Effective altruism is not effective

Intersectionality (which btw refers to almost the exact opposite of what most people think of as "identity politics") is absolutely compatible with (and arguably necessary[0] for) leftism.

Class reductionists OTOH certainly think of themselves as leftists and can be instrumental to leftist politics. They however run the risk of also being useful to other political permutations (e.g. they might be more open to "red-brown alliances", which generally lead to non-leftist "red" ideologies like national bolshevism and ultimately fascism).

Not every intersectionalist is a leftist (e.g. liberals often acknowledge intersectionality to some degree but don't see private property as a social power structure) and not every leftist is an intersectionalist. I would argue that leftism without intersectionality is leftist, but in an incomplete form. That said, "leftism" is a somewhat arbitrary label as its original meaning simply referred to opposing the monarchy in France, so policing who gets to call themselves that is probably pointless.

[0]: An example for how racism and class warfare can intersect is how the widespread racism in the early 20th century US prevented Black workers from joining unions, resulting in them becoming strikebreakers and thus undermining the collective bargaining power of those unions.

That indeed happens, but going by the gut isn't a bullet-proof moral philosophy. Snap judgements are something we can evaluate and consciously calibrate when we're not in the heat of the moment.

> lots of intelligent philosophers have argued against utilitarianism and have brought up flaws in utilitarianism

Yeah, I read some of those, many are really solid objections. I'm not arguing that utilitarianism is the be-all, end-all moral philosophy - just that it's a surprisingly good heuristic that can be pushed quite far before it starts to go "off the rails". And primarily, I'm arguing that working with approximations and heuristics is something we know how to do - not being able to compute a perfectly precise answer isn't a valid argument against a method.

#2: Just because there are charities or companies that do bad things, doesn't mean the concepts of charities and companies, or philanthropy and markets, are fundamentally broken. There are good and bad charities/companies, even though it may be hard to tell which is which.

#3: You can make your donations more effective if you get better at telling which charity is good (same for investments and companies). There are diminishing returns on effort here - particularly if you aren't planning to specialize in charity evaluation. In that case, you can convert this problem into an easier problem of finding trustworthy specialists in charity evaluation, and donating to places they consider good/effective.

Yes, it is. If you're an unhoused diabetic living in the US without access to insulin, it literally doesn't matter if the country is run by Ivy League graduates or uncultured generalissimos. Note that I said "many", not "most". I'm not even making a claim about proportions but in the US alone there is a large quantity of people for whom the status quo is either a death sentence or at least entails a lifetime of suffering. This isn't even taking general trends (e.g. the income gap, militarization of the police, or Climate Change) into account.

Note that I said "worse outcome", not "worst outcome". Yes, almost all bottom-up political change is brought about with "populism" (i.e. saying things are bad and promising that they can be changed for the better) that doesn't mean that all populism is deceptive or false.

Generally drastic changes only happen when the situation is already sufficiently dire precisely because the status quo (no matter how undesirable) feels like a safer bet than a leap into the unknown. This is why these changes are often so drastic and the means to achieve them (by necessity) so violent: incrementalism has failed and left them no other choice.

Whether the outcome is better or worse mostly has to do with what power dynamics will remain in place when the existing dominant power structure is gone.

The Cambodian Civil War is messy and complicated but portraying it as "people wanted political change and got the Killing Fields" is reductionist to the point of satire. The government was on a left-leaning (and even pro-communist) progressive path leading up to the fraudulent 1966 election and then suddenly snapped to the violently repressive hard right only for the monarchy to intervene by imposing "centrism", alienating both sides. Note that all this went on while the US was also wrestling for control in the region and China was trying to shake off the Soviet Union. These things don't happen in a vacuum but even without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unstable and spiraling into chaos.

Dropping in the Khmer Rouge as if Pol Pot is a meaningful representation of all political change is absurd, even if you only consider drastic changes (i.e. revolutions, overthrows, secessions and annexations). Outside of imperialist conquest almost every nation on Earth, past or present, is the result of such struggles.

The foundational mistake is believing that the status quo is stable and permanent because it never is and never has been before. Even episodes in history that are considered "stable" (like the Roman Empire/Republic) are tumultuous and only seem somewhat stable because we're looking at them from a bird's eye view often thousands of years later.