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?

a message board nobody reads

ilx has clearly wound down to the point where it's the internet version of the table in the back corner of the coffee shop where a regular group sits at the same table every morning and shoots the shit, but that doesn't make it less valuable to the ones who sit there.

just a little clarification on the numbers here

milo originally said "most troops are drawn from the middle and even upper class"

but according to his own link (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/demographics-us-military), while the middle class are over-represented (64% of recruits come from the middle 60% of income tracts), the upper class are actually more under-represented (17% from the top 20%) than the lower class (19% from the bottom 20%)

https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/imSiJQYKFHnf.png

measuring this by tract is not really ideal. it could be that there is further selection within tracts, i.e. members poorer or richer households within tracts are recruits. this bias is often called the "ecological fallacy"

but the conclusion seems to hold up in individual level survey data

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/skill-biased-technological-change-and-demographic-composition-us-military-1979-2008

https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg/public/image/FromMay2014/asoni19septfig1.png?itok=bbyDC-20

so directionally the change is that it draws way less from poor households among people born in 1997 compared to the cohort born in 1979. so it became much more representative

even if they are only slightly underrepresented, i still found it surprising that the lower classes were underrepresented given that the financial incentives to enlist would typically be stronger for the poorest. but it seems like this is at least partly an artifact of the military's skill requirements increasing over time, as it gets more technologically advanced

(the above is not an endorsement or criticism of veteran benefits, just some interesting stats i thought cogent to the matter discussion)

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?

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, October 16, 2026 8:57 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

then i would simply double down on uncool liberalism: if the rural-urban migrants moved voluntarily because the city offered them better economic opportunity than the farm, it was at the very least the best among bad options

^ sounds like a laissez-faire capitalism kind of argument

mechanization of agriculture and rural-urban immigration also happened in the ussr and other socialist and communist countries, cities were good there too

were the urban immigrants in those socialist and communist countries living "in the open air or in makeshift slums with no sewers and paltry water sources"?

you see this place has lots of action come on man!

xp yes. examples include magnitogorsk, beijing, havana, ulaanbaatar, among many others

the fact that libertarians also like freedom of mobility does not preclude liberals from liking it

the point I was trying (and seemingly failing) to make is that displacement is rarely a voluntary action, but usually the consequence of forces the individual is powerless to resist. an economic refugee is still a refugee and the 'better economic opportunity' provided by migration to a city is only better because all other opportunities have been forcibly denied.

look forward to grabbing a pint next time I’m in London buddy

― trm (tombotomod), Sunday, 18 October 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Let us know

an economic refugee is still a refugee and the 'better economic opportunity' provided by migration to a city is only better because all other opportunities have been forcibly denied.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 18 October 2026 15:40 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

aimless on hospitals: a person with cancer is still a person with cancer and the 'better medical treatment' provided by hospitals is only better because the other opportunity of not having cancer has been forcibly denied

the existence of forces individuals are powerless to resist is a fact of life. the existence of places people confronted with these forces can go is good

these are arguments from analogy. I suppose that when they are carefully considered for their validity they might convince for some people. i'll let others decide for themselves, but they seem heavy on rhetorical flourish and otherwise mighty weak to me.

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.

― omar little, Saturday, October 17, 2026 1:01 PM (two days ago)

the football coach at my high school wanted me to be a linebacker because i was fat.

i would not have made a good linebacker. i am incredibly unathletic. i was also something like five foot eight. i was just fat.

and it fucking sucks! like the one avenue towards a sorta functioning welfare state we have is to enlist! if we offered what we offer to veterans as a matter of policy, hardly anyone would bother to join!

anyway, the other shitty thing that happens when kids who are looking for respectability and job security enlist is that they often come out radicalized by violet misogyny and christian nationalism and shit, it's super depressing

― PBUH bryson (m bison), Saturday, October 17, 2026 3:35 PM (two days ago)

like, i'm not gonna go all hillbilly elegy about people who want me dead. to be clear. people make choices, and they're responsible for their choices, even if all they don't have _good_ choices. i also think that this shit is a cycle, and that some of these kids who grow up in these environments _do_ deserve better opportunities. i am privileged in a lot of ways, even if the shit i've been through has limited my own opportunities.

i will also say that the shit we offer veterans today is a _shadow_ of what america offered veterans in the past. (he served _before_ vietnam, i think... he was born in the 30s.) shit wasn't easy for my dad and i did, to be clear, have it easier in my life because my dad was a disabled veteran. serving in the military fucked him up really fucking badly, and it gave his kids opportunities that he didn't have, and i know that for him, that made it worth it.

ilx has clearly wound down to the point where it's the internet version of the table in the back corner of the coffee shop where a regular group sits at the same table every morning and shoots the shit, but that doesn't make it less valuable to the ones who sit there.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, October 18, 2026 10:09 AM (yesterday)

i don't have anywhere else to go

Kate, you can still be a linebacker - i know it's your heart's desire. ;)

xxp lol i got that from a great-uncle when i was a fat 10 year old. "you must play football huh?"

I got a little depressed looking at the military enlistment by household income because the majority of recruitment is in the three *middle quintiles* but those quintiles only cover ~$42K - $88K per year

fwiw the Pew research metric for the middle class, which is pretty variable depending on location, is $54K to $163K. "middle quintiles" with "middle class" get conflated

i don't have anywhere else to go

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, 19 October 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Why are people leaving when ILX is just getting started?

I got a little depressed looking at the military enlistment by household income because the majority of recruitment is in the three *middle quintiles* but those quintiles only cover ~$42K - $88K per year

fwiw the Pew research metric for the middle class, which is pretty variable depending on location, is $54K to $163K. "middle quintiles" with "middle class" get conflated

― mh, Monday, 19 October 2026 14:45 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

those aren't the quintiles of the distribution of household income. they're the quintiles of average household income by census tract. first average all the households in a tract then group the tracts into quintiles with equal numbers of people. this would be one reason why it's more compressed

there could be other measurement differences too though they don't explain in detail how they calculated it

the x axis in the second graph i posted is the range of household incomes, and that aligns more with your/pews notion of middle class

this is what I get for not digging into all of the posts after the one I noticed. thanks for the clarification

The crisis in Ukraine is 100% the fault of Putin and Russia wanting to take over territory from a sovereign state, thus invading them to do so, and any whataboutism aimed at Zelensky is pure uncut Putin apologia

Too simple man

just like Gaza, it’s complicated

(nb I do not believe Gaza is complicated)

Title of the thread, of course! However, what's not true about it? Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin is the aggressor. That's it, everything else is minor compared to that, unless one has fallen in the "Putin was trying to de-nazify Ukraine!!!111!" apologia that unfortunately finds its way over here on occasion

Generally, no, I don't want a Putin-Trump alliance, but Ukraine has not been clean the last 15 years

What did Ukraine do to Russia that deserves invasion? Merely existing?

Never said that!

Azov Brigade was obv problematic, but I do remember some ILXors bringing that up

Not aiming this at you, Alfred, just trying to figure out what exactly betwixt Ukraine and Russia would ever cause anyone to drop the Avril LaVigne "Be So Complicated" response rather than find the Uncool Liberal Belief that "Russia and Putin saw a place they wanted, then they invaded it, while interfering in foreign elections to elevate useful idiots into power"? Kinda figured that was settled law here

i just want to ask a question

who really cares to save a world in despair?

who really cares?

There'll come a time (There'll come a time)
When the world won't be singing (When the world won't be singing)
Flowers won't grow (Flowers won't grow, no)
Bells won't be ringin' (The bells won't be ringin')
Who really cares? (Who really cares?)
Who's willing to try? (Who is willin' to try?)
To save the world (To save the world)
That's destined to die (That is destined to die)
When I look at the world (When I look at the world)
It fills me with sorrow (It fills me with sorrow)
Little children today (Children today)
Are really gonna suffer tomorrow (Really suffer tomorrow)
(Oh!) What a shame (What a shame)
Such a bad way to live (Such a bad way to live)
Oh, who is to blame? (Who is to blame?)
We can't stop living (When we can't stop living)
(Ohhh!) Live, (Live)
(Live for life) Live for life
(But let live everybody)
Live life for the children (Live life for the children!)
(Oh, for the children!)
You see, let's... (Oh!) Let's save the children (Oh)
Let's...let's save all the children
(Save the babies! Save the babies!)
(And if you want to love, you got to save the babies!)
(Oh, you've got the feeling, you've got the feeling)
(You will save the babies! All of the children!)

but who really cares?

who's willing to try?

The only real complication is that (like Israel), it’s not just about territory and no concession of land is ever going to be enough. It’s a wider imperialist project that seeks to dominate and project power over neighbours while, at the same time, curtailing domestic democratic movements with a shift to a fully militarised state. Shouldn’t just be liberals who are unabashed in opposing that vision, whether it’s Russia, Israel or anyone else. Excited to see whether kneejerk campism can survive the US switching sides, though.

imo everything is downstream from russia’s prior invasion in 2015 where the outcome was a cessation in exchange for talks toward an agreement that just never happened. maybe it just didn’t happen because it never would, but NATO/ the US/ etc knew it was a ticking clock. probably none of it was in particularly good faith?

I’d imagine it never happened because Russia’s terms were exactly what they claim to want now, control of Crimea, and the unspoken end goal was control of Ukraine regardless of concessions

Kind of, yes. Zelenskiy was elected as the candidate willing to negotiate elections in Donetsk and Luhansk and special status within Ukraine - which was controversial at the time because, the argument went, that they’d effectively have a veto over major national policy decisions unfavourable to Russia, like potential EU accession. It was seen as a soft form of ongoing control. The sticking point was that the elections were meant to be free and held under Ukrainian law but that wasn’t seen as viable with Russian-backed warlords / militias setting the conditions on the ground.

It’s a wider imperialist project that seeks to dominate and project power over neighbours while, at the same time, curtailing domestic democratic movements with a shift to a fully militarised state.

otm. not seeing the invasion as fundamentally an act of imperialism is baffling to me (true of Israel as well, but it's the rare leftist who doesn't grasp that)

traditional conservatives also hate this war and Russian aggression... it's only the Trumpist faction that gets a chub from Putin

Traditional conservatives in Congress apparently don't hate it enough to team up with Democrats and block Trump's actions.

Not aiming this at you, Alfred, just trying to figure out what exactly betwixt Ukraine and Russia would ever cause anyone to drop the Avril LaVigne "Be So Complicated" response rather than find the Uncool Liberal Belief that "Russia and Putin saw a place they wanted, then they invaded it, while interfering in foreign elections to elevate useful idiots into power"? Kinda figured that was settled law here

― Bon JovIver - You Give Skinny Love A Bad Name (Prefecture), Thursday, 22 October 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe you should revive a poptimist thread in 2004

NATO lmao