Reveal Your Uncool Liberal Beliefs Here

Some of mine feel like they're getting more and more uncool by the day.

(I know there's a new age/spiritual beliefs spinoff thread, but I think the two are discrete.)

"liberal" meaning broadly left of center, or "liberal" as in the more narrow political philosophy?

As in the antithesis to whatever means "conservative" in the other thread.

*admiralackbar.gif*

(I know there's a new age/spiritual beliefs spinoff thread, but I think the two are discrete.)

― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.),

That. won't. play.

3,000 miles are too far to be away from one's heart.

I'm a pacifist and anti-military to the core but also am glad the shittiest cockroach imperialist military states of the west are providing weapons of death to Ukraine so their resistance to a Russian invasion is strong enough to hold up. It's a contractionary bunch of opinions to hold and probably the most meltiest position I have on world politics. But there is no surety from me here either though, because I know there are plausible counter-arguments for prioritising de-escalation rather than maintaining a long war - but I can't brook privileged brit knobheads of the left like Oliver Eagleton having strong opinions on something that will never touch them, well unless it ends with nuclear armageddon.

i don't understand this thread, I think

I still think LBJ was one of the better ones, that certainly can't be cool

As in the antithesis to whatever means "conservative" in the other thread.

which thread is this referring to? perhaps that will make this more clear. are there 'cool' conservative beliefs? I don't think so. or is it about 'uncool' conservative beliefs, which IMO is 'almost all of them'?

Property, within reason, isn't theft, how's about THEM apples *mugs provocatively to the camera* what a badboy edgelord

*stuffs Mother Jones into his Noam Chomsky tote bag*

I still think LBJ was one of the better ones, that certainly can't be cool

― Andy the Grasshopper,

hey it took Robert Caro to make it happen

Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

yeah I guess I don't totally understand either.. is it:

* Kind of dorky, cliched liberal beliefs ("co-exist" bumper stickers, etc); OR:
* Contradictory beliefs that we sort of keep to ourselves since they're in conflict with the established lib consensus

maybe this counts: i'm increasingly convinced that civil disobedience, violent or not, no longer works in the western world. I believe it worked in the past, but I think the proliferation of controlled media has completely neutered it.

I'm still quite susceptible to the myth of Reasonable People Arguing It Out, and get excited when it feels like I've made someone reconsider something, whether it's about economics or queer issues or whatever. Not so much a "belief" I guess as I fully understand why it's bullshit, but am drawn to it nevertheless.

Property def is theft tho.

I'll come forward with the thought I had that inspired it, and trigger warning, it's more of an uncool "insufferable ILX film snob" belief than an uncool liberal belief: If efforts to restructure the canon have some Sight & Sound voters using their ballots to elevate marginalized filmmakers over already canonized "great films," that's an unambiguously good thing.

I agree with that and don't think it's uncool, certainly not on ILX. Uncool to Paul Shrader, maybe.

xp (And the resultant realization that I'm fine putting that and likely other uncool liberal beliefs in print than I am putting uncool conservative beliefs out there into the world.)

I remember hearing David Simon awhile back complaining about supposedly liberal universities (UC Berkeley, for example) not allowing wretched people like Ann Coulter or Yiannopoulos to go through with their scheduled speaking engagements; I think he just described it as a 'bad look', and found myself slowly nodding in assent

xp LOL the main reason I started this thread is because I wasn't ready to commit to posting "Paul Schrader is occasionally right, tbh" in the conservative thread

xp Like, better they speak to an empty room than declare themselves victims of liberal intolerance

i like to live, laugh & love

The thing is, which most commentators miss, if you're a public university you have to agree to just about every speaker unless the university can claim a threat of violence.

I think it is kind of a bad look to shout down these speakers, although I understand it. Agree with Andy that it would be best to leave them addressing empty auditoriums, but I guess on a university campus with emotions running high that is not possible

Am just wondering who is in charge of these events and why would any university, public or private, want to make an engagement with these people as speakers. The results don't reflect well on them. Maybe at Stanford the Hoover Institute has total control over who it invites

It would be best to publicly execute them, no platforming is the compromise position

Well, it just plays into their hands: that universities are hotbeds of liberal 'fascism' or whatever.. it especially looks bad at Berkeley, birthplace of the modern free speech movement

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/~pQAAOSwF6Jg93Vl/s-l500.jpg

Yeah I’m going to agree with NV & say that an opinion Nazis having a “right” to speak belongs on the other thread. We know why those ideas are bad! There was a whole war about it.

otm

some very confusing opinions itt, let's focus on sasquatch-fucking plz

The thing is these fascist propagandists will do their hate speech whether you "give them an excuse" or not, so just cut out the middle bit

I am NOT defending a Nazi's right to speak: I'm only stating the law. I've come along some. I used to be a free speech absolutist. Meanwhile I still work with older folk who think we should run pro/con editorials in the school paper with Nazis and who don't understand how the opportunity valorizes speech that will turn violent against the very people we claim to defend.

Disagree gyac, the idea that every group should be given the right to speak is textbook liberal shit - part of the worldview where, again, Reasoned Debate solves all. Conservatives for all their faults don't really believe that.

I can see that, esp in the US

I remember getting in fights with libs that kept saying it made you as bad as Nazis to attack them at rallies.

"One side is LITERAL NAZIS, there is no 'as bad'"

didn't they watch Raiders of the Lost Ark

xxxp I don't think gyac was proposing that

One uncool liberal belief is that while I believe in cancel culture as a social movement to hold powerful people accountable and restore power to the powerless, especially regarding things like sexism, rape, racism, but that there is a sizable group of perpetually online folk that have used it to bully/severely harass undeserving people to the point of emotional duress. People whose transgressions were minor or non-existent. And it's usually perpetrated by people who do not actually gaf and that are there to enjoy piling on.

See: YA Twitter.

Obviously one does not reflect on the other but I think a lot of the latter activity gets excused because the abusers are on the 'right' side

Undeserving people who aren't rich celebrities mind

xps to Alfred, sorry, i wasn’t replying to you (or anyone specific in this instance), it was an exaggeration of a point floating around. I don’t think you were saying that.

Disagree gyac, the idea that every group should be given the right to speak is textbook liberal shit - part of the worldview where, again, Reasoned Debate solves all. Conservatives for all their faults don't really believe that.

I'm still quite susceptible to the myth of Reasonable People Arguing It Out, and get excited when it feels like I've made someone reconsider something, whether it's about economics or queer issues or whatever. Not so much a "belief" I guess as I fully understand why it's bullshit, but am drawn to it nevertheless.

I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your publication.

xps to Alfred, sorry, i wasn’t replying to you (or anyone specific in this instance), it was an exaggeration of a point floating around. I don’t think you were saying that.

― limb tins & cum (gyac),

no, I understood, thank you :) I was posting for the record.

maybe this counts: i'm increasingly convinced that civil disobedience, violent or not, no longer works in the western world. I believe it worked in the past, but I think the proliferation of controlled media has completely neutered it.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Tuesday, March 21, 2023

agree with this

this is predictably turning into reveal liberal beliefs you think are cool

in the sense that some posters would just post the same things anyway!

is it still cool to be against the death penalty?

Share your HOT liberal beliefs here then say it again slower

you are all awful and want to disparage everyone

The only reason cops go to jail (sometimes) for killing people is civil disobedience. It's not a magic wand but it's more effective than voting.

I don't think CIVIL disobedience does much, I think setting buildings on fire with the threat that "more may come" is what moves the needle.

Politicians don't care about constituents anymore but they sure as fuck care about feeling safe.

(and frankly I cheered when police stations were set ablaze in 2020, even if it's unclear who set em in some cases)

"you are all awful and want to disparage everyone"

I interpret the "Reveal" part of the thread title to mean something confessional, out of your usual comfort zone etc.. not the usual shite!

secret Trump vote reveal in 5, 4, 3...

general labor strikes more effective than civil disobdience or burning buildings but much more difficult to accomplish and more forcefully outlawed

otm

look at what's happening in L.A. now

So this is the thread for beliefs somewhat to the left of uncool conservative beliefs but well to the right of left beliefs?

I will always lose any game of "leftier than thou" on ilx, so Moodles otm.

I interpret the "Reveal" part of the thread title to mean something confessional, out of your usual comfort zone etc.. not the usual shite!

― calzino, Tuesday, March 21, 2023

ok

As righteous and justified as they were, I don't think the 2020 BLM protests were helpful to our cause tbh, for the majority of the people in this country they were too extreme and just created a backlash that we haven't been able to wrestle back as a positive talking point

what made them extreme

for a brief period, maybe months, support was universal, and without those protests it's possible Trump would have been reelected.

"Democrats love criminals" and the racist law and order shit existed way before BLM. It's not really been that effective a talking point post-BLM - the ones hurt most have been Democrats who gave in to pundits telling them that "Democrats love criminals" is hurting their numbers among people who vote Republican anyway.

OTOH, cops go to jail for murdering people sometimes now so I think it's a fair trade.

The BLM protests definitely seemed popular to me but I'm coming around to the idea that the looting and fires were far less tolerable to a large amount of Americans who are slightly left of center than I had thought. It seems that things like defund the police and more open borders also fall in this category. I don't disagree with such positions but I'm increasingly open to the idea that supporting them is deeply unpopular even among so-called liberals.

xp LOL the main reason I started this thread is because I wasn't ready to commit to posting "Paul Schrader is occasionally right, tbh" in the conservative thread

― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Tuesday, March 21, 2023 5:31 PM (three hours ago)

good reason to start a thread imo

I'm starting to feel like I may not be a liberal anymore. The major piece of evidence for this is that I don't think people with noxious right-wing views should be debated; I think they should be shot. If a sniper popped Marjorie Taylor Greene's skull for her while she was at a microphone, I would cheer (at least on the inside). Same for Ron DeSantis, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and a distressingly long list of others. These people are actively harming our country and they should be killed. And the thing of it is, I believe that a campaign of assassinations would have a positive effect on the country, because there is a general belief among the right wing that their opponents are cowards. If they are shown, conclusively, that yes, they can be killed, I believe that they will back down and stop attempting to pass so many hateful laws. And I don't think it will lead to more people voting Republican in subsequent elections.

I am in favor of assassinating legislators and judges on the state level, too, maybe even more so because it's bound to be easier — they really won't be expecting it, they travel with less security than their federal counterparts, and the ripple effect will be much quicker and stronger. If some Bible-thumping Republican asshole proposes legislation outlawing gayness in his state, he should take a bullet in the head as he's walking to his car the next morning. Period. This country needs some Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction types willing to kill its scumbaggiest leaders, and release statements explaining why they were killed, and hinting at who might be next. The time is now.

My fundamental political principles are "take care of people who need taking care of" and "what business is it of yours how other people live?" If you rub up against either of those too strongly, you should eat a bullet. All that said, I want someone else to do the actual shooting. I don't own a gun and don't want to. So maybe I am just a soft-hearted liberal with nihilistic fantasies.

I support targeted assassinations of all these people and still consider myself a liberal, so anything is possible!

"take care of people who need taking care of" reads differently in context of the rest of the post

loooool

I'm still quite susceptible to the myth of Reasonable People Arguing It Out, and get excited when it feels like I've made someone reconsider something, whether it's about economics or queer issues or whatever. Not so much a "belief" I guess as I fully understand why it's bullshit, but am drawn to it nevertheless.

I'm definitely susceptible to this one, though maybe it depends on what the "It" in question is. Its partly for same reason of if I've made someone reconsider something, but also if someone else has made me reconsider something, but more so on something where I don't necessarily have a clear position or understanding (which is pretty often). So when people do the Reasonable People thing I feel like I benefit from that, and when people skip past that I can feel left behind, like they've gone straight to their position(s) with all their ducks in order but I have a more muddled perspective

I think the most convincing pro-free speech argument isn't so much the marketplace of ideas one where you can talk nazis out of being nazis with reasoned debate, but more that the alternative is people in powerful positions having the ability to restrict speech, and then it becomes a question of how confident are you that those people are going to have the same opinion of what speech is beyond the pale as you do.

I guess have liberal sympathies because I do see free speech as a good thing *in itself*, an end and not just a means, that there a principles that are above or before politics, as opposed to the Bolshevik view where these supposedly non-political principles are actually just a justification for a status-quo where one class dominates another, and there are no higher principles than whatever brings about the victory of the revolution and the proletariat is good and whatever impedes it is bad, and freedom of speech and other liberal values are only good to the extent they move us towards that goal - this seems like the big divide between self styled liberals and leftists, whether there are rules or principles outside of advancing your cause or whether rules and principles are secondary to the cause.

Issue is complicated in the UK, for me anyway, because the Liberal/Liberal Democrat Party makes me flinch at the very mention of the word "liberal".

xp but I see the danger that this ends up with a politics that is too concerned with rules and procedures at the expense of outcomes, and abstract rights at the expense of whether people can actually put those rights into practise

I guess have liberal sympathies because I do see free speech as a good thing *in itself*, an end and not just a means, that there a principles that are above or before politics

I'm a firm believer in the principle that we cannot be tolerant of those who are intolerant, that to do so threatens the very nature of the tolerant society, and if that means shutting down some aspects of free speech (a highly nebulous and controversial concept anyway, at least in every day discourse) then so be it.

So this is the thread for beliefs somewhat to the left of uncool conservative beliefs but well to the right of left beliefs?

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Wednesday, 22 March 2023 01:33 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I thought this too, but Eric's subsequent clarification makes it seem that this is about beliefs that are very much to the left but also somehow very unfashionable (which is a hard thing to imagine in this world amirite)

I'm up for an um liberal interpretation of the title anyway, cd be a fun thread

the idea that there are values which exist outside of particular economic formations is the product of a very particular economic formation, idk maybe capitalism just got lucky and discovered some universal truths

I'm up for an um liberal interpretation of the title anyway

Different people mean different things with all these terms anyway so I don't know how anything other than a loose interpretation is possible.

I mean, if we're allowed to get meta, 'liberal' is a dirty word in a few online-left circles (including ILX) despite the fact that most people who use it as a pejorative are to a degree functionally liberal, which feels paradoxical, but if you come to regard it as shorthand for 'conservatives operating under a liberal aegis' or at the very least 'the landlord/boss class' then it becomes much more explicable. I don't much like its blanket use as a term of disparagement (this thread is a SAFE SPACE leave me alone alphie lol) because for me a lot of good falls under the 'liberal' banner, and people should be judged on their actions (whether they exploit other people, for example) rather than their opinions (which, being sufficiently right-wing, will often lead to malevolent actions anyway). So yeah, my uncool liberal belief is that the leftists and the left-liberals are the same and should stop fighting! We all hate Kieth! <<<a stunning, short-lived return to ukpol posting

Okay and more cards on the table now lol: lop off the ability to become infinitely wealthy (defined as personal wealth of more than say a few million pounds) and quite a lot of the problems with contemporary liberalism are solved. For me it is a matter of scale, and systemic implementation of restrictions rather than forced collectivisation or whatever feels like the way forward, along with emergency green-energy, anti-pollution and habitat conservation legislation. All of this, the Labour 2019 manifesto was aiming towards ofc, a manifesto that was notable as a very fine exponent of responsible, progressive liberalism. Some day, hopefully sooner than many here expect and fear, that manifesto will be back on the table. I shall run and hide now.

the Bolshevik view where these supposedly non-political principles are actually just a justification for a status-quo where one class dominates another, and there are no higher principles than whatever brings about the victory of the revolution and the proletariat is good and whatever impedes it is bad, and freedom of speech and other liberal values are only good to the extent they move us towards that goal

the question about "why can't people on the left make common cause with people whose main belief is to preserve capitalism thru regulatory adjustments?" kind of answers itself

that liberal Labour manifesto was viciously and relentlessly attacked by self-proclaimed liberals, and no amount of "no true liberal" malarkey is going to change that

well the big problem is that 'liberal' encompasses an incredibly broad swathe of the electorate, the poles of which have violently dissenting opinions

otoh it is important to always remember just how popular that manifesto was at the time, and how popular its individual policies would still be if floated now

So I guess that’s my unpopular opinion: that it’s more useful to look at what a government does to regulate and enforce in the adult industry rather than press scare stories about how Professor Shitforbrains has been told he’s not welcome to publish a book called Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines: Misunderstood By The Left? without criticism. Cos that’s all these cunts really mean: I want to say what I like with no pushback, and it’s high time that was said more often and louder.

Yeah, I'd hope most people agree that actual legislation is the bottom line. Culture-war posturing is a true self-indulgence and a grift, and the platforming of these dickheads is not what I'd call an important liberal cause. The ability to tell Professor Shitforbrains to fuck off is a key tenet of my ideal sort of liberalism!

a) it was very mild social democratic reform that wouldn't have undone half of the damage of the last 40 years. it was good as a starting position

b) it's abundantly clear that all the forces serving rentier capital in the UK will fight tooth and nail to prevent anything that reverses the current direction of travel towards its total domination

c) expecting the motherfucker of parliaments to do anything about this is the absolute pinnacle of uncool liberal belief

Hdu NV

adjust spider brooch

d) what you really need to explain is why it's so important to you to preserve the capitalist superstructure and in what way we should consider that leftist?

What does this even mean

I'm trying to say that there is a critique of 'liberal values' from the left - a liberal might argue that there are certain universal values that apply regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, whichever class or side you are fighting on e.g. freedom of speech, maybe due process or freedom of assembly, or the concept of 'human rights' in general. And the leftist critique is that these are not universal values at all, but contingent and the product of a particular economic system and function maintain the domination of one class over another in that system. (and not just class but race and sex as well).

Like that famous quote by Anatole France - 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.', a theoretical equality of each individual before the law exists but in practise there is huge inequality, so it's legitimate to defy these abstract liberal principles of equality and fairness in the cause of achieving genuine material equality and fairness

well at least you've explained why freedom of speech without economic democracy is a nonsense

I never said I wanted to ultimately preserve the capitalist superstructure! But as you say, a start is a start. Unbinding Thatcherism (let alone all capitalism, even a heavily tamed form of it) is not something I expect of the current Labour leadership, obviously - I don't expect it of them, they're largely soft and spineless. I expect it of others who are to come. I guess the difference between us is that I expect it to somehow battle its way through our shitty rigged parliamentary system, and you expect it to come through revolution. Either would work for me if the revolution is sufficiently, um, bloodless. Maybe a couple of guillotinings just to show we're serious, okay?

Exactly, soref. Liberalism, in order to fulfil its meaning, needs to take into account the liberty of all, and the provision of the means to even be able to exercise it (and as I say, the REMOVAL of the means to exercise a surfeit of it and thus deprive others) - it needs a Goldilocks definition of 'ideal freedom' that can be applied generally. Am I just describing communism here lol

despite the fact that most people who use it as a pejorative are to a degree functionally liberal,

This is 100% not the case, btw. I'd understand this confusion of terms to take "liberal" as meaning I dunno nebulous centre left from an American, but it's never meant that in Europe.

The Liberal Initiative in Portugal are militant free marketeers shouting about socialism every time someone gets unemployment benefits. The Liberal Democrats are what we know. I am not functionally on any of these ppl's side.

