WhatsTheHoldup @ WhatsTheHoldup @lemmy.ml

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You're taking the definition linked at face value and not doing further investigation into what it means and its material repercussions.

No, I am a liberal. These are my values.

In a capitalistic society capital and the right to private property is above all, including the individual, it is by all means sacred and must be respected. This means that despite having more empty homes than homeless people, these people can't be located into these empty homes because the property is above them, they don't matter.

Perfectly said. Yes this reveals the inherent conflict between capitalism and liberalism.

Liberalism says "homeless should be housed", capitalism says "I'm not paying for it".

Liberalism demands the answer "yes you will" but capitalists have bought up all the media and politicians so we don't have the power to force them.

The supposed "rights of the individual" is just the individualization of the self in detriment of the collective.

Get specific. My right to freedom of movement from one state to another is detrimental for the collective why?

Despite us being social animals that depend on each other, said rights and constant capitalistic propaganda sells us the idea that we are single individuals that are responsible for everything around us.

Please separate liberal ideology from capitalist propaganda.

Conflating them like this isn't going to convince me. The capitalist propaganda is bad, the honest liberal thinkers are not.

If you get get fired its your own fault and you should pull yourself by your own bootstraps,

That's not true. Unemployment exists and liberals constantly argue to expand welfare and introduce UBI.

The idea of "stimulus checks" was a liberal one.

if you get sick that's your own fault

Not true, healthcare should be a right. You're the one talking about getting rid of our "supposed" rights.

It also doesn't matter that someone is racist because that's their individual right of free speech, despite that hurting society as a whole, it's the individual above the collective.

Okay! That's an actual argument.

That's true. Liberalism says "that guys wrong and bad" but there's nothing they can do until the man breaks the law.

The idea behind this is that this is a limitation in the state, not individuals.

Go punch a nazi. Go tell them to fuck off.

The state won't do it for you, but the state also won't censor you in return when you talk about "controversial" stuff like LGBTQ rights, communism, etc.

If that's not a compelling enough reason feel free to argue against that specific right.

"Liberty" for who?

According to liberalism, for all.

If your choice is to pay rent or be homeless, that's not a choice. If you have to worry about keeping a roof above your head, not getting fired, if you can pay your bills, if you can afford food, then you're not free. The only ones that are free are the bourgeoisie, as they hold all the power in a capitalistic society.

Agreed. The type of capitalism liberals consented to was heavily regulated and based on competition.

Liberals aren't supposed to like capitalism. At most, a liberal can tolerate it in the moment while it's working but that moment has long since passed and capitalism is the main threat to liberalism right now.

Capitalists are trying to purge the liberals from making reforms and replacing them with fascists, which is pushing people further left from that for better allies.

The Republicans maintain capitalism, just like Democrats do. They are both liberals because liberalism is the status quo of capitalism.

There is lot in this short bit I need to correct.

The Republicans conserve capitalism because they're **conservative((.

The Democrats maintain capitalism (instead of progrssing beyond it) because their party is owned by capitalists..

You need money to run a campaign, it's impossible for any ideology (no matter how hostile to capitalism) to end up as a major party (at least in our current system) because it requires the capitalists to donate to those parties to have anywhere close to the resources needed to run a campaign.

Of course there is neoliberalism too, but as the name implies, it is a "new" type of liberalism.

Look at Bill Clinton who is typically the example of a neoliberal.

It's not a "new" type of liberalism, it's just centrism.

They are by all metrics liberals. Further right than the Democrats, sure, but liberals none the less. They fit into defending the things I explained above, just like the Democrats also do.

If you arent distinguishing between ideology, party and individual then I don’t think you fully understand capitalism.

I'm literally talking to you from a marxist instance. I don't claim to know everything about capitalism, but I do think I have a better grasp than most liberals on this.

Opposing capitalism doesn't mean you know more about it.

Furthermore, what do you mean with distinguishing ideology from party and individual?

What liberal ideology says you should do is not exactly equal to what the democrats do nor exactly equal to what John Locke does.

Ideology is present in both these things. Capitalistic liberal ideology as the status quo, maintains itself by being ever present in the collective mind of the people as the only viable solution.

Capitalist liberal ideology is a contradiction.

Liberal ideology says all people are equal. Capitalist ideology says people are worth the value they produce.

These cannot coexist at the same time.

To slot them in together, capitalism would need to slice out the very root of liberalism and then wear its skin like cloth. Exactly what they've done.

I deny their botched surgery as the original liberalism I believe in.

You can't separate these things because they are deeply interlinked, both the individual and the party are not separated from ideology.

