The future of video

Please enjoy the YouTube videos on philosophical matters, which I made between December of last year and now.   I'm going to take a break from making them for a while, but then I'll come back with fifteen minute of longer videos on philosophical and literary matters.  These will have a rather more formal, academic flavor.

These ones I've made to date give you my very general take on various matters that strike me as important.   I haven't been keen to engage much in the ideological wars that predominate in the space of YouTube, since these have to do with American psychology, politics and culture.

I don't have the American psychology, so I don't engage in that way.  A lot of it seems like yelling and pseudo-logic.   "Logic" is worshiped as the last, defining word on truth.  This does not involve an appeal to real logic, but is rather a rhetorical appeal to get others to view what one is saying as if it were the last objective word.

That is to say, American rhetoricians overwhelmingly have a problem in understanding logic.  For, logic is not what they seem to think.   Logic does not bring us to any truth.  It's not a holding pen.  It isn't even airport runway lights.   Quite simply, logic isn't something already out there in the world at which you can point and say "right there are our limits, bordered in by LOGIC."  

Logic is not content.  Logic is a method.  Logic is what one DOES WITH content.   If one sees the airport runway lights and lands outside of them, that is illogical.   But, the lights themselves are not logic.   The lights are placed logically, but they are placed by people who already have specific goals in mind, which have defined their parameters.   Change the goals and you change what becomes logical.   A trivial example:  It might be quite possible I need to fly over that airport I have sighted to land at another one, ten minutes away.    Quite clearly, then, the lights themselves do not COMMAND me to land between them.   They are not the embodiment of logic in and of themselves.

But the Americans who frequent YouTube treat logic as if it were something outside of themselves.   They view it as a kind of commanding objectivity, out there, somewhere.   It's commanding us to do something and if we don't do it, these Americans think we ought to be treated as if we were illogical.

According to this understanding of what logic is (but really, according to what logic necessarily isn't),  somebody can say this about a video I made supplying some anecdotal and empirical evidence for the need for the continuance of feminism:   "I thought your arguments and positions were flawed TBH."

Let me be clear.  I made a video that was purely anecdotal, describing how I was amused by the trivial nature of the lamentations of a particular anti-feminist gender warrior.   I also described how the need to address gender issues was of extreme importance still, in Zimbabwe.   I made a juxtaposition between a male YouTuber's lamentations about not being treated equally by girls on a school bus and the real gender-related violence that continues to occur in Zimbabwe.  What I left out was an reference to the American gender wars as I might have experienced them had I not been a foreigner, but rather been conditioned to understand the world according to American culture.

To have a flawed "argument", one must first have asserted an argument.   To have a flawed "position", one must be found to be at odds with truth claims that would somehow falsify one's "position".

The use of objective sounding language to make someone else's contribution sound irrelevant is one of the ways in which appeals to logic fall short of any approximation of logic.   One simply doesn't know what logic is, if one speaks like this.

The problem is that the US gender wars can't be settled on the basis of logic, since logic can only guarantee consistency between what you have already assumed as your premises and your conclusions.   The question of gender equality is a question of ethics, not logic.   But people in American want to go on arguing as if it were a question of logic.

Remember the example of the plane needing to land at a particular airport?   American rhetoricians would make it compulsory to land at every airport you saw, without the possibility of omitting one in favor of the one in which you really needed to land.    They're trying to command you to accept their views and values as the final truth, without consideration for your actual needs and interests.  If you don't land at their particular airport, they will say something like,  "I thought your arguments and positions were flawed TBH."

This doesn't mean they are right, any more than it means they understand  logic.   They have no grasp of it, just as they are unwilling to engage in broadening their perspectives.

Basically, what they are saying is:  "If you are not American and do not take my side, "I [think] your arguments and positions were flawed."

Unfortunately, they're either crazy or illogical.