The Soft Link Breaks the Chain: Ben Shapiro and Ian Miles Cheong think Kindness is dangerous.

hello it's me slimeborger in season 1 episode 12 of the wire yes i'm actually doing this minor spoilers upcoming by the way corner boys bodie and wallace are having a conversation unbeknownst to wallace bodie has been ordered to kill him by a higher up in their gang named stringer bell my mom just put mad bacardi in her though it wasn't much she didn't pour it into you man she ain't talking about your mom like you're still a kid well i got the thinking on them yo ass ain't gotta be hard all the goddamn time either soft link break the chain body later kills wallace again asserting his hardness and manliness over him come on you be wet in your pants like you a little boy be a man stand up like a motherfucking man do it god damn it bodhi is a loyal soldier to the end he is hard because that's what his leaders require of him that leads him to killing his friend wallace and ultimately to give his own life in service to the cause but his hardness here really only benefits the leaders of the gang he dies on the streets not living in the lap of luxury like the gang's leader avon barksdale or stringer bell for that matter that sense of duty that he must be hard and uncaring for those around him to shut himself off from the empathy he feels for his friend that doesn't serve him it's a tool to manipulate him bodhi sees himself as the adult in this interaction and wallace is a naive child but bodhi is the one being naive here wallace is right you don't have to be hard all the time it's actually profoundly destructive to be hard all the time and it costs bodhi his innocence and his life see bodhi's not a villain here he's a tragic character he's a kid trying to live up to the expectation set on him a model citizen of the fucked up power structure he lives within eager to do what he thinks is best for the enterprise and community as a whole he's romanticized the idea of being a tough guy a hard ass what a man is supposed to be wallace sees this garbage for what it is a grim necessity of their jobs that's ultimately not something to be sought out it's something to be survived they aren't the heroes of this story they aren't even the villains they're the pawns wallace knows he's being manipulated bodhi doesn't but as pretentious as i am even i'm not going to sit here and talk about the wire all day i could but i won't ian miles chiang is perhaps the world's most embarrassing human being everything about him is regrettable in a way that makes you wonder if man was created in god's image what horrible god made ian some kind of garbage god like a toilet god ruling over a turd heaven i mean ian's probably not the worst person on the far right's content spewing machine he's he's he sucks but it's a pretty low bar to clear you know like there's a lot of really bad people out there he is consistently however the most piteous a hateful spite-filled little troll that spends his days mad on twitter and getting owned in every conversation he ever has with anyone last week ian went on a weird posting spree of men with pets calling them pathetic for having pets sometimes because they took funny photos of them coddling their pets like as a joke but sometimes just you know like having a dog or a cat just being in a photo with a animal that's pathetic the most pathetic thing he's ever seen that makes them soft and according to ian you shouldn't elect soft men soft in this case meaning owning a pet if you own a pet you're too soft to do the grim business of politics to do the terrible things which must be done your vision is too clouded by kindness if you look through his twitter feed which you should only do if you have some sort of magic item that shields you from psychic damage you'll notice he thinks a pretty heavy hand is needed to deal with the lawlessness of these protesters when god is dead and this state refuses to enforce law and order there is only nihilism and anarchy it's the broken window theory applied to chris and um we've uprooted faith all across the world lack of firmament lack of culture nothing entices people to do well or be well no yeah no sure for sure nothing entices people to look after one another except for you know the natural impulse to care for other living creatures which you think is soft and weak it's okay to be a fascist when the alternative is complete lawlessness and rampant violence wouldn't you say well you know good point ian nothing curves rampant violence quite like literally fascism this guy is saying in this now deleted tweet we should enact fascism to stop people protesting themselves being murdered by police now i would argue that police murdering with impunity or doing war crimes to intimidate protesters is already fascist but ian seems to think the police haven't gone far enough and in that spirit of strength he backed down and deleted that tweet when too many people got mad at him soft men with their soft feelings will consider the safety of the hordes of criminals a hard man a man who's just so hard and i want to be hard when i think about him i just get harder he'll do what needs to be done this type of thinking is pretty common though most people are not mind poisoned enough to state it with such black and white terms