Don't fool yourself: It's mostly just about family connections and pure randomness.
#Capitalism#Liberalism#Philosophy#MoralPhilosophy#Inequality#Poverty: "Rawls thinks agents designing a society from behind the veil of ignorance might nevertheless allow some inequality, in exchange for greater economic efficiency. But in navigating such tradeoffs they’d be guided by the principle that inequalities need to earn their keep by (a) making the better-off positions available to every qualified applicant under conditions of meaningful equality of opportunity and (b) only allowing inequalities, even inequalities that satisfy condition (a), when whoever is worst off would still be better off than they would be under a more equal alternative.
The resulting loophole for acceptable inequalities is much narrower than many readers of Rawls over the decades have realized. Rawls himself, who certainly wasn’t a radical firebrand by personal inclination, had reluctantly come to realize by the end of his life that even a form of capitalism modified by a generous welfare state couldn’t meet his demanding standard.
Meanwhile, one of Rawls’s most important critics, the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, argued that even this loophole was too large for it to be appropriate to call any arrangement that passed Rawls’s test “justice.” Cohen acknowledged that economic efficiency matters, for much the same reason Rawls thought it did — the standard of living of even the lower classes — but he thought we should keep a more demanding notion of egalitarian justice as our north star."
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.
"Liberals do not see themselves as ‘political’ at all. They believe they are simply trying to implement ‘sensible’ policies that align with evidence and ‘common sense,’ in contrast to their opponents who seek to govern based on nothing more than ‘ideology.’
But liberalism is, of course, an ideology."
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: Al Shifa, Resistance, and Fanonian Psychoanalysis with Dr. Lara Sheehi
"In this episode we will talk about the war crimes the zionists have committed in Al Shifa, how this fits into the landscape of this genocide materially and psychologically. We will also revisit October 7th and discuss how psychological warfare has made it challenging to discuss what Al Aqsa Flood represented and enacted. In doing so we will seek to resist the framing of this day that places limits on our speech and actions in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance. We will also incorporate some discussion of Fanon and his analysis of the Algerian revolution and the anticolonial process."
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: Al Shifa, Resistance, and Fanonian Psychoanalysis with Dr. Lara Sheehi
"In this episode we will talk about the war crimes the zionists have committed in Al Shifa, how this fits into the landscape of this genocide materially and psychologically. We will also revisit October 7th and discuss how psychological warfare has made it challenging to discuss what Al Aqsa Flood represented and enacted. In doing so we will seek to resist the framing of this day that places limits on our speech and actions in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance. We will also incorporate some discussion of Fanon and his analysis of the Algerian revolution and the anticolonial process."
"#Russia has for years positioned itself as a bastion of "traditional" values in contrast with #Western#liberalism as its relations with the West have deteriorated over its 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 full-scale invasion of #Ukraine."
CS: “There is no society,” as Margaret Thatcher put it. Hence the focus on individual change and market solutions in liberalism that guards against any systemic change.
Fossil energy provides individuals with a great deal of independence from other people. Fossil fuels give individuals the ability to make choices and buy items without relying on others. One doesn’t have to work as part of a group to hunt for food each day. Instead I can go on my own in my car down to the supermarket and buy what I want. That is a lot easier than having to work with my neighbors to build a different world. And one’s consumption can be used as proof of one’s status. So fossil fuel-enabled individualism in the West is seen as sacrosanct, as it enables freedom from constraints of social obligations.
It is very difficult to bring about climate action in a world that prioritizes individuals and in which we are so alienated from each other. Technology is intimately related to markets; one can define it as the practical application of science in the service of markets. I argue, much like the sociologist and philosopher Jacques Ellul, that technology changes culture, and the introduction of new technologies hinders the emergence of other ways of thinking and acting on climate change." https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/liberal-blindspots/
German author and anthropologist Wilhelm Grimm was born #OTD in 1786.
Jacob's and Wilhelm's work culminated in the book Kinder-und Hausmärchen, the first volume of which was published in 1812. A second volume followed in 1815. The collection would later come to be known as Grimms' Fairy Tales, with famous stories that include Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, The Golden Goose, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella.
@gutenberg_org
In his later years, Wilhelm Grimm fought for the liberal constitution of the Kingdom of Hannover, together with his brother Jacob and other professors of Göttingen University: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttingen_Seven
As Jacob put it in timeless words, "das Befugtsein gehört denen, die den Mut dazu haben."
An excellent short essay on Islam and liberalism that is especially pertinent in these days of increasingly widespread and militant religious fundamentalism.