Australia's Liberal Party are another good counterexample. I guess I do mean it in the American sense, and I'm on a doomed crusade to rehabilitate it as a left concept lol

But it strikes me that the Americanisation of discourse has meant that social justice issues ARE often seen as 'liberal' causes, and it is hard to mentally square that with the European definition of 'liberal' as...well, free-market conservative

https://images.t-shirtat.com/2022/09/in-this-house-we-believe-an-evil-black-scientist-t-shirt-t-shirt.jpg

This is 100% not the case, btw. I'd understand this confusion of terms to take "liberal" as meaning I dunno nebulous centre left from an American, but it's never meant that in Europe.

OTM, I kind of hate that the American "definition" has gained so much traction but anything the Americans do we end up aping eventually.

If we’re going for uncool, mine is, I don’t like Keith but I will definitely vote for him. I will wash my hands afterwards.

Uncool liberal belief: a billion is 10^12!!!!!!!!!

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

I see this dril tweet get posted a lot by internet leftists as a riposte to liberals who complain about the left doing the same things that the left criticize the right for doing. The left argument is that supressing speech (or breaking other liberal principles) for leftist reasons is different from supressing speech etc for rightist reasons, and to think otherwise is to privilege process and procedure over outcomes, is to position yourself 'outside' the actual material reality of what impact these decisions will have on people which is only possible from a position of privilege where you have no skin in the game - in practise doesn't this just become an argument that the end justifies the means or that 'it's ok when we do it'?

Most of the time when people argue about this stuff the offenses against liberal principle are pretty small-scale stuff, should x have a right to publish y, and the same leftists would not support greater offenses against liberal values in the cause of true justice e.g. is it justified to kill x million peasants if it leads to the creation of socialism, but I don't know if there's a distance in principle or if it just feels morally icky to them after a certain point, but isn't 'this is bad b/c it feels morally icky' a posited universal value outside of politics?

is it justified to kill x million peasants if it leads to the creation of socialism

otoh it is important to always remember just how popular that manifesto was at the time, and how popular its individual policies would still be if floated now

It was a manifesto of regulatory adjustments to capitalism

for the most part at least

in practise doesn't this just become an argument that the end justifies the means or that 'it's ok when we do it'?

I could never vote for someone who represents everything I detest, thanks to Kieth and all his shitbag allies for disabusing me of that naive hope I had that the purpose of liberal democracy could be anything more than a career option for corrupt narcissists and scumbags to add a veneer of respectability to the real power - I feel much less burdened now I don't gaf which side is running the show tbh! sorry for going off topic I'll stfu now.

would not support greater offenses against liberal values in the cause of true justice e.g. is it justified to kill x million peasants if it leads to the creation of socialism,

Worth pointing out that, unless the liberals in your example are hardline pacifists, they also feel kill peasants is sometimes justified, just for different ends - protection of free speech, free society, free markets. Helps if the peasants are citizens of some distant place and as such not part of the free society, and gets justified on the basis that once it's done their children can be.

but isn't 'this is bad b/c it feels morally icky' a posited universal value outside of politics?

I would certainly hope not! Most people are icked out by anything slightly different to them, "it feels icky" is a driving force of homophobia.

I am I guess "voting for Kieth" but in my case that means voting Diane Abbott, and I can't see how diminishing her turn-out would be viewed as anything but a positive development by Starmer and his cronies.

But it strikes me that the Americanisation of discourse has meant that social justice issues ARE often seen as 'liberal' causes

By people whose main points of engagement with this are American TV shows and Instagram, sure. Go ask BLM UK or Sisters Uncut if they consider themselves "liberal".

Chuck_Tatum at 10:18 22 Mar 23

If we’re going for uncool, mine is, I don’t like Keith but I will definitely vote for him. I will wash my hands afterwards.

xps to Daniel _Rf yeah as an Irish person I’m hoping soref is not British and typing that load of revisionist shit

Assessments of how many people died during the Great Famine, either of disease or hunger, stands at around 1,000,000. This, along with emigration to escape the famine, significantly reduced the population of Ireland.

In 1846 The Economist magazine declared that Irish distress was "brought on by their own wickedness and folly". Such attitudes were not uncommon in the British media during and after the Famine, as Niamh Gallagher explains.

even the Maratha tyrants in India had a history of impressive famine responses, where the elites were forced to cough up and feed the poor whenever necessary. All parts of the British Empire were made more susceptible to famine and disease because the imposition of liberal trade policies were more important than local planning, infrastructure and human lives.

think a lot of people I know (friends/family) would say the same. personally, if I were the deciding vote in a swing seat in the narrowest of general elections, I still wouldn't vote labour now.

I look at it like this: things will get worse both ways, but IMO they will get worse more slowly with Keith. I would rather buy the extra time that Keith’s slower-worseness enables, in the deluded hope that something better emerges, than shrug and let the whole lot go down the shitter. This, basically: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/the-chomsky-position-on-voting

That piece is much too long btw and apologies for posting it, I thought it stopped at the first ad.

"IMO they will get worse more slowly with Keith"

I often hear this. Is there reason to believe it?

Genuine question. I don't know.

Maybe Labour still have a slightly better green policy than Con? Not aware of much else.

I worked for a large UK charity and slowburn progressive lobbying changes (e.g. w/r/t climate change, or NHS maternity care, and asylum applications for children) were easier to get through during the Brown and coaliition govts than with all subsequent tory govs. So that - along with what I've heard from civil servant friends about current chaos - is enough to persuade me to give them one (1) chance.

Chuck Tatum - is this difference perhaps because the calibre of some people lower down in government (junior ministers or whatever they're called) will be slightly higher from Labour - rather than KS himself who we know is bad?

Pretty sure the calibre won't be much different.

xpost

Yes

"I don't much like its blanket use as a term of disparagement (this thread is a SAFE SPACE leave me alone alphie lol) because for me a lot of good falls under the 'liberal' banner, and people should be judged on their actions (whether they exploit other people, for example) rather than their opinions (which, being sufficiently right-wing, will often lead to malevolent actions anyway). "

Sadly no safe space here.

People usually act according to what they say, almost all of the time.

"as opposed to the Bolshevik view where these supposedly non-political principles are actually just a justification for a status-quo where one class dominates another, and there are no higher principles than whatever brings about the victory of the revolution and the proletariat is good and whatever impedes it is bad"

The working class have never held power in human history apart from a couple of years after 1917. Our status-quo is of a class of rich people dominating the poor.

Debates around free speech are used to manipulate liberals into thinking the left will jail you when they are in power. Your post is something they will want to hear all day long.

Tfw peasants are being killed

BREAKING🚨 | Government delays plan to lift UK state pension age to 68 as life expectancy falls.

— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) March 22, 2023

Seriously don't know what's better. Me being made to work longer for some cunt's wealth or living a few years less.

I worked for a large UK charity and slowburn progressive lobbying changes (e.g. w/r/t climate change, or NHS maternity care, and asylum applications for children) were easier to get through during the Brown and coaliition govts than with all subsequent tory govs. So that - along with what I've heard from civil servant friends about current chaos - is enough to persuade me to give them one (1) chance.

My gut feeling is that a Starmer govt will be to the right of Brown but tbf that might just be because of Kieth's embarassing pub bore talk rather than anything more concrete.

i think my issue with this thread is not fully grasping the non US connotations of 'liberal'

that and also it doesn't seem like a lot of these posts are revealing uncool beliefs

Well, tbf Eric is American.

Anyway I think the non US connotations have started to seep into US political discourse as well, thus so many American leftist's attempts to distance themselves from the label. Basically liberalism insists on the rights of the individual politically and the free market economically - obv there's huge room for manouevre within that, so at its most radical it is basically libertarianism, at its most cuddly it resembles 20th century social democracy. The fact that it's become synonymous with "left" in the US is not accidental imo - rabid hatred of socialism plus a myth of meritocracy that is to some extent shared across political lines means it's the only "safe" way to advocate for centre left positions.

we should delete this thread and replace w/ Reveal Your Uncool Ordoliberal Beliefs Here

for my part I will say that what I listed for myself is 100% an uncool belief, both in terms of being unfashionable but more importantly in that the facade of Reasonable Debate invariably works to silence voices that fall outside its genteel borders and because it encourages ppl into a chummy debate team dynamic where issues that actually mean life or death get treated as fun rhetorical contests. I'm drawn to the myth but what lies behind it is very ugly.

as a genuine contribution to the thread, I recognize the truth of "no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism," while I nonetheless buy organic/fair trade/bandcamp/whatever and, worse, get annoyed at people who use that slogan to justify consumer choices I think are bad.

IOW, I can't shed the idea that my individual choices in the market have significance, even if I logically understand they don't

but more that the alternative is people in powerful positions having the ability to restrict speech, and then it becomes a question of how confident are you that those people are going to have the same opinion of what speech is beyond the pale as you do.

This is probably the most accurate 'uncool liberal belief' listed in the thread tbh - a belief in the value of a set of rules and playing by them even when the other side doesn't.

Hate speech laws are exactly the kind of shit the right whines about constantly and they are usually canny enough to target the people who support the policy rather than the policy itself, cos otherwise they might have to answer the question “What’s wrong with keeping Holocaust denial illegal?”

When I was observing the alt right ascent/moral descent of a friend of mine, I saw he was using his platform to attack (as he depicted them, in his cartoon caricatures) the beta white male/histrionic female supporters of BLM, the oblique attack strategy that would serve to showcase bravery of support as weakness, or try to suggest the support wasn’t actually wanted. That the supporters were putting words in the mouths of BLM.

When it came to LGBTQ/Covid issues of course the attacks were plenty direct, cruelty and false info run amok.

then it becomes a question of how confident are you that those people are going to have the same opinion of what speech is beyond the pale as you do.

tittw we reveal our uncool liberal beliefs so we can be told precisely how uncool they are and why so that we may recant them and resolve to do better in the future

I don't really get the point of this thread either, but lord knows ILX is not a place to come and expect to not be chided for your beliefs by all kinds of people

Me: I live in a country with a violently racist government and this is extremely bad I don’t care about hypotheticals
User Aimless: hoho! The naivety of the young! This is as a game to me!

interesting to see how you imagine me talking and thinking. it explains the way you respond when I post things. but your version of me is purely a work of imagination and I feel the need to make this clear.

lord knows ILX is not a place to come and expect to not be chided for your beliefs by all kinds of people

With vigor, as well.

My definitely uncool liberal take is that I find the way both left and right talk about “capitalism” obnoxious and not all that useful. It’s the totalizing sense of either an omnipotent enemy that is everywhere all the time, or (on the right) a jumbled quasi-religious faith in a mystical god of the markets. It’s not just or even primarily that I’m not a communist — though I’m not — but that I think the reductive Karl Marx-Adam Smith framing (or maybe Marx/Milton Friedman is more the point these days) locks us conceptually into arguments that I’m not sure really go anywhere.

Just reading last night how FDR was enamored with a book called Sweden, the Middle Way (Childs, 1936) - he liked the idea of a royal family, free markets, and a moderate socialist nanny gov't all working in concert

And internment camps, apparently.

(I guess the Roosevelts would be the royal family in this model)

The high concept of the thread this is based on (which it should be noted is on ilafl) is indeed a “safe space” to blurt out horrifying reactionary positions you hold without expecting challenge/debate as it’s already understood (in theory lol) that ppl here won’t share your shitty Tory opinions

There are a lot of v obvious reasons this thread won’t work in the same way imo

And internment camps, apparently.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

nyuk nyuk nyuk

My definitely uncool liberal take is that I find the way both left and right talk about “capitalism” obnoxious and not all that useful. It’s the totalizing sense of either an omnipotent enemy that is everywhere all the time, or (on the right) a jumbled quasi-religious faith in a mystical god of the markets. It’s not just or even primarily that I’m not a communist — though I’m not — but that I think the reductive Karl Marx-Adam Smith framing (or maybe Marx/Milton Friedman is more the point these days) locks us conceptually into arguments that I’m not sure really go anywhere.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, March 22, 2023 7:02 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm not sure why i'm responding, i believe you've said this before and there's no point in trying to change your mind of course.

my deal with 'capitalism' is that it's just 'the truth' or 'the world as it is.' i haven't run across any other frame that explains the state of the world materially & socially as satisfactorily as 'capitalism'. well, maybe combined with some psychoanalysis but that's whatever. the fact that most people don't even know what it is is sort of telling. also that there are big stakes in denying its existence, or naturalizing its existence. major sign that something is important is when there are huge active forces trying to keep people ignorant about it or convince them that it's the only way.

of course it's difficult to move from that to 'what do we do.' in many ways the directionality here becomes 'disengage from current formations.' i imagine you see that as 'not really going anywhere' because you see government as it exists as the only option we have, de facto. i see 'disengage from current formations' as a step in the right direction. does that mean i'm living in an anarchist commune? no, but it does mean i make choices that tend toward minimal engagement in the apparatus of capitalism and distributed exploitation. which makes me feel less alienated, more myself, and happier.

The high concept of the thread this is based on (which it should be noted is on ilafl) is indeed a “safe space” to blurt out horrifying reactionary positions you hold without expecting challenge/debate as it’s already understood (in theory lol) that ppl here won’t share your shitty Tory opinions

par for the course for the thread starter i might add

i don't know what to make of this thread, i think liberalism is worse than conservatism, should i reveal my uncool leftist beliefs? i'm not sure i actually have uncool liberal beliefs except maybe that to some extent, within certain limits, compromise might sometimes be desirable. not the way things are now, though. there's no possible benefit to any compromise in the current environment, imo.

I initially took it as a hundred flowers thread last night, but since the threadstarter has revealed they had completely different intent it's gone all over the place - well it would have anyway.

just kinda wondering how many people here share imago's uncool liberal opinion that "the leftists and the left-liberals are the same" (an opinion i've heard from a lot of liberals and approximately zero leftists)

I feel like the labels aren't even used consistently in the US, whereas they're probably more rigidly defined outside (which is where imago is base).

how low can you go!

the question in the back of my mind every time i skip past your posts

lol

rawr

to me the meaningful differences are between exploiters and exploited; landlords and renters for example. the rest is a semantic game in which general overlap can be generally assumed in good faith unless an individual explicitly self-selects a dissident position

I feel like the labels aren't even used consistently in the US, whereas they're probably more rigidly defined outside (which is where imago is base).

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal)

yah the media have accepted the hand-me-down definitions framed by the right and their reporter ancestors from the '60s -- and the frame poisons their reporting.

I get a chuckle out of someone like Kamala Harris being described as a member of the "radical left."

par for the course for the thread starter i might add

No arguments here.

I get a chuckle out of someone like Kamala Harris being described as a member of the "radical left."

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux),

A Black woman is automatically a radical. See: that infamous radical Val Demings.

alls I know is, I identified as an mega-idealist socialist arch-liberal in college (who liked Kucinich), but was told NO, "liberal" is bad, we shouldn't be 'liberals', we're left-wing, liberals are just people with faded t-shirts of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone in his diaper, so then I said "ok i'm leftist" and then suddenly from another sect of similar-minded people it was "no fuck that why should we be ashamed to be liberals, we're liberal-minded, we believe in trying new, progressive things, and allowing people to live, conservatives want life to always be 1865 America", so I said that again, and years later was suddenly told this was bad again.

so now I identify as a Satanic capitalism-hater and hope people figure it out

i haven't run across any other frame that explains the state of the world materially & socially as satisfactorily as 'capitalism'.

It's a good explanatory frame in a lot of ways, I agree. But ... it's also "just" a frame. It's not the world, it's a picture of the world from a particular perspective. e.g. the only-capitalism framing has a hard time dealing with science, art and culture with the richness and appreciation that I think they deserve, the frame becomes too narrow and reductive. Human history and the actual ways people relate to and connect with each other are imo much too varied, complex and subtle to only be seen through that lens.

So maybe my uncool liberal opinion is that, you know, art and culture and the pursuit of knowledge as ends in themselves have values that transcend economics. And that, e.g., I think there's something wonderful about even an institution as deeply problematic as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When z_tbd has successfully monetized his enjoyment of his dog we'll be able to say capitalism has finally transcended all other social, emotional or aesthetic frames. this development is happily anticipated any day now by the dedicated crypto bros.

you know, art and culture and the pursuit of knowledge as ends in themselves have values that transcend economics.

I identify as a moderate anarchist but I caucus with the Dems

xpost well another uncool liberal opinion I have is that I 100 percent support public subsidy of arts, culture and especially arts education in well-funded public schools!

Abolish business schools and MBA programs is my very cool opinion.

interesting how eugenics was once considered a very progressive field of study, a century ago

I wonder if any liberal positions today will be seen in that light fifty years from now

hopefully ranked-choice voting

what? ranked-choice voting is a good thing

that's what they say now

it basically chooses the candidate/position acceptable to the most people, without a costly run-off

Going back to something map said, I don't believe "government as it exists as the only option we have, de facto" — I'm not even sure if that's a "liberal opinion" anyway, I feel like the liberal mindset always has a twinge of utopianism that imagines a constant state of things getting better (albeit in often hazy ways). Obviously government as it exists isn't the only option we have, historically as a species we've experimented with a lot of different formulations.

But having worked in government I also see it more pragmatically than ideologically in a lot of ways — what most people want from government is a combination of help and support when it's needed, and being left alone most of the time. Any system that can deliver those things effectively will probably be popular.

i hate ranked choice voting. in my experience it just leads to someone winning that was absolutely no one's first (or even second) choice.

I mostly think the exchange between map and you is going over my head, but tipsy mothra, I see no contradiction in believing that there are aspects of the human experience that predate any kind of economy, let alone capitalism, and believing that capitalism holds hegemony over all of those aspects right now. It's in everything but that doesn't mean it IS everything, if that makes sense.

re: ranked choice - in the recent Oakland mayoral campaign, it led to the candidate getting the most #1 votes losing to the candidate that got the most #2 votes

xpost

It makes sense rhetorically, but I don't think it actually describes the world. I don't think we really exactly live under a "hegemony of capitalism," I think that describes aspects of our world but it also misses a lot that's important. But see, again, that's why I find talking about "capitalism" as an abstract force kind of limiting and enervating. (I mean, I feel the same way about "God," so no offense to Marx.)

Like, we're just animals on this rock, making up words for things we experience. I feel like politics rooted in that understanding does more for us in a pragmatic sense than a lot of admittedly brilliant but increasingly musty framing devices.

xpost oakland elections are exactly what I was thinking of (I don't know anything about new mayor, she seems alright, better than the last one, also I can't think of a single good mayor of any city anyway)

xxp so it rewards consensus over enthusiasm. I don't think that's a bad thing

i think liberalism is worse than conservatism

see this is a completely bizarre statement to me and makes me assume we are talking about different things

...but every kind of politics is based on a framing device? What is this politics rooted in this understanding of our animaldom, does it just mean accepting the framings of current systems because the framing doesn't matter?

