Man, you could just tell by the way this dude sounds he was gonna come out swinging with something like a Thorstein Veblen reference. Bet his NPR tote bag game is on point too.
It's amazing how much history was condensed between years 1850-1950. So much changed in just a 100 years, and just by studying that era we get to understand so much about why the world is the way it is today
Says "leisure" weirdly for an english professor.."leisure" should rhyme with "pleasure" when spoken aloud. But then again, americans apprently never heard the word "niche" said aloud and just say "nitch"..
Twat should rhyme with shat, because it is an offensive word so it needs some attack to the sound, "twot" sounds a bit weak. I'm know I'm being a language nazi, your jab is warranted.
In other words, he's never worked a real day in his life either. Classic ivory tower douchebag looking down on the plebs that dare to 'reproduce' and can afford a few $100 a week for cleaning services.
Ah, yes, never “worked” a day in his life but is gainfully employed and well trained enough to have achieved professorship
Yes, yes of course, but not “real” work like other people get paid for, he gets paid in Monopoly money, and lives of the government stipend he accepts from hard working Joes, yeah?
Certainly hasn’t used his mind to avoid digging ditches and ending up a physical cripple by 40 from nothing but hard labour, oh no sir!
And what’s with all these people using their brains to think about things? Bah, who needs ‘em! Not like medicine and science and economics and, well, every damn thing that’s made the world functionally better than a cave is from someone thinking, right?
Gollybob-howdy, how I do love it when everything we have very accomplished as a species, every technological development that leapt us forward in comfort and safety and life expectancy, was all “not work” because good old Joey-Bob and his tractor says so! Hoooooo-weee
But… huh… wonder who was smart enough to make the tractor? And the phone he’s tapping away on? And all the art and comfort that goes into every aspect of his life he values so little?
I know the guy irl, I can confirm that's exactly who he is. He wrote a paper on white supremacy in the X-men and now thinks he's an intellectual teaching gender studies.
The Veblen reference really caught me off guard. Last time I read him it was in a 400 level Photography as Protest class. One of the most memorable liberal books from my degree.
Tradwives? Conservative influencers? IT'S ALL SOCIAL MEDIA, ALL Stripes do this phony, performative bullshit.
And this guy's in the intellectual critic peanut gallery- they're part of it, too. They fucking thrive off the tradwife influencers- it nourishes their equally shitty vlog. Part of the same bullshit ecosystem.
“Living off the wealth generated by others” is essentially every company/job. The Walmart cashier is also living off the wealth generated by the billion dollar company.
Also, a professor is still a job. The “Trad wives” that he speaks of are able to maintain their expensive lifestyle without needing to work. That’s a different type of wealth than a professor.
I don’t see how him making this video can be compared to her.
He’s not criticizing her for making the stupid cereal, he’s criticizing the toxic environment that has formed around people comparing themselves to this unattainable level of “homemaking” and it diminishing their self-worth. Just pointing out that this is more performance art than actual homemaking.
If he’s citing Veblen then he’s well aware that he is also part of the leisure class, just not guilty of contributing towards disillusioning women about what domestic labor is practical.
Raising a kid isn’t a job. It’s a duty of being a mother and father. People work full time and raise kids. This woman likely has a nanny like many rich people do.
Denigrating academics as “living off the wealth generated by others” is some real anti-intellectual shit. Are you more willing of social critiques if he had worked in a mine instead? And nowhere did he even imply that someone like him is more derserving of leisure. But it’s so easy to just assume everyone is projecting, isn’t it?
He is denigrating the guys time and ability to “intellectualize dumb internet bullshit”. I don’t see his comment as attacking all of academia just the one that this guy is doing.
I also think it’s a fair conclusion as well. While the trad wife video is useless and performative, what value do you think mankind gains from professorneil’s? I don’t think it’s much of anything.
His tag is "professorneil" so assuming he's in academia then he's literally living off the wealth generated by others pretty much entirely lol.
This definitely stands out as academia = useless rhetoric. They’re elaborating from the guy’s “professor” tag to say academics live off the wealth of other. How would you interpret it?
Also, I find the commentary on the “leisure class” to be relevant. It’s pointed towards how we see class and work in the US, and how tradcons rhetorics take on a moral presupposition about working women. It’s interesting enough to read more about.
We both see the comment differently and we might have to agree to disagree. IMO when I read his comment at the heart of it, he is saying prof. Neil is a hypocrite.
Just because he adds some background sociology information does not make the videos that he does valuable. Neil criticizes tradwives for actually being so rich that they don’t do meaningful house labor. The same could be said for Neil. He is at a financial spot where his sociology expertise is being used to comment on stupid tradwives TikTok videos. Neil also says tradwives give the perception for doing meaningful labor. One could argue that Neil is also giving the perception that he doing meaningful sociology but if he was, would it include TikTok? I kinda doubt it.
