Mass Effect
Member
And centrists have no convictions because many of them will turn with the blowing wind in order to desperately try to stay "in the middle."
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"Let's talk about who leftists distrust and why"
- Thread starter mlclmtckr
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And centrists have no convictions because many of them will turn with the blowing wind in order to desperately try to stay "in the middle."
MadJackChurchill
Banned
"Hate muslims...a little?" - centrists' motto. Clearly leftists are in the wrong here. /s
gutter_trash
Banned
Centrists do have ideologies, ask Macron and Trudeau.
This obsession with picking a Hard Side versus an opposing Hard Side is what caused the Spanish Civil War.
The beef I have here is that there is no room for nuance, it always to be on the EXTREME of one or the other on everything and that is not how REALITY works.
I experienced both form of Extremes and they are both wrong though their faults. I lean more Center-Left than Center-Right and I do agree that the Left is more compassionate than the Right but this insanity of going LEFT or BUST is insane because you need a little bit of economic Center-Right to make the world function. Or else, you wouldn't have a fuckin' job.
The idea that world can function on a Hard Left point of view economically is unfeasible.
Conciliator
Banned
the 2020 primaries are gonna be nasty as fuck
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Yes, and as I argued last thread the apparent lack of any accepted definitions are making discussion difficult. I don't want insane full blown socialism. I want both where appropriate, understanding that both have serious faults. I don't want the government to develop videogames.
Also, it would be nice to see articles advocating for rather than bitching about. Or perhaps they can't find and that meet their narrow criteria...
You think socialism means government-created video games? What?
Seize the means of production in Congress's hottest new AAA management sim!
The Albatross
Member
I think I officially hate the phrase Neoliberal as much as I hated the phrase Neoconservative. If there's one thing that I can thank the Tea Party and Alt-right for, it's that we don't need to read neoconservative 50,000 times in every bloviating think piece by some pseudo-intellectual hack.
Tal Shiar Agent
Banned
Too many "leftists" (I don't like that term, just say what you are. Communist, socialist, social Democrat, whatever) aren't pragmatic and don't participate in the political system so we can't make the step by step progress we need in a free society to advance to state socialism.
Refusing to compromise with the left-of-center in the short-term prevents any gains in the long term. Too much ideological posturing and not enough action.
Refusing to compromise with the left-of-center in the short-term prevents any gains in the long term. Too much ideological posturing and not enough action.
But Neoconservative had a very specific definition (hyper-hawkish GOPers.) Iraq destroyed their credibility.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Has a serious marketing problem.
Basically, the only thing is really seems to mean is:
"Social ownership"
Which could be even applied to the stock market.
The democratic party is never going to come out as anti-capitalism and declare it's intent to be the complete dismantling of capitalism. And not because they are afraid too but rather because it is not a position they genuinely believe in. Most elected democrats come from the point of view that government should regulate the excesses of capitalism, not destroy it entirely.
It's actually a really interesting topic and worth looking into further, even if you don't agree with its conclusions.
open markets are not synonymous with capitalism and government ownership of everything is not synonymous with socialism
Its so funny how "neoliberalism" has become some sort of boogeyman, literally google the term and "free market economics" while you are at it.
Fenderputty
Banned
"my last article has nothing to do with sexism and racism"
"To seem impartial I will bring up Joe Biden (a white male who's more conservative than Hillary Clinton) but then include the caveat that the far left loves Joe Biden regardless of these issues I'm going to bring up to look impartial."
"To seem impartial I will bring up Joe Biden (a white male who's more conservative than Hillary Clinton) but then include the caveat that the far left loves Joe Biden regardless of these issues I'm going to bring up to look impartial."
The Albatross
Member
It had a very clear definition. By 2006, Neoconservative just popularly became "any conservative who I particularly dislike and want to sound intellectual when talking about."
Now it has a definition again because the phrase (and I suppose, specific type of conservative) has become less common.
Not the only people, but I'd imagine that if you had all the data in the universe you could come up with some plot where you'd find a direct correlation between over use of the word neoliberal and a person's pseudo-intellectual hack coefficient. If only there were some database of New Republic washouts and we could run a wordcount on how many times they use neoliberal in an article about, say, grilled cheese food trucks or about how Brooklyn is great but it's just not real anymore, I think we could accurately identify all of the pseudointellectual hacks.
It's encroaching on ludonarrative dissonance levels of pseudo-intellectual hackishness.
It was always that definition though? NeoCon (Cheney, Rumsfeld) vs PaleoCon (Pat Robertson) was always a thing, but the latter never got power because the isolationist FP views were a minority within the party.)
