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back in the day when i first started getting into politics, i learned the general idea of things like affirmative action. it's when i learned that broadly speaking, rightwingers are against it. and most of the people against AA just happened to be white. back then, i was fully on board the anti-AA side. my thought process was initially very straightforward: companies/universities should hire/admit the people with the best qualifications, end of story. and it was because of that meritocratic system that we had currently the best people running these institutions, which just happened to mostly be white dudes. obviously i changed my position since then, but even when i did fully support it, a part of me still wasn't oblivious to the fact that white conservatives (and some libs) were more than likely sympathetic to the idea of a supposed meritocracy all the more just cause they happened to be white themselves. and in recent years it's become super loving clear to me that all that talk about meritocracy was pretty much complete bullshit. the whole hooplah with james damore was probably the first noteworthy incident that made me realize this. because this wasn't a case where some college had to adhere to quotas ordered to them from oh high. no, this was a private company willingly hiring more women, of their own free will, for various reasons that they felt would help the company. but that apparently was a big no no. companies chose to hire white dudes all the time giving them a competitive advantage before (and still do, tbf), but THAT discriminatory hiring was perfectly fine for some mysterious reason *shockedpikachu.gif* and you're seeing that sort of thing a lot more nowadays with hollywood studios hiring more women and people of color as cast and crew. movies like shang-chi were insanely successful, and disney/marvel probably got a bit of woke cred by hiring a mostly (or all?) asian cast, which in turn probably led to more sales. again, nobody's forcing them to do such thing, but rather they're doing it themselves because they think its in their best financial interests. but holy poo poo, the libertarian/conservatives finally realized there IS such a thing as a private company having a little TOO much control with how they operate! 
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Apr 21, 2022 05:30
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I AM GRANDO posted:I might call it a personality or debate style, but I agree that the whole point of it is people looking for an excuse to only care about themselves and who maybe get off on making other people angry, or who like to feel superior to those they consider weak, which definitely includes “intellectuals” and their professor in college who only gave them a bad grade because they were biased and jealous of being not as smart as the libertarian. i think this is quite accurate, and can personally confirm. back in my thankfully very short lived libertarian days, the primary driving force for me was just feeling like a smug edgelord. i watched things like south park and that Zeitgeist video series back in the day and thought it imbued me with esoteric, hidden, forbidden knowledge. the kind of things "THEY" don't want you to know. i immediately thought i was smarter than my professors cause i knew stuff they didn't. there was no larger project i was interested in aside from thinking i was better than everyone else. it was only when i realized how lovely and self-indulgent libertarianism was and how hosed up and fascist conservatives and started moving left that i began to give a poo poo about legitimately making the world a better place. a place where the two aforementioned groups stopped trying to make it actively worse/destroy it.
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Apr 21, 2022 08:29
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Mr Interweb posted:i think this is quite accurate, and can personally confirm. back in my thankfully very short lived libertarian days, the primary driving force for me was just feeling like a smug edgelord. i watched things like south park and that Zeitgeist video series back in the day and thought it imbued me with esoteric, hidden, forbidden knowledge. the kind of things "THEY" don't want you to know. i immediately thought i was smarter than my professors cause i knew stuff they didn't.
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Apr 21, 2022 14:45
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Mr Interweb posted:back in the day when i first started getting into politics, i learned the general idea of things like affirmative action. it's when i learned that broadly speaking, rightwingers are against it. and most of the people against AA just happened to be white. back then, i was fully on board the anti-AA side. my thought process was initially very straightforward: companies/universities should hire/admit the people with the best qualifications, end of story. and it was because of that meritocratic system that we had currently the best people running these institutions, which just happened to mostly be white dudes. another germane example of the above: https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1517123140987543553
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Apr 21, 2022 21:57
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He makes me ashamed to be a Jew... and a human... and alive.
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Apr 22, 2022 00:47
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I will never understand why some people fetishise, for lack of a better term, markets/'free' enterprise. Putting aside people who promote those so-called principles due to their own greed and lust for wealth, a lot of people genuinely have this hard-on for this idea that if, somehow, everyone acts as selfishly as possible it will work out in the collective best interest. The inability of some people to see any flaws in a social system that pits everyone against everyone and the simple idea that 'freedom to do anything' will mean 'many people will do bad things' is utterly mystifying. Mr Interweb posted:another germane example of the above: Now that I look at it again, I'm not sure what this claptrap means. Maybe my brain is scrambling language to protect me from evil, in which case thank you brain.