men are not meant to be emotional caretakers they're decision makers and violence doers women do the boring shit of making sure everyone's feelings are okay and that they're alive because they got food and water boys don't cry they play with little power tools and violent army toys girls have pretend kitchens and baby dolls that's all just biology the type of toys you play with is just basic biology it's based on the toys found in nature according to the biggest pieces of shit on the planet anyway men are stronger and therefore they should do the violence because what you want of course is for the violence to be as plentiful and dangerous as it can be the idea that maybe nobody should do the violence maybe we ought to have less violence doesn't occur to them there's always going to be violence so you you better be good at it or you're going to be the one who gets violence done at you you'll be the victim last week ben shapiro noted manly man went on a rant about how empathy is actually a bad quality in elected officials how empathy makes you irrational and incapable of making clear and advantageous decisions like a feeling this robot presumably would do he said morgan freeman led off the season with a bizarre meaningless video about empathy because of course the implication is that if you disagree with kneeling for america's systemic racism you're not empathetic benjamin how can something be simultaneously meaningless and carry an implication okay there's only one problem okay empathy is actually kind of bad for politics the reason that empathy is bad for politics is because it leads you to empathize with people that you are more likely to like as opposed to people you don't like i look forward to seeing you cite a source for this okay so first of all the pitch for empathy is actually there have been several books that are written on this social science books talking about how empathy is not actually the best thing for politics it actually almost deactivates the reasoning centers of your brain wait you just said that the problem with empathy was that it led you to empathize with people who you like but now you're saying the problem with empathy is a different thing which is that it turns off the reasoning center of your brain but okay sure all right but let's hear your let's hear your citations for this claim oh several books have been written okay social science books no less i can't wait to hear one of their titles or an author who's written such a book because when you're empathetic you don't actually create good policy this doesn't mean that feeling sympathy for people is a bad thing it means that if empathy is what drives your policy-making you're probably not acting in a rational fashion but the the real goal here is of course not to generate empathy the real goal here is to suggest that if you disagree with the idea that america is systemically and institutionally racist you are not an empathetic person and therefore you're a bad cruel and callous person if the goal isn't to create empathy why does it matter that empathy is bad and even even if even if that weren't the goal ben did you know that baseball players actually don't form public policy did you know that's a thing that the baseball players typically and this is also true of morgan freeman don't do the idea is that that empathy is really about me it's really a moral statement about what kind of good person you are and you can't watch baseball until you say it along with morgan freeman you can't you can't just watch a game and be distracted which is the goal of sports ben is marginally less pathetic than ian so he makes a more coherent case for this position with less overt displays of his own insecurities now personally i'd prefer if we didn't have leaders making all of our choices for us but failing that i'd at least like my leaders to have my best interests in mind i would like for that to be the expectation you know like it seems really weird and self-evidently undesirable that these guys are arguing that kindness and regard for others is a bad quality for people who are entrusted with the safety of others and i get the faulty logic of it divesting oneself of emotional attachment allows you to step back and view the big picture caring too much about people's immediate well-being or wanting to prevent harm coming to them in the short term could blind you to longer-term harm but here's where that logic goes off the rails a little bit for me if you didn't care about the well-being of others why would you be incentivized to do what's best for them at all if they were actually uninterested in the well-being of others they'd use any leadership position to enrich themselves everyone else be damned they'd be really corrupt they would oh okay yeah now i get it that makes sense actually that i forgot that's the guys they like ben at least makes the distinction between empathy which is irrational and bad and sympathy which is neutral and could in theory be good i think he gets them backwards because the distinction he makes makes no sense to me the reason that empathy is bad for politics is because it leads you to empathize with people that you are more likely to like as opposed to people you don't like okay this doesn't mean that feeling sympathy for people is a bad