I was wrong about Landlords

hello it's me thought slime sometimes i make youtube videos and when i do sometimes people respond to them and usually they just make fun of me and they're usually literal children or they're people with the emotional intelligence of children sometimes they're right wingers who want to call me slurs sometimes they're left-wingers who are very mad for some reason that i don't think slurs are good normally what i do in that situation is ignore them or if they seem very silly hmm burger king i'd make fun of them but the thing is i don't like conflict i don't like watching people respond to me it makes me really anxious i get a tight feeling in my stomach it makes me feel kind of sick i believe wholeheartedly in the things that i say on this channel but i'm not at all confident in the way that i say them i always feel like i'm gonna get ripped apart by these responses owned beyond all recognition until i'm forced to crawl back into the ocean from whence i came this is the assumption each and every time and a lot of people sent me this video by youtuber matt mckeever responding to my video landlords are bad people messaged me on every platform asking me to respond to his response many emails twitter dms discord messages people even paid me with super chats to get my attention about this video so i was genuinely kind of scared i thought oh no he must have completely destroyed me i'm gonna look like a fool but at the same time if he did destroy my arguments i had a responsibility to watch it i say this not to inspire sympathy from you but to point out that i genuinely approach response videos with the assumption that the material therein will be stronger than mine probably more thoughtful but failing that definitely more persuasive and until watching this one no response video has actually gotten me to change my position they always turned out to be pretty unconvincing but this one this one's also unconvincing sorry i know the title of the video says i was wrong that's a typo i don't know how to fix it i'm not good at computers i meant to say i was right about landlords and and i also the thumbnail where i look apologetic that's also a typo i don't know how to fix that either it's supposed to look like this i don't honestly i don't even know why i made the other thumbnail jokes aside when i sat down to watch this video it was in the hope that i could make little pithy jokes respond to his counterpoints be a little snark lord like i usually do you know the whole thing what i do around here what his video is almost an hour long and look we cannot allow this escalation to continue i release a video that's 20 minutes long he makes an hour-long response i respond to that with a three-hour video he responds to that with a 24-hour video on and on until eventually both of our videos are of infinite length every particle in the universe divided into positive charges and negative charges to create the binary code that makes up these videos i thought instead what i'll try to do is synthesize his main points as i understand them into a few distinct categories and present my rebuttals it is possible that by doing this i may misinterpret his arguments so if you'd like to see if i've taken him out of context you can view the link to his video in the description below probably watch it at two time speed would be my suggestion it is my intention to steal man his positions to present the strongest version of his arguments as i can at least for the positions that like i understand the logic of at all also one thing that will be confusing is that we're both named matt so in the spirit of charity i will henceforth call him simply matt and myself stink mat to keep us differentiated these are the main points that matt makes throughout his video one other businesses operate similarly to landlords so it's wrong to single out landlords in particular two leases and rental agreements are mutually beneficial contracts which are signed voluntarily and the landlord-tenant relationship should not be adversarial 3. landlords assume risk therefore justifying the profit they extract and 4. i stink mat present no solution to this problem matt is keen to point out that landlords are not unique in profit seeking that all businesses attempt to make money i'm going to take issue with this argument that landlords don't pay for anything and that their tenants pay for everything if we view this outside of the landlord tenant model and simply look at it as business and customers all businesses use their customers money like that's how a business works guys right so it doesn't matter whether you're running a coffee shop an apartment building or a fortune 500 company you understand every business is inherently if it's like every business is a for-profit enterprise they're in the business of seeking margins seeking income thought slime i get it and it sounds really bad when you frame things like this but this is literally any for-profit business any for-profit business i know i know that that's obvious curiously his example is almost always either food or coffee i think because i mentioned early in my video that i don't think it's ethical to charge someone for something they were required to live and food and coffee are things that i require to live matt seems to be under the impression that i believe shelter is the only basic need people are entitled to he seems pretty preoccupied with the idea that i'm focusing too much on landlords and not talking about other businesses and like yeah i did that because that's what the video was about so that's why i talked about that thing rather than other things however just because other businesses also profit from basic needs that doesn't make working for those businesses the moral equivalent to being a landlord he gives the example of a farmer making fresh produce if i find out that my local farmer is profiting by selling me vegetables do i have the right to just go and seize those vegetables because they're also a physiological need right like it's at the bottom of the hierarchy of maslov's triangle the thing about farmers is you're paying them for their labor they grew the food they harvest the food they distribute the food by putting it in the little bin so the mayor can come get it it wouldn't be fair for them to do all of that without compensation within a system where they require compensation to meet their needs ideally everybody would get the food they need without paying but within capitalism the system we live in right now that means that the farmers wouldn't be able to pay for the things they need such as tractors sprinklers and sword upgrades for fighting in the mines and little hats that you buy from a cat that comes once a week landlords might perform labor incidentally they might do repairs or maintenance on a unit they might fill out paperwork but that's not what you're paying them for you're paying them because they own your home like if you moved into an apartment and there was never any need for repairs and there was no paperwork you'd still have to pay rent because the thing they're charging you for is the access to the thing that they own that's different from just like selling someone a carrot or a house in that transaction you're paying them to own a carrot or a house at the end of the deal you own your carrot or house same way with a coffee or a copy of ghoulies on blu-ray dvd combo disc when you pay rent you hand over your money to a landlord and then they do nothing but collect it that's why it's called passive income the only role the landlord plays in this transaction is to collect money and hand their tenant back nothing nothing not not a thing nothing no no carrots the service and i use that term quite generously you're providing only exists to make a profit if it weren't profitable it wouldn't even make sense that it existed like what would a landlord even be if they weren't making a profit but with or without the profit motive there would still be farmers there would still be plumbers there would still be cobblers both pie and chew you're providing nothing and doing nothing and people have to pay you or someone like you or they don't get a place to live please note the phrase you or someone like you it will become relevant later because if you're watching this right now matt i imagine you've paused to say that no it's voluntary for people to choose to live at the home you own i know how much you like to pause my videos and complain about something i say before listening to my justification and then ignoring my justification so i thought i'd let you know ahead of time that i'm gonna be talking about that later buddy just so you know but you're right that my video did focus on landlords to the exclusion of other business practices based on ownership that i also think are immoral i think owning the patent on life-saving medicine and charging a premium on people who manufacture or sell it is also wrong i think it's wrong to extract the surplus value of workers by owning the equipment they use to do that work i think it's wrong to profit off of the ownership of an emerald mine or a car factory or a rocket factory i didn't bring those up because that my video was about landlords so that's the thing i talked about the same way you didn't mention that you disapprove of the actions of serial killers in your video but based on the principles you purport within that video it would be reasonable to conclude that you do in fact dislike serial killers your argument here is essentially claiming that i believe something that would make my views on landlords contradictory point out the contradiction and then pretend that shows i'm a hypocrite which would be great if i believe the things you're saying but i don't why is it that we're so precious around shelter but everything else is free game that shows an emotional reaction my opinion because that's a blind spot nor does me talking about landlords implied that i think they are uniquely evil among the bourgeois for the record i don't think you or landlords in general are evil which was the first thing i said in my video number one i don't think all landlords are bad people like i said about cops it does not matter to me if an individual landlord is a good person who will go to heaven the institution that they take part in by being a landlord is what i take issue with specifically i'm not making a judgment on anyone's entire moral character i'm making a judgment on this particular action that they're taking i think that the economy incentivizes landlords to exploit their tenants and so logically they respond to that incentive i am assigning no moral characterization to the word exploit here i'm using it literally to mean to make full use of something for your own benefit naturally matt wants to extract as much money as he's able to from his tenants and properties that's why he bought them this isn't a judgment on him this is a statement of facts no business decides to operate at less profit than they could and if they did the nature of the market is such that they would be out competed by some business that did it isn't something they decided to do out of cruelty or greed from nowhere it's the basis of capitalism matt talks a lot about the landlord-tenant relationship being win-win in his video he doesn't really explain why it's a win for the tenant presumably i guess because they get a place to live or a chill landlord i guess to me like we talk about on my youtube channel all the time win-win relationships i personally believe that we have win-win relationships with a lot of our tenants i personally believe that we have win-win relationships with love or targets but the landlord doesn't provide a place to live they buy places to live and then withhold them so that people will pay to live there they don't create homes they just own homes the need they fulfill is a need that they create not individually but as a class of people by buying up surplus homes for profit a good way to think about this and to see if it's really a win for the tenant is to imagine a world where there were no landlords nobody had ever thought of it it just never occurred to anybody to do in this world people who live in homes owned those homes now imagine you're the first landlord trying to explain to your prospective tenants why it's a good deal for them no no no no you see i'm not selling you a house