So the liberal discourse has shifted from "It will be worse under Trump" to "This is morally justifiable because Trump would do something worse"?
I never believed that Trump Derangement Syndrome was a really thing but your comment is making me rethink this position.
That wasn't really my point. What I meant is that what was allowable has shifted, possibly permanently. There's a whole new generation being shown that it's ok to be a criminal.
Legality does not and has never equated to morality. If we're talking about criminality and matters of legality, has the Biden/Harris administration worked furiously to defend and enable Israel to violate international law? When congress invites a war criminal who has an arrest warrant issued for them by The Hague and congress lavishes this figure with dozens of minutes-long applause, does this not signal that criminals are not only permitted by the system by openly and roundly praised by it?
Did we not see mass scale war crimes and human rights violations under Obama/Biden and, obviously, Trump and now under Biden/Harris?
There is no higher level of law than international law. Help me to understand what you're referring to with regards to you concern for condoning criminality.
Better yet, help me to understand why your original comment was dismissive of ethics while your reply seems to be concerned with people being given authorisation to violate ethics? That doesn't seem cogent to me at all; by pronouncing the premature death of ethics are you not tacitly condoning people to abandon the very ethical framework that you are lamenting the abandonment of?
You're speaking in absolutes; I am not.
It's simpler than this, I expect a cheater and lliar to cheat and lie. His main focus being money and own benefits, is going to affect his decisions.
So my main concern is with the, let's call this, initial personal characteristics or the moral core.
When it's thrown into complex decision systems it surely will be bent out of shape, but I can expect general shape to hold.
I mean, you can't half-violate international law. Either you break the law or you don't.
But if you're attempting to refute my claim that legality has never equated with morality then your reply is nothing more than a tactical and rhetorical retreat because if you truly believe that I'm incorrect about this then it should have been an easy matter to provide a counterargument instead of just a negation.
Moreover, you haven't actually answered the questions I posed to you.
It's simpler than this, I expect a cheater and lliar to cheat and lie. His main focus being money and own benefits, is going to affect his decisions.
How does this not apply to someone like Biden or Harris though?
So my main concern is with the, let's call this, initial personal characteristics or the moral core.
When it's thrown into complex decision systems it surely will be bent out of shape, but I can expect general shape to hold.
The funniest thing about liberals turning themselves into solipsistic egoists is that it undercuts the social propaganda of liberalism that in turn undermines socialist development, liberals believe that by taking off the mask it'll somehow scare average people back into obeying the liberal order, but they fail to recognize the only thing keeping liberalism alive was the kayfabe of social harmony and incrementalism
Once those two things are abandoned in favor of playing in the fascist sandbox, our job as socialists becomes infinitely easier, since we can now simply point to the now naked abomination of liberalism and the majority of the population having no recourse to the previous illusions of social liberalism become radicalized at incredible rates
Liberals VOLUNTARILY killing social liberalism is a fuckin dream come true for us, because liberals are fundamentally idealists and they never recognized that they are in fact a vanishingly small minority keeping an inhuman system alive, that's why for our ideas to flourish we don't need 18 intelligence agencies or the largest global state/media apparatus in history to keep it alive, we just need people to come to a simple yet intuitive recognition
And it's easier for people to come to that recognition when liberals abandon their duty as propagandists of capitalism and instead call for the deaths and immiseration of average-day people for legally voting for a candidate liberals themselves created and fostered
Frankly I hope liberals really lean into this kind of shit
it undercuts the social propaganda of liberalism that in turn undermines socialist development... [Libs] fail to recognize the only thing keeping liberalism alive was the kayfabe of social harmony and incrementalism
This is really on point.
There's this philosopher who's politically kooky but his critiques of liberalism in particular are useful imo. He's a bit like Chris Hedges; some good critiques but when it comes to conclusions and application and what is to be done, best look elsewhere because these people are poster children for the dire consequences that long-term materialism deficiency has on the mind and the spirit.
