skewetoo posted:

right after i finish swearing myself in and deputizing myself im gonna kick your rear end

vyelkin posted:

yeah, the whole point of neoliberalism wasn't necessarily to use the state to enforce technocratic capitalism, it was about removing the ability of the state to do anything else. end of history meant end of state power, and third way leaders more than anybody else made sure that "the state can't do anything" became the defining ideology. people might acknowledge that the state had the theoretical authority to do things, but they made sure that the ideological apparatus surrounding the state constantly reaffirmed that it shouldn't, both because it was theoretically wrong and because it was inefficient. everything is more effective when someone other than the state does it, so why would you ever want the state to do anything even if you acknowledge that it can?

what state capacity did remain was, as dreylad says, used to funnel state money to private individuals. sometimes this was in the form of pure graft, but more often it was rooted in the privatization of the state. neoliberal ideology says capitalism is the only system that works and efficiency is more important than efficacy. capitalism is driven by the profit motive which drives people to efficiency, and neoliberalism says the problem with the state is it doesn't have a profit motive so it can never be efficient, even if it is effective - the state might get the thing done that you want, but it will waste resources doing it, so there will always be a theoretical private initiative that could reach the same result for less expenditure. and so the privatization of the state took place, both because of graft but also because of an ideological belief that only privatization could lead to efficiency. and this didn't only apply to things neoliberals dislike about the state, but about everything--private police, private prisons, private soldiers. why spend money creating an effective police force, prison, or military when you could contract it out, get the same result for less expenditure, and get the chance to give a big contract to your friend from university while you're at it? the state still exists but it primarily exists as a clearinghouse for taxpayer money to go to private contractors who provide state functions. the principal thing that changes when government changes hands is not the basic ideology of how the state should operate, but rather which group of well-connected donors get the big taxpayer-funded contracts

of course, it should go without saying that this system only works when the good times are rolling. as soon as it faces a systemic crisis that can't be solved in the course of a single fiscal quarter using a public-private contract, it collapses because the state no longer has the capacity to do effective long-term planning and the private contractors either aren't interested in it or aren't capable of doing it either. neoliberalism teaches that there is nothing outside the market, and so it cannot conceive of problems that are legitimate market failures. it either stalls on those problems, acknowledging that they exist but remaining unable to solve them, or its ratcheting mechanism reassures the neoliberal mind that the solution is more of the market, because these market mechanisms cannot fail, because there is no ideological alternative to them. the pandemic or climate change are problems that exist outside the market and that cannot be solved by the market, because in both cases the short-term profit incentives cause drastic long-term consequences far out of proportion to the short-term choices that caused them

this is why we keep doubling down on bad responses to both these systemic problems, because our political class is entirely wedded to the neoliberal view of the world as one big market where private enterprise is the driving force of history and where the only efficient thing for the state to do is to get out of the way, but these problems are ones that are made worse by the market, not better, and therefore cannot be solved through this model. sometimes a far-sighted individual might break the trend and try to do what's healthy in the long-run, but the short-term incentives to stab that person in the back and go back to opening the economy or burning coal are just too great, and because nothing exists outside the market our leaders simply cannot conceive of a long-term solution that might overcome the short-term perversions of the profit motive.

infernal machines posted:

sorry, you need an ex-cop to do the first deputization or it doesn't count

Frosted Flake posted:

That was fantastic, thank you.

I know this is a weird question, but how did we - C-SPAM posters I guess - not adopt that worldview? I mean, like you said it’s culturally hegemonic, it’s certainly all I’ve seen in my lifetime, we’re surrounded by people who actively believe and support it or passively believe it’s the only possibility, “just how things are”, and so on, it’s constantly socially reinforced.

Frosted Flake posted:

That was fantastic, thank you.

I know this is a weird question, but how did we - C-SPAM posters I guess - not adopt that worldview? I mean, like you said it’s culturally hegemonic, it’s certainly all I’ve seen in my lifetime, we’re surrounded by people who actively believe and support it or passively believe it’s the only possibility, “just how things are”, and so on, it’s constantly socially reinforced.

I’m definitely not smart enough that I saw through the veil, I mean, you’ve seen me post. I’m married to CATO, my old man is a LtCol, my brother is a “Canadian Scholar” and sits on all these panels and committees, Public-Private Partnership things as a Millennial-That-Made. I know when I lived at home I read the Globe and Mail, Economist, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, but I don’t remember thinking anything of it, they were “just what people read”, you know?

I realize many of you likely did the readings, or were organizing or were born and came up in groups that the system more nakedly didn’t work for, but I’m curious how this works. Christman said most people’s political views are just what’s socially reinforced, everything reinforces neoliberalism, how did we end up outside the consensus?

There’s no reason I can see that I shouldn’t hear “efficient market solutions” and say “yeah, okay, that sounds great!”, I mean, that’s what should make sense to me, right? Not now, obviously, because I have done and read all of these things since I suppose, but at some point I should have fit comfortably within the consensus, and I’m wondering how that broke down. I don’t remember if I believed any of that stuff, but I also don’t remember not believing in it, where now there’s no much doubt about where I stand.

I hope that wasn’t too personal or introspective, but I’m wondering why and how these beliefs stopped working for “us”, and how that might be transferable? I’m also wondering if any of you experienced this more clearly because I’m just scratching my head at how all of the social reinforcement would be pushing me towards there.