i'm letting you use part of my house for a while for like 30 to 40 percent of your paycheck it costs more or less is the same as the payments on buying a house but at the end of it that you don't you don't get to keep my house that's it's still mine i own it you might say well for some people who can't afford a down payment on a house the deal makes sense and it does make sense that someone would take that deal if they literally couldn't have a home otherwise if someone is desperate enough that deal is better than being unhoused granted the same way that taking a payday loan makes sense for people who can't pay their bills at this moment that's what makes it predatory lending it might be a logical choice to make but only someone desperate enough will make that choice and like a payday loan rentership which requires that you pay thirty to forty percent of your paycheck and get no return on that investment makes it that much harder to save up for the down payment making it that much more difficult to escape the cycle of debt but let's be perfectly optimistic here let's say that all landlords just decide to be perfectly altruistic and charge less than they were able to just to give a fairer deal to their tenants just out of the kindness of their hearts every single one of them decides to do that don't you think it'd still be kind of a problem that they could express the power to charge more like if your neighbor bought a chain gun and aimed it at your bedroom window it doesn't matter that he doesn't intend to use it the fact that he could use it still gives him power over you now if he asks you very nicely to get rid of those begonias in your lawn because he doesn't like the way they look you might think twice before saying no hey just move away from the neighbor with a chain gun but uh-oh the anti-begonia league has bought all the available housing and decided that all available homes will be in the path of their chain guns this analogy is getting away from me a little bit my point is that your relationship with your individual landlord is voluntary only in the sense that you chose that place to rent the fact that you had to rent at all is usually a financial necessity imposed on you if you're dying of thirst in the middle of the desert and i have a canteen that i'm willing to share if you agree to give me a thousand dollars a liter the guy buying the water is technically doing this voluntarily i'm not forcing him to buy my water he could hold out for an oasis or someone else to come along with water and i mean technically i'm helping him out without me and my canteen he'd be dead but i'm still taking advantage of his desperate circumstances to get him to agree to a deal that he wouldn't agree to otherwise now say there were three people with canteens or a dozen or several thousand each charging different amounts and the dehydrated guy chose to buy water from me because my water was the cheapest that's still not voluntary except on an extremely literal technicality it is exploitation renting a home is the same way i can choose not to rent from you personally i can agree to rent from someone else but if i can't afford to buy a home or move my options are either rent from someone or get kicked onto the street either put myself in danger or agree to someone else's terms i am agreeing to my landlord's terms under duress even if i can pick which set of terms i submit to from a small pool of similar ones any contract that is signed under duress is fundamentally invalid your solution to this problem and i wish i was joking here is to either move somewhere cheaper which might not be an option for you or to set up a tent and camp on unincorporated land they are as a class of people holding you hostage you need a place how are they holding you hostage you have the free mobility across this country you can move to any any city any province any municipality you could literally just go up to where there's essentially unincorporated land and you could probably just camp out there so i often joke that libertarians think that the real world is just minecraft but this is what this guy actually believes go out and live in the woods that'll be fine and it's normal to accept that as a reasonable alternative to renting so yes it is technically possible to not agree to rent from anyone so long as you're willing to be unhoused the same way that it's technically possible to build your own aeroplane or grow your own penicillin but it isn't a sensible thing to expect people to do a rental agreement is a voluntary one only in the strictest most generous interpretation of the term where we choose to ignore any outside factors which make volunteering for it inevitable it's a word game gotcha an absurd thing to hang your ethical framework on you could justify literally anything using this logic that something is fine if all parties agree to it regardless of the circumstances that led to them agreeing to it hey if poor people want to sell themselves into a dentured servitude rather than going to debtor's prison that's their choice we should let them do it i'm not making them do anything they don't have to do it they don't want to they can go to prison i don't see the problem with child labor certainly the child could simply quit if they don't like to do the work why shouldn't i be able to pay someone ten thousand dollars to let me hunt them on my private island it's their choice thankfully it's not the only ethical justification for profiting from rent seeking that matt provides one of the problems here thought slime that you're having is you're not viewing it as there being any risk taken on by the landlord there is inherent risk they can invest into a property and then a socialist like you might come into power and be able to seize that property from them there's an inherent risk there small quibble here socialists like me don't seize power we seek to destroy power not possess it power is the problem to socialists that are like me you're thinking of other socialists i'm an anarchist that's why there are two anarchist flags in the background of the video you're responding to and a big anarchist day at the end but let's assume i'm lying about that and i'm just