We had a lunch lecture where this environmental scientist gave a talk about critical materials and how big of a problem our reliance on these are. He links the whole thing up with politics pretty well, explaining how various political actors are involved and benefit from this or that.
At some point, he even mentions how in the netherlands, policy doesn’t get passed without a buy-in from industry. It means quite a lot, cause this guy is government hired in recommending policies.
Then he contradicts himself in the next paragraph by saying that this is the curse of democracy that people make stupid decisions.
I ask this guy about the contradiction. How you simultaneously harp about profits over needs, the evils of consultancy firms, and the inability of the Dutch government to do anything but pursue corporate interests, while also talking about the problems of “democracy”?
He just tells me “we are a democracy that’s why the Dutch government listens to industry”. Well not exactly that, but at least that’s the message I get when he talks about all the corporate controlled parties winning the elections and how that’s what the people chose.
Dude is this close to realising that the definition of liberal democracy is “legitimised rule by corporations” .
Of course, the lecture ends with a book recommendation for a book about the collapse of human civilisation. And a recommendation to go vote and participate in political parties.
Unlimited death upon elections.
Honestly regardless of your opinion on AES countries vis-a-vis sectarian knife fights, the one thing that AES countries like China and Vietnam are doing is proving out that the consequentialist model of people’s governance can deliver material gains from a position of weakness under direct threat from global capital compared to deontological VOTE Westoid ones.
Regardless of China’s future in respect to communism, it’s proved out a better governance model. If liberals had any fucking brains, they’d be creaming themselves over a country that can deliver that level of material gains to the poor and middle class and still have the most billionaires in the world. It’s the compromise they’ve been dreaming of, but they’re too stupid to realize that.
a country that can deliver that level of material gains to the poor and middle class and still have the most billionaires in the world.
I mean, some of them are creaming there pants. Despite what the Internet makes it seems, not all of them are rabid china haters. Even this lib I’m talking about said “China dominates all the supplies for renewable tech not because they are evil but because their government is smarter than ours”.
If they understand how the Chinese model and chinese democracy works, that just makes them not liberals anymore.
Yeah? I studied under a . . . Very clever man, who loved bringing up a case here, where several high school kids sued a government minister to force the minister for the environment to consider future generations in their decisions. They won! And then were overturned in a higher court.
And my incredibly clever professor couldn’t shut the fuck up about how that was proof that it’s good we live in a “democracy”, unlike china.
I was studying environment science.
Dude was also a smarmy shitty teacher but hey, who’s asking…
I’ve come to the acceptance that most people already have their opinions and will just use whatever theories are out there to justify them. They are not doing any critical thinking or care about pursuing the truth.
The way to convince them is through their social relations. The more they are surrounded by people who arent libs, the less lib they will become. Its frustrating but youre not going to change someones mind with a well constructed argument
I always find it odd that even after more or less mainstream people have started questioning if the US is still a democracy after Trump nobody ever seems to really notice or care that for Trump 1 the guy got less votes and won with 0 trickery involved, that’s just how the system works. And it’s not even like one vote and some rounding errors, straight up got 2,1% less votes and won. how is that a democracy, it failed at like the most basic idea possible
…[T]he guy got less votes and won with 0 trickery involved…
What are you talking about? The dastardly Ruzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzins tricked our wholesome keanu chungus white American patriots into vooting for Cheeto Benito!
weirdly despite all that nobody even bothered to accuse the ruSSians of falsifying election boxes at that level. I assume this was too stupid to do for anyone to do because this is the 5th time this has happened in the short US history
They would have to prove it and above all they can’t look stupid. They have to be smarter than you, so that’s why Putin is a bond villain that like I don’t know used satellites and honeypots or something
the jewish space lazer was a russian controled psyop to distract from the russian controlled ballot-rewriting satellite
Dutch Progressivism is the same type of scam that German remembrance culture is. Fake bullshit to sell the country as a brand.
This is like when I see libs online say things like “We need to get money out of politics!!” but it begs a question no one ever asks, which is “How?”. How do you get money out of a political system so deeply entrenched with lobbying at its core? Naturally, when pressed on the question, they fall back to “we just need to support progressive candidates, we have to be more ‘politically active’ and we have to educate people on the issues”. Yet,
that what constituents want, and what results from our political system, never actually align at all.I wonder what it is that keeps even the most politically engaged, and highly educated libs, like the one you are referring to, on the treadmill for so long?