It was all over the place in '06 because that subset of the party royally fucked the country and the Mideast for a generation running into Iraq for no reason.
The Albatross
Member
The definition was always the definition. The definition never changed. It just became overused, and not just to describe that particular brand of conservatism or the dominant brand of conservatism, but as a way to make someone sound like a more evil conservative and if you were talking politics on the internet back in 2005, it was neoconservative-this and neoconservative-that. And now, it's neoliberal this and neoliberal that.
Also, FWIW, Pat Robertson isn't a paleoconservative, you might be thinking of Pat Buchanan. Pat Robertson is more of an evangelical conservative, which I'm sure there are plenty of evangelical conservatives who are also paleoconservatives, but Robertson was always associated more with the 'Religious Right.' Of course there's always cross-over between people and groups, but they're mostly considered distinct conservative movements.
Personally, I wish we went back to calling neoconservatives Socialists for Nixon, which has such a sweet ring.
Ownership is easily accumulated at the top in the stock market, making it unequal. Socialism is supposed to be about economic democracy. Just as you wouldn't have a guy who pays more get more votes in politics, there aren't supposed to be private individuals controlling things at the top due to their personal resources in socialism.
The "marketing problem" has always been there, because socialism is a broad term, like "conservatism" or "democracy". There are different subsets of socialism with different methods.
Which requires them to ignore just how many minorities are leftists. Or rather outright erase our existence.
I mean, given that centrists contribute to the country staying hard-line center-right at absolute bare minimum, I can blame them for plenty. They want to compromise with the enemy and often the compromises involve letting the right-wing screw over minorities such as myself and the poor. Sooooo yaaa knoooow.
IrishNinja
Member
again i would kindly invite anyone who decries "identity politics" to get the fuck out of the left, you're not fooling anyone
amen
the "it's about class, not race" crowd (huge overlap with bernie's base, i thought) really did push this as status quo while stressing the importance of free college...then wondered why he polled so shit with blacks & others. it was mind boggling.
like i still don't know how this became the highest possible priority
i get that Occupy set the stage here but tossing social/racial justice, healthcare etc to the wind in favor of supporting the brokest candidate you know still seems weird - yeah, booker takes big NJ money. if he rides for single payer, why should that be worse than, say, a canddiate's stance on LGBT issues? medical marijuana? etc
so what do you call someone who wholesale rejects austrian economics/much of classic liberalism's free market worship but doesn't outright do so with capitalism then
okay, may have answered that last one
ugh, tribalism at its worst - get ready for 10 more years of trump, guy
if you ever find one pls let me know
FL DNC is such a joke even senator nelson kinda seems to forget they're there
amen
the "it's about class, not race" crowd (huge overlap with bernie's base, i thought) really did push this as status quo while stressing the importance of free college...then wondered why he polled so shit with blacks & others. it was mind boggling.
like i still don't know how this became the highest possible priority
i get that Occupy set the stage here but tossing social/racial justice, healthcare etc to the wind in favor of supporting the brokest candidate you know still seems weird - yeah, booker takes big NJ money. if he rides for single payer, why should that be worse than, say, a canddiate's stance on LGBT issues? medical marijuana? etc
so what do you call someone who wholesale rejects austrian economics/much of classic liberalism's free market worship but doesn't outright do so with capitalism then
okay, may have answered that last one
ugh, tribalism at its worst - get ready for 10 more years of trump, guy
if you ever find one pls let me know
FL DNC is such a joke even senator nelson kinda seems to forget they're there
I read this as saying abolition of capitalism is necessary but not sufficient.
On that reading I think it's clearly true.
I'm still not a fan of this writer. For all of the issues, they raised about those on the left including minorities about not vetting candidates appropriately, a very broad vague assessment on the dismantling of capitalism, is not likely to happen. I know more than anyone how wealth inequality (the burning of black wallstreet) affects marginalized groups even today but what structure is he suggesting for that dismantling?
Getting a foothold with a diverse constituent base, protecting their right to vote, while tailoring candidates to specific areas and having them pledge not to do away with things like the right to choose even if they personally disagree it.
For me, I'd rather have a candidate like Warren(this is only for example purposes not that I'd want her to run), who showed an evolution in her stance from being a Republican to who she is now.
That being said, Voting Rights are under attack. Want to dismantle capitalism? The start is protecting minorities right to vote before candidate selection. If people think that in the Trump era people can just vote him out in 2020; someone with the full power of the government behind him is different than being a billionaire* running for president. So, for me, I'm not interested in candidate selection when people can't vote freely. So even if an ideal candidate comes along gerrymanding and things well all know about will prevent them from voting them in.