thing it means that if empathy is what drives your policy making you're probably not acting in a rational fashion we can only feel empathy for people we like uh i don't know man i feel i can tell people's emotions pretty easily even if they're very much not someone i would like it's possible i'm giving him too much credit here and maybe he's using the terms as synonyms rather than antonyms it's unclear from the way that he's speaking and ben is telling on himself a little bit to just take it for granted that you can't feel empathy for people you don't like that explains so much of the way he sees the world for the record i don't like ben shapiro but i think it's pretty clear in this clip how he feels he's angry at the insinuation that because he doesn't care about people that makes him uncaring and that he can't turn off his brain even more than the normal amount that it is turned off to watch baseball without morgan freeman asking him to think about someone else's feelings before the game starts you don't want caring and therefore weak soft men to lead you want hard men i want them to be hard so hard if your decision is based on numbers on the cold hard facts that's you doing the job as an elected official you're not letting the soft namby-pamby feelings of others influence your choices but rather logic reason etc which makes sense you wouldn't want someone making instincts based on their gut or ignoring experts so okay let's say someone took a cold hard look at the facts and realized there was a problem in america with police brutality against people of color let's say we were in the middle of the biggest american mass uprising of the century largely because of that fact let's say that you have the power to take out an ad in a baseball field to bring people's attention to the problem without naming it or actually doing anything about it because you're a big evil company that doesn't actually give a shit but want to give the appearance of giving a shit but even though the numbers are on your side and most people would commend you for doing it a few extremely fragile ding-dongs would be offended what is the logical decision here do you listen to the numbers or do you listen to ben shapiro's feelings it's not helpful to be empathetic with communities being brutally oppressed for generations but you should empathize with a guy who just wants to watch a ball game what's next they're going to sing the national anthem before every game they gonna invite the president onto the mound and have him throw the first pitch both of these bizarre takes are trying to sell you on the same idea you shouldn't feel bad for the people that must be brutalized a wave of brutality must come to suppress the barbarians at the gate and it'll be tough but a strong leader needs to arise to handle problems like this a leader who is empathetic is just going to give in to the mob we need a leader who doesn't empathize only he and his hardness can protect us protect us hard daddy protect us from the scary anti-fuzz and black people your natural instinct upon seeing people being brutalized upon watching mothers grieve their sons seeing the jack boot of the state slam into the skull of the people around you instead of the far-off skulls you don't get to see on your twitter feed you would want to empathize with that you just can't help it but that makes you stupid and weak you see the game being played here right the idea is to make you think that being able to relate to one another is actually a bad thing that coming together in the face of injustice is bad actually not simply in this instance but like in general you know oh these people out there saying that if you don't care about other people's suffering that you're cruel that's unreasonable i shouldn't have to care about other people i got baseball to watch and i'm hard baby i'm a hard man we like to point and laugh when guys like ian miles chiang and ben shapiro tout the virtues of masculinity and hardness they're not exactly prepared to go out and kick ass they're not tough i mean neither am i for the record don't get me wrong but i could beat both of these dweebs in a fight at the same time easily i'm i'm much stronger than either of them but i don't go telling people to harden up either i don't go around demanding a toughness from others i can't exhibit in myself the thing is they don't see themselves as tough guys they think the tough guys the guys they're encouraging you to be will be the ones they manipulate they think of themselves as the chess masters the toughy boys as their pawns they think they're like stringer bell except you know definitely not black and all of the men listening to them are like bodhi their pride can be used to make them act outside of their best interests to cultivate a meaningless toxic aggression that they can exploit or at the very least they hope to curb a person's natural impulse to care about others lest they do so and realize hey wait a minute i don't like the fact that people are being murdered by the police for no reason beep boop i am a computer according to my calculations caring about each other is bad thing is there's only so strong a single person can be a single man is limited by their own muscles their own body but if we cared about one another if we looked out