tricking everyone into believing me so that someday i might become a tyrant imagine that i become lord of canada the master of all i survey and i immediately get drunk with power and also regular junk and i enact my sinister plan to make sure everyone's basic needs are met what will the landlords do then if housing is distributed by need rather than profit thereby giving us a surplus of homes with which to house everyone if everyone is housed landlords will be out on the street wait a minute you're being tongue-in-cheek though i don't think you view a socialist revolution as the biggest risk factor when buying a property or when renting a property even your tenant could trash the place they could bring in bed bugs they might not pay but this isn't a risk you assume out of benevolence it's a calculated risk that you know is likely to make you a tidy profit and why should someone want to be a landlord why should someone want to take on the risk and the burden of being one if they don't have the right to profit this is asinine nobody needs to risk letting people rent their homes it's a risk you take because you believe it will benefit you the fact that it's risky does not make it beneficial so it's not something we really should be incentivizing like you're right that without the profit motive nobody would assume the risk of becoming a landlord to which i say tight sick that's what i want actually besides the tenant assumes the far greater risk here you could move somewhere with black mold or rats or a murderer living in the walls you could lose your job and then you can't pay rent and then the landlord can take you to court or worse kick them out onto the street more on that later eviction's going to come up later don't worry the conditions of the neighborhood or your life could change drastically and then you might be trapped in your lease what if a month into a 12 month lease you're offered a better paying job in the next town over what if a relative gets sick and needs live-in care then you're on the hook to sublet if your landlord will even let you or pay whatever fee they demand to break the lease you're also you know putting all of your stuff in a place that they have a key to so there's that but let's put aside both of those things let's say that being a landlord is beneficial and they assume more risk than the tenant isn't that kind of fucked up here's a clip from american johnson talking about this so let's return to the idea of risk and and the way that a lot of capitalists just glamorize risk and say that the reason that capitalists are entitled to making millions of dollars is because they risk so much okay well we've already covered the fact that millionaires and billionaires are making much less of a risk anytime they make an investment than you are with your life savings okay that aside let's say you are a small business person you go out you you invest in this business you work hard and you win the lottery your business does really well and you start pulling in millions you bootstrap yourself up to success therefore according to the logic of of capitalists you are entitled to all of that money that you wrench from your employers and you're entitled to all of that exploitation that you were committing is this really the way that we want ron to run our society do we really want to run our society in a way where for you to have any chance of making it you have to gamble with odds that are worse than what you have in las vegas you have to put everything on the line with competition that can buy and sell you many times over in terms of the liquidity in the assets that they have i mean do you really think that this is how we should be pursuing human progress does this really sound like a good formula to you i'm just asking just think about it okay if you're if you're pro capitalist and this all sounds good to you you like the idea of risk reaping rewards through risk just think a little bit about it is this really honestly the best way that humans can can structure our society is there no better way are there is there nothing better we can do when my complaint is the system shouldn't work this way it's a really weird reaction to argue back but that's how the system works like yeah i know that i want i want to change it but what then matt keeps bringing up this point that i propose no solution to the problem you know what's your counter argument like what's your solution maybe you're going to get into a solution here i'm fascinated because if it involves something like rent control i'm really curious what your solution here is because we're almost through the video we're two thirds of the way through and we haven't heard a solution yet i just find it intellectually insul bankrupt to make some of the arguments he's making and then not propose any real solutions but i don't know what problem he's referring to the problem of there are landlords i didn't think i needed to spell this out but if i think landlords are bad the solution is not to have landlords the solution is not landlords landlord but i guess it it's as close as you get to a fair point he's right to say that my argument does not demonstrate the alternative which is a real problem with my argument but not with my position like you're right that i wasn't as persuasive as i could have been by not discussing the alternative but not discussing the alternative doesn't change the fact that the problem exists climate change is also a problem even if i personally don't know how to solve it if i said we should just reduce carbon emissions but didn't really know how to do that because i'm not a carbon scientist it'd still be right carbon scientist that's not a thing right that's that's wild that i just said that i'm reading off a script and i still said something that weird i would still be right even if i was being vague you don't need to offer a solution to point out that a problem exists but for the record here's a very basic outline of how to fix this problem all homes under absentee ownership which is to say all homes that are owned by people not for the purpose of living in but for profiting off of should be seized by the people held in common and distributed on the