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Apr 25, 2022 01:24
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JustJeff88 posted:Now that I look at it again, I'm not sure what this claptrap means. Maybe my brain is scrambling language to protect me from evil, in which case thank you brain. It's only capitalism when it produces a result Benny likes. Everything else is exactly the same as the worst excesses of the USSR under Stalin
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Apr 25, 2022 01:26
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Reminder that when working in a literal government contracting facility, many of the people there praised the Free Market while simultaneously charging their time to a government project. The reason for this is solely correlation of the right's lip service to the free market and its addiction to defense spending. If you want to learn about people's feelings toward the government, just read Major Major's father's feelings on the government and farm subsidies.
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Apr 25, 2022 02:33
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Libertarians are also really into the aesthetic of self reliance versus the reality. Government aid and infrastructure is more “apparent” in day to day life in urban areas even though many rural areas are just as if not more dependent but things like cheap staple food and gas that make rural life affordable aren’t as visible.
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Apr 25, 2022 02:58
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It's the result of upbringing and education where material factors are entirely absent from politics and ideology. You either end up like this or a Hamilton fan who is still mad that Bernie Bros wouldn't stop going on about student loans and defunding the police.
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Apr 25, 2022 07:15
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's the result of upbringing and education where material factors are entirely absent from politics and ideology. Amazingly, this might actually be similar to how I feel. Would you care to elabourate?
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Apr 25, 2022 23:13
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There are some neat things that the free market does in the grand scheme of things. The fact that people can end up working together at a great distance without really needing to coordinate or even know eachother at all is kinda magic. There's always people probing around looking for unfilled demands to supply, and if they come up with some crazy new idea, they can just throw it out there into the market and it'll sink or swim. Command economies just can't make that happen. There are a lot of weird things that never would've taken off without the openness of the free market. And it's genuinely impressive when you step back to look at it. The problems really come about when you try leaving that as the only perspective you understand the world from. Most markets are only conditionally free. Many companies engage in lots of uncompetitive practices, and it's very common for very successful companies to have histories where they've kept a foot outside of the free market or gone around the free market to get their success. There's some outright corporate propaganda out there that deliberately tries to obfuscate those facts. There's also plenty of things that don't work the most optimally with a free market system. In theory, government programs can influence the "invisible hand" of the market to goose it towards more desired results. Labor systems can be described in market terms, but there's an inherent power disparity between bosses and employees, and people who need jobs to make a living are about as far as you can get from the platonic ideal of undifferentiated goods being traded instantly between an infinite amount of sellers that many free market economic theories were built up around. I can understand people who may not be huffing big corporate farts or ascribing to some rich dude's cult of personality falling into the pattern of worshipping the free market just because it's a thing that a clean model of the world that "makes sense". And somebody with that perspective may just not know of all the ways that other people get around the free market, so when they see something real low down like the charity towards the poor or affirmative action, that doesn't look "fair" to them, and they just don't know about how no billionaire is self-made. There's a lot of people who end up in the field of Economics, the least social of the social sciences, because it is a way to understand people and society without having to sympathize and understand their emotions and just using math with charts and graphs. Which is extremely appealing if you aren't generally good with people but you are sure good with math.
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Apr 25, 2022 23:52
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Interesting points, but I see it a different way. My view is that the idea of human labour is to do two things: satisfy human needs, and do so while respecting the limits of the natural world. To me, saying that I should be able to have such and such luxury item while someone else doesn't have food and shelter is unconscionable, and since for-profit economics only cares about, well, profit, that means that regardless of the level of production or its 'greenness' we will never obliterate poverty utterly. Alongside preserving the environment, there's nothing more important than that and I'm horrified, simply horrified, every day by a society and economic system that rails against discrimination due to... let's call them 'demographic factors' but is perfectly okay with it based on each person's perceived economic value and their ability to contribute to profits even when in many areas we are more than able to produce enough commodities to meet everyone's need. Whether we can do so in a green way and in what areas we are post-scarcity is another discussion, but I fail to see how letting people starve amongst plenty while others have too much isn't the ultimate -ism.
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Apr 26, 2022 00:17
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We decided we can collectively measure value and regularly prove how collectively terrible we are at.
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Apr 26, 2022 00:58
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:Libertarians are also really into the aesthetic of self reliance versus the reality. I've definitely noticed this too. They are often rather outdoorsy types but I don't necessarily think they love nature per se. Citations Needed had a whole episode of the pioneer archetype in the US and how it shapes attitudes and policies today.
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Apr 26, 2022 01:27
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JustJeff88 posted:Amazingly, this might actually be similar to how I feel. Would you care to elabourate? I'm not much for effortposts, but short version, the Cold War means most economics had actual cause and effect removed from it and became a mix of missing missing reasons and cheerleading for the wealthy. At this point, actually acknowledging material conditions is a fringe position in Western politics, hence why it's a Sisyphean task to get many people to even understand the concept of 'people are more likely to vote for you if you demonstrably, materially improve their lives and the world around them' when they appear to believe that a politician's role is solely that of a mascot.