Alastair Macintyre and Bernard Williams - top notch writers when it comes to ethics
#MoralPhilosophy#Ethics#Liberalism#Morality#Marx#Marxism#Localism: "MacIntyre once believed that Marxism offered a solution, but by the time he wrote After Virtue he thought that it was ‘exhausted as a political tradition’, even if it remained ‘one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’. The familiar liberal explanations of its failure missed the point, however: the problem with political Marxism isn’t that it is dogmatic, scientistic, authoritarian or economistic, but that it is ‘deeply optimistic’. This is a typical MacIntyre moment: simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true. If there is a single thread running through the works of Marx, it is that the evils of capitalism, terrible as they are, will soon be outweighed by its double legacy: on the one hand the enormous wealth generated by modern industry, and on the other an international proletariat with the strength and wisdom to put it to good use. But Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting ... political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ‘tolerable alternative’. The resulting ‘exhaustion’ had spread from Marxism to ‘every other political tradition’, plunging the world into a ‘new dark ages’, darker than ever before. (‘This time ... the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,’ MacIntyre wrote, ‘they have already been governing us for quite some time.’) The only chance of building a better world, he concluded, was to abandon politics and concentrate on ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’."
Are there even any other (western) company structures aside from cooperatives that promote / consist of structures of respect and equal / fair pay, instead of letting autocracy and greed reign supreme? 🧐
There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy
actually exists; by the political analogue of #GreshamsLaw, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it
does not yet exist. What would it be?”
#Fascism isn’t an ancient relic or an outdated term; it has returned as a living, breathing process transforming and weaponizing the state against its people.
Few remain from the generation that watched the #ideology take hold and mutate and unfold its horrors the first time, and without that living memory, we are challenged to explain what fascism was and how it worked.
Because liberalism has failed us, delivering vast inequality and climate catastrophe.
More liberalism is not the answer, it's fuel on the flames of fascism. What we need is a political economy that distributes the resources, costs and benefits of being human fairly in our society. Our time is short before the world is burned in the name of profits
PSA: Liberals that I absolutely love. My actual, biological fam is also you. Couple things:
Please, what your hear on MSM (yes, talking about MSNBC, CNN...) may not be entirely accurate in non-white terms.
I know you are all super smart, I don't think anybody said otherwise? At the very same time your leftish fam/friends might just be trying to help avoid moral hazards that will literally expand fascism? 1/2 #Liberalism#Fascism#MSM#Baselines
"We live in a democratic society! Apologies, but I cannot stay to discuss this proposition, because if I'm late for work, I might get fired unilaterally by my boss, which then could lead to me losing my ability to shelter, feed, and clothe myself. My boss also exists at the mercy of his boss, who could unilaterally decide to fire him. This is very democratic, because every few years, my boss' boss selects a slate of politicians from which I can choose. I am not a sucker."
#Argentia#Milei#Liberalism: "Even the way Milei speaks of his project carries strong echoes of the country’s liberal statesmen. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the famous nineteenth-century theorist of classic liberalism, used to say that Argentina would only progress insofar as its citizens were “intelligently selfish.” That is, Argentina’s progress depended on its citizens working for their own benefit without worrying about others.
Today, that kind of individualistic worldview has obviously been reinforced and radicalized. As a specifically liberal vision of the individual, it has served as an incentive — or a subtle pressure — coaxing people to orient their lives toward commodity production and the valorization of commodities. Again, as an individualist project, this liberalism expresses itself as a system of rewards and punishments, where economic power represents the fundamental reward.
Milei’s emergence represents, in a sense, the increasing social significance of punishment for the liberal project, in that it is no longer just indirect, impersonal pressures orienting our lives in a market-friendly direction; there is an increasingly open expression of animosity and hostility towards any life project that is not framed by capitalist goals."
Smadar #Lavie: "The refusal of elite #military reservists to attend to their periodic training […] is conceived as another Ashkenazi privilege. In general, being pro-Palestinian in #israel often requires contacts and funds to pay bail rather than rot in prison in case one is arrested during a solidarity visit to West Bank villages."
His family is originally from Massachusetts:
“Here, the geographical division is ethnic-based: we’ve had ghetto communities since the founding of the country. We are the only country in the world where a town can decide who to admit and who not to. They exclude not only Palestinians, but also the poor, or single mothers.” https://global.ilmanifesto.it/israel-is-a-fragmented-society-that-no-longer-knows-itself/@israel
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
"We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations."
— Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, First Series (1845)
Global Elections - 2024