Yes I can. The majority of liberal voters oppose the genocide. It's the democrats who are funding it.

https://truthout.org/articles/poll-finds-6-in-10-democratic-voters-now-back-palestinians-over-israelis/

Don't blame liberals when capitalists are the ones doing this shit.

No, a genocide doesn't stop being wrong when the genocided population have rights.

Are you genuinely kidding me? Lmfao. You're so bad faith for no reason!

Also you completely ignore Palestine as a country, which grants the Palestinians rights, even tho Israel doesn't since it is a settler colonial genocide entity.

I don't even know how to respond.

It sounds like you agree with me that Israel is a settler colonial genocidal state who are violating the Palestinians so these last two comments are confusing.

Liberalism agrees with you that genocide is bad.

Anyone with a shred of empathy supports Palestine.

Yeah

The question of a liberal supporting Palestine or not on ideological grounds is settled in if the liberal believes in the legitimacy of Israel or not, and anyone that does believe that, doesn't support Palestinians in any way whatsoever.

That's not accurate. I already cited data which shows liberals support Palestine over Israel.

Besides that's only half the question.

Let's say a liberal accepts the legitimacy of Israel. The next step is that they'd have to accept the legitimacy of Palestine on equal terms.

A liberal would typically default into the 2 state solution.

A liberal may condemn Oct 7 and say the music festivals shouldn't be a valid target, but that is a rare exception in a one sided war waged on Palestinians by Israelis.

There no way a liberal could look at the settler violence and decide Palestine doesn't have the right to violently oppose that.

Israel is not a legitimate state, it was a settler colonial project from its very inception. That's why we have 75+ years of a genocide happening that the world brushes off and does nothing about.

Yep, then people were born into that situation and now wr have to deal with.

"Is Israel legitimate?" seems like a bit of a distraction personally when the answer to "are they committing genocide?" is "yes".

Oh I see what's going on here. You're not separating the ideology of philosophical liberalism from the actions of a state power that is labeled as "liberal".

Wrong again. John Locke (the founder of liberalism), owned shares in slavery-concerns, and openly defended slavery.

To my point.

If a person is capable of separating ideology from the actions of state powers they might have considered the possibility "John Locke was a hypocrite".

It's disingenuous to accuse liberals of supporting every single action a supposedly "liberal" state power might make. State powers aren't ruled by ideology alone, there are a bunch of different parties compromising and corrupting and grabbing power for their own interests that has nothing to do with liberalism.

The US genocided an entire contintent and hundreds of native tribes, under a liberal form of government.

Oh it was so much more horrific than you can put into words.

"Liberalism for me, not for thee" should be the Americans national motto.

Tecumseh is considered a national war hero in my country for that exact reason. They had the right to defend their land and our liberal democracy recognizes that.

Before the Treaty of Fort Wayne, Tecumseh was relatively unknown to outsiders, who usually referred to him as "the Prophet's brother." Afterwards he emerged as a prominent figure as he built an intertribal confederacy to counter U.S. expansion.

In August 1810, Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, capital of the Indiana Territory, a standoff that became legendary. Tecumseh demanded that Harrison rescind the Fort Wayne cession, and said he would oppose American settlement on the disputed lands. He said the chiefs who had signed the treaty would be punished, and that he was uniting the tribes to prevent further cessions. Harrison insisted the land had been purchased fairly and that Tecumseh had no right to object because Native Americans did not own land in common. Harrison said he would send Tecumseh's demands to President James Madison, but did not expect the president to accept them. As the meeting concluded, Tecumseh said that if Madison did not rescind the Fort Wayne treaty, "you and I will have to fight it out."

In the War of 1812, Tecumseh joined his cause with the British, recruited warriors, and helped capture Detroit in August 1812. The following year he led an unsuccessful campaign against the United States in Ohio and Indiana. When U.S. naval forces took control of Lake Erie in 1813, Tecumseh reluctantly retreated with the British into Upper Canada, where American troops led by Richard Mentor Johnson engaged them at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, in which Tecumseh was killed. His death caused his confederacy to collapse. The lands he had fought to defend were eventually ceded to the U.S. government. 

This is probably my biggest regret in history.

Britain wanted to establish a native "buffer nation" between Canada and the US which Tecumseh was heavily rallying for. The US said "no way".

I wish they got their land.

I wish you luck in the war on manners.

Please read Losurdo - Liberalism, a counter-history.

I've been told to read a lot of stuff haha. I'm not unaware of the issues you raise though so I'll respond.

from its very inception, in all of liberalism's founding authors and countries, liberalism has meant unlimited freedom only for rich, white, male, property-owners / capitalists.

Can you clarify what you mean? When I think "founder of liberalism" my brain goes first to John Locke.

John Locke says.

To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

Why does John Locke say all creatures of the same species are equal when you claim he's only thinking of the white ones?