Maybe I’m looking for an answer within the self but really this is just a consequence of the Neoliberal order breaking down and a certain percentage of people with X class background, Y education, who have been trained to think in a certain way through Z institutions begin to have dissonance with it? In which case, would we expect more people who went to Queens or Bishops or RMC or whatever to slowly fall out of step?

Again, sorry, I know it’s a weird question.

Karach posted:

I think being abused by my parents was an early wake-up call that authority figures are not to be trusted and do not have my best interests at heart. doubly so when you realize it's the brutal and hosed up society we've created that likely led to my being abused in the first place.

once that thought is in place, everything else seems to follow quite naturally.

vyelkin posted:

Then add onto that that younger generations are often terrified of climate change, and you can see how people currently in their 30s grew up in the eternal optimism of the 90s only to graduate into capitalism's worst crisis in a century so they never got any of the promised benefits that previous generations enjoyed, and then spent a decade watching as the market repeatedly failed to either fix the problems affecting their material conditions or to make any indication that it could ever solve the massive elephant in the room that will affect their material conditions even more in the future, and you can see how an increasing number of people came to think that maybe capitalism is actually the problem, not the solution.

Frosted Flake posted:

That was fantastic, thank you.

I know this is a weird question, but how did we - C-SPAM posters I guess - not adopt that worldview? I mean, like you said it’s culturally hegemonic, it’s certainly all I’ve seen in my lifetime, we’re surrounded by people who actively believe and support it or passively believe it’s the only possibility, “just how things are”, and so on, it’s constantly socially reinforced.

Tighclops posted:

I grew up relatively poor while surrounded by comfortable middle class people and watched way too much Star Trek so when I hit my mid-20s I was like oh

Oh gently caress

DariusLikewise posted:

https://twitter.com/lisaporter2/status/1491644242929795074?s=21

lmao

DirtyRobot posted:

[looking back at the 90s optimism in which one was reared, but with an adult's knowledge of what was actually happening, as well as what was soon to come in the near future]



"Oh... lol. lmao."

Futanari Damacy posted:

https://twitter.com/AmitAryaMD/status/1491438045400567812

To me a hosed up thing right now is for whoever stands up to the protests like those old ladies blocking the trucks the media has nothing better to offer than to basically say "hey truckers, here's your chief antagonist, their full name, where they work, where they live and what they look like!" Some loving Manchurian Candidate in the protestor ranks is going to kill one of these people.

Poor CTV taking the decals off their vehicles, as if the higher-ups aren't loving this poo poo. Most of the country is against the protests but bigging it up drives views and clicks while cementing their own irrelevancy.

Vox Nihili posted:

One thing I don't understand is how obnoxious truckers laying onto horns for days jn a city center aren't immediately and constantly bombarded by eggs and trash.

Vox Nihili posted:

One thing I don't understand is how obnoxious truckers laying onto horns for days jn a city center aren't immediately and constantly bombarded by eggs and trash.

vyelkin posted:

In addition to this being a forum of self-selected internet leftists, I think there was a big shift among younger generations that have come of age during and after the financial crisis. We transparently saw that capitalism, left to its own devices, broke and couldn't fix itself, and was then propped up by the state because the state was committed to maintaining the system that had just broken the world economy. I've read this as anecdotal evidence from others, and I certainly notice it in myself as well, that living through and graduating into the financial crisis and seeing how it affected me, my family and friends, and my entire generation, was certainly what started pushing me left.

DariusLikewise posted:

https://twitter.com/ctvwinnipeg/status/1491841899736481793?s=21

insanity

Vox Nihili posted:

One thing I don't understand is how obnoxious truckers laying onto horns for days jn a city center aren't immediately and constantly bombarded by eggs and trash.

yellowcar posted:

top trending in canadian twitter right now lmao

https://twitter.com/APFactCheck/status/1491404841364733956

infernal machines posted:

why would it matter if he was?

Saalkin posted:

Fake. News. Castro is his Dad. I will believe nothing else!

Saalkin posted:

It doesn't. I just find it funny so I hold onto that faith.

infernal machines posted:

oh for sure, but i meant to the truck klan. are they going for some sins of the father poo poo? was PET not enough of a villain for them?

infernal machines posted:

oh for sure, but i meant to the truck klan. are they going for some sins of the father poo poo? was PET not enough of a villain for them?

Dreylad posted:

the neoliberal order wasn't about offering new solutions to the state, it was about maintaining the bare minimum of governance to keep the good times rolling so that public-private partnerships could flourish so that money could flow from the state to private companies, which would in turn enrich citizens who are now consumers whose rights are respected so long as they're taxpayers. It's a complete mess as soon as something that requires putting the brakes on the good times pops up, especially something as uncontrollable as a disease or, say, climate change.

at the same time, if you look at historical examples of plagues it's hard to say that this pandemic has actually been a failure. the spanish flu persisted in some form for 50 years. polio had a decade long vaccine rollout with some early disasters of children contracting polio and dying from their vaccination.

it only seems like a failure because we have unprecedented access to modern medical science, technology, and data and we, as neoliberal subjects, all expect that to quickly and efficiently solve all our problems as has been promised. as it turns out pandemics are a problem of politics and civics (or sociology, or whatever term you like) not just curing the thing and expecting everyone to accept that cure. We no longer have real politics where clear class and regional interests struggle over the distribution of resources in our society. instead we have cultural battles that serve as moral showdowns and sideshows of Content that keep us attached to our screens.

yellowcar posted: