WhatsTheHoldup @ WhatsTheHoldup @lemmy.ml

Posts

0

Comments

221

Joined

4 mo. ago

Social rights are great, but you're ignoring cost of living and material conditions to paint there being more progress than there has been.

Financially, the average worker has seen the cost of food, housing and transportation increase massively with inflation but wages haven't kept up.

The 2008 banking crisis and COVID 19 have only pushed this even further.

83% of statistics are made up. Here's the original comment:

I'd imagine if one genuinely cares about stopping the genocide they'd be exactly as civil as they'd strategically need to be.

In the scenario where celebrating Bidens death is strategic I actually made an argument pro celebrating his death.

It would require bad reading comprehension to interpret it differently than what it literally says.

they are responsible for a genocide

So then shouldn't we do everything strategically possible to oppose the genocide?

Why is "we should adopt the best strategy possible to stop genocide" so offensive to you?

He didn't, and it's bad faith of your to say he did.

if they did it again, you'd find some new procedural nitpick to justify not responding to it.

Then that's it. If I'm bad faith the discussion needs to end.

If you understand why they might not want to type up a long comment only for the other person to find some nitpick then you 100% understand why I ignored that one specific comment and replied to every single other comment on this thread.

Including to you actually multiple times to which one comment you replied

You've captured the flaw in liberalism extremely succinctly.

Thank you for the compliment. It's funny to see you reply to me in so many different threads I feel like Schrodingers faith right now. Am I good faith? Bad faith? Who knows.

Thank you!

Letting the guard down to capitalism is a core part of liberalism. In order to not let your guard down to capitalism, you would have to abandon liberalism.

Yes I understand you want me to believe that.

I have my guard up and describe myself as a liberal. You see my guard up and say I'm not a liberal.

At the end of the day these are just labels. Losing our minds at someone describing themselves as "socialist" or "liberal" is not worth it to me if we agree on the concepts.

So many people here seem to be more focused on the label than the concept.

To make what point?

Read the original context. It all makes sense if you read what I was quote responding to.

You said, to paraphrase cause I don't want to go find it, "if liberalism means that then the US isn't liberal" or something, so I quoted a Marxist who described the development of the frontier less as a liberal democracy and more as primitive Libertarianism.

"Rights of the individual", "liberty", "consent of the governed", "political equality" and "equality of the law" are meangless buzzwords that should be ignored is an interesting angle.

I assure you, socialists already know how capitalism coopts ideology.

Then there should be no issue in using the term liberal without anyone getting confused. But yet..

Yes, because they did it under a liberal system. Liberalism allows capitalists to do these things. Thats the problem with liberalism.

Correct. Liberalism let it's guard down to capitalism for too long under the idea that competitive markets increase efficiency and now society is having to face with that mistake.

I don't even know what point you're trying to make.

I posted a Marxism.org link to quote a Marxist philosopher I told you to read and you replied

"Yes, that's all well and good, but it still not anti-capitalist or marxist."

Did you miss the part where he listed taking slaves as part of his ideology?

In the way you describe, yes I missed that.

So you do accept that unilaterally declaring that someone has "forfeited their rights" and taking them as a slave with no due process is compatible with your beliefs?

"Slave" is a very archaic word in this context. It is my understanding he is talking about the concept of prisoners.

If a person murders another, I do accept they have "forfeited their rights", and that we should then use due process to try them of this crime, and if guilty they should be imprisoned (does that mean taking them as a slave?).

This is not the economic practice of slave labor being described.

Yep. I'm somewhat new to some of these ideas, and there's a whole bunch of people trying to raise points at the same time.

If I'm going to learn, and respond intelligently I need to make sure I don't get burnt out, and if this guy opens in such a blatantly bad faith way I'd rather spend the time replying to one of your or the many other intelligent comments I've been getting.

If I misjudged them, they now know how to phrase it to get a reply and I've told them they're free to comment again and make an argument.

Poor reading comprehension on your part?

Then just respond to my arguments

Make an argument.

Ok, but this is wildly different to how the vast, vast majority of the world uses the word liberal, including liberals. Realize that the definition for liberal that you're a applying to yourself is incredibly divergent to how most people use it, and consider that you might have less misunderstandings if you just say socialist.

I think that misunderstanding can actually be a good thing because it allows me to explain how capitalists coopt ideology.

Whatever the dominant philosophy in a culture is, you'd expect capitalism to grab its grubby hands around it and twist it into something it's not.

Capitalist liberalism and liberalism are not the same thing, and there's value in helping people understand this.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that he agreed with him on everything.

Exactly, just like I don't agree with John Locke on everything.

Karl Marx critiqued liberalism and the social contract where he felt it deserved to he critiqued. He didn't equate it as the same thing as capitalism, or strawman if as I've seen done in this thread.

People are using the word liberal to describe things that capitalism did.

Yes, that's all well and good, but it still not anti-capitalist or marxist.

I'm sorry..what?

Youre criticizing me for saying the Republicans aren't liberal but that marxist.org link isn't Marxist enough?

Albert Weisbord (1900–1977) was an American political activist and union organizer. He is best remembered, along his wife Vera Buch, as one of the primary union organizers of the seminal 1926 Passaic Textile Strike and as the founder of a small Trotskyist political organization of the 1930s called the Communist League of Struggle.

Here's a pamphlet of him being advertised as the guest speaker at the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in the Soviet Union

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Weisbord#/media/File:27-weisbord-leaflet.jpg

I don't even know what to say to this. What am I missing?

I'm not going to be trying to persuade anyone about culture war bullshit that doesn't matter.