I do think humankind was a bad idea

We should have at least been Beta tested.

xxxp - I assume Rushomancy is coming from a place similar to MLK's critique of the white moderate

What is this politics rooted in this understanding of our animaldom, does it just mean accepting the framings of current systems because the framing doesn't matter?

Framing matters, especially to politics, but I think talking about abstract concepts like "capitalism" take you farther away from engaging with most people's experience of the world than closer to it. That's all. And there are ways to talk about capitalism obviously that aren't "talking about capitalism." You can talk about injustice, inequality and exploitation in real and concrete terms without getting into this totalizing economic vision that I think is just alien to how most people encounter the world.

xpost that was how I took it too, Fetchboy

esp w/ our elected officials, where it has felt like 2 years of "we have many of the necessary toolkit to start fighting many of the things that are affecting real life people right now but we just need things to get a little bit worse before we use them".

everything is fucking means tested.

to me the meaningful differences are between exploiters and exploited; landlords and renters for example

This is a stupid example IMO. I mean, are there shitty landlords? Sure, lots of 'em. But owning property and renting space to other people, in general, is good, not bad. I'm gonna be renting an apartment for the rest of my life, by choice. I have enough money and a good enough credit score to get a mortgage if I want to, but fuck that. I mowed my last lawn and raked my last leaf when I turned 18 and moved out of my mom's house. My wife and I pay for enough space for ourselves and our books, and that's all we want out of life.

to me the meaningful differences are between exploiters and exploited; landlords and renters for example. the rest is a semantic game in which general overlap can be generally assumed in good faith unless an individual explicitly self-selects a dissident position

― imago

i'm disinclined to dismiss the difference between a neolib like h. clinton who doesn't support trans rights and someone like, say, aoc who does as a "semantic game". to me this is the real spirit of liberalism - an overgeneralized universalism that dismisses the lived experiences of marginalized groups as unimportant, and chooses to make the convenience and security of white cisgender men the overriding political concern - with all political concerns that _don't_ center white cisgender men dismissed as being "divisive" or "extremist".

so now I identify as a Satanic capitalism-hater and hope people figure it out

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal)

you actually have this shit figured out completely! just don't get sucked into debates like "wait, are you talking church of satan or satanic temple?" and you'll be fine (though for the record i believe the satanic temple are 'the good ones')

what most people want from government is a combination of help and support when it's needed, and being left alone most of the time.

this sounds about right. the kicker is that a large proportion of 'most people' have an easy time accepting the first half of that formula, but generally conceive of taxes as contradicting the second half, rather than as the mechanism for delivering the first half.

my father whined about the existence of much of the support he is now receiving from the state before his stroke

hell he railed against handouts while in the midst of unemployment.

people hate the idea that "other people are cheating", in their view

the kicker is that a large proportion of 'most people' have an easy time accepting the first half of that formula, but generally conceive of taxes as contradicting the second half, rather than as the mechanism for delivering the first half.

lol another uncool liberal belief I have is that, actually, most people don't care all that much about taxes. I worked for a mayor who raised property taxes fairly substantially with zero pushback from left or right, all the arguments were about what to do with the money, what the priorities would be. Yes in the abstract if you ask people "do you like taxes" I'm sure most would say no, but in practice I don't think it's that much of a huge thing to people unless/until it gets really out of whack. We think people hate taxes because rich people hate taxes and they've completely sold one of our two political parties on taxes as this political/philosophical third rail, and put a lot of fear about it into the other party as well. But most people don't even know how much they actually pay in taxes, and in real day to day life almost nobody talks about taxes.

see this is a completely bizarre statement to me and makes me assume we are talking about different things

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

short form is that it's based in my lived experience as a trans woman growing up in the '80s and '90s - i view harry benjamin as the archetypical liberal - the "benevolent" advocate of trans rights who arrogated to himself the right to differentiate "true" and "false" forms of transness. the liberal idea is that a white cisgender man can be more of an expert on trans existence than trans people themselves. the result of this was benjamin's formulation of an absurd, ridiculously restrictive definition of "transsexual" met by nearly no actual trans people. the effect of this "benevolent" and "compassionate" approach to promoting trans rights left me, and most other trans people, defined as false transsexuals, both my womanhood and my queerness erased. i was taught to be ashamed of myself and hate myself. what i learned about trans people came from liberal media, films like jonathan demme's "silence of the lambs" and neil jordan's "the crying game", films that taught me that being gender non-conforming was often pathological, and when it wasn't, the appropriate response to seeing a naked trans body was to vomit.

conservatives hate me and want me dead, and that is... not great. liberals, though? liberals taught me to hate myself. they taught us all to hate ourselves, and when we commit suicide, as we often, tragically but understandably, do, they blame _us_ for it, blame us for what _they_ did to us.

the one thing i like about liberals is that they can sometimes - not always, but sometimes - learn to stop being liberals. i'm an ex-liberal myself (one need only look at some of the truly horrid shit i said earlier on in my time in ilx), so my utter contempt for liberals is mixed with a strange sort of compassion.

i guess that's not "short form" really, sorry about that

xxp

that's one thing the liberal democratic state is very efficient at, propagandising against the welfare state and encouraging large blocks of voters to vote for their own demise. They shit a brick in the UK when 40% of the electorate voted for something that would have improved their lives - it will never happen again in my lifetime.

'Landlords should be allowed to liveretain their investment properties' is an uncool liberal belief.

What if it's an Airbnb and they put up one of those "Live Laugh Love" signs?

only waiver allowed
https://i.etsystatic.com/23914345/r/il/b016fd/3238431356/il_1588xN.3238431356_f31k.jpg

what most people want from government is a combination of help and support when it's needed

As Neaderthal points out, the only good help is subjectively warranted help... otherwise those slackers will lounge around and have more babies, live off covid relief and not work like we used to back in my day, hrumphh

Well shockingly most people consider any public help or benefits they receive to be completely warranted, de facto. (My ex-mother-in-law simultaneously relied on Medicaid for health coverage and bemoaned all of the people who were "working the system" and didn't "need" it.)

My uncool opinion, as a data geek: among my state's electorate, I am definitely in the 5% furthest left. Thus, if I want my agenda to ever be enacted statewide, I need 45 percentage points (or 47.37%) of the remaining electorate to choose my preferred candidate. If that candidate has to sell a left-wing agenda by campaigning as a "sensible" "pragmatist" who gives suburban voters the impression that they are the "moderate" "patriot", not only will I support them, I'll write the damn speeches if they ask. (It's not really that difficult: "John Adams didn't risk his life to fight his colonist rulers so his ancestors would have yet another claim denied by their profit-hungry health insurance company...")

"I thought we were an autonomous collective."

"You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship."

"Framing matters, especially to politics, but I think talking about abstract concepts like "capitalism" take you farther away from engaging with most people's experience of the world than closer to it."

Because work is part of almost everyone's experience of life then talking about how shitty your pay and conditions are is where these things intersect. Or how you will never be secure in your housing situation (which -- to jump to unperson's point -- is an outcome a lot of people would be happy about but will never get to). It explains resource extraction and how our responses to the climate situation are inadequate. The abstract very quickly becomes real very fast. "Capitalism" might be a tired way of talking about these things so a lot of socialists talk about jobs, pay, conditions, housing, lack of water and vegetables in supermarkets, changing weather patterns...

particle physics takes you farther away from engaging with most people's experience of the world

to me the meaningful differences are between exploiters and exploited; landlords and renters for example. the rest is a semantic game in which general overlap can be generally assumed in good faith unless an individual explicitly self-selects a dissident position

― imago, Wednesday, 22 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Striking how with liberals what matters is what they immediately perceive. I've seen a post about imago's housing situation so ofc he acknowledges there is something 'meaningful' here to consider between landlords and renters. Otoh Unperson has a secure rental situation so "some landlords are good", he doesn't understand the concept of landlords as a class because he can shut the door with his wife and his books.

Tipsy wraps it all with a bow with "what are these models?", even if scientific models are predicting with accuracy what is happening to the planet in the next few decades if we keep going. Ofc they differentiate between the scientific method as opposed to this Marxism stuff.

And it's because they perceive it with the drastic changes in weather.

But it mostly doesn't stand in elections across the US/UK, and it has proven to be very ineffectual on the 'what is to be done?' question.

I think talking about abstract concepts like "capitalism" take you farther away from engaging with most people's experience of the world than closer to it. That's all.

I'm unsure about this, one the one hand I think more tangible things stick better with people than more abstract concepts, but then "free speech' and 'woke' are extremely abstract and seem to be somewhat energising for people. Though I find it difficult to tell how much penetration these things actually have

yeah abstract concepts help me make sense of what's going on in the world

I wonder if there's a correlation between places where ppl are particularly anti-taxes and places where govt aid is particularly boureaucratic and inefficient (that inefficiency of course being a feature not a bug - the worse the system the easier it is to privatize.)

i'm disinclined to dismiss the difference between a neolib like h. clinton who doesn't support trans rights and someone like, say, aoc who does as a "semantic game". to me this is the real spirit of liberalism - an overgeneralized universalism that dismisses the lived experiences of marginalized groups as unimportant, and chooses to make the convenience and security of white cisgender men the overriding political concern - with all political concerns that _don't_ center white cisgender men dismissed as being "divisive" or "extremist".

the difference between h clinton and aoc is not a semantic game! what i said was "general overlap can be generally assumed in good faith unless an individual explicitly self-selects a dissident position" - i would say that h clinton has selected numerous positions not only putatively but (thanks to her closeness to the levers of state) materially antagonistic to the economically-disadvantaged, lgbt+ people, foreign citizens under us bombardment etc. the semantic game is the assumption of bad faith or even enemyhood in those who haven't demonstrated anything to justify it. when you say that liberals want you dead...well, i'm sorry that your lived experience has brought you into proximity with bigots who call themselves liberals. but, as one example among many 'left causes' that i'd say are (or should be) more general human rights causes (except they don't seem to matter to the conservative monsters who dominate political scenes around the world), trans rights feel to me like something anyone calling themselves a 'liberal' of any stripe SHOULD enthusiastically support! the problem comes down to the word 'liberal' - what it should mean, what it has come to mean. what's becoming clear is that calling myself a 'left-liberal' hasn't gotten me anywhere lol - it doesn't seem to please anyone, because it seems to align me with neocon bastards i don't remotely support. is the term really lost to the left forever? would seem a shame to me. by its very origins and meaning it seems to denote not only the individual's right to resist prejudice but the state's responsibility to ensure that prejudice (economic, racial, sexual etc) is resisted. the current hegemonic interpretation of 'liberal' is some sort of eldritch wealth-fetishising nightmare - freedom to oppress. that isn't liberalism, that's feudalism and tyranny under another name

also renting is horrible, and it's getting worse, at least here. i say this as someone (as alphie states) getting kicked out of his flat by a landlord selling up, who's spent the past month flat-hunting in a state of increased agitation. and if this is the experience of someone in a dual-income relationship with no dependents, how fucking bad must it be for others. and yeah, ofc my awareness of this has been sharpened by my own experience, that is what happens lol

also, speaking of 'overgeneralised universalisms', see how alphie manages to generically dismiss me as a 'liberal' - hence, in the bin, to be disregarded, idiot, etc - with "Striking how with liberals what matters is what they immediately perceive" - like, c'mon, i'm not a specimen in some sort of museum, the Liberal Fool, see how he only cares about issues when they affect him! - because this is just one example i can draw from my immediate consciousness - i'd be willing to submit to the Left Catechism, adjudge my views and stances on every single material issue affecting the precariat - and what's more, i reckon the vast majority of youngish leftish people in the UK could submit to the same catechism and PASS WITH FLYING COLOURS - what i'm trying to say is that i don't like this hiving-off of 'liberals', 'part, pen, pack' as Hopkins puts it - it isn't a discontinuous difference, there are no different tribes, people are all smudged shades of each other. the only blade of difference descends when someone does something to materially differentiate themselves, whether that is giving money to an anti-trans foundation, voting Tory, buying an extra house in order to let it, etc etc

(ultimately my uncool liberal belief is 'be nice to me and give me a cookie', haha, true...but also, be nice to your fellows! there are lots of us! we will win eventually! there's already a growing popular resentment towards the hoarders and bigots, it will not abate)

I don’t want to rake leaves either but I don’t think those of us who are anti landlord are under the impression the only two possible options are home ownership vs giving half your income to a private citizen so they can profit far in excess of the cost of upkeep of the house you’re living in

"also, speaking of 'overgeneralised universalisms', see how alphie manages to generically dismiss me as a 'liberal'"

You are constantly saying liberals do nice things, that we are on the same side, the state is alright because it provides museums. Your position isn't very complicated.

"and yeah, ofc my awareness of this has been sharpened by my own experience, that is what happens lol"

A 'lol' at the end of that sentence is telling.

why do you love using the word 'telling' so much, it is infuriating, it's like you're a witchfinder or something. I SMELLE A LIBERALLE

i didn't say the state was alright either, that's an um TELLING haha perversion of what i said which was that i like local museums (often with no state or council grants at all). our current 'state' is a hellstorm of bastards obviously, idk how you'd think i think any different

I smell bullshit.

care to elaborate? this coming ofc from someone who just described very normal internetese punctuation as 'telling', feels a bit short-shrifty yknow

Keep going lads, this is def the time you'll work this out for good.

I wasn't going to reply Daniel. I am good now 😇

speaking of 'overgeneralised universalisms', see how alphie manages to generically dismiss me as a 'liberal'

I'm confused as to whether you want to be categorised as a liberal, resent being categorised as a liberal, or both. Especially given the terms amorphous nature in which people don't seem particularly able to agree what one is, why it matters?

It’s much easier to argue about terminology and definitions than address the beliefs in question.

well quite! it was the dismissal that annoyed me, not the label

the essentialism of 'this is what liberals do'

xp I’m not agreeing with you?

i was agreeing with you though! too much is put on the labels, it's much better to argue about the actual beliefs

or if not argue about, discuss

That's how you'd like it imago.

Real chasm here between beliefs on stuff like property, how capital functions, whether a model can describe this stuff...almost as if you need to aggregate this into rough labels.

"I'm confused as to whether you want to be categorised as a liberal, resent being categorised as a liberal, or both."

People don't want to own their beliefs when they are labelled as regressive or worse. It's like when people say "we can't afford immigrants in our town" but some of them are horrified when the government comes up with a plan to deport them to Rwanda.

Real chasm here between beliefs on stuff like property, how capital functions, whether a model can describe this stuff...almost as if you need to aggregate this into rough labels.

lol isn't that chasm exactly what you would expect a thread with this title to illustrate? It's not news to anyone except Tucker Carlson that liberals aren't communists.

Yes. More responding to imago who resents being called a liberal. He wants to be told it's progressive and to get a cookie for it. To talk about beliefs and not be judged by it.

you have it ass-backwards buddy. i do not resent being called a liberal. i have been calling myself a left-liberal and finding that it does me no good! so maybe i'm not one? idk. i have no idea what it even means any more, what i even am. and who cares really - i'd rather talk about issues. not to identify with Tucker Carlson lol but what is the point at which liberal ends and communist begins? there's surely a lot of grey space in between to negotiate, and a lot of agreement in a lot of areas as well as points of contention

"i have been calling myself a left-liberal and finding that it does me no good! so maybe i'm not one? idk."

Don't worry. I know better than you do.

imago have you read much about social democracy? because "what is the point at which liberal ends and communist begins?" is kind of an absurd question (the answer is capitalism). but if you think there's genuine overlap between liberalism and communism, maybe you're a social democrat

He wants to be told it's progressive and to get a cookie for it.

"Progressive" is one of those especially tricky words imo. In U.S. political discourse of the last few decades I feel like it's used somewhat interchangeably with "liberal," although with a somewhat more leftist orientation? Left-liberal, basically. But I don't really know how much people identify with it. I guess it's the Liz Warren of political labels. (Not surprisingly, I was a Warren supporter, for all the good it did me or her.)

There's another uncool liberal opinion, Liz Warren could have been a pretty good president.

Warren and Sanders were my only choices in the primaries.

Progressive is for white and upper middle class people who cannot bring themselves to use the words ‘left’ or ‘socialist’.

Honestly, a lot of the people I know who use the P word starting saying it instead of "liberal," which they felt like had become too damaged by decades of right-wing demonizing. So yeah, it can be people who don't want to say (or don't know the words) "social democrat," but in the U.S. at least it can also sort of generally place you to the left of center without having to be too specific about where.

"progressive" is interesting because historically it's been entangled with some very right-wing ideas (eugenics in particular)

yeah I was going to say, "progressive" came about as a way to evade the "liberal" label, but then you had Glen Beck doing hour-long lectures on Woodrow Wilson

Early 20th century capital-p-Progressivism prized experts and fetishized improvement, hence the dalliance with eugenics, which I don't think anyone thought was right wing policy at the time.

Modern conservatives love highlighting the racism of the Progressive Era, which is of course undeniable but it's also like, do you think conservatives of the time were less racist? Conservatives of the time were segregationists and Klan members.

Don't know that any of this historical context is at all applicable to current usage of "progressive" in the US. For example, AOC and the entire squad are part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus under Pramila Jayapal, with Ilhan Omar as deputy. They very straightforwardly call themselves "Progressives".

https://progressives.house.gov/about-the-cpc

At least some of them (+ Bernie) call themselves Socialists too though But are they socialists or capitalists? or both? In some of the definitions above they would surely be liberals, but in others socialists? This all seems very malleable

Tipsy wraps it all with a bow with "what are these models?", even if scientific models are predicting with accuracy what is happening to the planet in the next few decades if we keep going. Ofc they differentiate between the scientific method as opposed to this Marxism stuff.

Well yes ... However scientific its observational methods may be, I would categorize Marxism differently than, like, biology. But imo it is a sort of telling point of comparison that gets to the totalizing Marxist worldview that I was objecting to way back in my original comment.

But let's pursue it for a minute because I have to think through why I object. Marxism and biology both describe the world based on observations of systems and individuals within systems (and in the case of biology, of course, systems within individuals). But biology isn't inherently ideological, or at least it's differently ideological — I know, I know, the practice of biology has always been shaped by or just as often run aground on the ideologies of the moment, but the core ideology of biology is basically the ideology of the scientific method, the belief that that is a valuable explanatory process. The ideology of Marxism has some of the ideology of the scientific method, certainly it's a product of many of the same Enlightenment impulses and ideas, but it also has some of the ideology of religion, assumptions about "good" and "bad," an overarching moralism that biology-qua-biology lacks (or should). A biologist describing the functions of an ant colony does not make moral judgment about its systems of exploitation. Nobody's trying to organize the worker ants.

So, yeah, I don't see Marxism as a scientific model, per se. I think it has many valuable insights! But I also think it carries connotations of a visionary belief system, and those are the connotations that I find trying.