basis of need this is in fact what i think should be done with most stuff that's the thing i like right about now i imagine matt would pause the video and say hey stink matt that just raises more questions who decides who needs what how do you seize it who takes care of the vacant properties this is the type of argument matt makes a lot in his video he asks a question and then lets it hang in the air as though i were in the room with him failing to respond to it i would argue that this constitutes an argument from it i would argue that this constitutes an argument from income i would argue that this constitutes an argument from incredulity incredulity incredulity i would argue that this constitutes an argument from in i would argue that this constitutes an argument from incredulity inc i would argue that this demonstrates an argument from incredulity where because matt can't imagine what my answers to these questions might be or chooses to ignore when i answer them that i must therefore have no answer to these questions and the fact of the matter is i'm not going to sit here and walk you through precisely how i think the housing council should decide who needs what they could just keep stock of what they have and people can make an application for what they need and then that could be assessed on a case-by-case basis or what the best insurgency strategies are to mount a successful revolution probably a general strike partly because that's not the focus of my landlord video or this one but also partly because i don't think it's my decision to make if i sat here and prescribed those things that defeats the whole point i alone can't decide how an entire society should be run and if i attempted to that would be a disaster the whole idea is that people should work together to make these decisions that the only way for people to escape the exploitation they find themselves living under is to work together in solidarity this is why many times in the video i urged people to join tenants unions and rent strikes you by contrast told people they shouldn't do those things the government shouldn't give people stimulus money and people who lose their jobs should still be on the hook for their rent kind of seems like you don't have a solution there bud in fact it seems like this is a problem with several common sense solutions that you've rejected out of hand for ideological reasons what is your solution for that problem you could probably answer that question but do you see how it looks like you don't have an answer because i just pretended like you're in the room with me and you're being quiet and if people needing to work together seems too pie in the sky for you matt may i remind you that you said this your relationship with them is a negotiation in which they will do everything they're legally able to do and anything they're not really legally able to do but they're confident they can get away with to get as much money as they can out of you and in theory you do everything you're able to do to fight back against them and make sure that you can keep as much this is really a dark view of the world like i'm curious thought slime do you live in the scarcity world where everyone's out to get everyone else to me like we talk about on my youtube channel all the time win-win relationships i personally believe that we have win-win relationships with the law of our tenants now i'm not a cynical person and i think people naturally want to work together the thing that prevents them from doing this is the division sown by capital to maintain their authority i think it's less divisive to say that all of us all people who work for a living have interests that conflict with people like you people who own for a living not because you're a bad person or whatever but because your class interests conflict with hours and those are his arguments as i understand them but before i wrap up it's time for me to get what i assume you came here for the unproductive dunking that's right now i'm just going to dunk on matt it's not going to be productive or informative it's just going to be rude throughout the video he keeps inserting these parts where his pal pops up to tell me all for being mean to him addition to renting to me what's going on thought slime just thought i'd interject here a little bit i'm actually matt mckeever's vp of media and i also have my own youtube channel the hungarian experiment that's actually how i met mats you know matt mckeever here you're probably already judging him if you're watching this video as well as maybe all the followers that you're sending over to this video but i have to say matt is a great person a great landlord which is weird right because i had never heard of this guy i didn't say shit about him i don't know him but like even if i did it's really weird and embarrassing that he inserts these clips where his buddy comes to tell me how cool and tough he is like that's weird dude and it's even weirder because in the video he says he works for you matt you're probably judging him already because oh he has 100 tenants because he doesn't have another job well he's going all in into helping other people helping people like myself i was a server for a long time then i was working as a nighttime auditor at a like a prestigious hotel here in london and he gave me the opportunity through his vehicle of real estate investing to work with him full time and now i'm going all in on my passions as well as helping him with his youtube channel like can you imagine if i just had one of my friends pop up and say nice things about me hey it's me grumbletom and i just wanted to say mr mckeever stop making fun of stinko matt he's a good friend who brings me all the likes and subscriptions i require to live without them i would almost certainly die i don't have real friends so i used the cartoon guy that i made up at one point he says that rent control is actually bad for rent prices and that that is one of the most well-studied things in the field of economics and pulls up a study from the von mises institute a libertarian quack economics think tank that and and i'm just this is too amazing for words bases their economic views on the made up science