Colonized peoples, the poor, workers, and women have always been and were explicitly excluded from the community of the free.

That's true. Saying "all people are created equal" and making all people equal are two different things.

Liberalism set the goal to strive for, and it gave us the tools to notice the contradiction and flaws in our society like lack of rights for women, black people, indigenous or other minorities.

When we raised our kids to be liberal, they grew up, saw the oppression and inequality to these groups and one by one, civil rights, Vietnam War protests, woman's suffrage, right to abortion, gay rights were secured as they grappled with the contradictions of this injustice done by the state and the ideology that says the state shouldn't act that way.

All social justice movements today have their roots in this liberal enlightenment philosophy.

For example, you don't get a Karl Marx without first having liberalism. Take his father 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.

The values liberals teach their kids allow liberalism to evolve towards societies way freer than the parents could have ever imagined or maybe even accepted from their biases at the time.

Those are fascists. Not liberals.

What I don't see is a path forward that doesn't involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.

But do you actually see a path forward that does involve incremental progress?

I've watched politics incrementally change from Clinton's Third Way to Bush's War on Terror to McCain/Palin and the Tea Party to Trump.

I've watched Fox news incrementally change, I've watched print media incrementally be bought up.

I'm hearing about abortion getting banned, hate crimes going up, school shootings, people being abducted and sent to death camps in El Salvador.

When does this incremental change move us forward instead of backwards?

You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.

I'm not the assorted folks responding. What I personally want is a reform. I like the idea of democracy. I do not think we have it.

I think the system we currently have is rigged and not capable of producing the incremental change you ask of it.

Where I agree with everyone else, is that if we have to resort to revolution just to get the slightest pedestrian changes to the electoral system to let incremental change takeover (repeal citizens united, disband both parties, disallow "parties" to subvert primaries, remove big money, etc)... why set it back up more or less the same?

When those other leftists accept revolution as inevitable they can dream bigger beyond the current system.

The more liberalism is cooped by capitalists to resist the reforms liberalism itself demands, the less liberalism as a coherent movement can thrive.

This leaves actual liberals like you and me disenfranchised and without a party. A further leftist might describe that as defeatist.

Both Democrats and Republicans are liberals

What?

From your link

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.

In what ways do the Republicans respect equality before the law? I can't accept this label. They are conservatives/fascists. Not liberal.

The Democrats are neoliberal/conservative. I'm more okay describing them as liberal because the voters tend to be, but the party itself is not.

If you arent distinguishing between ideology, party and individual then I don't think you fully understand capitalism.

Capitalism coopts ideology. Liberal voters vote for a Democrat, then capitalists bribe the Democrat to do something else.

What's ironic is that the objective fact of the genocide in Palestine is built on liberal thought.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.

The genocide in Palestine is wrong because they cannot have a right as individuals, they do not have liberty, they have not had an election allowed to be held since 2008, they have no political equality, they have no right to private property and settlers can kick them out, they are not equal to Jews under the law.

Your criticisms of the Democrats don't seem to be that they're liberal, but that they're not liberal enough.

Any true liberal would support Palestine from your own source.

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

If your excitement in the cancer diagnosis of a old man is more important to you I get why people are weirded out.

That's an interesting thought, but I believe it to simply be a coincidence.

The base 12 counting being based on counting the division of your fingers is historically verified, but if the division aspect was so compelling to them you'd expect it to carry forward into their writing system.

By the time you get cuneiform math though, they actually go back to base 10.

https://images.app.goo.gl/9GR6VEiT7GHYF3KaA

As you can see base 12 is not in the written system, or for written mathematics. It just was convenient for counting on their hands.

They used mixes of base 10/base 12 and base 60.

Base 10 would be used go determine the symbols for a specific "digit" in base 60.

So similar to how our 13 is 1 ten and 3 ones, their 13 was the symbol for 10 then 3 symbols for 1. 13 = 𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹 But 73 would be written 𒁹 𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹

Which would be interpreted as 1 sixty and 13 ones, or 60 + 13

I understand your frustration as the entire thread is strawmanning liberal positions.

Essentially, capitalism coopts movements. Liberalism is an ideology which exists and has values, but since this is the primary vehicle for left leaning politics on a national level, companies spend a lot of lobbying effort stuffing liberalism with stuff that helps them.

Conservative have has gone through similar changes, stuffing a fiscal conservative viewpoint with bullshit culture war stuff as the primary vehicle for right wing politics.

When people critique electoralism, they see liberals as unable to organize because the movement has been cooped by big money and liberals refuse to admit they aren't in control of their own party.

When you campaign for liberal values, critics see you as providing ethical cover for the promises to lobbyists that had already been made behind your back which secured their campaign donations enabling them to run in the first place.

