The Simplification Game

In this week's episode, I asked Ian and Sam a question on whether it was possible for someone to disagree with an aspect of a social movement but not be assumed to be against that said movement. I gave the example of Black Lives Matter and its use of civil disobedience in order to achieve their goal of social justice. I was not very sure on how I feel with certain levels of civil disobedience, especially the kinds of actions that saw the burning of police stations, riots and the lootings of shops. I personally thought there may be a problem with the proportionality of this havoc brought about by a movement, that some shop owners or policemen may not be complicit in the structural racism that BLM opposes but they are targeted by street justice. Yet, I also saw how the violence was a result of decades of oppression and the lack of response to the cries of a systematically oppressed race. However, I also had no problem with the pulling down of statues of racist historical figures. Ess...

I'm going to follow what Ian did in the podcast by starting off with a YouTube reference. While researching for this episode, I came across a video by the channel "Autumn On Venus", in which a woman claims not to identify as a feminist and that she hates Third Wave feminism due to how they "do not fight for equality". I could not sympathise with her thoughts because we disagreed on what this Third Wave actually stood for. I should have noted that this was a danger of constraining the discussion of feminism through the use of waves.  A discussion on a broad political ideology constrained within the 30 to 45 minute range is bound to be comparatively shallow, even if the topic we discussed was set within the parameters of a Third World country. It is important that we challenge the foundational assumption of the episode, that it is acceptable or in any way productive to frame the struggles and fights of the feminist movement through its different waves. We aim to e...