And to be clear, in my OP on the subject I mostly meant the kind of flip way "capitalism" is thrown around as this all-encompassing explanation/diagnosis of *waves hands* everything going on. I don't mean Thomas Piketty writing a thousand-page book with 5,000 footnotes. I do think there's value in deep exploration and analysis of economic systems. I'm just talking on the level of popular rhetoric, really.

tbf "science" is evoked in equally dim ways in popular rhetoric

Again, if there’s a better explanation for the overarching motivations behind so much suffering and cruelty in the world, let alone the degradation of the environment, than capitalism, I’d like to hear it. If it’s just disagreement with the term, then I’ve made my point on that upthread.

xp i don't think "progressives" are socialists. i'm not sure i am either anymore.

i listened to a podcast where a historian was talking about the "withering away of the state" under communism, which means that when ownership of the means of production are socialized, we won't need as many formal, legal institutions to regulate ourselves and serve basic human needs. a lot of what the state does will be taken care of through informal arrangements and small scale democratic consensus. this sounds terrible to me. what he called "bourgeois right" seems like an enormous achievement. it introduced a principle of equality into our societies that became the foundation for things like the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement -- all this stuff is about rights, and about how the rights of the individual transcends the demands of the community.

capitalism means the centrality of the profit motive to how we organize society. the existential need for firms to grow by any means necessary, and the state's role in facilitating the avaricious, insatiable process. this certainly needs to be overcome if we are going to address fundamental social needs. but i do sort of recoil from some of the more outre ideas about what will happen when capitalism is overcome, this idea that the society that emerges will be unrecognizable.

I don't have any disagreements with the term, its more that different people mean seem to mean different things by the term (and the other terms). But then I also don't really see how Sanders or Corbyn are anything other than capitalists and therefore liberals either,

Another uncool opinion: Twitter losing relevance will be a wonderful thing for left-wing progress; as the least-informed primarily-male (but I repeat myself) bullies will no longer have their optimal platform to anonymously harass real people for daring to support a narcissism-of-small-dfifferences policy variation than they do. Instead, the bullies will be fragmented across a collection of niche spaces where no single entity can dominate, leaving actual political discussion to less-anonymous places like Dischord, Facebook, or - gasp - real life, where discussions of actual policy proposals and a nuanced understanding of human societal preferences will be more prominent.

i do sort of recoil from some of the more outre ideas about what will happen when capitalism is overcome, this idea that the society that emerges will be unrecognizable.

Yeah, that's the eschatological side of Marxism that I have trouble getting with. I don't think it really describes anything about the world as it is, it climbs into fantasy. But also I don't know how many modern self-identified Marxists actually incorporate all of that into their worldview.

if there’s a better explanation for the overarching motivations behind so much suffering and cruelty in the world, let alone the degradation of the environment, than capitalism, I’d like to hear it.

Hmm. Again, I think Marxism does a good job of delineating the uses and tendencies of capital, or of people with a lot of money (as I like to call it, because I don't like imbuing "capital" itself with mystical anthropomorphic qualities). But also, at some base level we're just talking about stronger people exploiting weaker people, with "strength" and "weakness" determined largely by economic status. And that's a tendency that far, far predates the industrial world that birthed Marxism, right?

I admit a fair amount of my hang-up is rhetorical, my original uncool belief had to do with "the way people talk" about it. I just find it can obscure more than it reveals.

if I want my agenda to ever be enacted statewide, I need 45 percentage points (or 47.37%) of the remaining electorate to choose my preferred candidate. If that candidate has to sell a left-wing agenda by campaigning as a "sensible" "pragmatist" who gives suburban voters the impression that they are the "moderate" "patriot",

but i do sort of recoil from some of the more outre ideas about what will happen when capitalism is overcome, this idea that the society that emerges will be unrecognizable.

― treeship., Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Ideas like...not having to pay rent, and this freeing you up to do things other than work for a manager that harasses/hates you. A world of no hunger, of leisure time as yours to do what as you wish. Where our relationship to nature is reset.

That kind of thing?

I don't think it really describes anything about the world as it is, it climbs into fantasy.

Sure is a wild fantasy to me!! Better get back to my 50 hour week and to die at my desk!

Yeah, that's the eschatological side of Marxism that I have trouble getting with. I don't think it really describes anything about the world as it is, it climbs into fantasy.

I think it does! What does Marxism get wrong?

I don't think it's Marx's utopianism that gives him ongoing relevance, although I agree it's part of what continues to win acolytes — people like a story with a happy ending. That's the religious side of it that doesn't speak to me. I think it's the grasp of the economics of his moment, his understanding of the changes that were happening around him, and the lens/lenses he introduced to understand them that are the reasons Marxist analysis is still practiced even by people who disagree with Marxism ideologically.

that's not what i am talking about. it's the idea that the state and other large institutions could ever "wither away" and people will be able to govern themselves. the strong state that emerged alongside capitalism is what has secured individual rights, historically. i want a better state, not its overcoming. (the state, for me, doesn't have to be the nation -- i can envision a more international, cooperative arrangement).

I haven't read all of Das Kapital, but I don't see Marx as painting any kind of ending, happy or otherwise. Life is a struggle. Dialectical thinking isn't about endings.

xp xyzz

i mean, he says this in the german ideology:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

but to get here one needs to go through a period where the proletarian rule after overcoming the bourgeoisie. this is the phase that has gone awry historically.

he strong state that emerged alongside capitalism is what has secured individual rights

But in America the struggle for women's, Black, and queer rights has always pitted itself against institutions which excluded them precisely on capitalist grounds.

which institutions? these movements appealed to some institutions to challenge others.

I haven't read all of _Das Kapital_, but I don't see Marx as painting any kind of ending, happy or otherwise. Life is a struggle. Dialectical thinking isn't about endings.

and most of all they appealed to the idea that each person has fundamental rights by virtue of being a person. this idea -- which maybe is metaphysical ultimately, though i believe it -- is something like the baseline idea of liberalism. critiques of the injustices of capitalism often are more popular when they appeal to this principle. i wonder how it could be secured in a society where there wasn't a strong state that superseded local arrangements.

which institutions? these movements appealed to some institutions to challenge others.

― treeship.,

You could argue that Christian churches -- the ones in which these minorities constituted large parts of their congregations -- were the only unblemished institutions.

most of all they appealed to the idea that each person has fundamental rights by virtue of being a person.

But capitalism by its very nature revolts against the idea of personhood.

yeah so this is the contradiction between capitalism as an economic system and the liberal society it gives rise to. marx thought it was fatal, and this is why he predicted capitalism would collapse.

like, for labor to move "freely" and for capital to be invested "freely," an idea of freedom is introduced into society. but capitalism, in the way it exploits people for their labor power and thus treats them as objects, hinders the development of this very freedom. even corporations aren't really free because they must expand, expand, expand or else perish. so the society we have is at war with itself. it needs to preserve economic growth but it also attempts to do things like protect the environment.

I don't see Marx as painting any kind of ending, happy or otherwise.

The overthrow of the capitalist system, the withering away of the state, and the development of a fully communist system of production and consumption seems like a happy ending to me.

I don't wanna get into intent here, but from what I've read of Marx he suffered no illusions about getting to that ending.

i think this might be the problem with him though because once you establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" then what? where are you going from there?

Another uncool opinion: Twitter losing relevance will be a wonderful thing for left-wing progress; as the least-informed primarily-male (but I repeat myself) bullies will no longer have their optimal platform to anonymously harass real people for daring to support a narcissism-of-small-dfifferences policy variation than they do. Instead, the bullies will be fragmented across a collection of niche spaces where no single entity can dominate, leaving actual political discussion to less-anonymous places like Dischord, Facebook, or - gasp - real life, where discussions of actual policy proposals and a nuanced understanding of human societal preferences will be more prominent.

lol zero chance of any of this. Political discussion will instead move to TikTok, where misinformation will tbf be accompanied by cooler music.

as tipsy says upthread, Marx's acolytes regularly think/thought it was ... the passage treesh quotes seems quite idyllic

I think it's the grasp of the economics of his moment, his understanding of the changes that were happening around him, and the lens/lenses he introduced to understand them that are the reasons Marxist analysis is still practiced even by people who disagree with Marxism ideologically.

this is otm imo

i think this might be the problem with him though because once you establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" then what? where are you going from there?

― treeship., Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I don't think this is the only road but the class that is in power will not give it up without a fight.

Also: the proles have never held power for any sustained period of time in human history.

that's not what i am talking about. it's the idea that the state and other large institutions could ever "wither away" and people will be able to govern themselves. the strong state that emerged alongside capitalism is what has secured individual rights, historically. i want a better state, not its overcoming. (the state, for me, doesn't have to be the nation -- i can envision a more international, cooperative arrangement).

― treeship., Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is a lot better than people dying at borders in search of a better life (and migrants are mostly going to wealthier countries bcz their own countries have been looted by colonial powers), or again dying at your desk creating wealth for a class of people that don't care, or fighting and dying for any rights we have won.

The states established in this world aren't able to coordinate a solution to climate crisis; they are unable to overcome the borderless capital, which is what actually rules and is killing the planet, your state's and your precious rights.

i listened to a podcast where a historian was talking about the "withering away of the state" under communism, which means that when ownership of the means of production are socialized, we won't need as many formal, legal institutions to regulate ourselves and serve basic human needs. a lot of what the state does will be taken care of through informal arrangements and small scale democratic consensus. this sounds terrible to me.

well, sure, of course it sounds terrible to you - the current institutions we have are there to protect people like you at the expense of people like me. in practical terms a lot of marginalized people are _effectively_ having to live like this. we have to take care of each other because we can't trust other people to be there for us - even a lot of people who call themselves "allies", often their support is only conditional. to them, we exist at their convenience - when our needs become inconvenient to them, suddenly they start changing their tune. this is why marginalized people often speak of "allies" in a disparaging tone.

a lot of things suck about t4t community, because we're systemically underresourced, because we're all super fucking traumatized. keeping each other alive is exhausting and hard and we all have to work so so hard on maintaining healthy boundaries. still, i'm way happier, i'm doing way better, than i was under liberal capitalism, trying to conform to what they demanded of me.

what he called "bourgeois right" seems like an enormous achievement. it introduced a principle of equality into our societies that became the foundation for things like the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement -- all this stuff is about rights, and about how the rights of the individual transcends the demands of the community.

― treeship.

honestly i don't agree with your historical analysis. i mean let's dig into this, you know? the women's movement, for instance, how _did_ women get the vote? there were all of these liberal feminists, who tended also to be institutionally racist, whose argument for women getting the vote were often explicitly racist - "you'll give the vote to _those people_ but not to us?". and then you had radicals, leftists, socialists who stood outside the white house every day during world war one with incendiary slogans, comparing woodrow wilson to the kaiser, until woodrow wilson, who was busy making all sorts of bullshit excuses about why sure women should get the vote just not _now_, got fed up and threw them in jail and had them beaten and shit, fucking racist, misogynist liberalism showed its true face, and then, only then, did women get the vote.

the gay rights movement? you think the gay rights movement was liberal? it wasn't a trans woman who threw the first brick, the riot at stonewall was preceded by the compton's cafeteria riot, but the gay right movement was not a respectable liberal movement. it was insurrectionary, it was violent, it was "zaps" and it was ACT UP and it was against, first and foremost, _liberals_, the liberals who tried to ignore us, who tried to explain us away. what did liberals do for the gay rights movement? liberals gave us _philadelphia_, a nice respectable film about a nice respectable gay man who got a nice respectable version of AIDS directed by Jonathan Demme, whose last film had been the nice respectable film _The Silence of the Lambs_. that's where fucking queer respectability got us. you ever see the celluloid closet, where the entire last 30 minutes of it is this self-congratulatory twaddle about how Philadelphia is the culmination of the gay rights movement? bullshit! utter fucking bullshit.

the civil rights movement? christ, liberals love to talk about how dr. king was a triumph of liberalism, love to distort and lie about what he did, take quotes of his out of context, make it look like he went down to birmingham as a tourist and visited their jail and wrote a letter while he was hanging out at their fucking gift shop. it's a classic example of liberal misrepresentation, liberals taking the credit for the work of radicals. when i look at the birmingham campaign, i see a radical movement - not one man, but a _collective_ effort - that, on both a strategic and a tactical level, skillfully exploited the division between "respectable" white racists and openly hostile white racists like bull connor to gain liberation for a group of people who were oppressed by both white liberals _and_ white conservatives.

all of these movements, to my mind, were examples of radicals fighting _against_ liberals, _against_ liberal ideology, against particularly the liberal tendency to _separate and divide all human beings into rational, self-interested individuals_. feminists, queers, Black americans, they all had _class interests_ that pitted them against the liberal norm, and they all gained those rights through collective organization and struggle _against_ liberalism.

i think this might be the problem with him though because once you establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" then what? where are you going from there?

Changes in the social-economic structures of society.

Unless I’m way off, the reason why you needed the proletariat* to be the ones who called the shots is that they had (quite literally) nothing to lose and therefore were much more likelier to want to upend things and had a much easier time of it since they didn’t have to shed their holdings(a problem that came up in the early USSR).

The thing that would happen next was the next stage of society. You get to a society where things are produced not according to profit but according to need, as a starting point. In the process of doing so, you are changed as a people, and will presumably have a better idea what to do next once you’re in that situation.

*back then the urban industrial laborer, but even Adorno pointed out by the 1940s that wasn’t necessarily true anymore, as plenty of workers were getting shit like personal transportation and housing

which institutions? these movements appealed to some institutions to challenge others.

― treeship.,

You could argue that Christian churches -- the ones in which these minorities constituted large parts of their congregations -- were the only unblemished institutions.

― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

of course, when you look at their record on queerness... in my mind christianity is _the_ biggest institutional force when it comes to LGBTQ+ bigotry, and that bigotry happens pretty much across the board.

Thanks, Kate.

A couple months ago I read Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, where so many damn New Deal/Great Society liberal gays go to work for a federal government which under Dem and GOP presidents spent millions forcing them out of the empire-building because they were worse than Communists. Gays and lesbians couldn't even get a fair shake from the state they wanted to preserve! One of the most infuriating books I've ever read.

the marx quote about how after communism you can hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner is great bars and undeniably captures some essence of the idyllic utopian imaginary, but it’s actually dumb if you think about it. why don’t people just specialize at the thing they’re best at producing, and then have ample leisure time for hobbies? there’s no reason for a communist mode of production to incentivize every one to be a jack of all trades and forego the efficiency boost from specialization. also not how any existing socialist economy was/is organized

of course, when you look at their record on queerness... in my mind christianity is _the_ biggest institutional force when it comes to LGBTQ+ bigotry, and that bigotry happens pretty much across the board.

― Kate (rushomancy)

Oh yeah. Bayard Rustin had a couple things to say about it.

Was Marx arguing for jacks of all trades? I read that passage to mean that with greater time for oneself you can be as dilettantish as you please -- or don't do anything at all.

xpost to flopson

there’s no reason for a communist mode of production to incentivize every one to be a jack of all trades and forego the efficiency boost from specialization. also not how any existing socialist economy was/is organized

yeah, that's the thing that stuck out in my mind ... the idyllic Marx quote (which imho is kinda awesome and preferable) vs. the reality of some place like the former East Germany where very few workers seemed to have much variety in their labor (based on the documentary I've been watching about the Assassination of the neo-lib dude who was brought in during the reunification)

A couple months ago I read Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, where so many damn New Deal/Great Society liberal gays go to work for a federal government which under Dem and GOP presidents spent millions forcing them out of the empire-building because they were worse than Communists. Gays and lesbians couldn't even get a fair shake from the state they wanted to preserve! One of the most infuriating books I've ever read.

Did you ever read David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government? Gets into the further history of that, that a lot of the Red Scare of the second post-war era fueled the Lavender Scare, by people freaking out about queer folks since there was also a massive panic about masculinity at the time

Was Marx arguing for jacks of all trades? I read that passage to mean that with greater time for oneself you can be as dilettantish as you please -- or don't do anything at all.

It wasn’t necessarily an argument for dilettantism but against class society, that you could do different shit during the day without being consigned to that as class position.

"why don’t people just specialize at the thing they’re best at producing, and then have ample leisure time for hobbies?"

See, but that's you telling other ppl what they should be doing.

What if you don't want to produce anything?

Agree, that seemed pretty obvious.

Was Marx arguing for jacks of all trades? I read that passage to mean that with greater time for oneself you can be as dilettantish as you please -- or don't do anything at all.

xpost to flopson

― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, March 23, 2023 12:10 PM (thirteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

marx is concerned about alienation of labour that comes from specialization and division of labour. many other passages where he’s more explicit about it. def wants ti move things more in the jack of all trades direction

i also don’t think he believed in “or don’t do anything at all”. he and engels pretty much thought everyone able-bodied would work under communism. in some parts he hopes that capitalism will get so productive and require so little labour to produce abundantly that there wouldn’t be that much work to go around, but he also thought revolution would happen in germany or France his own lifetime when the precondition of superabundance clear wasn’t yet a reality

xp to kingfish

This discussion prompted some googling that led me to this really interesting 1934 essay by Anton Pannekoek: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1934/collapse.htm (If there hasn't been an indie band named Anton Pancake, there should be.)

He's grappling with how Marxist theorists of the prior couple of decades had in various ways interpreted the idea and mechanisms of the "collapse of capitalism." It's partly interesting (if a little bewildering) to read his delineations of the many competing schools of thought and action at the time. He ends up basically skeptical of both the "inevitable collapse" thesis — in which the system will fall apart of its own contradictions, and socialists will be there to pick up the pieces — or of the possibilities of a Soviet-style revolution, which had already basically failed in his view. Gonna quote his final paragraph in full because I think it's good but also because from the perspective of 90 years later it has a Waiting for Godot quality. He ultimately can't really get much farther than, it will all happen someday.

The workers’ movement has not to expect a final catastrophe, but many catastrophes, political — like wars, and economic — like the crises which repeatedly break out, sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly, but which on the whole, with the growing size of capitalism, become more and more devastating. So the illusions and tendencies to tranquillity of the proletariat will repeatedly collapse, and sharp and deep class struggles will break out. It appears to be a contradiction that the present crisis, deeper and more devastating than any previous one, has not shown signs of the awakening of the proletarian revolution. But the removal of old illusions is its first great task: on the other hand, the illusion of making capitalism bearable by means of reforms obtained through Social Democratic parliamentary politics and trade union action and, on the other, the illusion that capitalism can be overthrown in assault under the leadership of a revolution-bringing Communist Party. The working class itself, as a whole, must conduct the struggle, but, while the bourgeoisie is already building up its power more and more solidly, the working class has yet to make itself familiar with the new forms of struggle. Severe struggles are bound to take place. And should the present crisis abate, new crises and new struggles will arise. In these struggles the working class will develop its strength to struggle, will discover its aims, will train itself, will make itself independent and learn to take into its hands its own destiny, viz., social production itself. In this process the destruction of capitalism is achieved. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism.

I got hot dogs if anyone's hungry

Kingfish otm. Almost all of us have to work for somebody else. I'd like to do things that I currently do in my spare time all of the time.

xps

Guys I read between the lines of Das Kapital or maybe an interpretation scrawled on a toilet wall or something and Marx says that fluffy kittens are bad, that’s why I personally don’t like him

"i also don’t think he believed in “or don’t do anything at all”. he and engels pretty much thought everyone able-bodied would work under communism."