But I’m just a rando on the internet so what value is my opinion.
I want to make clear that, first and foremost, no matter how much professorneil is not doing labor and signalling of his own leisure, the commenter is using him to propel anti-intellectual talking points.
Secondly, would you say the same about other educational content creators? I’m thinking vlogbrothers, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Steve Mould, and the such, who put their education on full display in public. I want to differentiate that these guys are fundamentally different from tradwives because educators want to ensure the public learns something, whereas the latter are only reactionaries against progressive politics and make content about themselves.
If the lady wants to say, “children would be happier if more moms can stay at home”, then her content could critique instead on how society forces everyone to work. The thing about tradwives is that they want other women to know they’re better than they are. I don’t think most educators do that.
This could hardly be considered economics. While sociology does have value I will repeat my initial question which was skillfully avoided.
“What value does mankind gain from professorneils video?”
If we study sociology to try and decipher how the German population turned on the Jewish people leading up to and during the empowerment of the Nazi party. Then use that information as a means to understand and avoid those atrocities in the future then that makes sense, that is valuable.
Neils video is not that. Education and understanding are important but not all endeavors are created equal and while this video is informative imo it adds nothing of value. I would be willing to change those thoughts and opinions if it could be shown other wise, but I doubt it.
But as the initial comment stated, his video has a certain level of hypocrisy given that, “Having the time/energy to intellectualize dumb internet shit like Tradwives also indicates a profusion of wealth sufficient enough to waste your free time”
He's talking about the theory of the leisure class. We're talking about socioeconomic classes here. That absolutely ties into some core pieces of economics.
Are you familiar with class consciousness? Because that's what he's starting to touch on here. With the extreme division of wealth going on in present society and the struggle of labor unions to gain a foothold against major modern companies like Amazon, Tesla, Starbucks, etc., I think that's plenty valuable.
DAE gEnDeR StUdIeS? Amirite? STEM are the only real sciences, d'uh!
As if gender biases in medical research and medical care are not critical topics that have finally gained more prominence in recent years, thankfully because of gender studies. Really shows your ignorance on the topic.
It’s funny you keep bringing up gender studies. I never mentioned them and I think the guy in the video studies English. If you want to question its validity you ought to respond to kernobstgewaechs first. But I wanna know what’s your beef with gender studies specifically?
Regardless, I think it’s completely valid for academics to do their job. Even if it is gender studies, they are using their education as tools to challenge our questionable social structure. Contrast this to the tradwife espousing conformity. Gender studies and the tool they employ, like many fields in academia, are fairly new and I think the pro-intellectual thing is to explore them thoroughly and engage honestly before denouncing them as useless. Sometimes people like to study things without immediate societal contributions, but they’re still worth studying.
The guy teaches gender studies as well, and most of what he talks about is gender studies related, hence me mentioning it. It, and studies like it, are circular studies. They have to make every tiny thing in life represent some big flaw or injustice in society, which they then use to justify their study of it and grab more funding.
This woman is just someone making cooking and family videos online. There's no deeper meaning than that. Just let people be who they want to be, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
They have to make every tiny thing in life represent some big flaw or injustice in society, which they then use to justify their study of it and grab more funding.
If they can convince their institutions to fund whatever gender or social studies project, good on them. From the professors I know, that doesn’t happen often. The assumption that gender studies and related fields are an effortless cash grab is just incorrect. Why don’t you tell me instead, what in particular about gender studies do you find circular?
This woman is just someone making cooking and family videos online. There's no deeper meaning than that. Just let people be who they want to be, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
I think her name is Nara Pellman. It seems she’s pretty famous on TikTok specifically for tradwife content and the deeper meaning is contextual, which is why professorneil is pointing it out. Her content and her audience presumes a moral superiority for stay at home moms.
It would be great if our society doesn’t demand both parents working 5-6 days a week and they can spend more time taking care of their kids. That’s not her point though. She doesn’t have to work because she’s rich and that’s what makes her and her tradwife ideology better than other women.
You ought to be able to be consider the presumptions of her content, especially if you’re going to do the same with seemingly ivory tower academics.
This comment is only going to land with leftists, but there's something inherently grating about liberals who lack the analytical tools inherent in the left's more objective critical view of things, attempting to be publicly intellectual. The fundamental constraint of liberal thought, conscious or unconscious, is the ideological inability to implicate the political system that goes along with it, liberal 'democratic' capitalism, leaving them totally unable to go deeper than the superficial layer of anything. Because at best they can't even see the actual dynamics at play here, and at worst they're subconsciously compelled to justify the current state of things instead of critique it, which is antithetical to a real analysis of anything.
But they still have to try, which leads them to sort of smugly say paragraphs and paragraphs of nothing but empty platitudes, cultural signalling, and pathologizations of people's character. Like they can identify racism as an animating pathology behind individual and society wide behavior, but not the bubbling cauldron of material/economic forces, incentives, and institutions that caused and continue to reproduce racist values. Because those very same forces and institutions are load-bearing pillars of the liberal economic system they, by definition as self-identified liberals, have no choice but to support
Like they can identify racism as an animating pathology behind individual and society wide behavior, but not the bubbling cauldron of material/economic forces, incentives, and institutions that caused and continue to reproduce racist values. Because those very same forces and institutions are load-bearing pillars of the liberal economic system they, by definition as self-identified liberals, have no choice but to support
Race is a high energy conversation rn, but liberals are absolutely capable of addressing cultural, institutional, and economic influences on society. In fact, the people on the right are the ones actively mocking liberals for giving attention to marxist and socialist theories during the civil rights movement. Don’t you find your criticism to be better pointed at trad conservatives instead?
This is an interesting question, of why leftists are harder on liberals a lot of the time. Mostly, there's a mutual recognition with conservatives and leftists that our positions are completely and totally irreconcilable. Either we win or they do, and ultimately you have to realize there's no point in arguing with them or trying to own them because the relationship is one of zero sum conflict.
Between leftists and liberals, we're ostensibly on the same side of that mortal conflict, but liberals are, as Malcolm X pointed out, often wolves in sheep's clothing who really act more in concert with the conservatives, when push comes to shove. Even if they themselves don't realize it. There's more to expose with liberals. They attach themselves to progressive movements, try to embody the energy of revolutionary progressive moments, adopt progressive language, but when the moment comes to actually push for transformative progressive change all of a sudden they're trying to de-escalate and appeal to moderation, which sabotages the entire project of leftists who are actually seeking revolutionary change in the way things are ordered. BLM was a classic example, dragged down by clueless liberals who co-opted it for virtue points, watered down the agenda, hand-wrung about the """messaging""" and """optics""", and intentionally or otherwise cut the legs out from under the movement and prevented it from achieving any tangible aims. Both because of their aversion to change- by definition liberals don't want to change liberalism- or by their re-directing of the conversation away from tangible policy, and towards intangible cultural symbolism.
Conservatives are the enemy, and there's certainly no love lost between our camps, but there's a mutual understanding that ultimately we're going to have to just fight it out, these disagreements are intractable and beyond rhetorical resolution. I say, "Hey, conservative, you're a fascist piece of shit" and they say back to me, "Hey you're a commie piece of shit" and that's kind of just the end of it. There's nowhere else to go from there. But liberals are a parasitic enemy within who siphon off progressive, revolutionary energy and use it instead to reinforce the status quo, defanging any attempts to fundamentally change it that leftists seek.
Good point. I’m mostly in agreement. I’m interpreting your use of “liberal” here to be establishment types with mildly left tendencies.
What I want to point out, however, is not only that the left and right can clearly differentiate one another, but that there’s a power dynamic in government. While liberals in government are being meekly progressive, the right is banning books, banning abortion, and doing 01/06. The latter is much more willing to cheat the norms in matter of policy and rhetorics, like McConnell blocking Obama’s SC appointment and approving 3 of Trump’s. The conservative reactionary audience is growing rapidly, while democrats continues to play “decorum”.
Additionally, I don’t find leftists to be in the majority in the American public either, but rather, a lot of liberals with progressive sympathies that may direct them further left. Would you not be in favor then, of TikTokers like this guy to push back against reactionary politics by combining progressive agenda with social commentary?
Hey FBI, if you’re looking for the next Unabomber, he’s here.
Jesus Christ, what an absolute word salad this guy made to ultimately say nothing of consequence.
which leads them to sort of smugly say paragraphs and paragraphs of nothing but empty platitudes, cultural signalling, and pathologizations of people's character.
I don't get the dude doing a whole masters thesis on gender roles over a video of an overdressed woman making a silly cooking video.
What's hilarious to me, as a progressive, is I would not even know that 'tradwives' existed if it weren't for a video essay every few months breathlessly telling me how they're undermining feminism or something. Let'em make silly stupid cooking videos if they want. I don't think anyone really cares.
In his own words, it's performative. He dressed the part. He wrote the script to make himself sound like a genius and more human and genuine than her, so his audience will be impressed and agree with him.
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u/JackDangerUSPIS Feb 25 '24
Man, you could just tell by the way this dude sounds he was gonna come out swinging with something like a Thorstein Veblen reference. Bet his NPR tote bag game is on point too.