Getting a foothold with a diverse constituent base, protecting their right to vote, while tailoring candidates to specific areas and having them pledge not to do away with things like the right to choose even if they personally disagree it.
For me, I'd rather have a candidate like Warren(this is only for example purposes not that I'd want her to run), who showed an evolution in her stance from being a Republican to who she is now.
That being said, Voting Rights are under attack. Want to dismantle capitalism? The start is protecting minorities right to vote before candidate selection. If people think that in the Trump era people can just vote him out in 2020; someone with the full power of the government behind him is different than being a billionaire* running for president. So, for me, I'm not interested in candidate selection when people can't vote freely. So even if an ideal candidate comes along gerrymanding and things well all know about will prevent them from voting them in.
I only really have a remark on the "total overhaul of American Capitalism" remark as I've not followed the controversy that existed prior to this article.
Couldn't he just be arguing the elimination of neoliberal thought and activity, which is the progenitor cause to many problems in the growing precariat class? You know, the actual problem of anything that can be commodified is, in fact, commodified? This is how America has moved into a rentier class and part of the reason labor is a game of diminishing returns, prior to the automation tsunami coming. That's just economic and class issues, though. Racism plays in those, but is not caused by those. Ideas of people being X means they're unpeople is a problem of mind first, society second. Society just finds a way to play out those views. The issues go beyond the models we use to live as a society, but into the nature of thoughts and ideas themselves. To believe that being black or gay is a mark against a person, that goes back to what ideas people believe about others. It gets acted out in the cultural operating system, but is not directly caused by it.
This is a quaking mess, but the "total overhaul" is systemic. We also have to deal with the cultural and intellectual facets as well. All of these blend. Having a society where college is free, we have UBI, and have a single-payer/universal health care system does little to change the "X are unpeople" problem of race, gender, and sexuality. Those games would still be played despite the overhaul.
Couldn't he just be arguing the elimination of neoliberal thought and activity, which is the progenitor cause to many problems in the growing precariat class? You know, the actual problem of anything that can be commodified is, in fact, commodified? This is how America has moved into a rentier class and part of the reason labor is a game of diminishing returns, prior to the automation tsunami coming. That's just economic and class issues, though. Racism plays in those, but is not caused by those. Ideas of people being X means they're unpeople is a problem of mind first, society second. Society just finds a way to play out those views. The issues go beyond the models we use to live as a society, but into the nature of thoughts and ideas themselves. To believe that being black or gay is a mark against a person, that goes back to what ideas people believe about others. It gets acted out in the cultural operating system, but is not directly caused by it.
This is a quaking mess, but the "total overhaul" is systemic. We also have to deal with the cultural and intellectual facets as well. All of these blend. Having a society where college is free, we have UBI, and have a single-payer/universal health care system does little to change the "X are unpeople" problem of race, gender, and sexuality. Those games would still be played despite the overhaul.
Socialists don't want to toss civil rights issues to the wind, they just see overturning capitalism as integral to the process. It's actually intersectional, though there are some doofus socialists who don't realize that and want to plow on with just a focus on economics alone.
Socialists typically believe in the base/superstructure theory at least to some extent, the idea that social structures and issues derive from a material basis (such as how capitalism and imperialism were integral to creating white supremacy). Whoever controls production controls society and shapes it to fit their agenda. Therefore, to not just ameliorate problems but actually defeat them, you need to change the underlying material processes of society and which class controls them. By democratizing the economy (socialism) you take away the power of the capitalist class to fund divide and conquer strategies that they use against the common people (such as right wing media that bolsters white supremacy), exploitative economic practices (anti-unionism, the oil industry and its mucking around in climate science, for profit prisons that help fuel the racist drug wars), and so forth. Socialists think you can somewhat regulate these things within capitalism but never defeat them utterly. That said, there are too many people who think base/superstructure = the only answer and that racism all just magically disappear once you change the base. The experience of the USSR tells us that isn't the case.
Yeah, it's basically a social democrat. The term social democracy is actually a old synonym for socialism, but reformist socialists who wanted to try to achieve it through parliamentary means rather than revolution ended up over time turning into what are basically regulatory capitalist parties (see the Socialist Party in France). The difference between social democrats and democratic socialists (a term seen as a redundancy by other socialists) is that the former usually are fine with regulatory capitalism as an endpoint while the latter want it as a stepping stone to socialism.