The work isn't of the alienated labour kind though, of wealth creation for somebody else.

Right now the work would be undoing the damage to the environment, for example. It may not be profitable, which is why it isn't happening.

See, but that's you telling other ppl what they should be doing.

What if you don't want to produce anything?

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, March 23, 2023 12:20 PM (twenty-three seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

i disagree that marx’s vision of communism was of a society where no one tells other ppl what to do and able-bodied people who don’t want to produce anything are allowed to do that. “to each according to their needs from each according to their ability” sounds to me like everyone will have to work according to their ability in order to produce enough to meet everyone’s needs

The “difficulties”you handwave in the section of your post following this oh so obvious theory are usually things like appealing to moderates by dogwhistling about racism or engaging in transphobia. There’s also signalling of disregard towards the following: poverty and the problems of poor or limited housing; inadequate employment; and lack of infrastructure to deliver any benefits. Most centrist politicians seem to lean heavily on bigotry rather than having any real plans for the material issues which raises the question: who are you willing to throw under the bus of your voter coalition to get your 50%? Because there’s always someone in that arrangement that is being portrayed as lesser than, and increasingly over here you get to enjoy stuff like your vote being demanded of you, as though your responsibility is to the politician and not vice versa.

― limb tins & cum (gyac), Thursday, March 23, 2023 10:17 AM (fifty-five minutes ago)

I have no idea where you are getting any of this. I said nothing about tossing aside any voter coalition, rather that we need to acknowledge the reality that winning the ability to run governments requires 50%, not just the 5% who agree with me on everything. Thus, a successful campaign does not merely aim its campaign towards that 5%, but to take those same policies and frame them in a manner that appeals to the other 45%. It's the marketing campaign that changes, not the policy agenda. And this can totally be done without marginalizing anyone.

I know but I am not following Marx chapter and verse. He wrote up a model 150 years ago that seems to be pretty relevant to how I live today and the challenges we face.

I wouldn't like to work but yes absolutely think there is a lot of work to do in undoing the damage of what we've done to the planet, for example xp

That's work of the good kind.

I just read these essays by Marc Mulholland about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which I thought were interesting, it talks about a populist, direct-democracy set up that is probably at odds with liberal ideas as generally understood, politicians should directly implement the will of the people rather than being elected representatives who weigh up their own decisions

https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1433/a-tale-of-two-phrases/

https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1434/dictating-to-power/

The principle of annual elections maintains a continual public pressure on MPs. The demand for this (and the restoration of the old requirement that anyone accepting appointment as a minister of state must submit to a by-election) should be considered a key democratic demand for today. It would maintain the electorate as a presence en permanence, act as a countervailing pressure to corruption and press dictation, and encourage political organisation as a duty of popular citizenship.

According to Adorno, "leisure time" itself is an obscenity.

He's grappling with how Marxist theorists of the prior couple of decades had in various ways interpreted the idea and mechanisms of the "collapse of capitalism."

Yeah, it always helps keeping in mind that for decades, the vast majority of Marx’s writing were unpublished or untranslated, so you had writers having to go off what Engels said or dudes like Kautsky or Bernstein said for the longest time.

A sense of determinism started creeping in, and you had the more mechanistic types going on about how not only was socialism the automatic next stage in social development, that it was about to happen as capitalism was hanging around long past its usefulness(which I believe led to William Sombart’s coining of the term, “late capitalism,” over a century ago).

Except that Marx’s point wasn’t that socialism was automatically the next stage in development, but it was a _possible_ next stage. There’s always the possibility that the next stage was just horrible for everybody and you wind up with “the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Put another way, as in Peter Frase’s _Four Futures_, we’ll probably have to go thru one stage to get to another.

It wasn’t necessarily an argument for dilettantism but against class society, that you could do different shit during the day without being consigned to that as class position.

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish)

otm

thanks for the book rec, kingfish

xposts

To be fair (is there a more uncool liberal phrase than "to be fair"?), we have some actual large number of people — hundreds of thousands? millions? — who are currently doing paid labor every day to undo damage to the planet. Mostly in the public and/or academic sectors, but it's not like we have to wait for the proletarian revolution to make that happen. Of course it's not enough, and of course the capitalist destruction of the planet is at the moment vastly outpacing remediation. But it's not like it's not happening. I think the liberal or social democratic view would be, "That's great and we should do a lot more of it" (and also regulate the polluters, impose carbon taxes, all that). Where the more revolutionary left view would be that, what, those things are kind of meaningless fig leaves? Or can there be value in those efforts even in a capitalist dystopia?

I’m busy at the moment so I can’t type out a full thing, but it helps to separate the ideas of “wage-labor” or a “dayjob” from one’s “life’s work.” The latter can be fulfilling and challenging and life-giving, the former will slowly kill you. My late philosophy professor Frithjof Bergmann worked on this for most of his life, putting out “New Work, New Culture” which helped explain this difference.

https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-if-you-do-what-you-love-you-ll-never-work-a-day-in-your-life-marc-anthony-0-92-33.jpg

“to each according to their needs from each according to their ability” sounds to me like everyone will have to work according to their ability in order to produce enough to meet everyone’s needs

yes, but it goes back to the issue of alienation from one's labor ... and that a worker would have more choice and agency in determining the work that they do, hence the fisherman/critic concept ... as well as what xyzzz and gyac (assumedly) about the results of the production being owned/distributed by the workers, as opposed to the non-working Capitalist class that just passively accrues wealth.

And the thing about specialization ... that is also a bit alienating, in that it treats people as machines. Yes, it makes more optimal productivity in the Taylorist way ... but is that what the actual people want? It's about who is making those decisions.

Oh yeah. Bayard Rustin had a couple things to say about it.

― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

yeah i should read more about Bayard Rustin, seems like an interesting dude. wonder if there's a good bio of the man.

Also a thing to remember is that we do not really know what life in a future phase will necessarily look like, as we ain’t there yet and we’ve been shaped by much cruder conditions, shall we say.

You get the idea about this from watching Star Trek: TNG, and the limitations of the writers back then. They were trying to depict a post-scarcity, post-patriarchal society but were all living fairly comfortably in Southern California in the late 80s.

Marx was pushing back against what we now call utopian socialists that preceded him, dudes like Saint-Simon or Fourier, the latter of which wrote some _real_ wild shit(hint: it involved the ubiquitous availability of lemonade to an extent you would probably not predict).

Of course, his limited describing of what a post-capitalist life could be sorta backfire when 50+ years later, some folks got in the position to actually instantiate these changes, but for various reasons, went hella authoritarian and state-capitalist. And then called _that_ socialism.

marx is concerned about alienation of labour that comes from specialization and division of labour. many other passages where he’s more explicit about it. def wants ti move things more in the jack of all trades direction

xp flopson -- yes, exactly.

To be fair (is there a more uncool liberal phrase than "to be fair"?), we have some actual large number of people — hundreds of thousands? millions? — who are currently doing paid labor every day to undo damage to the planet. Mostly in the public and/or academic sectors, but it's not like we have to wait for the proletarian revolution to make that happen.

Worth noting how much of this work in the public and academic sectors is structurally defanged in order to produce outcomes that will not save the lives we could save but will try to cordon off the catastrophe sufficiently for the PR damages to corporations to be acceptable. Not because that's what the people working those jobs think they are doing, but because of a certain pesky framework.

this cynicism brought to you by having too many friends in the NGO sector to believe otherwise

I have no idea where you are getting any of this. I said nothing about tossing aside any voter coalition, rather that we need to acknowledge the reality that winning the ability to run governments requires 50%, not just the 5% who agree with me on everything. Thus, a successful campaign does not merely aim its campaign towards that 5%, but to take those same policies and frame them in a manner that appeals to the other 45%. It's the marketing campaign that changes, not the policy agenda. And this can totally be done without marginalizing anyone.

You get the idea about this from watching Star Trek: TNG, and the limitations of the writers back then.

Yeah I read theory!

ok so here's my uncool leftist belief, i don't give a fuck about theory

i haven't read "the conquest of bread" (it's a cookbook, right?) or das kapital or any of that shit because like i'm sure these guys were all very smart fellows but most of them were like 19th century dudes and shit's kinda changed since then

i like emma goldman's sexts, they're cool

i'm not out here trying to formulate the ideal society or solve all of society's problems or try to figure out what comes after capitalism, i'm just like trying to exist in a world that institutionally wants me to not exist

so much theory argument is just like dishonest anyway, it's all about abstract ideas and intellectual debate and so so so often i see people coming up with these bullshit ideas to justify their emotional prejudices, like y'all own your fucking emotions. like i don't primarily disagree with vaush because of his theories, i disagree with him because he's a fucking piece of shit as a person, reducing that to theory i think is leaving important shit out

yes, but it goes back to the issue of alienation from one's labor

Yeah, the alienating aspects of a dayjob were known even back then, and I believe it was Adam Smith(and probably David Ricardo after him) who thought it was this division of labor that did it. Marx was responding to that.

Kinda funny the fixed things these guys used as their pet examples, be it a pin factory or how much linen would make a coat.*

*being a broke-ass bohemian-type in London, Marx would occasionally have to pawn his trousers and/or coat for his family to get by, IIRC

to undo damage to the planet

that was me, sorry my bad

i should say i did read the anarchist cookbook when i was a kid, it's overrated, i tried making a blotto bomb for a dinner party i had once, it wasn't very good, too much cumin. 0/5.

i think because my non-ILX time is spent engaging in practical work to help people and fix problems, that I enjoy talking about theory on ILX because it's a reminder of some of the guiding principles behind why I do what I do? Also I'm a nerd and like to read books and talk about them.

so much theory argument is just like dishonest anyway, it's all about abstract ideas and intellectual debate and so so so often i see people coming up with these bullshit ideas to justify their emotional prejudices, like y'all own your fucking emotions. like i don't primarily disagree with vaush because of his theories, i disagree with him because he's a fucking piece of shit as a person, reducing that to theory i think is leaving important shit out

Yeah, there’s definitely something there to the use of theory as “justifying some shit somebody wanted to do anyway.” Years ago I recorded a podcast episode with C. Derick Varn that I titled “A Baby Leftist Primer,” wherein he advised that people read far more history than theory. You have to pay more attention to what these folks back then actually _did_ rather than what they _said._

i haven't read "the conquest of bread" (it's a cookbook, right?) or das kapital or any of that shit because like i'm sure these guys were all very smart fellows but most of them were like 19th century dudes and shit's kinda changed since then

otm

xp - I think both history and theory are useful? And I'm someone that tends to focus on history more... praxis keeps coming back to my mind as a crucial concept.

my favourite book about marx is “Marx: an eighteenth century life” by Jonathan Sperber. he’s a writer we always read through the 20th century (in which his ideas had most impact on the world), but the ideas make so much more sense when set in the context of his own times. in many ways marx was “live-blogging” the nineteenth century

(hint: it involved the ubiquitous availability of lemonade to an extent you would probably not predict)

my kind of utopia

i find it harder to get bogged down in theory for me anymore (in the US that is) now when I've grown more pessimistic about any of it succeeding in an oligarchy where constituents are all ignored. though that's not me saying 'hand over the keys and give up' because that's not me, nor does it mean I don't care (I care too much, which is why I could not sleep last night). i got real inspired when I saw movement forward during the George Floyd protests, but it really felt like the moment RBG died added a bit of semi-permanency to the fuckery. in the shitty Scalia days we could depend on them to at least preserve abortion and knock down these ludicrously draconian gay/trans hate bills, and there was still a fighting chance when it was just a 5-4 split, but now protecting people basically involves hoping you get the 'right' federal court and hoping if they rule favorably that SCOTUS *doesn't* take the case or the other party declines to appeal.

(just vibing with what rushomancy said, sorry all - which was otm <3).

A lot of theory is also dull, badly written.

xpost prior to that, talking about these lofty ideas was much more exciting

if you reject theory doesn't that leave you with your only option being incremental changes to the current system, though? I guess I think of theory as being what allows you to imagine radical change that goes beyond the constraints of what currently exists?

Wonder why we keep coming back to this 19th century blogger..

positive incremental changes, the thing we used to get in nasty in-fights about on the left, now seem a distant memory in addition to progressive leaps forward, moreso nationally than at the state level, though, which seems to generate nuggets of good news still, depending on the state of course. but right now most of the work being done feels like preventing the levee from breaking rather than creating positive change, and we're using old pieces of gum to do it.

alright enough of that from me, sorry for derail.

We must leave all that and read the New Yorker or The Guardian, had a few reminders this week of how, twenty years ago, those writers were thirsty for Iraqi blood.

Kate, check out Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin

How did that damage get done and by whom?

Two sentences later included the phrase "capitalist destruction of the planet," fwiw.

Yes, namely that it was done by people and companies rather than a concept. It’s called a rhetorical question. My question is meant to point out that the cause is being overlooked to treat the symptoms.

i feel like tipsy's point was that treating the symptoms is better than not treating the symptoms?

Yeah I think treating symptoms is good and treating causes is better. Also, some of what we have done environmentally actually IS treating causes, like our clean air regulations and our elimination of CFCs. And, you know, making it illegal to dump toxic chemicals in the river.

Oh of course, the only choices available.

again even the treatment of the symptoms is severely restricted by the existence of economic interests

I’m asking exactly how you do that, because from the evidence I’ve seen, it plays out that way in reality exactly 0% of the time. Tony Blair won a huge majority and he said “even if I could win from the left, I wouldn’t do it.” So I’m asking exactly what that framing is, because the evidence doesn’t bear this line of thought out.

I get your frustration with what Tony eventually became (the few Americans who got what George Michael was saying in "Shoot The Dog" can all raise their hand), although the mental despondence that befell any left-of-center politician who not only witnessed the horrific effects of Thatcherism, had to then deal with watching said horror get rewarded at the ballot box, it's understandable how beat down he might have felt towards the base of his own party. I really wish people didn't turn inward with their anger, but here we are.

A side question for y'all in the UK: how much power does the party leader really have? If Labour controlled government, and a majority of the Party's MPs state emphatically that they support a specific policy, then force votes on said policy, can one leader actually stop it, then hope to stay said party leader?

As for successfully building a winning coalition on progressive issues without marginalizing anyone, look to Minnesota, especially Attorney General Keith Ellison. The Democrats won a majority by emphasizing women's bodily autonomy, more power to labor unions, expanding voting rights, expanding affordable housing, marijuana legalization with expunging criminla records, and direct cash payments to families. And not only was the whole statewide ticket pro-LGBTQ, they all endorsed the re-election of the first Black Trans city councilmember. All in a fairly competitive state! Is it worthy of a pre-Cupid & Psyche '85 Scritti Politti-level examination via the lens of Frantz Fanon-meets-Antonio Gramsci-while Engels dialectizes, well not quite. But it's working-on-a-hope optimism, and evidence that there is a way forward.

again even the treatment of the symptoms is severely restricted by the existence of economic interests

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, March 23, 2023 10:28 AM (one minute ago)

this is also true ...

that said, i don't think ilx will dismantle capitalism ...

Also, some of what we have done environmentally actually IS treating causes, like our clean air regulations and our elimination of CFCs. And, you know, making it illegal to dump toxic chemicals in the river.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Please this is beyond CFCs and regulatory tinkering.

that said, i don't think ilx will dismantle capitalism ...

― sarahell, Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe some of its posters can look at what our reality is.

Nobody's saying they're the only choices available or that the choices aren't restricted, but I mean — another uncool liberal belief I guess is that clean air and water regulations are valuable even in a capitalist dystopia.

And writing off the elimination of CFCs as "tinkering" I think is a drastic understatement of that particular achievement. But I guess this answers my question: From a revolutionary left perspective, any and all environmental efforts are meaningless until we get the proletarian revolution.

Absolutely no point in engaging with this thread further.

Which gets me back to why I find these kind of discussions of capitalism just not very useful. If the answer always is "Everything sucks and nothing matters until we destroy capitalism," I'm not sure where that leaves us.

yes and ... where I live there was/is still a lot of environmental racism ... many of the poor BIPOC neighborhoods are located near the freeways where the trucks from the port carry cargo to/from the airport and other industrial areas. The prevalence of asthma and other health problems in those neighborhoods was super high. Environmental regulations about vehicle emissions have reduced those. Like, things still really suck, but there are real improvements that have been made in real people's lives because of the regulatory tinkering.

Of course you read that Europe are investing and converting their dependence on carbons (post Ukraine invasion), as is China, and yet certain things have been kicked off that will fundamentally change our societies. We will to reckon in a world that has missed the 1.5 target.

xp - this is not about proletarian revolution, though I expect a lot more disruption, protests and worse. Maybe a proletariat revolution is all of this activity organised to replace a capitalism that is dismantling itself.

A side question for y'all in the UK: how much power does the party leader really have? If Labour controlled government, and a majority of the Party's MPs state emphatically that they support a specific policy, then force votes on said policy, can one leader actually stop it, then hope to stay said party leader?

This could never happen, I don't think? The party leader picks the shadow cabinet, which is who would then be the govt, and MPs are mostly obliged to vote in favour of govt legislation (this is what the Whips are for).

xp - I guess I am just imagining something worse than capitalism ...

Regulations aren't meaningless but they haven't stopped the main events. In that they sense it's "tinkering" because it doesn't alter the main set of outcomes.

I don't know why ppl are struggling with this.

I can imagine something better than this. Maybe I've read too much theory..

*sips latte*

Wouldn't severe national/global restrictions on carbon emissions be the most obvious step toward altering the main set of outcomes? Isn't that regulation?

"We don't have the needed regulations in place" isn't the same as "Regulations are useless."

Would capitalism allow for severe national/global restrictions on carbon emissions?

Isn't that the idea behind a carbon market?

Capitalism already has created a market for buying/selling carbon offset credits ... it is very adaptable.

Do carbon offsets actually reduce emissions, globally? My impression is that that whole system has proven to be a joke, but maybe I'm reading overly cynical sources.

also, I was about to xpost myself by saying "national" restrictions are imaginable; I can see, say, Canada lowering emissions within its borders while encouraging its mining and energy industries to continue doing whatever they want in the rest of the world

Capitalism (or "people and industries with a lot of money") is obviously the major obstacle to emissions restrictions. But if the options are "fight for strong emissions regulations" or "fight to destroy capitalism," I'm going to say based on the track record that Choice A is more viable. We have lots of smaller-scale environmental wins over capitalist interests, but not so many wins on the "destroying capitalism" front.

Do carbon offsets actually reduce emissions, globally? My impression is that that whole system has proven to be a joke, but maybe I'm reading overly cynical sources.

idk my point was that capitalism can adapt and monetize these things ...

yeah sorry sarahell, I conflated yours and jimbeaux's responses

but tbc I don't think creating a new market to financialize carbon will have any positive effects whatsoever. that said, I don't think anyone here is proposing carbon offsets as a regulatory solution, so nvm

Capitalism (or "people and industries with a lot of money") is obviously the major obstacle to emissions restrictions. But if the options are "fight for strong emissions regulations" or "fight to destroy capitalism," I'm going to say based on the track record that Choice A is more viable. We have lots of smaller-scale environmental wins over capitalist interests, but not so many wins on the "destroying capitalism" front.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, March 23, 2023 5:51 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

choice a is impossible until choice b is made.

but choice B won't necessarily result in Choice A being possible tbh

I mean, feudalism wasn't capitalism, and it was a pretty fucked up economic system

We need big scale environmental wins and it's pretty delusional to think we are getting those, or that worldwide regulation is coming.