of praxeology which explicitly denounces empiricism i.e studying things and observing the results you know the scientific method the von mises institute literally believes that if reality contradicts their theory reality is wrong i desperately want to go into more detail but this video is already super long in the tooth but rest assured i have to make a video about them at some point they are amazing but despite the poor choice of example matt is correct to say that almost all economists agree that rent control is a bad thing what's left out of this little fact is that almost all economists are parasites that believe whatever neoliberal bullshit the chicago school tells them to turns out that when you actually look at the data rent control reduces the amount of rental suck because landlords sell rental units more and everyone watching this by the way do you know what rent control is because it doesn't mean that landlords can't raise rent it means that they can't raise rent on existing tenants without providing some sort of renovation to justify it all rent control means is that the landlord can't arbitrarily raise the price they extract from you and even that minor concession scares the shit out of them at one point matt argues that if we forbade the privatization of water it would create a slippery slope that eventually led a stout lung soda we may want to be like oh people shouldn't profit off of just water but what if you oxygenate it what if you add some flavoring at what point in time are you now allowed to profit off of water is there a certain sugar content where if i sugar my water just enough i can now profit and sell this pop but if it's pure water i can't the same argument is in effect with landlords or owning property or real estate a no it wouldn't just because you do one thing doesn't mean you have to do the most unreasonable version of it b even if it did who cares losing soda is a fair price to pay to maintain access to water without which we will die and see when companies have been allowed to privatize water supplies they have caused water insecurities in local people specifically to make soda the exact reverse of your slippery slope argument is already happening at one point he refutes my claim that a landlord has power over you because they can kick you out onto the street by saying no we can't we have to get the sheriff to do it or to toss you from your home onto the street if you fight back even a little bit we literally can't toss people out onto the street we have to hire the sheriff and we can't even hire the sheriff during quarantine or covet 19 bro yeah i didn't mean that you personally could do it you aren't physically powerful enough to move me i am like the blob from x-men both in body shape and because i am immovable your complaint here is nuh-uh we have to get a cop to do it for us so there okay he then claims that the institution of the state is aligned against landlords and for tenants and this is after he mentions how he can call the sheriff and have people kicked out of their homes in fact if i'm a landlord and i'm having problems with a tenant in ontario canada and i call the government if i call the police to try and solve the problem they're going to tell me no that's under the residential tenancy act i can't stop that tenant from trashing your apartment i can't stop that tenant from being an asshole i can't force that tenant to pay you i can't force that tenant out you're gonna have to go through the ltb which is currently closed you're gonna have to wait a really long time even when things were operating as normal it would take months at a time then several months for the pro paperwork to get processed then you'd have to wait for the sheriff then you kick them out you make it sound like i can just snap my fingers and kick a tenant out at any moment he tells me anybody who claims the state works on behalf of the landlord doesn't know what they're talking about and this is the sum total of his argument because he can't provide any examples beyond things like the government makes us have fire escapes like yeah okay boo hoo sorry you can't make us all live in death traps i didn't think i would have to defend my position that the police will arrest people who break into vacant homes but would not arrest the landlord for a refusing entry to an unhoused person in the same vacant home even though one obviously leads to worse results in that the unhoused guy could die of exposure the state creates laws and enforces them to benefit the owners of property this isn't fucking rocket science dude like why the hell do you think people are paying you rents because they like it or because they're legally compelled to at another point he says that he can't think of a time when government regulation has ever helped anyone again just naturally wanting to jump to government regulation doesn't solve like honestly guys let's just have an adult talk here how much government regulation have you truly seen that solved your problems yeah what's regulation ever done for anybody it's only given us five day work week the eight hour work day paternity leave reasonable confidence that our food will not contain botulism or hide dangerous but addictive additives auto safety standards air to breathe which isn't saturated with lead and reasonable confidence that drugs we buy actually contain the things on the label in direct contrast to the unregulated supplement industry or black market drug sales where that's often not the case i could go on but what you just said was buck fucking wild i don't even like the government come on dude get your shit together but if you'd like a more personal anecdote of a time that regulation helped me solve a problem personally one time a landlord tried to withhold my last month's rent because they claimed i vacated the apartment and broke the lease after the apartment caught on fire they claimed to have repaired the unit when in fact what they had done was duct taped a garbage bag to the window firefighters had been forced to smash out in the middle of winter in newfoundland which looks like this i later found out this was the third such fire in as many years a fact that was not disclosed