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Apr 26, 2022 04:31
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And it’s true there are plenty of people so invested in seeing politics as a kind of sporting event that even if their lives were made better, they would still jeer and go on shooting up food courts because they’re too wrapped up in the debased celebrity identification aspect of American politics. People refused a life-saving vaccine and died because Biden was president when the vaccine became available.
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Apr 26, 2022 04:35
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Harold Fjord posted:We decided we can collectively measure value and regularly prove how collectively terrible we are at. A really common thing with libertarian types is a very strange and cargo-culty approach to 'value', see goldbug adjacent stuff and the thoroughly empty but insistent concept of 'sound money', which nowadays tends to be all in on Bitcoin. Ultimately this attitude is omnipresent in the western world to the point where there's a paper I recently read about how economists are starting to realise their measures of 'strength of an economy' might actually all be completely wrong, massive overvaluing service sectors while undervaluing resource extraction, processing and manufacturing, that Russia may not have as many people shuffling papers around as England but has a fuckload more oil, gas, and steel.
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Apr 26, 2022 13:01
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Wow Libertarians really hate the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child", huh. It kind of feels like they treat their kids as property that they shouldn't have to "share" with anyone.
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Apr 26, 2022 15:24
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Panfilo posted:Wow Libertarians really hate the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child", huh. It kind of feels like they treat their kids as property that they shouldn't have to "share" with anyone. Selling them is fine, though!
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Apr 26, 2022 15:34
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I mean, complete blindness to their own privilege is part and parcel. Of course, the idea that children are the property of their parents indefinitely is just flat out standard Boomer parenting, just ask the rejected parents thread. Really, most of the deal with libertarians is basically Boomer logic being copied without the context and underlying assumptions that made it actually work for them.
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Apr 26, 2022 16:25
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The Boomer story is a classic throughout history. A man fights for wealth power or even just survival and succeeds. Descendants are born into it and grow soft, but imagine that they inherited all of their ancestors traits, not just their appearance and money.
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Apr 26, 2022 16:48
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JustJeff88 posted:I will never understand why some people fetishise, for lack of a better term, markets/'free' enterprise. Logically, this means that if you oppose capitalism, you effectively oppose the entire history of humanity (except for the occasional bit here and there that can be denounced as "socialist," e.g. some of these people characterize the Incas as such.) Enver Zogha fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Apr 26, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 17:54
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I occasionally punish myself by arguing with libertarians on Twitter, and it's hilarious how few of them could even tell you the dictionary definition of the word capitalism. They have to have it pointed out to them that it isn't a synonym for trade or commerce.
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Apr 26, 2022 17:58
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Enver Zogha posted:I've come across quite a few right-wingers, especially those who identify as libertarian or "anarcho-capitalist," who think that capitalism has existed since the dawn of humanity due to hunter-gatherers engaging in barter and because if you took someone's flint knife for no compelling reason then they'd probably be pissed off and want it back. Of course if you bring up terrible side-effects of similar economic policies throughout history, suddenly they're all "That was mercantilism, not capitalism"
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Apr 26, 2022 18:02
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A lot of it is the wider assumption that capitalism = having a market too
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Apr 26, 2022 18:12
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DarklyDreaming posted:Of course if you bring up terrible side-effects of similar economic policies throughout history, suddenly they're all "That was mercantilism, not capitalism" Crony capitalism, etc. Funny how it comes down to 'real capitalism has never been tried'. Of course, liberals and conservatives will often give you almost exactly the same arguments, even if the wording and tone are different. It's from a very specific education that's been actively presenting capitalism as the only natural and logical order, and any alternative (rather, socialism and communism) as unnatural, sinful, and inherently unworkable.
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Apr 26, 2022 18:18
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DarklyDreaming posted:Of course if you bring up terrible side-effects of similar economic policies throughout history, suddenly they're all "That was mercantilism, not capitalism"
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Apr 26, 2022 19:11
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I've seen the whole markets = capitalism thing too, many times. I know that a lot of people are big on the 'next step' being the worker ownership of the workplace, but I don't see that as being a cure-all, especially on the environmental front. It's not going to distribute labour evenly and there will still be plenty of unemployed, and it's still going to serve the infinite growth fallacy because everyone will want to keep making more money. Every time I try to think about it, I end up back to the point of the only alternative being a planned, rationed economy with greatly reduced work and consumption... but I don't trust that either because I can't see it not ending up as an autocracy.