And no one is saying capitalism will be destroyed as an option B. But it's pretty much set that a lot of bad things are happening first.

But it's pretty much set that a lot of bad things are happening first.

this is otm

also, I was about to xpost myself by saying "national" restrictions are imaginable; I can see, say, Canada lowering emissions within its borders while encouraging its mining and energy industries to continue doing whatever they want in the rest of the world

― rob, Thursday, March 23, 2023 1:50 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

somewhat surprisingly, consumption based measures of carbon emissions (which adjust for the offshoring of emissions you’re describing) are falling in canada, europe and the us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?tab=chart&country=CAN~Europe~USA~GBR

how cool does an uncool belief have to be to be suitable for the uncool beliefs thread? we may never know...

bill maher is hilarious!

A string of unconnected posts of ppl posting their supposed uncool liberal belief opinions with no pushback or discussion doesn't really strike me as a better thread than what this is, but I guess opinions vary. xpost

yeah I actually think this thread got better?

flopson, I'll check that out; this is def not in my area of expertise

tipsy wrote: Capitalism (or "people and industries with a lot of money") is obviously the major obstacle to emissions restrictions.

This is why I wouldn't want to stop calling capitalism "capitalism" as this gloss is too narrow imo. There are cultural and social aspects to capitalism as a belief system, an ideology, a way of life. Are "people and industries with a lot of money" the only reason we haven't banned meat production or SUVs, stopped building pipelines, or etc?

The complicated cultural dimensions of capitalism aren't captured by simply naming the oppressors (though I would agree that fulminating against "capital" prob only works among cognoscenti). I understand your average person-on-the-street doesn't want to talk about the subjectification of the consumer or ideology v. hegemony or etc, but there's more to capitalism than just rich people being greedy, otherwise we would just kill them all.

Sorry if this is a boring tangent

choice a is impossible until choice b is made.

Well see this is the enervating side of the conversation, to me. Tends toward rhetorical paralysis. But ymmv.

Are "people and industries with a lot of money" the only reason we haven't banned meat production or SUVs, stopped building pipelines, or etc?

Mostly, yes. All of those things have deeply entrenched monied interests that resist threats to their profits (or even just things they perceive as threats even if they're not.)

Sure there's more to capitalism than "rich people being greedy," but at the same time "rich people being greedy" is pretty much a baseline of the whole enterprise. And right, killing off one set of rich people doesn't solve the structural problems, as revolutions keep finding out. So yes, it's about changing the structures. But what are the obstacles to changing the structures? Rich people being greedy.

There's a whole train of thought - I would say probably still the prevalent train of thought in the mainstream - that argues rich people being greedy is the only way to ensure we have anything resembling a healthy society, present in academia, the media, politics, etc. And it's not just espoused by ppl directly paid by said greedy rich people. That's an obstacle to changing the structures.

Why do you think (some / most / take your pick) people go along with it then?

xp, yes thank you Daniel

Because capitalism tells a good story! It can afford to. In some cases obviously it's more than propaganda, it's ingrained habit and tradition — a lot of people actually like eating meat, it's what they're used to, so they don't need a lot of prodding from Big Beef to oppose restrictions on cattle farming, e.g.

I mean I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of people go thru life without doing much critical thinking.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality" -- noted racist/anti-Semite T.S. Eliot

Well yes exactly, capitalism tells a good story, has done so for centuries and continues to do so regardless of whoever the current group of greedy rich ppl are!

My point was that the situation you just described — capitalism tells a good story — means retaining "capitalism" as a theoretical concept is more useful than simply calling it "people and industries with a lot of money," but perhaps I've misconstrued your original uncool belief after so many posts?

Or maybe this seems like pointless semantics (it's not to me, because "why do people consent to capitalism and take it on as a personal belief?" is something I'm interested in)

multi-xps

fwiw, people 'go along' with capitalism and its structures because they are deeply embedded in them, have known nothing else their entire lives, depend on those structures to deliver the basic necessities for life, and they are codified in both law and custom to the extent that even those of us who would gladly destroy capitalism are forced to 'go along' with it in the face of force majeure, in the same way a leaf goes along with a river in spate. this includes all the people who have posted in this thread. nor is this is an indictment of them, their ethics or morality, their critique of capitalism, or their lack of success in destroying it.

it is stunningly difficult to imagine a practical path from where we are today to a wholly new and better set of economic and social structures that better serve humanity without also creating conditions that kill tens and more likely hundreds of millions of people. the fact that many of the participants in this thread actively seek alternatives and devote large amounts of energy to building them is a testament to their tenacity. we should be encouraging one another in that process, not tearing down anyone's attempts to imagine a path out of where we are.

I mean I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of people go thru life without doing much critical thinking.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

That's hardly the reason why capitalism has survived.

A lot of people who tried to build a better society, or protested at the current state of things, have been killed or imprisoned by capitalists and the state.

"My point was that the situation you just described — capitalism tells a good story — means retaining "capitalism" as a theoretical concept is more useful than simply calling it "people and industries with a lot of money,""

OTM. A very telling post when you just don't want to use the concept that's right in front of you.

Words -- even if they come from big bad 'theory' -- are actually good sometimes.

Aimless, I'm unsure of your tone, but ftr I'm asking tipsy these questions because my understanding is that he finds it tiresome or unhelpful (sorry if that's a mischaracterization, I need to run) to describe capitalism in more or less the kind of totalizing water-to-the-fish terms you have just used. I'm pushing back because I think his preferred terms are too simple and don't capture the magnitude of capitalism's presence in history, society, politics, culture, and people's everyday lives — the way capitalism invades and affects an increasingly widening array of phenomena. I'm certainly not criticizing people for going along with capitalism tbc!

This could never happen, I don't think? The party leader picks the shadow cabinet, which is who would then be the govt, and MPs are mostly obliged to vote in favour of govt legislation (this is what the Whips are for).

And if they don't vote for govt legislation the leader can do like Boris Johnson did and throw them out of the party.

fwiw, people 'go along' with capitalism and its structures because they are deeply embedded in them, have known nothing else their entire lives, depend on those structures to deliver the basic necessities for life, and they are codified in both law and custom to the extent that even those of us who would gladly destroy capitalism are forced to 'go along' with it in the face of force majeure, in the same way a leaf goes along with a river in spate. this includes all the people who have posted in this thread. nor is this is an indictment of them, their ethics or morality, their critique of capitalism, or their lack of success in destroying it.

I think this is true in many respects but also incomplete and unsatisfactory. It's just the kind of totalizing framing I don't like. Believing in this omniscient/omnivorous "capitalism" is a belief itself, one that imbues an imagined adversarial force with so much power that it almost defies resistance. I do think capitalism conceptually explains a lot of things; I do not think it explains everything. I think the realities of both economies and humans are more simultaneously more earthy and subtle than that formulation.

Which I guess is also my answer to rob's question. Yes I know I'm using simple terms, because I think it's most valuable — useful! — from a political standpoint to talk about things in more concrete and less theoretical terms. And also because I just resist the mystification of "capitalism" that I think both the right and left fall for (in obviously very different ways). I think the Marxist lens is invaluable and has held up well and provided great insights. I don't think it's a religious revelation that explains everything and leaves us waiting for its own final judgment.

"My point was that the situation you just described — capitalism tells a good story — means retaining "capitalism" as a theoretical concept is more useful than simply calling it "people and industries with a lot of money,""

OTM. A very telling post when you just don't want to use the concept that's right in front of you.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, March 23, 2023 12:04 PM (sixteen minutes ago)

but there have been "people and industries with a lot of money" longer than capitalism has existed. I feel like it's easier for people to understand the pre-Capitalist society than a post-Capitalist one, but still, the existence and reality of Pre-Capitalism does expose some of the (invisible) framework of capitalism. So I feel like it's valuable to point it out. Like, there are horrible things that humanity has done/been that predate Capitalism. Granted, Capitalism has allowed humanity to do horrible things on a much larger scale.

otm there is more continuity than discontinuity through human history of exploitation and carnage by those with wealth and power.

A lot of Marxist historians have engaged with these btw...they use big words, sometimes.

Believing in this omniscient/omnivorous "capitalism" is a belief itself, one that imbues an imagined adversarial force with so much power that it almost defies resistance.

Globalization has created a system that is extremely resistant to capture or control. Most especially, the globalization of banking and finance. This greatly undermines the ability of national governments to defy the destructive imperatives of profits before people. So, it isn't simply a belief. The adversary is unified at a level greater than the unity of nation states and can divide and conquer with depressing ease.

Well yeah except that capitalism is NOT actually a giant sentient blob acting with unified purpose. And I don’t think talking about it in those terms clarifies much.

A lot of Marxist historians have engaged with these btw...they use big words, sometimes.

Sure! Big distance between that and “becz capitalism” Twitter discourse.

Some twitter discourse is like that but a lot of it isn't -- it depends on who you follow.

Personally I consider myself a jackoff of all trades.

I have followed this thread closely and gotten several good reading recommendations. Thanks to all.

What remains to be seen is this: even a fairly privileged liberal (like me) who is reasonably close to the levers of power (again, like me - I work in and around Washington DC and have spent time in the White House and Congressional committee rooms) has extremely limited ability to change the structural stuff.

Like, I could literally walk into the executive offices of (say) the CIA or the U.S. Navy and tell them to do things differently. This would last appproximately twelve seconds before I was thrown out and placed in Gitmo while my children vanished into poverty and peril. What would I have accomplished by doing so?

an awesome tall tale to tell in prison

“And then everybody clapped.”

i saw something on twitter and it hurt my feelings, that means ppl should say "greed" instead of "capitalism"

Like, I could literally walk into the executive offices of (say) the CIA or the U.S. Navy and tell them to do things differently. This would last appproximately twelve seconds before I was thrown out and placed in Gitmo while my children vanished into poverty and peril. What would I have accomplished by doing so?

― carne asana (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 23 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

But its how change happens! I think you should do it.

Xyzzz I presume that in this scenario you are providing for the material needs of my wife and children whilst I molder in captivity

Or are they just collateral damage on the way to a socialist utopia

Your move, my dude

I've never really understood how you get people to do the majority of jobs if their housing/food/comfort aren't dependent on them

I promise you, poster carne asana, I will pay wife and child support.

Now please go with socialism!

Don't listen to Marx then, listen to Joyce.

Biggest con in US history is how a very small wealthy portion of the population whose only political motive is to reduce taxes to virtually nothing (for them) has managed to exploit folk fears to align millions with their cause. Fear/hatred of the Other is all they promulgate.

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 23, 2023

one of my most favorite persons to follow on twitter

tweet gives me hope; reading the replies makes me want to kill myself

I only read replies to posts like this if I want to be reminded of how many trolls/bots there are on twitter, which is not very often

Xyz, just asking out of curiosity, how many global economic systems have you successfully overthrown?

Show your work please.

Pics or it didn't happen.

If you know so much about how change happens, surely you have a track record to demonstrate the feasibility of your recommended methods

i saw something on twitter and it hurt my feelings, that means ppl should say "greed" instead of "capitalism"

Yr not within 100 miles of anything I've said or meant, but that's OK, I knew what this thread was when I came in. To restate, I think a lot of the ways people talk about "capitalism" are not interesting, insightful or useful. The more it becomes this all-encompassing inescapable blob, the less anyone actually understands it.

carne asana - please walk into that FBI office. Once you're in jail posting on ilx (pics please) I will tell you what to do.

I've never really understood how you get people to do the majority of jobs if their housing/food/comfort aren't dependent on them

Many (not all) shitty jobs are awful largely because of precarity - overworked, underpaid, fearful. Absent disparities in pay I would much rather be an overnight janitor or warehouse worker than, I dunno, ExxonMobil accountant.

Question about that, though. The disparities in pay part. So let's say the surplus value of labor accrues to the worker rather than the boss. Don't you still end up with some workers making more? Not everybody's going to produce the same amount of surplus value. Or do you just somehow absorb all the value in some kind of depository and then distribute centrally?

I know there isn't really a working model of this, but I'm trying to conceptualize how that works.

I have been working hard for 30 years, and I generally like my job, but I am totally aware that a good robot could do my job adequately.

Once robots are doing all the stupid work, perhaps we can all just relax for a bit. Drink a lot of wine and play with our genitals until the apocalypse arrives.

So let's say the surplus value of labor accrues to the worker rather than the boss. Don't you still end up with some workers making more? Not everybody's going to produce the same amount of surplus value. Or do you just somehow absorb all the value in some kind of depository and then distribute centrally?

Hang on, I think you’re conflating value with wage with profit.

I think the big distinction of the set up in a cooperatively run firm is that such differing pay rates would be democratically decided by the workers. One of the main goals of Marxism has more to do with equal power, rather than equal pay rates. A much more just and equitable society would be set up to deliver differing levels of care and support to differing people, wouldn’t it? That’s part of where the “…to each according to their need” bit comes from.

Once robots are doing all the stupid work, perhaps we can all just relax for a bit. Drink a lot of wine and play with our genitals until the apocalypse arrives.

thevenusproject.com

Your wife might leave you for one xxp

Re: robots

I’ve started reading James E. Smith’s _ Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation_ and it’s quite good so far.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo70564105.html

So let's say the surplus value of labor accrues to the worker rather than the boss.

This is where I get confused about what happens when there is no profit, ie an early(ish) stage company where wages come out of investor capital not profit because there is no profit (yet?). But if there is no profit does that also mean there is no surplus value or am I conflating the two.

I realise maybe that one is probably more suited to the economic questions thread

I think you’re conflating value with wage with profit

Not conflating, trying to figure out how the value generated by labor would translate into either wage or profit under a cooperative system. I mean, I suppose there wouldn't be "profit" per se.

And per anvil's question, definitely things like "investor capital" seem like they would just disappear in this kind of system — maybe that's good, who knows. But how anyone would, like, start a company, or who could do that and how, is hard to picture. We're talking about an economic arrangement so different to what we have that it's hard to envision in a concrete way.

ended lenin, trotsky and stalin pic.twitter.com/oxO8T0n6Ux

— leonardo (@skyferrori) March 23, 2023

definitely things like "investor capital" seem like they would just disappear in this kind of system — maybe that's good, who knows. But how anyone would, like, start a company, or who could do that and how, is hard to picture. We're talking about an economic arrangement so different to what we have that it's hard to envision in a concrete way.

you realize that in the US, this is basically how 501(c)3 nonprofits work, right? The surpluses go towards operations and no one gets dividends or profit sharing points. There are different degrees of equity in terms of compensation, and some nonprofits have somewhat radical pay structures for staff. Others are more conventional in capitalist logic terms. ... and there are a lot of workers that work for non-profits, and lots of non-profits get started every day. I have personally started two?

hey sorry i hadda drop out of this thread, my life is fucking crazy right now, just wanted to give shout-outs to alfred, thanks for the bayard rustin recommendation, it's going to the top of my reading list. anyway peace out love y'all

hugs, Kate

Nonprofits are something of a model, sure, but not necessarily a great one — I have many, many friends who either work/have worked for/run/have run nonprofits and for one thing they sure as heck do not create any kind of workers' paradise. Plus also obviously the nonprofit structure as we know it is embedded in capitalism, not separate from it, so it's at best a partial guide.

Which is to say, just removing the "profit motive" from a workplace in no way promises a good work environment. (See also churches, obviously.)

Nonprofits generally depend on other people's profits to survive.

Specifically they depend on other people's tax deductions.

Yes, but if people did not have disposable income to donate, virtually all nonprofits would die on the vine.

ideally we would t need a lot of these nonprofits if those people didn’t have so much money

it's v difficult to imagine these things without sketching out how society as a whole works in the scenario. like if you accede to there being some kind of central governing body, some of these "problems" go away. obviously the nature of that body is the crux, but for ex you don't need venture capital if you have a state-planned economy, you don't need nonprofits if you have better systems of care, etc.

Yeah, you can sort of hazily outline that but let me say that my experience with government at all levels — and not just in red states, and not just right-wing governments — leaves me uh not super thrilled at the thought of that much centralized power. I mean, if you just assume universal good faith and a certain level of communitarian selflessness you can posit all sorts of possibilities, but hoo boy that's a lot to assume.

Like, you have to build some level of expected self-interest into any system, you can't make it reliant just on selflessness. (Or I guess that's at least an uncool liberal belief of mine.)

Most of my experience in the nonprofit world was in environmental advocacy and animal welfare.

Environmentalism is in no one's best interest (except, paradoxically, it's in everyone's best interest). Most extractive businesses would gain near-term advantage from fucking the planet faster than their competitors do.

As a naive statist liberal, I want the government to do the things no one else wants to do. That's kind of its job. Nonprofits have had to swoop in and try to pick up the slack. Neither one is succeeding at oresent, but you go to war with the forces you have.

I don't have an easy solution in mind but that's how it looks from here rn.

xps tipsy

in marxism, communism is perfectly compatible with paying some workers more than others. marxism isn't really about reducing "inequality" the way utilitarians care about it (where inequality is bad because you could take a dollar from someone earning more and give it to someone earning less and make the latter better off than you made the former worse off). it's more about destroying the capitalist class. once that's done and the economy is socially managed by representatives of the proletariat, they'll figure out some wage scheme in order to try to make sure enough labour is supplied to fulfill production quotas and provide various services. the ussr had plenty of systems where different workers would be paid different wages; piece-rates, occupation-specific pay-rates, adjustments for "undesirable" work, etc. this typically didn't work very well and over time reforms went more in the direction of more decentralized labour markets

Peak uncool liberalism

oh my god lmao new landlord just dropped pic.twitter.com/SmjksL9f31

— iris (@kkcombb) March 24, 2023

Yes we have often wondered how to exploit people while being totally gay at the same time.

Personally I love 2 print eviction notices on lilac-covered paper and sign them with a sparky gel pen

Nice episode on “the Cult of Nonprofits” here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-sounds-like-a-cult-82627527/episode/the-cult-of-nonprofits-102942825/

I found this interview with Michael Walzer interesting. He's written a book called The Struggle for a Decent Politics.