for one another kept each other safe and healthy there's no upper limit on the strength that could be established people working together will always be stronger than people working alone except in the instance of ian and ben as a tag team versus me in the ring where i would win handily a community of love solidarity and mutual aid produces stronger people than a community of backstabbing sabotaging competition you know what the most dangerous animals are mothers the caretakers of the young they fight harder and more fiercely than any other animal hell you could trap a human baby under a burning car and its mother will develop literal superpowers to rescue it i mean don't do that i'm not i'm not saying you when i say you could do that i don't mean go do i'm i'm using it as an it's a thing taking care of others doesn't make you weak it makes them strong and if everyone takes care of everyone else it means someone else is taking care of you making you strong i should know i've been taking care of all of you i've been protecting you you have no idea the things i've seen the things that have seen me clawing away at my mind in the deep deep night calling to me i'm trying to hold them at bay i want to save you i don't know how much longer i can last hello and welcome to the eyeball zone here in the eyeball zone we seal the fate of small leftist projects that need eyeballs on their work it's all well and good mr so-called thought slime for you to talk about being all lovey-dovey keeping people safe and all that soft boy shit but how does that apply to a combat situation what if you need to use big cool guns i don't know i don't know shit about guns but do you know who does tactical girlfriend runs a youtube channel where she discusses guns in a calm safety oriented and instructive way in the two videos on her channel so far she walks you through the basics of firearm safety and how to create a basic first aid kit being able to fight isn't just about being good at fighting it also means knowing how to survive a fight how to minimize risks in a fight it means not being a macho doofus who runs in guns blazing and is a liability to themselves and their comrades do you have a small leftist project you'd like to see featured here in the eyeball zone send me no more than one email with the word eyeballs somewhere in the subject line and pertinent details for example your pronouns and perhaps you will find yourself trapped here in the eyeball zone that's another video in the books thanks for watching if you enjoyed please press the i enjoyed it button which is a little thumbs up it's uh it's on every video in on youtube.com you can press it on any one that you want i would like it if you pressed it on this one but i understand if you don't you can also subscribe for new videos every friday at 12 p.m eastern standard time but hey maybe you want even more videos than that i well i can hook you up with some videos i've got another channel called scaredy cats where i talk about horror movies where i post new videos every tuesday at 12 p.m eastern standard time but maybe that's not enough videos for you guess what i got even more i got a channel called the mega slime entertainment zone at youtube.com mega slime entertainment zone where i post video game let's plays and i post a new video every dang day sometimes twice at seven am eastern standard time i also do weekly live streams on thursday at 8 pm eastern standard time and that's some of the things that i do that you can get extra content from me if you like my styles thanks as always to my backers on patreon who make my work here possible uh please be patient doodle wise i am moving and i'm also planning a wedding so my life's a little a little bit busy right now uh but i'm not taking it for granted i am i'm gonna get those doodles out to you even if you stop donating i will still you'll still get the doodle no one's getting cheated out of their doodles it's it's just it might take a while okay that's all for me that's all of the things i say at the end of the video goodbye forever

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 219,775

Rating: 4.9508643 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 87owL8lINLg

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MightyMofo]

That Ben Shapiro rant about empathy being bad because it "makes you irrational" is really striking, because that's his argument style in a nutshell. Triggering people, deliberately pissing them off and misrepresenting arguments so that he can say "see, you got emotional, you lose I win bye bye." As though just being stoic means you "won" the argument, or that it's a trump card.

I guess I'm not surprised that the "facts don't care about your feelings" guy wants to paint HAVING EMOTIONS as irrational, but it's different hearing it said so explicitly.

[u/SlaugtherSam]

I kinda want to see the boxing match between thoughslime vs Ian and Ben at the same time.

[u/ChairmanReagan]

This is bullshit because Ian Miles Cheong isn’t capable of actually thinking at all.

[u/rosefuri]

hmmm....BORGER king

[u/[deleted]]

This is one of Thought Slime's best vids in a while.

[u/sparky2212]

This was re-tweeted by Ian. Dude's a straight up fascist.

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1290020051177725952