Things like funding Israel.

You can discuss being anti Israel, you can rally behind someone like John Fetterman or Krysten Sinema who promises to be a progressive, but the thing about electoralism is you can just lie and turn heel.

Help me out. What's our next step?

This is where I agree with you.

There are steps inside electoralism and steps outside.

If you're saying "just vote Democrat and wait 4 years for things to get better" I agree that's naive and there's action we can take outside of electoralism.

If they're "stay home and don't vote" I agree with you that's nauve and we can take action inside of electoralism too. It's just gonna be inherently pretty ineffectual.

Currently, when candidates we elect take big money and vote against our interests we can't do anything for 4 years about it. But because we have our "I voted" sticker it acts as a balm to the consciousness and deluded is into believing our fellow countrymen actually agree with the direction it takes.

All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can't jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.

Again, this is where I fully agree with you.

Protesting Kamala from my university campus seems like a better alternative to protesting Trump from El Salvador, even if the genocide is happening in both cases.

I haven't heard a compelling argument staying home and not voting is better.

Don't listen to OP's bullshit.

They work for big clock. They're trying to convince you 12 hour clock is useless so they can sell you double the clock.

"People who believe in god thank god for stuff, more news at 11"

Then credit the author.

The author was plagiarized by copying the genes of two parents. Credit the parents.

That way people who enjoy it can know where the author came from and may wind up reading his parents books.

No one should be told they're purity testing for criticizing the democrats.

Purity testing would be saying someone can't be an ally in criticizing the democrats with you because they're an enemy for voting for them.

Someone put a coin in my hand and said "heads is genocide, tails is genocide in a different way" and I really cared about not doing genocide so I asked "can I choose none" and they said "you can walk away, but then the coin will be flipped randomly".

If you walked away from that coin flip and left the consequences to chance, I really don't have a lot of patience hearing you judge me for all the burden and anxiety I put on myself researching which option was worse so I could make the least worst choice.

Walking away seems the easy choice here. You didn't stop the genocide, you just washed your hands clean of it.

Criticizing me for choosing, instead of being an ally, saying "that was a tough choice, but don't give up **here's what we can do next" is useless.

Instead of saying we should stay home and not vote, suggest something we can do. The endless criticizing of powerless people just trying their best in a shitty situation is why you're being accused of purity testing.

This is the perfect example of the purity test OP was talking about.

Two people who couldn't be more clear in their comments how disgusted they are by this obvious ongoing genocide, but yet completely powerless to do anything about it.

One person wants to use the little power they have to steer the country as far away from genocide as they can, and the other who sees that the game is rigged and wants no part in the government claiming their consent.

What's unfortunate is that you're directed all you anger at each other since neither knows how to direct it at the people in power.

Democrats give Palestinians no better chance of fighting another day, that just give liberals a license to pretend the genocide isn't happening.

"Democrats" are not a monolith. Criticize the democrats all you want when they deny the genocide, but when we have candidates saying the following, it does feel like you're being overly pessimistic about what allies you actually do have available to you inside this broken party:

“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her speech Friday. “A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government.”

“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” the New York Democrat added, “open your eyes.”

genocide is not something you negotiate away.

Genocide is not something you stay at home for and hope it goes away on its own.

You don't get to claim the ally if all you did was nothing.

OP criticized people who stayed home (choosing to hold on to their purity) instead of voting for the candidates least likely to perpetuate futher suffering.

Going "oh no this trolley problem is so terrible I refuse to even look at the lever" is prioritizing your own moral superiority over the people tied to the tracks.

I believe that's "whataboutism"?

Not OP but your very first sentence was

It's very simple, valve is a gamer company.

It's not "whataboutism" to directly respond to your point and try to argue they aren't a gamer company.

I do agree with you overall though that Epic can suck it.

Yeah that's exactly what's happening.

Look at comments above like

may you get the future you are hoping for

A lot of people aren't interested in learning about AI as it stands today they're worried about the future.

They see massive corporations trying to replace artists.

If the output is "good" they might just succeed, if the output is "slop" then they can dream of a market solution where consumers band together to look at AI ads/art as lazy and artists get to keep their jobs.

If someone hates AI because of power politics, they're not trying to speak objectively about it, because that objectivity is perceived to support the tech billionaires who are trying to push AI so hard.

Great answer.

the "somewhere elses" all have their own fucked up problems, like algorithms that optimise for combativeness, and corporate control of various debates

I think keeping this in mind is key. When corporations have full control of these debates we realize maybe we're wasting our time trying to appeal to their algorithms and should just build a new space without it.

Inherently the new space will be a little smaller and reach less people, but we value that because it gives us a bit more room to speak.