Anyway this philosopher named John Gray identified four fundamental values inherent to liberalism/liberal mythology:
The first three in that list are pretty easy to grasp, I think. The last is closely bound with the myth of progress and however you want to rehash the concept: a rising tide lifts all boats, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, etc.
Your comment really struck upon the same ideas that John Gray traced out. Arguably "social harmony" is how liberals perceive Individualism, Universalism, and Egalitarianism to manifest in society. Incrementalism is simply a different way of describing meliorism.
I'm not sure if you've come across John Gray's work before but I just wanted to point out that not only are you hitting the nail on the head in your comment but you've arrived at a conclusion that an academic managed to build half of their career upon, which I think is pretty neat.
I get that there are more important things to study but on a personal level I've found that learning about the philosophical basis of liberalism to be really instructive of how to play the angles when it comes to highlighting liberal hypocrisy and using the inherent contradictions of that political project to do all that good stuff like deconstruction and rebutting and undermining and agitation. Your comment drives home how a solid grasp of what liberalism is and what it tells itself is instrumental in revealing liberalism (and liberals) for what they truly are.
That's so cool, I'm not familiar with John Gray, I was just going off my own intuition and understanding, but it's not surprising if anyone observes liberals long enough and take their history into account they would most likely come to the same conclusions as Mr. Gray
Meliorism is also an interesting term, I wasn't aware of it until now, but it encapsulates so much of what I find insidious and subtly sinister about the architecture of liberal thought
I agree, the liberal framing of meliorism is so pernicious. This kinda weird, linear concept of progress that posits that every development ultimately benefits us all.
Obviously that's not true though. I have a little quip that I occasionally dust off when discussing this and it is that meliorism doesn't account for the invention of the whip.
In more prosaic terms, the Americas really didn't see the benefits from the development of things like advanced seafaring or gunpowder and it's undeniable that these advancements of Europe caused an unfathomable amount of suffering, deprivation, and dispossession. But in all honesty I think that's the pro-colonialism and white supremacy that comes built into liberalism and its idealised notion of meliorism shining through; it's all pretty great, just as long as you don't consider brown people!
Ethics; such a noble notion. Perhaps you've forgotten already who was just chosen as president.
So the liberal discourse has shifted from "It will be worse under Trump" to "This is morally justifiable because Trump would do something worse"?
I never believed that Trump Derangement Syndrome was a really thing but your comment is making me rethink this position.
That wasn't really my point. What I meant is that what was allowable has shifted, possibly permanently. There's a whole new generation being shown that it's ok to be a criminal.
Legality does not and has never equated to morality. If we're talking about criminality and matters of legality, has the Biden/Harris administration worked furiously to defend and enable Israel to violate international law? When congress invites a war criminal who has an arrest warrant issued for them by The Hague and congress lavishes this figure with dozens of minutes-long applause, does this not signal that criminals are not only permitted by the system by openly and roundly praised by it?
Did we not see mass scale war crimes and human rights violations under Obama/Biden and, obviously, Trump and now under Biden/Harris?
There is no higher level of law than international law. Help me to understand what you're referring to with regards to you concern for condoning criminality.
Better yet, help me to understand why your original comment was dismissive of ethics while your reply seems to be concerned with people being given authorisation to violate ethics? That doesn't seem cogent to me at all; by pronouncing the premature death of ethics are you not tacitly condoning people to abandon the very ethical framework that you are lamenting the abandonment of?
You're speaking in absolutes; I am not. It's simpler than this, I expect a cheater and lliar to cheat and lie. His main focus being money and own benefits, is going to affect his decisions.
So my main concern is with the, let's call this, initial personal characteristics or the moral core.
When it's thrown into complex decision systems it surely will be bent out of shape, but I can expect general shape to hold.
I mean, you can't half-violate international law. Either you break the law or you don't.
But if you're attempting to refute my claim that legality has never equated with morality then your reply is nothing more than a tactical and rhetorical retreat because if you truly believe that I'm incorrect about this then it should have been an easy matter to provide a counterargument instead of just a negation.