Thread-relevant pull quote:

Liberalism in Europe, today, is something like “libertarianism”—it is a right-wing ideology. There used to be a left libertarianism, which is probably better called anarchism, and that persists in various sectarian versions, but it isn’t much in the public eye. And then in the United States, liberalism generally means “New Deal liberalism.” It’s our very modest version of social democracy, and it isn’t a very strong doctrine, since many of its practitioners became neoliberals much too easily. So, the -ism is not a strong or coherent doctrine. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t liberals. But liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. But those liberal qualities don’t imply any social or economic doctrine. So, there are liberals in the world, and I can recognize them, but liberalism does not describe their actual political commitment. The word is better used to qualify the kinds of commitments that I write about: democracy, socialism, nationalism, et cetera.

looks good:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/4107-mute-compulsion

Yeah, you can sort of hazily outline that but let me say that my experience with government at all levels — and not just in red states, and not just right-wing governments — leaves me uh not super thrilled at the thought of that much centralized power. I mean, if you just assume universal good faith and a certain level of communitarian selflessness you can posit all sorts of possibilities, but hoo boy that's a lot to assume.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Friday, March 24, 2023 12:54 PM (four days ago)

this is super otm ... there is also a hierarchy of nonprofits, where you have many larger nonprofits that have the same issues as government does, which generally include: excessive bureaucracy, an aversion to "making waves," cluelessness around what is actually going on in the communities they are supposed to be serving/representing ... I've been in positions "consulting" with government and larger nonprofits where it's like that meme with the blond woman from The Office that says "they are the same picture"

oh and we can also talk about how absurdly long it takes to actually accomplish anything ... Covid was actually really impressive in that it was a great test of government and institutions ... and in some cases, I was actually pleasantly surprised!

Yes, but if people did not have disposable income to donate, virtually all nonprofits would die on the vine.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Friday, March 24, 2023 12:36 PM (four days ago)

not really? for a lot of them, at least in the US, it's more along the lines of what YMP was referring to in terms of "picking up the slack" from government (and capitalism tbh). A lot of nonprofits exist due to government and institutional contracts for services, as well as earned income from programming provided to the public. And I forget the data on this, but a lot of donations don't come from the wealthy capitalist class. Anyway, it's a "diverse sector."

Yeah, the nonprofit sector is its own whole universe with a lot of different constellations for sure. There are a whole bunch that get most of their revenue as basically government contractors, especially on the social services side. I do think arts/culture organizations are more in the monied-donor tradition, along with foundations and some small amount of public subsidy. (But even NEA grants aren't very big.) And then there are a lot who survive on a combination of all of the above, scraping together whatever they can get. But it's definitely fair to say that the nonprofit sector as we know it is embedded in our current economic structure, so it can't really serve as much of a model for how things could operate in a different structure.

xp Point taken, I was speaking mostly from my experience on boards, largely having to do with the arts.

Even government grants represent profits in the sense that it is tax in income paid over to the government.

even in arts/culture orgs (my background is in the arts and affordable housing) there is diversity of income "streams" ... though historically they have relied on monied-donors (the SMOB apparatus especially -- acronym for Symphony Museum Opera Ballet), and I feel like some of that predates capitalism tbh.

Even government grants represent profits in the sense that it is tax in income paid over to the government.

There are always going to be profits. The question is what is done with them.

Yeah, I currently serve on the board of an organization that gets more than half its revenue from classes and events. That's unusual in my experience.

the SMOB apparatus especially -- acronym for Symphony Museum Opera Ballet

One of my former bosses — a rich guy — was on the board of the local opera, and he used to joke that the symphony-museum-opera world was just "every rich person in town writing checks to each other."

There are always going to be profits. The question is what is done with them.

This may be true in the non-profit sector but its definitely not the case in the commercial sector!

oftentimes a failing business will still generate profits... for the banks

A company that is making a loss doesn't mean the company is unsuccessful, far from it

the SMOB apparatus especially -- acronym for Symphony Museum Opera Ballet

Why SMOB when MOBS is right there?

A guess: the list is ordered by numbers of organizations of each type and the total size of their operating budgets

i doubt this is an uncool belief with the ILX audience, but it's something I've gotten pushback on from some liberals.

and that is...although yes, someone might legitimately struggle to understand someone that has a thick accent, most of the time I see it happen "I can't understand you" is mostly a form of weaponized racism and little else.

the 'pushback' I've received is "just because it was clear to you does not mean it was clear to someone else - and if someone doesn't understand, they have a right to ask to repeat, you can't just jump to racism". ok fine, except there are a significant number of times I've been told "ugh I couldn't understand this person and their thick accent", then listened myself and was at a loss how anybody could find them hard to understand unless they were trying hard to not understand them.

on one or two occasions at work in the last year, I've been asked to listen in on classes due to 1-2 learner complaints about how difficult the trainer was to understand, and each time the complaint was registered, the trainer was from India. and each time me and another manager independently investigated, we both found the person spoke very clearly and their pace was fine, and there was little merit to the complaint. each time, that was the assessment we gave back to the manager who requested the listen, though I wanted to say "this was pretty clearly your learner being prejudiced".

Limmy has a story of getting a meeting with the BBC and the exec just telling him "listen people just can't understand you" and he was like "well why do you think that is". I'll admit I found his Glaswegian tough going as a recent migrant to the UK but all it took was watching some hours of his stream, exposure really is everything.

you are describing a form of linguistic bias -- there is a whole field of study about it. see also: testimony of rachel jeantel :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_intergroup_bias

yes you have a right to ask someone to repeat, that is normal
you do not have a right to criticize that person for unintelligibility on the sole grounds of "i don't understand this person"

well i guess you technically have the right to criticize whatever you please but you run a strong risk of being an asshole

the field of accent reduction/modification has gotten a thorough revision in the last few years -- i have been TESOL teacher for long enough to see the pendulum swing to acceptance, which i support.

Limmy has a story of getting a meeting with the BBC and the exec just telling him "listen people just can't understand you" and he was like "well why do you think that is". I'll admit I found his Glaswegian tough going as a recent migrant to the UK but all it took was watching some hours of his stream, exposure really is everything.

Yes, it's a class thing in the UK. From my own experience, middle class people in the South of England are the ones who struggle most with accents that don't sound like theirs. Struggle is the wrong word though, I suspect they think it's not really their job to try to understand anyone else, so why bother?

xp yeah I have spent a lot of time trying to convince Chinese students that they don't need to copy an accent, they should practice their stress-timing instead, it isn't ever easy. I remember one 10-year-old girl had been meticulously trained to speak like a Jane Austin heroine, her teacher was very proud of herself for this useless training.

think it's best to have a foreign accent in England, nobody can work out your class and nobody will hate you for coming from the wrong city. English people hate other English people even more than they hate foreigners.

I once had a year working with an American woman, when she left the city she had a goodbye dinner where she got drunk and settled her scores, apparently she told one of my closest friends "I can't understand a word CaAL says and I hate him" and obviously this got back to me and I was annoyed, but considering the friend is also English it wasn't all an accent problem, I think she essentially hated me for being anxious/nervous when speaking to her, which is imo a bit of a dick move.

Thank you for that, LL! That was helpful to understand that as part of a bigger phenomenon.

Going to show this to my boss's boss after lunch

Ironically, because of its value as a lingua franca, speaking English in India is employed as a means of increasing mutual comprehension. Educated Indians usually have a complete mastery of English grammar and vocabulary.

The main problem with what we call accents is that they change the 'music' we are used to hearing. Because we use those musical clues to anticipate what's coming accents disrupt our ability to interpret the flow of spoken words. By changing the 'music' into unfamiliar patterns our brains have to work much harder, in part because that anticipatory mechanism keeps delivering mismatches with what is heard and we get confused.

I remember watching an American TV interview with Imran Khan where they subtitled him and thinking it was the most ridculous thing I'd ever seen.

I got no problem if they began to subtitle everyone all the time.

when I have a customer at work request something I am always wary of annoying them by asking them to repeat themselves more than once if I don't understand what they are saying. so if I can't tell what they have requested the 2nd time I just say we don't have it.

If this is about being “annoying” (it’s not imo) Isn’t it vastly more annoying to not get what one wants if it’s available than to be asked kindly to repeat something verbally?

generally restating the question is a good step anyway to confirm you understood what they asked, so if I made out some of it, but not the rest, I'll say "it sounds like you're asking about <object>, but I missed that last part - can you repeat the last thing you said?", or if I didn't get it at all, and I've already had to ask to repeat twice, try and say "I apologize, I know I just asked you to repeat - my hearing isn't what it used to be" (which is true), and asking "would you mind repeating your question one more time?", so they know I'm not blaming them for my inability to hear.

worst that can happen is they get frustrated with my inability to understand, and frankly I can't control how people react to me being honest so I don't worry about it. best that happens is I make it out and can help them! good enough trade-off to make the attempt IMO.

(because in my case, my concert-going lifestyle has genuinely eroded a bit of my hearing. I'm not significantly impaired, but enough where I miss things that others without said damage don't). I was doing the closed caption thing before it was a trend for that reason.

it’s ok to say “I’m sorry for not being able to understand you as well as I would like to.” It’s better than writing the person off and not answering their question? This is pervasive and we have a long way to go.

otm

If this is on a call rather than in person isn't it better just to say its a bad line when asking to repeat?

Yeah that works

Every president should be jailed immediately upon completion of their term

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) March 31, 2023

um, that would only incentivize politicians near death's door to run for president. plenty of them would gladly trade up to eight years of massive power and attention against possibly a few years in a minimum security prison with decent health care, depending on how the dice rolled.

Joe Biden is 80

Every president should be jailed immediately upon completion of their term

Death or arrest isn't uncommon for many departing presidents around that world, so this is already true to a degree depending on where you live

since the formation of Pakistan not one president has served a full term. And loads of them have been arrested or forced out. I think they've averaged something like one military coup per decade.

Every president should be jailed immediately upon completion of their term

call it the Seinfeld Rule

Typically the path Illinois governors take.

Joe Biden is 80

and ilx is simply thrilled about it, too

What do liberals think of things like this.

Beautiful speech by @JLMelenchon on free time, explaining what the fight in France is really about pic.twitter.com/IJcn1JQL1u

— David Broder (@broderly) March 31, 2023

Liberals totally agree with this in concept! Idk why you would think they wouldn't?

tbh I think that most ppl on any side of the political spectrum would agree with that speech in isolation, it's not like conservatives don't enjoy having free time lol

the necessity of assuring that everyone gets equal access to this free time is where divisions start

Liberals totally agree with this in concept! Idk why you would think they wouldn't?

― sarahell, Monday, 3 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

"In concept" is the problem. How about just agreeing to it without that caveat? I think society should be transformed so that everyone has quite a lot of free time from work.

it comes down to "how much free time can society afford" as well as what Daniel cites re "equal access" and who gets to make the decisions and the basis for the decisions.

it isn't like liberals are spending their free time forming working groups to engage in mass struggle against capitalism ... I think the communist/socialist left is more concerned with utility than liberals are tbh

granted their definition of utility is different from that of the capitalist dominant ideology

"it comes down to "how much free time can society afford" as well as what Daniel cites re "equal access" and who gets to make the decisions and the basis for the decisions."

I would say that society can afford this. But the concept isn't even talked about by liberals, only the left. Why is that?

I'm a pacifist and anti-military to the core but also am glad the shittiest cockroach imperialist military states of the west are providing weapons of death to Ukraine so their resistance to a Russian invasion is strong enough to hold up. It's a contractionary bunch of opinions to hold and probably the most meltiest position I have on world politics. But there is no surety from me here either though, because I know there are plausible counter-arguments for prioritising de-escalation rather than maintaining a long war - but I can't brook privileged brit knobheads of the left like Oliver Eagleton having strong opinions on something that will never touch them, well unless it ends with nuclear armageddon.

― calzino, Tuesday, 21 March 2023 21:54 (one week ago) link

Sometimes I think of it as "the tie goes to your own side." If caught between imperialisms, I'm still going to choose my own side's imperialism over the other's. Course it's easier in this case that Russia is obviously the aggressor.

Not applicable to Ukraine, but considering the amount of countries ravaged by US/Soviet Union proxy wars I don't think there's a need to choose and in fact a strong argument for telling both to fuck off.

the only side that matters is the people who are victims of neoimperialism - as soon as you start arguing for your preferred team, you're wrong

I would say that society can afford this. But the concept isn't even talked about by liberals, only the left. Why is that?

― xyzzzz__, Monday, April 3, 2023 12:29 PM (yesterday)

talking about it in what context? You mentioned something upthread (or maybe a different thread) about increasing the "pension age" in the UK ... are you thinking along those lines? Because liberals do like writing and talking about their vacations and leisure pursuits that remind them of what happiness is, etc.

only a certain class of people get to do that though everyone else has to work till they die

returning to the theme of lefties who claim to reject liberalism taking ostensible liberal values more seriously than those who proudly claim liberalism ever will

which means that either leftists are the real liberals or that liberalism is a broader church than either group is willing to admit. or that there's something inherently self-undermining about liberalism's claims to universalism. or that the universalism always been kind of a ruse because liberalism has always only been an ideology of and for the bourgeoisie, and leftists are attempting to call its bluff by highlighting its shortcomings. or something

pissing everyone off by claiming marxism and anarchism as radical forms of liberalism

only a certain class of people get to do that though everyone else has to work till they die

they aren't working 24/7 though ... I am just ... idk ... trying to figure out what this is grounded in. Because it seems like you are greatly exaggerating the liberal position, and while you are doing so to make a point, it is still an exaggeration, and I am confused by it. Also I am American, so that could also be part of my confusion lol

and then there's the issue of "work" itself ... I'm assuming you are referring to laboring for others in a capitalist system where the worker is alienated ... I think you're saying some interesting things, Left, and I'm just trying to understand

it's true I'm most familiar with british liberals who are strong contenders for the worst people in the world

I don't have a point I'm just saying shit but I'm trying to make sense of why those who identify most with liberalism (IME) seem to be at best indifferent to the whole liberty equality fraternity their entire political/intellectual tradition is supposedly about - this is nothing new with prominent 1800s liberals supporting poor laws, opposing aid to ireland etc - maybe it's britain that's the problem but I hear talk of liberalism collapsing in on itself all over the place these days

I mean work in the way you defined it, if liberalism is (I contend) synonymous with bourgeois ideology (in all its contradictions) it relies on alienation to exist and can't really acknowledge this within its own terms (assuming for now that marxism isn't liberalism, or is a weird aberrant form of it)

I don't have a point I'm just saying shit

New board description

Anything to replace that onerous Fred quote

only a certain class of people get to do that though everyone else has to work till they die

Uh, yes, OTM x1000.

i know some of y'all here are dyed-in-the-wool liberals who are struggling to understand, for instance, some of the negative things i've said about liberals and liberalism. anyway i was just watching this new f.d. signifier video and i think he gives a pretty good breakdown towards the beginning of the issues a lot of us have with liberalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiLlRwFX_9w

Marvelous, Kate. Thanks.

I would say that society can afford this. But the concept isn't even talked about by liberals, only the left. Why is that?

― xyzzzz__, Monday, April 3, 2023 12:29 PM (yesterday)

talking about it in what context? You mentioned something upthread (or maybe a different thread) about increasing the "pension age" in the UK ... are you thinking along those lines? Because liberals do like writing and talking about their vacations and leisure pursuits that remind them of what happiness is, etc.

― sarahell, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am taking a speech by a French left-wing politician who is thinking along my lines. If you didn't spend time working so much you'd have time for other pursuits, or you could spend time doing nothing.

Liberals here do have time to take a lot of vacations. Skiing holidays, they go away many times a year but they might be working pretty hard a lot of the year. Liberal politicians don't really spend anytime talking about the notion of not working at all. Although in the pandemic you got some of them reflecting on how there is something other than commuting, that you would bake bread, or something like that. It was a one-off though.

Military personnel and veterans getting special privileges like boarding a plane first, etc. Harris Teeter supermarkets reserve parking spots for “veterans”, totally separate from the legally required handicap parking.

Related: businesses that ostentatiously advertise themselves as “veteran-owned”, most egregious in craft beer where they name beers like “Freedom Isn’t Free Lager” or “Honor and Sacrifice IPA”. I avoid all that. Most egregious of all: https://onefamilybrewing.com/products/freedom-250-american-lager
which has to be licensed from Trump’s fake Freedom 250 charity.

Related: businesses that ostentatiously advertise themselves as “veteran-owned”, most egregious in craft beer where they name beers like “Freedom Isn’t Free Lager” or “Honor and Sacrifice IPA”. I avoid all that. Most egregious of all: https://onefamilybrewing.com/products/freedom-250-american-lager
which has to be licensed from Trump’s fake Freedom 250 charity.

― Professor Woods and His Blues-singing Dummy (Boring, Maryland)

i'd argue the contrary: freedom _is_ free lager. i want some free fucking lager.

"freedom isn't free" retains its abject stupidity for me even after seeing it everywhere for, what, two decades? is it older than that? probably. like......... freedom. the definition of the word. is the same definition. as "free". they have the same root. the same concept. the same state of being. freedom isn't not-free. free-ness is free. it's a one-to-one match. the venn diagram here is a single circle.

freedom is good! not-freedom is not. imo. roping oneself to the state with an ideological statement isn't doing freedom. not at all.

it's just such a brazen example of ideology. a straight-up lie. like saying 'one is not one' and nodding along gravely.

Liberals have mastered the grave nodding along.

"Freedom isn't free" afaict just code for: "If I don't violate your rights, HE *points at an Arab* will"

i hate grave nodding along. usually the expected response when a liberal person starts talking about politics. like please, i swear on the twinkle of life you are blessed with that literally any other subject will be more enjoyable for us both.

xp

yes, i know that. a breathtaking lie. perverted and tragic. a tribe of people who have no idea what freedom actually is. because freedom is real and wonderful and it is absolutely not that, and it is free.

they have the same root. the same concept. the same state of being.

true enough, but after more than a century of incessant advertising jargon pounding it into our brains, the stand alone word "free" has acquired the meaning originally expressed in the phrase "free of charge". nevertheless "freedom isn't free" is still pure militaristic propaganda and people who parrot it are at best suspect.

https://i.ibb.co/27YgMCMf/Jack-Nicholson-Nodding-Yes.gif

Veteran antipathy doesn’t seem very liberal-coded to me. A seat on Veteran Affairs is how you establish your “I’m no commie” bona fides.

https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/cdn/shop/files/brcc-dark-chocolate-11-ounce-ground.png

- affirmative action is good, and there should be explicit quotas for underserved racial minorities and poorer students

- the second amendment does not in any way protect the right to own firearms, and no one should be able to

"veteran founded" w/ a U.S. flag on the label is about as meaningful as "all natural" or "thoughtfully grown"

You know at the back of the grocery store, by the bathrooms, there will be a shelf with a bunch of marked-down, expired or weird products? That's where I saw the bag of Black Rifle coffee

Lol at "Naturally and artificially flavored"

My top 2 favorite types of flavors!

Black rifle cold brew is actually ok … I have had worse

you know what they say, the only thing that stops a bad cup of coffee with a gun is a good cup of coffee with a gun

butthole flavored coffee

I would actually wholeheartedly agree with most of the veterans-special-stuff-is-bullshit especially considering the tooth-to-tail ratio of the vast majority of the services but feel it necessary to point out that the hourly rate for most military members is pretty damn abysmal all things considered so a little discount here and there doesn’t hurt.

But yeah “this business is owned by a veteran” who gives a shit - you own your own business.