I mean, I gotta be honest, I feel like most people seem to be able to navigate the definition of socialism. It's a continuum! You can be more socialistic or less socialistic depending on how your government is run.
To the degree that it's confusing it's only confusing because people deliberately seek to make it confusing by saying things like "you can't ever be socialist without a complete overthrow of the capitalist system." That's just linedrawing for the sake of controlling definitions. You should ignore those people! If they had useful things to say they wouldn't be arguing over the definitions of words. That's actually a good general rule for life.
It's not just line drawing though if you pay attention to the history of socialism. It's a fundamentally different conception of how the world operates, and what socialism would even mean in the context of the world around it. I'm not particularly partial to that understanding, but it's generally more nuanced that its opposition actually.
Moreover I can't agree with the rest of this. Words matter, in fact that matter quite a lot. If you don't sit down and really work through what you're talking about, a lot of times you won't really be talking about anything.
I don't think it's particularly fundamental. If it were, their analysis would have more meat to it than just drawing a line along the continuum everybody else is discussing and saying that Marx says you have to be this tall.
Arguing that other people are using a word wrong is not the same as trying to make sure you both mean the same thing by a word. One is domination and the other is communication.
It's fundamental to certain understandings of socialism for sure. Not in the sense that socialism in some abstract requires it, but in the sense that capitalism cannot be ended by democratic means because politics is mere superstructure.
Again I don't agree, but there's a lot of good work that's been done on the topic, and it's not particularly easy to dismiss.
Again you're simplifying this to an absurd degree. Marxism wasn't just a big deal because people personally liked Marx, that's actually a rather hard thing to do, it's because it's a broad and powerful explanatory tool that makes some amount of sense.
Audre Lorde famously asserted something similar to this in saying "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
There's using a word wrong in the prescriptivist sense, which I think is stupid, and there is asserting that someone is the word wrong as an argument for how we should understand words, which I think is useful.
The same Foucauldian analysis you're alluding to here props up this understanding of language. It isn't only about control, but about acknowledging that words themselves aren't valueless means of communication but key epistemological components of our thinking.
This includes acknowledging what effect they have upon us and our thinking outside of communicating with others.
What happened was that the neoconservatives fucked up big time and were forced out of power by rival factions of the Republican Party. Given the fact that the Democrats have continued to lose so many downballot races over Obama's presidency that they have been basically reduced to a small set of old people who are poorly cultivating what little of the next generation there is, and that their most recent presidential nominee lost what should have been an easy win, it is blindingly obvious that the Democrats need to at least change their tactics. Now that does not necessarily mean going all in with Bernie's platform. In fact, I think what Democrats primarily need to work on is their marketing. People as a whole like the Democratic platform, but Democrats end up selling it poorly to them.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
You got a point. I am getting too bogged down in the definitions.
It just seems far too often, arguments go nowhere because there is no agreement to what is being argued. End goals are too diverse, with the steps to get there being ignored far too often. Then discussion gets too broad, and collapses due to terms being too ill defined, which was my original concern.
I guess the need is to push for specifics. Then the issue becomes the lack of knowledge on how to get there. People argue for a National Healthcare system in the United States without understanding the structural differences needed to make that happen, when effective results can be achieved without such a radical transformation using mandatory regulated insurance plans, including medicare. Then they get mad that you don't agree with a National Healthcare System. How about we figure out a way to make it to point A before considering how to get to B.
Anyway, that's where i'm coming from. I'll try to stop focusing so much on definitions.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I appreciate them going back and calling out three white dudes but also I really don't know who in the "establishment Democrats" is at all excited or even accepting of the Zuck or Cuomo. I guess some people want Joe Biden to run? But I'm really not seeing that either. He's acknowledged as being politically problematic in just about every circle I'm part of
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I will say that, while I genuinely hope they find a solution amenable to everyone, the recent kerfluffle within the DSA over their newly elected board member who works for a police union and the actual disagreements about if that's completely unacceptable (as some people feel very passionately) or acceptable is at least...illustrative of why the Democratic party's default state is largely "everyone is unhappy with everyone else all the time".
Large scale political movements that successfully represent broad populations tend to be wrangled together by getting everyone who dislikes everyone else to co-operate just enough to get some bullshit done
Large scale political movements that successfully represent broad populations tend to be wrangled together by getting everyone who dislikes everyone else to co-operate just enough to get some bullshit done
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Yes, and the agreement reached is not radical, because in order to get that tepid agreement it had to be some sort of compromise. Radical change only tends to occur following a big disaster (like the Great Depression), or following an actual revolution, which don't tend to go very well.