Moreover, you haven't actually answered the questions I posed to you.
How does this not apply to someone like Biden or Harris though?
I don't follow.
Can you please explain what you mean by this comment?
The funniest thing about liberals turning themselves into solipsistic egoists is that it undercuts the social propaganda of liberalism that in turn undermines socialist development, liberals believe that by taking off the mask it'll somehow scare average people back into obeying the liberal order, but they fail to recognize the only thing keeping liberalism alive was the kayfabe of social harmony and incrementalism
Once those two things are abandoned in favor of playing in the fascist sandbox, our job as socialists becomes infinitely easier, since we can now simply point to the now naked abomination of liberalism and the majority of the population having no recourse to the previous illusions of social liberalism become radicalized at incredible rates
Liberals VOLUNTARILY killing social liberalism is a fuckin dream come true for us, because liberals are fundamentally idealists and they never recognized that they are in fact a vanishingly small minority keeping an inhuman system alive, that's why for our ideas to flourish we don't need 18 intelligence agencies or the largest global state/media apparatus in history to keep it alive, we just need people to come to a simple yet intuitive recognition
And it's easier for people to come to that recognition when liberals abandon their duty as propagandists of capitalism and instead call for the deaths and immiseration of average-day people for legally voting for a candidate liberals themselves created and fostered
Frankly I hope liberals really lean into this kind of shit
This is really on point.
There's this philosopher who's politically kooky but his critiques of liberalism in particular are useful imo. He's a bit like Chris Hedges; some good critiques but when it comes to conclusions and application and what is to be done, best look elsewhere because these people are poster children for the dire consequences that long-term materialism deficiency has on the mind and the spirit.
Anyway this philosopher named John Gray identified four fundamental values inherent to liberalism/liberal mythology:
Individualism
Universalism
Egalitarianism
Meliorism
The first three in that list are pretty easy to grasp, I think. The last is closely bound with the myth of progress and however you want to rehash the concept: a rising tide lifts all boats, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, etc.
Your comment really struck upon the same ideas that John Gray traced out. Arguably "social harmony" is how liberals perceive Individualism, Universalism, and Egalitarianism to manifest in society. Incrementalism is simply a different way of describing meliorism.
I'm not sure if you've come across John Gray's work before but I just wanted to point out that not only are you hitting the nail on the head in your comment but you've arrived at a conclusion that an academic managed to build half of their career upon, which I think is pretty neat.
I get that there are more important things to study but on a personal level I've found that learning about the philosophical basis of liberalism to be really instructive of how to play the angles when it comes to highlighting liberal hypocrisy and using the inherent contradictions of that political project to do all that good stuff like deconstruction and rebutting and undermining and agitation. Your comment drives home how a solid grasp of what liberalism is and what it tells itself is instrumental in revealing liberalism (and liberals) for what they truly are.
That's so cool, I'm not familiar with John Gray, I was just going off my own intuition and understanding, but it's not surprising if anyone observes liberals long enough and take their history into account they would most likely come to the same conclusions as Mr. Gray
Meliorism is also an interesting term, I wasn't aware of it until now, but it encapsulates so much of what I find insidious and subtly sinister about the architecture of liberal thought
I agree, the liberal framing of meliorism is so pernicious. This kinda weird, linear concept of progress that posits that every development ultimately benefits us all.
Obviously that's not true though. I have a little quip that I occasionally dust off when discussing this and it is that meliorism doesn't account for the invention of the whip.
In more prosaic terms, the Americas really didn't see the benefits from the development of things like advanced seafaring or gunpowder and it's undeniable that these advancements of Europe caused an unfathomable amount of suffering, deprivation, and dispossession. But in all honesty I think that's the pro-colonialism and white supremacy that comes built into liberalism and its idealised notion of meliorism shining through; it's all pretty great, just as long as you don't consider brown people!
Sorry bud this made my absolute fucking BAR detector blow up in my hand