Letting underpaid feds and vets save 10% off on their Apple products ain’t hurt nobody

I'm a pacifist and anti-military to the core but also am glad the shittiest cockroach imperialist military states of the west are providing weapons of death to Ukraine so their resistance to a Russian invasion is strong enough to hold up.

― calzino, Tuesday, March 21, 2023 5:54 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

⏩ ⏩ ⏩ ⏩ ⏩

I just don't give a fuck about Putin, Whereas to me, Zelensky is a dispacable villain.

― calzino, Friday, June 26, 2026 7:08 PM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have no problem with beleaguered feds, some of my best friends, etc.

hope Calzino is well, anyway.

large dense cities where a lot of immigrants and people of diverse backgrounds all live together in harmony are a triumph of human civilization and are the best places to live in the world

yes

what if the immigrants are mostly displaced from the rural districts, number in the millions, and live in the open air or in makeshift slums with no sewers and paltry water sources?

the hourly rate for most military members is pretty damn abysmal all things considered so a little discount here and there doesn’t hurt.

average hourly rate for US army personnel is $26.26.

tell me again why some dumb chud motherfuck simp with a hardon for the flag and guns should get a discount when that rate is higher than any minimum wage in any state in the country.

fuck the military, fuck the vets, and fuck their discounts

Less worried about veteran discounts and more about $200 billion in disability payments. #1 reason to go with an all-Terminator army.

table, I love you man, never change

love everyone who has always had easy choices

milo I’ve come around, you’re OK too. Keep doing whatever it is you do

what if the immigrants are mostly displaced from the rural districts, number in the millions, and live in the open air or in makeshift slums with no sewers and paltry water sources?

Well that’s most of human history, right? Neverending cycles of these stories of conquest and displacement. But I do think cities are amazing, the connections that happen in them because of density and diversity. The engines of culture.

Like if I had a Time Machine, I would mostly just travel to cool cities in different places and times.

love everyone who has always had easy choices

― trm (tombotomod), Friday, October 16, 2026 6:55 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

explain to me what you mean by this.

I mean it’s easy to mistake your own good fortune for good judgment, and to assume that people who made different choices had the same options you did. Table, some people have had to make compromises or take risks that others have never had to consider. I think it’s worth keeping that in mind before judging them.

wait, what happened to calzino? Did he leave or get permabanned?

He left for the the sake of his own wellbeing I think.

del, i asked tombot, not you.

xp Calzino left because he was losing patience with #liberalthoughts

We are mutuals on twitter, he is posting there as he usually does.

I remember he said he had a relative in the Middle East; he was commenting, like, 12 hours straight at one point, which is not good for anyone's health no matter the thread.

del’s answer is nicer than mine.

i miss him, tbh. a voice of reason

i liked him too, but he was getting weird about Zelensky and Ukraine, and took the worst interpretation of other posters.

I agreed with him 9 out of 10 times and considered him one of the funniest of posters; the relentlessness of his posting style however made nuance a casualty at times even as I nodded.

calzino got a one-month ban in April and never returned. classic poster but Boring otm, he was brainwormed and lashing out at some of our more even-keeled posters, which is always going to look toxic no matter why

Watching the VA assign a dollar value to my dad's health and quality of life has been very interesting. They assign categories of harm via what diseases or conditions you can get, they have your service data so they do some secret math of how close you were to Agent Orange and radioactivity and so on, and they come back and say, since you've had heart attacks and profound hearing loss and cancer and diabetes and we know you were around munitions, jet engines, jet fuel fumes, poisons we used, etc, you can have a monthly stipend of $ and waive this % of your property taxes, and x amount of your lifetime medical care will be covered, and if you're really sick the benefits also extend to your spouse after you die.

The sicker and more compromised you are, as long as you're not dead yet, the more money they give you. The crazy thing, I guess, is that my dad didn't engage with the system until his mid-70s when all the health stuff had already happened to him. Idk if it would have been any better if he had known about it earlier when he hadn't almost died 4x yet? He didn't engage because he wasn't proud of his service, didn't like to talk about it, never got therapy, and still has PTSD, as it turns out, since an earthquake shook him out of his bed last year and threw him into a waking nightmare he was still carrying from that time. (Crazy story there btw.)

Idk if these benefits are assessed the same way for younger vets now, or if the system favored the last generation that could be drafted and then pulled up the ladder. I asked my dad if it was weird to personally exchange his bodily functions and capability for a late in life windfall and he said profoundly so, but also that he has never before felt the...the solemnity of respect that every single person in the VA system has shown.

Sorry if it seems weird that I'm sharing so much detail about something that was 55 years ago and didn't happen to me. Not many people on the board talk about the experiences of being in the military or how America's military has variously touched our lives. Apart from Ned obv! and t-bot and I'm sorry if I'm leaving others out. My dad wasn't even career, he did 4 years the Air Force voluntarily to avoid being drafted, and then refused offers to stay in. He's said in recent years that being in a war made him an objector. But...the life of someone who was deeply damaged at age 19-23ish, and then tried for the rest of their life to be normal but very definitely was not okay...it affects everyone around them too.

calzino got a one-month ban in April and never returned. classic poster but Boring otm, he was brainwormed and lashing out at some of our more even-keeled posters, which is always going to look toxic no matter why

― rob, Saturday, 17 October 2026 bookmarkflaglink

I think there were two bans, but after the 2nd one he returned for a bit to basically tell a few posters where to go before saying goodbye.

Good stuff tbh.

xp to myself And to be slightly relevant to the thread topic, he didn't engage with stuff for vets because he thought discounts and free burgers and drinking beers with people who wanted to talk about being in a war were...I couldn't quote him exactly but he didn't want any of those things. I suppose he would say that if the govt hadn't made him fight their war he wouldn't have, and he never wanted to be part of memorializing it or trivializing it.

I know someone else who was drafted but never went overseas and likes to get his free cheeseburger every year on Veteran's Day or whatever. His life was probably better for it tbh.

I have a friend who was concussed by an IED who goes with her husband to Outback every V-Day to get a free Bloomin’ Onion. Good for her frankly.

For what it’s worth:

my great grandfather volunteered for “the good of country” in the first world war, and never recovered from what he saw as an early fighter pilot. He jumped off the Staten Island Ferry on August 31, 1951, after years of experiencing symptoms that today would be called CPTSD. He was against the second world war, and against all war after his experiences.

My grandfather and grandmother— the daughter of the aforementioned great-grandfather— saw it as their duty, too, and went to Korea. They both returned profoundly changed by the experience, and became lifelong anti-war activists. By the time my grandmother died at 94, she had been arrested more than 100 times at various demonstrations and such. Both she and my grandfather founded their state branch of Veterans for Peace.

Tho of course my existence depends on my mother meeting my father, there is also the matter wherein the love of my mother’s life was, like her, a poor immigrant who was drafted into Viet Nam and never came home, body never recovered.

I am anti-military for many reasons, some could say it’s in my blood.

I have sympathy for more recent vets who were made to believe they didn’t have other options, but the reality is that there were always other options, and many people in similar positions took those other options.

I am also friends with a good number of vets, most of them through my time in Food Not Bombs, which intersected quite a lot with the IVAW back in 2008- 2012 or so. All of them are traumatized and loathe the US military and loathe the VA. A few of them refuse to use their benefits at all.

When I say “fuck the vets,” I mean fuck those who are proud to have served this despicable country. Delusional nationalism is still nationalism, and I won’t ever excuse it.

What I object to is the idea that active military members deserve discounts— which is what tombot was intimating— when so many people are struggling despite having made decisions that didn’t involve working to further murder, which if we’re being honest is the end result of every single action taken by the US MIC. If it is radical to suggest that someone making $12/hr deserves a discount more than some military family that already gets subsidized housing on top of their pay, then call
me a fucking radical.

don’t forget the free healthcare

xp ah you're right xyzzz, I'd mixed things up, nevermind

I was recently at Walmart looking for coffee and apart from bottom shelf shit, it was almost all military or tough guy nonsense. I managed to find a bag of Sophia Vergara coffee which was surprisingly decent.

Veteran antipathy doesn’t seem very liberal-coded to me. A seat on Veteran Affairs is how you establish your “I’m no commie” bona fides.

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z), Friday, October 16, 2026 10:27 AM (yesterday)

yeah i was gonna say, my uncool liberal belief is that veterans deserve better!

but fuck "military discounts", that's on par with calling someone a "hero". nah i mean like opportunities to live a life that doesn't involve the being programmed to kill and obey orders without question.

Sorry if it seems weird that I'm sharing so much detail about something that was 55 years ago and didn't happen to me. Not many people on the board talk about the experiences of being in the military or how America's military has variously touched our lives. Apart from Ned obv! and t-bot and I'm sorry if I'm leaving others out. My dad wasn't even career, he did 4 years the Air Force voluntarily to avoid being drafted, and then refused offers to stay in. He's said in recent years that being in a war made him an objector. But...the life of someone who was deeply damaged at age 19-23ish, and then tried for the rest of their life to be normal but very definitely was not okay...it affects everyone around them too.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Saturday, October 17, 2026 7:22 AM (one hour ago)

yeah my dad was a vet and had a complicated relationship with things

i don't know the details because he wasn't a reliable narrator, but he had shitty awful parents and limited opportunities and needed to get away, and the air force was there. he was an alcoholic and drank a lot and got "dishonorably discharged" for reasons relating to his alcoholism and quit the booze and did ok on veteran's benefits, because it was one of the many things that fucked him up. even if he "volunteered" (and frankly i don't know if he did) he had a bunch of shitty choices to make, and i'm glad that he at least got paid for one of them. it's part of the privilege i have, honestly, having a dad who was on VA disability for decades. the money i inherited from him got me out here to PDX.

he had a bunch of shitty choices and he had opportunities that i didn't and i have opportunities that he didn't, and fuck yes i deserve to get fucking paid for the shit this country has put me through, and i don't expect i ever will. and that doesn't mean he didn't get deserve to get fucking paid for _something_. out of all that bullshit.

my dad wasn't proud of his service, ever. and he was also a fierce advocate for other disabled vets. and those things have stuck with me. whenever veterans' day comes by i do try to remember my dad, his experience as a veteran, because he was _ashamed_ of serving. and that's not a narrative that we hear often.

I believe in coyotes, in time as an abstract, and
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.

xxxp nicely put, table.

For my part, I have no contempt for any person, veterans included, because people are complicated and have unique journeys and experiences I never had. What I really was venting about was how our society seems to have become increasingly militarized and treat them as a special class that deserve perks. as opposed to teachers, for example, who are also paid shit and also put their lives on the line in our sick society.

I do have contempt, as stated before, to businesses that make a big deal about their ties to veterans and cover themselves in right-wing/fascist aesthetics.

This Rick Perlstein article was very illuminating:

‘Stay Strapped or Get Clapped’
How the media misses the story of companies seeking profit by keeping traumatized veterans armed and enraged

https://prospect.org/2024/03/20/2024-03-20-stay-strapped-or-get-clapped/

In orbit, thanks for sharing that. Ambivalence, yes.

My own personal father has a love/hate relationship with his service. He is in every respect a standard NPR tote bag liberal now, and has been a pacifist all my life. But his time in Vietnam sits stubbornly in his story like a sharp rock in a shoe.

He did hippie-adjacent "veterans against the war" protesting, and has been very dismissive of vets and service members getting preferential treatment on planes... but in later years started grudgingly participating in veterans day commemorations and allowing his name to

My father is, I hasten to note, a bullshitter and fabulist whose stories are inconsistent and cannot be trusted.

To this day he tends to blur whether he was drafted or enlisted. Best I can gather, he was either an Army nurse or medic, he was in a normal hospital or something like MASH, he was either exposed to action or was merely involved in cleaning bedpans far from it.

He has been mentioned in a unit citation involving helicopter medical crews, and on a commemoration of a hospital unit, but his stories are often cartoonish, like "I fought off 40 Viet Cong armed only with a banana."

But ambivalence remains and it seems like he wants to have his cake and mock it too.

As to this from Boring

our society seems to have become increasingly militarized and treat them as a special class

Well it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The big 20th century wars had large citizen armies that resembled the populace. These days, increasingly, military-minded folks are becoming a warrior caste, of military families.

And then this separation means the tactical camo bro warrior caste ragerds the soft citizenry with vague contempt, and military people and normies regard the each other warily across the cultural divide.

This would not have been the case for the draft-era military, which included poets and misfits like Vonnegut and Hendrix and Randall Jarrell.

Citizen armies gave us better war poetry. Not that I am advocating for the draft or signing myself up.

When my grandfathers turned 20 the nation was suddenly at war in a far-flung part of the world. My father, ditto. Ditto me in 1991, and my younger half-brother in 2001. My son is 15, and...

calzino got a one-month ban in April and never returned. classic poster but Boring otm, he was brainwormed and lashing out at some of our more even-keeled posters, which is always going to look toxic no matter why

― rob, Saturday, 17 October 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Proud of the fact I'm one of the few ILXors he didn't call a cunt at one point or another. Never say never though!

he once called me a cunt but then applogized because he misread me lol

The “God Bless Our Troops, Especially Our Snipers” signs drive me crazy. God has a prioritized list of occupations that get blessed? Does he have a limited number of blessings to give out? Soldiers that can be a mile from the action while killing people need blessings more than someone actively in the middle of combat?

We haven't had conscription in over 50 years and most troops are drawn from the middle and even upper class - it's definitely an uncool liberal belief to pretend they're largely members of an underclass forced to join the imperial forces to survive (definitely not because love the warfighter hate the war helps one ignore American liberalism's love of imperialism).

Troops are adults (young adults, but still adults) who decided to take a gig at the war crimes factory for their own reasons. They weren't forced into it, they weren't facing a situation with no alternatives - it was a choice.

My family members who were military are all gone now bc they were all WWII vets. none of them viewed their service as a flex but as a duty to combat some extremely fucked up ideologies. They seemed to have gone through hell and never talked about it, I only know stories from letters home i read years later that my mom came across, and the shit is vv bad. Interestingly none of them owned a single firearm after the war, ever. Definitely they were citizen soldiers who just wanted to get home and forget it as best they could.

milo, have you ever hung out with enlisted people?

Or are you just talking shit based on your perceptions of the officer class?

We haven't had conscription in over 50 years and most troops are drawn from the middle and even upper class

Do you mean enlisted men and women or the ROTC grads who enter as officers? In my experience with both groups there's a difference.

You know what, fine, take away the discounts and the free bloomin’ onion and whatnot, shut down every legion outpost, but to act like every vet is some piece of shit worthy of contempt - I mean, trumpet that on a messageboard nobody reads all you want. I guess I hope it makes you feel good.

Some people just want a job that lets them raise a family. Sometimes that job isn’t great.

And some people at the age of eighteen don’t have a clue what they’re getting into.

a workforce that will never be allowed to unionize, is built on contracts that are aimed to exploit young people, that lock them in to jobs where there is no limit on the number of hours they may be required to work in a day, that puts their lives on the line should whichever POTUS decide to launch them into a combat environment, or an adversary decide to try and kick something off, that requires they pull up stakes and move every three years or so to some arbitrarily determined new location - yes. You are all correct. That workforce deserves our disrespect.

massive standing military bad? Sure!! Minimizing or eliminating vet bennies because we can’t see trees for the forest? Dumb as fuck.

milo, have you ever hung out with enlisted people?

lol yes, even if you exclude the people I work with every day, 2/3 of whom are ex-troops.

Do you mean enlisted men and women

The entire military, yes. The poor are slightly under-represented in the American military.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156131/military-views-poor-kids-fodder-forever-wars

https://prismreports.org/2022/04/18/marginalized-students-military-recruitment/

https://iacenter.org/2022/12/21/how-the-war-machine-recruits-poor-oppressed-youth/

https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/2024/editorial/military-recruiters-target-low-income-students-in-the-us

https://inequality.org/article/military-recruiters-high-school/

Milo, have you ever used a search engine?

Opinion pieces repeating the myth and the “Berkeley High Jacket”?

Or we could just look at the actual demographics of the military.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/demographics-us-military

so any information about military recruiters targeting vulnerable low-income young people is invalid because you have some data that shows more middle class kids end up actually passing the tests at MEPS?

good to know, guess we’re back at “fuck vets, they had CHOICES at eighteen”

I hope your coworkers know what you actually think of them

I knew people who earned purple hearts in WW2 who’d be rolling in their graves at the idea that people would genuflect over their service. Knowing and respecting those vets is probably why the constant drumbeat of of awful people demanding gratitude for a job they chose and got paid to do has given me the ick for 25 years. I guess I find the whole thing unseemly, as would most of my relatives who have served.

My opinion is probably also affected by growing up with someone whose ‘gold star mom’ grift following her son’s death in combat (he was a Ranger in Afghanistan) made her into a mega-chud who keeps company with some horrible people. She is basically begging for handouts, but it’s OK because she’s a white ‘patriot’. Unfriended.

The stereotype of kids from conservative petit bourgeois families who weren’t exactly college material joining up has some truth to it where I grew up, and they show themselves on friends’ political FB threads being racist and using the ‘r’ word - that is now their active service. It was particularly horrible during Metro Surge and after the 2024 election. These people definitely expect expressions of gratitude in social settings, but they also expect people to tolerate being called libtards for having more inclusive politics.

But there are exceptions: my best friend from elementary school has four kids she raised right, not a Trumper among them, very working-class. Her daughter went into the Navy to finish her education and after serving in Texas and Italy, she’s training at Walter Reed as a dental technician working with facial reconstruction teams. Her mom would never demand special treatment for the very necessary job her daughter is doing.

as someone who was not low income growing up, but definitely went through some shit, I distinctly remember a marine recruiter specifically seeking me out because one of my classmates had told him I might be a good candidate for the Marines. I was definitely not a good candidate, and it struck me even as fucking weird, like there was no reason that this particular guy would have said anything about me except for the fact that perhaps he knew I was a bit directionless at that time and the recruiter pressed him for others he might pull in. And I don’t even think that guy went into the Marines either.

When you are that age, though, you are not fully formed, and if you’ve gone through some things or you don’t see hope for the future, you understand why it might be tempting.

just responding to boring, maryland's original revive of this, which is basically saying "i don't like it when companies elevate veterans in these kinds of ways". 1. those ways are pretty transparently shallow, idk. 2. it's a feeling to have, for sure, and while i kind of get why, it's also just kinda shallow.

is it an uncool liberal belief to think that people who get strung out on advertising that trades on dickheaded macho bullshit need to get better priorities or is that a conservative one, idk.

let's be clear though that on the subject of violence, the only violence happening in this thread is people, or maybe just a person tbh, going out of their way to hang up on another large group of people, possibly because of a desperate need to locate evil in anyone who isn't themselves.

OK, I guess I’m shallow. But let me be clear. I’m not complaining that “they get a 10% discount at Subway I want a 10% discount waah”. I’m seeing it as emblematic of an increasingly militarized society and special treatment of those who are in the military, which is antithetical to how I think a good society should be.

and you don’t get a special parking space just because you sat in an industrial park and guided drones to weddings.

it is true that 100% of all veterans blew up weddings and killed children by choice.