does the majority want to listen to minority um and so I think for example it's a radical idea that anyone involved in state apparatus should ever look at my junk I don't think you should do it I think it's weird um I think it's gross I don't think it should happen but um going back to Alexander wood uh famously and and he was a Canadian politician back in the 1800s there's a statue of him there was you know in the gay Village in Toronto and the whole premise was was that in order to find someone who had committed um uh gender-based violent sexual assault uh he went around inspecting penises um and then he got run out of town because people would had gay Panic around it um don't do that but we have that normalized every day every time you go through an airport we have full body scanners that should in theory block out those those areas but we know that they fail and we know that they they capture images that the state has images of our junk we also know that any messaging app uh the NSA one of the first things the NSA did when it got access to everybody's um internet they were trading around pictures of their exes naked because they could do that I don't think the state should have access to those things I don't think that's a radical idea but if I'm framing this in terms of National Security the NSA absolutely post 911 justifies this was the commander of NORAD said collect it all they said we now have a a clear threat to the American public that justifies us collecting all the data on the internet that we can get our access to so that we can be protected and we can be safe and so those who get to Define what is safe say what is acceptable and unacceptable and if you challenge those things you are being radical um and so the the textbook says what defines the root problem depends on the particular radical Theory anyone can articulate a story I can change something like this in into radical anyone can articulate a vision a different vision of the world and then people can agree with it or not um all involve a critique of the status quo I don't know that the status quo exists other than there is people who render it into existence by saying that's the status quo within that status quo there's people who are always contesting ideas aren't sure about our ideas or are being convinced by good orders who look like them that this is the way we should do it so which is to say that this chapter on radical ideas isn't very political which raises these questions as to why that would be at a political analysis that doesn't deal with with radical ideas um here's a just a simple way to do it so they use the image in this of radical ideas being um uh this notion of uh the extinction Rebellion the extinction Rebellion is uh is a you know it wants to declare climate emergency they articulate Net Zero carbon emissions they have citizens assemblies and they want to just transition that's one way is that really that radical I've got a radical one here this is the voluntary human extinction movement they argue that we should choose not to have children voluntarily humans should choose Extinction promote sustainable Lifestyles responsible consumption Absecon advocate for Reproductive Rights access to competition raise awareness about the negative consequences overpopulation that's not true but whatever that's why it's radical it's it's got to articulate a bit of a claim that's not true and encourage and open a critical dialogue thinking about population growth and its impact on the environment also they're not related in any way the the top uh what is it top 20 percent consume like the I think it's top 10 percent consume 50 of the resources so that's not even a bit true that's a radical idea because it it butts up against truth and it's challenging us to think like this movement is it's not a rebellion against its Extinction it's an advocacy of Extinction that's a radical position um and so I just went on their websites it's a false equivalent islands that happens over and over again in this this chapter it says well this is a radical idea and this is a radical idea no you get to decide so putting this image in here is their way of saying oh look at these radical um ideas I'm like no you want to see real radical ideas there's a real radical idea um the you know I went on their website and said what do what are they what is advocated by these two different groups this is basically on Wikipedia it's some weird person who created it and this is the idea of telling truth acting down and decide together treating these as equivalent is not I've I guess it's valid if you're liberal because you're examining their ideas but giving them the same weight is a fundamental misrecognition of of what's Happening Here this has a well-founded foundation for its claims they're articulating a vision of those things and that we can check and verify this other one is some weirdo who's come up with this thing that is using the same language in the context of climate change but is not what we would consider I don't know would it acceptable political organization so so we're going to talk about this this idea over and over again of left and right comes from the the sitting in the French after the French Revolution the French Parliament if you're on one side or the other you're left or right um so radical ideas then just fall into these buckets that Americans love because they have a two-party system we don't have a two-party system it's a spectrum and I don't know what the spectrum is doing the spectrum is is always framing towards centrism which doesn't really help us understand radical ideas unless we plot them all on a spectrum but who gives you the right to plot somebody um and so the idea left to right or radical is often used to discredit by tractors again I think this is just Beltway stuff um discredited by who Beltway insiders so beltway are basically people who live within the area of Washington DC on the Beltway highways and they have a very insular way of viewing the world because everything frames through the kind of political machinations and organizations of Washington and Washington DC American politics and so this idea of you know people of the supporters uh supporters of the people sat on the left and sport is the monarchy side on the right is this weird kind of binary understanding of politics that we have just adopted over time you know the Beltway Insider is an individual with significant access influence excuse me a knowledge to Washington DC include lobbyist journalists Beltway Insider shaped legislation advised political leaders provide insights to governments it could be used neutrally or critically so those people who want to influence those people want to be insiders want to be insiders who then frame everything in terms of left and right and want to be insiders because they're part they influence both left and right they want to sit Above The Fray and that's what this chapter is doing it wants to be an Insider that sits above The Fray and doesn't think about what it's actually doing the way it reproduces these questions over and over again these Beltway insiders who are very insistent this is just a funny thing that was on ABC at the time this is um all of the democratic candidates at one point um and they basically the Beltway insiders said that there was no way that Bernie Sanders could get elected but what are the ways they reproduced that was just by listing him as other rather than giving any Oxygen to those ideas and so this idea of left and right is just framing things in terms of Politics as horse races this is 538's famous prediction that it was a 70 at Beltway insiders that those who do this type of work absolutely believed that that the chance of winning was 70 Hillary Clinton and that Donald Trump only had 28 chance of winning um that they produced this over and over again and so there is this notion in the Insiders that they stand above The Fray that they see both sides and they don't have a position those ideas are largely this vision of Politics as deeply cynical as Machiavellian as the dumb people listen to left and right and actually debate ideas everybody else is behind the scenes this is famously the tail wagging the the dog it's the idea that well we don't want them to look at this thing so we're going to try to set the agenda so President Clinton starts ordering missile strikes while he's under scrutiny because he is trying to shift the the he's trying to use that securitizing move to shift our interests away from what we're interested in into what he's interested in it just simply doesn't always work sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't so that was a long-winded way for me to say radical politics um framed in this text is largely done from a political Insider position which is a tacit liberal positions that doesn't actually evaluate the claims being made but treats the claims as equivalent by the categorizing it as not part of the dominant group or narrative and so the whole chapter the whole way of thinking about radical ideas is itself this weirdly perverse radical liberalism that says that ideas only matter to the extent to which we can render them legible and that we accept that they are ideas that we want to engage with and as a majority if we don't want to engage with them they are radical ideas and you don't have to take them as seriously as the ideas as us as insiders as those who work between the left and the right permit you to understand them and so yeah it just came in a bit hot on this one because this chapter I mean we'll get into it but there's there's lots of ways in which we should probably think critically about the way that this is framed about radicalism being framed