to me luckily what they were doing was illegal and i got my money back thanks regulation that's one example maybe the reason you can't think of a government regulation that helps you is because it's only derisively called regulation rather than legislation when it helps working people instead of people who own things for money all things being equal i don't think matt is a bad guy i don't think in his heart of hearts he wants to hurt people he probably believes that he's benefiting people he probably thinks that his actions are beneficial if not necessarily completely altruistic i'd bet that he cares deeply about his fellow man and wants to leave the world a better place than it was when he was brought into it he seems pleasant enough he's a perfectly normal person with what i'm sure is a healthy and well-developed moral character but he lacks imagination in some areas he's unwilling to look a little deeper into the core assumptions that justify his worldview he keeps telling me that we need to look at this rationally and without emotion but several times in his video tells me that my point must be wrong because they make him feel uncomfortable and i think that says it all because deep within himself he doesn't want to look straight at the exploitation at the heart of his business can't say i blame him really i probably wouldn't want to think too hard about it either if it seemed uncomplicated and made me shit loads of money it's easy to see a nice young man with good manners and kind of just let the violence at the heart of his business slide i mean who cares if he depends on the threat of homelessness to extort money from people that's just the way the world is who could blame him for responding to the economic pressures he found himself within but there's one moment in this video where he kind of lets that mask slip off a little where he accepted this violence as necessary if only for a moment it's towards the end of his video where he's criticizing me for advocating people support the april first rent strike he claims this isn't in people's best interests and of course we can take it from him the guy who would lose money if people did that to provide an unbiased view he tells me that i'm making my audience more vulnerable by saying this honestly i think that you're doing your audience a disfavor by promoting rent strikes because i don't think it's going to be in their best interest like i don't think that you're going to get some sort of 99 versus one percent where you're really going to truly upheave our entire economic system i don't think that you're going to flip capitalism on its head with a rent strike and i i think that you're actually going to put some of your audience in a more vulnerable state if they choose to rent strike because that is going to give the landlord a valid reason to try and process an eviction and that's strange to me because he spent an hour claiming that the landlord-tenant relationship is mutually beneficial that the courts are stacked in favor of the tenants and landlords have negligible rights that all of this is strictly voluntary that we shouldn't stoke tensions and division and then he says that i'm making people more vulnerable not vulnerable but more vulnerable an admission that they were vulnerable before i advocated anything that they were already being victimized and any attempt to fight back will inevitably backfire and make their vulnerabilities even worse and all of that raises the question vulnerable to whom i know who i'm vulnerable to it's the eyeballs hello and welcome to the eyeball zone here in the eyeball zone we place eyeballs on small leftist projects so that they cannot hide their sins from us gonna be honest everybody i chose this topic because i'm very busy with wedding stuff and i thought it would be an easy video to make and then i wrote 5500 words by far the longest script i've ever written for a thought slime video so i didn't have a lot of time this week to vet somebody for the eyeball zone but my pal tristan who you might know from the terminally underrated channel step back history is someone who i can depend on to put out quality thoughtful content until now it would have been weird for me to eyeball him because he has almost 70 000 subscribers a small project step back is not but he just started a new channel with less of a focus on history and more generalized video essays uh-oh i've recorded for a fucking hour and i forgot to say the name of the channel i was eyeballing it's called tristan won't shut up is what it's called now you know okay bye is this a nepotistic excuse for me to help out a friend yes but also both of the videos on his new channel are excellent and well worth your time if you like my videos i find it very difficult to believe that you wouldn't like his i know this is a bit of a weird situation and probably some of you might feel cheated that it didn't highlight a smaller creator without an extant fan base so next week i will do two eyeballings as penance if you'd like to be one of them send me precisely one email to thoughtslime editor gmail.com with pertinent details like your pronouns and the word eyeball somewhere in the subject line and perhaps ye shall be damned here in the eyeball zone boy this was long this was a long video that i made oops sorry i don't know maybe you like it longer because that's more video for you is this a good value you tell me a good way to tell me by the way if you want if you want to let me know is you could hit the like button don't tell anybody it's a secret you can also subscribe here for more videos every friday at 12 p.m eastern standard time if you'd like to see more videos from me you can also follow scaredy cats at youtube.com scaredycatstv that's where i talk about horror movies every tuesday at 12 p.m eastern standard time or you can follow the mega slime entertainment zone at youtube.com megaslime entertainmentzone there i upload video game footage i'm on a bit of a hiatus with it right now because my life is in shambles i want to extend a thank you to all my patrons at patreon.com thoughtslime you can see some drawings of them scrolling by in the background thanks patrons for this being my job you