I wonder what it is that keeps even the most politically engaged, and highly educated libs, like the one you are referring to, on the treadmill for so long?
If the existing political system is untenable, then that means that they are morally required to overthrow it, an endeavor that involves a lot of hard work, personal risk, and sacrifice. As Nechayev said:
The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.
The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.
The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the State and toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.
I think it goes back to the Western Chauvinism problem. Progressive libs, even if they earnestly want a future with a more empowered working class, have too much emotional attachment to the assumption that the tools necessary for such a future are in the liberal democracy toolkit. The ideology is that the solution must always be within this particular precept, and if it isn’t working right now it just means we haven’t plumped its depths enough to find it.
The chauvinism is so deeply entrenched, even some close friends of mine that call themselves socialist have a hard time believing that China and Russia aren’t trying to destroy all civilized society. Even with the horrors we are well aware of, they still believe the US is trying to be good if we could just get rid of those dang fascists and racists.
We just have to
for people who won’t take the money but not now because we need to run the safe old guy because this is the most important election of our lifetime™I wonder what it is that keeps even the most politically engaged, and highly educated libs, like the one you are referring to, on the treadmill for so long?
Ideology
I wonder what it is that keeps even the most politically engaged, and highly educated libs, like the one you are referring to, on the treadmill for so long?
Not being aware of alternatives.
This was me as a teenager. I collected little bits of 60’s leftism but had no outlet in my bougie ass town I grew up in. The nearest city with any youth movement is like 4 hours away
Um achkstully it’s only democracy if corporations are never told what, who, or when to do anything. Otherwise it’s authoritarian. Oh put the people in said authoritarian country generally like what their government does and approve of it? That’s just populist authoritarianism. The most evil of all. Now let Exxon in
He literally called industry control of the country “populism”. So the lib non-understanding has evolved beyond what we expected.
Corporations are people so rule by companies is just populism. Truth nuke
Mitt Romney I didnt know you were on hexbear!
People can be corporations too though!
I don’t understand why “populism” is such a dirty word to these people. Maybe there’s a part of the definition I’m missing, but the alternative to populism brought us trump, soooo…
That word is a little trick of theirs. They only ever use it to describe reactionaries as a way to get you to think leftist ideas arent popular.
Because it’s just a buzzword that means “literally everything that isn’t a very narrow band of elite managerial technocracy”. Like they call Trump, the elitest and fanciest of all lads whose base of power is aggrieved landowners, small business tyrants, and the enforcers of the ruling class, a “populist” despite entirely representing the ruling elite, simply because he’s also a boorish lout who’s rude to them personally. They can’t attack him on his crimes or his policies, because they’re all elite fancy lad crimes and the same policies they themselves support, so they froth about him being rude and dumb and vulgar like the poors and call him a “populist” because he’s what they imagine the public to be (when he’s the physical manifestation of the American ruling class without the flimsy mask of humanity it tries to hide itself behind).
The [USAID] report [on disinformation] identifies platforms […] that can help groups create “populist expertise” to develop alternative opinions and challenge official U.S. government narratives. These […] must be challenged and marginalized.
Because they can’t imagine truth being on a spectrum, where there* are various points where truth becomes lie. Absolutes, splitting is very comforting, but very misleading. What’s really weird is trumpeting about nuance, where the outer limits of that nuance begins looking like a pale blue dot against an infinite expanse, where there is nothing beyond the gravitational pull of that dot.
I saw a quote on here the other day about how “science advanced one funeral at a time”. The same is true of liberal politics.
People have a religious fanaticism about “the truth”. Like the scientific method doesn’t exist. We are supposed to “follow science” but if something comes out that contradicts the established science, it’s dismissed out of hand for 50 years and then they quietly try to retcon what has been “the truth” all along. There’s a concept called The half life of knowledge (apologies for a Wikipedia link) that states that over time, some “facts” either become untrue due to more information or sometimes due to cultural shifts. Liberals hate this one simple trick
The same is true of liberal politics.
I’ll go farther and assert the same is true of politics, or anything else, really. Otherwise, I agree.