The original guy was talking about strategy. Is there a strategic reason to try to persuade those people not to celebrate Trump's death?

Lmao, I engaged with all your arguments, but you cannot do the same for me.

I will engage with any content in your argument.

I'm not going to argue with your definition of liberal.

I would love to keep talking but I'm the liberal, accept my definition of my own system of beliefs or I have nothing to say but "nu uh".

Wow, scratch a liberal and they'll tell you not to do that because they don't like getting scratched.

How revealing.

You realize you've just redefined "liberal" to mean "socialist".

We get to the same conclusions I realize, but I didn't redefine anything because we get there from different premises. Liberalism and socialism I would argue are ridiculously compatible views.

Marx's favorite philosopher was Hegel and if you look at Marx's dad Heinrich

Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, which was then an absolute monarchy.

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

And also given a definition where the Democrats aren't liberal, nor is anyone who supports the existence of the US or nation states in general

Give Albert Weisbord's Conquest of Power a read.

The fact that practically all of the settlers were poor has led to a sort of idealization in the United States of the poor and common man. In England one would fain forget his common stock; not so on this side of the Atlantic. Yet poor must not be confused with proletarians The mass of emigrants forming the basic “mother class,” a class so large that it believed no other classes existed, and thus no classes at all, was composed neither of proletarians nor of bourgeois but of petty bourgeois middle class elements, trying to find prosperity and plenty. In the Western hemisphere, the idea of class was dissolved into its matrix of mass; that is, there were masses but no classes!

The lack of great capital and the resultant absence of clearly-defined classes in the West have given many historians the idea that democracy flourished in the West from the beginning. This is not the whole truth by any means. The West has not only given us Democracy; it has also provided us with a wholesome contempt for all government.

It must never be forgotten that Democracy is essentially a type of State in which the people are supposed to control political affairs, either directly or through representatives. Democracy includes in its fundamental characteristics not only the right to vote and to hold office, but also a host of civil liberties in which the right of free speech, press, and assemblage are the most prominent. Now, in moving West, the tendency of the pioneer and frontiersman was to move away from all government and state laws, however mild. It was not a case of “liberalizing the law"; on the frontier the hand of the law was not to be found at all. Whatever action was necessary was effected by a posse made up directly of the people involved. There were no courts, no police, no prisons, no armed force of the State, no tax- gatherers. The original state of the frontier can best be described not as one of primitive Democracy, but as one of primitive Libertarianism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/weisbord/conquest2.htm

Again, Marxism and Liberalism aren't necesarily disagreeing.

There is no separating capitalism and liberalism because liberalism is the ideology of capitalism.

I'm liberal, you aren't.

The only definition of liberal you will allow is one I do not hold, a strawman that completely contradicts all of my values.

That's the end of the conversation then. I'm sorry you wasted your time typing this up.

If you have anything beyond semantic arguments on labels I would lead with that next time.

John Locke was a shareholder in the royal african company (a slave trading / capturing company)

That's horrible, what a hypocrite.

When he sought to challenge the march of civilization, violently opposing exploitation through labour of the uncultivated land occupied by him, the Indian, along with any other criminal, could be equated with ‘one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security’, and who ‘therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger’. Locke never tired of insisting on the right possessed by any man to destroy those reduced to the level of ‘beasts of prey’, ‘savage beasts’; to the level of ‘a savage ravenous beast that is dangerous to his being’.

Yes this is what I was asking for. Fantastic argument.

I think your book might be misleading with its commentary, the original passage doesn't seem to reference Indigenous peoples.

Sect. 172. Thirdly, Despotical power is an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases. This is a power, which neither nature gives, for it has made no such distinction between one man and another; nor compact can convey: for man not having such an arbitrary power over his own life, cannot give another man such a power over it; but it is the effect only of forfeiture, which the aggressor makes of his own life, when he puts himself into the state of war with another: for having quitted reason, which God hath given to be the rule betwixt man and man, and the common bond whereby human kind is united into one fellowship and society; and having renounced the way of peace which that teaches, and made use of the force of war, to compass his unjust ends upon another, where he has no right; and so revolting from his own kind to that of beasts, by making force, which is their's, to be his rule of right, he renders himself liable to be destroyed by the injured person, and the rest of mankind, that will join with him in the execution of justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute, with whom mankind can have neither society nor security. And thus captives, taken in a just and lawful war, and such only, are subject to a despotical power, which, as it arises not from compact, so neither is it capable of any, but is the state of war continued: for what compact can be made with a man that is not master of his own life? what condition can he perform? and if he be once allowed to be master of his own life, the despotical, arbitrary power of his master ceases.He that is master of himself, and his own life, has a right too to the means of preserving it; so that as soon as compact enters, slavery ceases, and he so far quits his absolute power, and puts an end to the state of war, who enters into conditions with his captive.

https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/LockeJohnSECONDTREATISE1690.pdf

From what I'm reading here, someone only forfeits their rights when they put themselves into a state of war with another.

In that situation, we have a right to end the war and then keep the combatants captive only until we can reintroduce the social contract and return their rights.

I'm thinking or post Civil War reconstruction and partly agreeing we needed to do a better job of shutting down those slavers.

The answers to this comment reveal why I disagreed with the rest of these folks when I originally responded to you.

As a liberal, I don't think voting once every 4 years and hoping things get better is a great strategy.

But reading a bunch of theory until I accept Russia is amazing and wait for them to invade me doesn't feel particularly better.

I'm sure as well. I don't want the guy to die, I want him to stop doing harm.

If death is how that happens I could take that. If death isn't necessary I'd prefer it.

Ideally we could try people who commit war crimes publicly.