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 304,465

Rating: 4.8953681 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: TBOxrHdTKE0

Length: 42min 19sec (2539 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Klockbox]

The best part about that video was his smug shit-grin when he lifted the veil of clickbait.

[u/eecity]

There's no labor in being a landlord. Why should it be perpetually rewarded? I don't know what's difficult to understand?

[u/Banesatis]

I have an impression that quite a bit of the bread tube community don't like thoughtslime.

Is there any specific reason for this ? I didn't hear about anything bad he's done.

[u/wronghead]

It seems like people this deep into the system can't really see it. He keeps being recursive in his justifications, and consequently the two trains of thought happening in this video are occuring in entirely different strata.

His argument seems to boil down to: "without landlords, who will do the hard and perilous work of driving up property values and exploiting tennants?"

[u/Theosarius]

The title is click bait if that isn't obvious to anyone. I honestly checked to see if it was an old april fools video I missed before watching.

That said, it is a response to a response video, which is always rather low effort. To which I must say it's refreshing to see one of those that's actually had some effort put into the script. Veering closer to debatebro territory is regrettable, but thought slime does a pretty good job of it.

[u/sigilvii]

Maybe this is leftism 101 but under a stateless society how do regulations work? I found myself wondering this a few days ago and Matt just touched on how helpful regulations are so it's back on my mind again

[u/DroneOfDoom]

Reads title

My disappointment is unmeasurable and my day is ruined.