Oh absolutely. I’m pushing 40 and I’m still not in the running for having any power to steer my family in decision making. The “queen bee” is my last grandma and we just do what she wants because she’s fucking impossible. Not to be morbid, but things are gonna get a lot more chill once she passes. I love her and I don’t want her to die on one hand but we have a very strained relationship from decades of her mental abuse.
Anyway, yeah. Some things get better as generations age out and lose power, but some people pick up the mantle and come kicking and screaming
They’re advancing so quickly I can’t keep up yet they’re not going anywhere
le public-private partnerships (backstopping industries you frequently privatized yourself) is the essence of neoliberalism, <40 year old people have not seen anything else
Technically nothing can be “uncooked” i dont think… lol
However, yes you are right. I don’t think the political ideology of your average liberal can be redeemed at this point.
The only way liberals change is by being personally effected by the negative aspects of capitalism. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the person. It could be someone they care about.
There’s another avenue that I think a lot of us on hexbear took. It was being worn down by online comments chipping away at the contradictions of our preprogrammed views. However, I think that avenue is only for people capable of self reflection.
I’m often surprised to hear how some hexbear came here from the CHUD side. But I’m older than a lot of people here. I didn’t grow up with 4chan and spaces like that. The internet wasn’t as consolidated when I was more impressionable so it was harder to find fringe views if you were like me and mainly used the internet for music purposes. That being said, I was like 13 when 9/11 happened and everyone including me were heavy into revenge, the military and islamophobia. I don’t really remember being heavy into the islamophobia though. I did grow up using gay as an insult but me and my friend group quickly outgrew it. Oddly enough I credit our boy scout group with curbing those behaviors. While there was a lot of “boys will be boys” mentality in the scouts, our leaders who were just our dads were very good at teaching us right from wrong in that area. It was pretty progressive for the time even if the parents didn’t believe what they taught us.
I feel like I was always a leftist at heart, but I got sheepdogged by Obama (my first election). I grew up hating bush and the Iraq war. I always liked “hippie music” and it’s messages. I read Abbie Hoffman at 14. There just wasn’t much of a movement outside of lib protests in the early 2000’s. I fell in with the hippie kids at school more as a social thing, but I went vegetarian because of a friend making the argument.
The beginning of my radicalization came from Calvin and Hobbes and being interested in the Woodstock era.
I was like 13 when 9/11 happened
i will just continue to quietly
in the corner over hereLol sorry. I work with people who weren’t even alive for it and that makes me feel old. I’m turning 37
that avenue is only for people capable of self reflection.
100% agree. Most people wont look at how their position fits in with the larger picture. They are haplessly self-absorbed in their own story-line, which I can only fault them for so much, I am a miserable sad-sack because of my inability to do this.
I was like 13 when 9/11 happened and everyone including me were heavy into revenge, the military and islamophobia.
Sounds like we are around the same age and I can say that I had a very similar shortsighted worldview at the time. Especially because I grew up in a very privileged bubble with a conservative family. It wasn’t really until I went to college in a major city that I started to see and experience what the world was really like, both good and bad. I became way more progressive and had my Obama arc as well. Then I had my Bernie arc, which started to really push me away from the centrist liberal ideations. My full radicalization came in 2020, COVID and the piss poor reactions/response to it is what got me to the point I’m at today. Watching as the world around me did everything it could to fake normalcy for the sake of “the economy” was extremely eye-opening and made me extremely resentful of the establishment and everyone’s unfeathered support of the capitalist machine.
All that said, back to the initial response, I think at this point its very hard for the adult liberals of our generation to make the turn anymore. They have established themselves, started families, are in the middle of their careers, all within the confines of the current system. I think we are seeing them slowly become part of the “fuck you, got mine” demographic that for a long time has been reserved for boomers and genX. Not to say that’s everyone, I am definitely making a few broad strokes with some of this, but by and large its what I have seen from people in my life.
To add to this: liberalism is more of a lifestyle brand. Deviating from the narrow cultural acceptance of what constitutes liberalism is heavily frowned upon. Just like where I’m from, everyone drives a truck owns guns and camo, drinks beer out of a yeti cooler and has at least one dead animal on the wall.
That’s a great point as well. The reluctance to look inward and question their beliefs is at odds with the… dare I say… identity politics.