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Apr 26, 2022 23:14
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Personally I think that the biggest driver of overproduction is when the people ordering the production are not the people actually having to do the production. It is much easier for people to sit in an office and demand that other people churn out piles of crap, on threat of starving them, than it is for people to sign up voluntarily to churn out piles of crap, I think. I think it is less appealing to work long hours than it is for people who work very little to demand other people work long hours for their enrichment, so I would assign the tendency to do that to non-participatory production, either bourgeois-directed or state-directed.
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Apr 27, 2022 05:18
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One dynamic I've noticed with Libertarians online now is quite a few of them aren't temporarily embarrassed Millionaires. They are quite successful in their own right. I think this drives their condescention and post hoc rationalizations. Think about it: you have Larry Libertarian, he's middle aged, he owns property, maybe a boat or something. Larry might be an MD, small business tyrant, or have a very niche trade job that pays extremely well. In spite of wanting to come off as a social maverick he's likely got a pretty traditional nuclear family. He's arguing with Sally Socialist, whose very demographic creates a lot of apples/oranges comparisons. She's typically younger than him by a decade plus, she doesn't own property, she majored in liberal arts but her work history is spotty. She either doesn't want kids or doesn't think she can ever afford them. This dynamic lets Larry think he can get away with a lot of condescending conclusions. He's successful and she's not, so any criticism of him is obviously envy. That she is younger and lacks a nuclear family like him is seen as a testament to how dysfunctional she is as a person. Her lack of a tangible skill means whatever wealth of knowledge and empathy she actually has is irrelevant-it didn't land her a house, a husband, or a career so what's the point? And all these contrasts just reinforce Larry's misguided and selfish beliefs. And very often Larry himself did work very hard for what he had, it's just that his privilege was rowing with the other oar alongside him. How can you truly tell if someone is successful solely due to privilege or unsuccessful due to laziness? The existence of privileges in society and the illusion of a meritocracy make it impossible to tell.
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Apr 27, 2022 16:33
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I repeat this a lot, but: the average person who identifies as a libertarian isn't a young cryptobro atheist incel. They're mostly ordinary middle-class white male Protestant Republicans. And yeah, a lot of them are the stereotypical suburban white guy who thinks he's a "self-made man" because the many state and federal policies that benefit him are invisible or taken for granted.
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Apr 27, 2022 16:38
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Libertarianism in the US was invented as post-hoc justification for old arguments in favor of segregation and destruction of the social safety net and new deal. The only reason there are people who embrace those post-hoc justifications in themselves and in ways that conflict with republican orthodoxy is that there are people too naive or misinformed to understand what’s really going on with them.
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Apr 27, 2022 17:31
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The major theme that I see is just-world fallcy and it's non-secular cousin the prosperity gospel. People can't deal with the idea that life isn't fair, OR they know that it isn't but don't give a gently caress so long as it's unfair in their favour. So, if they see someone struggling they have to assume a lack of effort or some inherent flaw, and vice-versa for the 'successful' person. Partly it's just awful people, but partly I do understand it... people have to believe that effort = rewards and rewards = effort or why do anything? I had a set of professional experiences that happened to me over the course of a few years that completely shattered that nonsense world view and - I say this with no exaggeration - drove me half insane. One of the few good sides to this experience was that it made me understand how people lie to themselves when the truth is too dire to confront.
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Apr 28, 2022 00:57
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Also there seems to be a lot of projection with them. Like you hear them complain about leftists-"They're lazy and act entitled to the labor of others. Their parents gave them participation trophies. They're obsessed with feelings over action and logic! They ignore what works in society and just make poo poo up as they go." But this seems to refer to themselves more than anything. Libertarians themselves come off as very whiny and entitled. Their own supposed hard work and success should stand on its own, so why need to punch down? Their egotism suggests they were raised to think of themselves as A Very Special Boy. Their ideology is also less rooted in reality than the ones they criticize. "Socialism never worked!" they scream. Uh huh, so about that fictional Galts Gulch they say is so much better?
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Apr 28, 2022 15:01
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I accidentally stumbled into the Noeliberal subreddit. I lost my appetite, but my loathing for neolibs is sharper than ever.
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May 13, 2022 00:50
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 It hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces. 
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May 13, 2022 00:59
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Big "the prison cell is everything outside the room with the big door on it" energy to that image.
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May 13, 2022 01:09
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Hey, did jrod ever come back? I’m going to take the lsat in a year. I’ll post my score and if he doesn’t do the same, we’ll know libertarianism is a bad philosophy.
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May 13, 2022 01:14
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What exactly do people mean when they say Neoliberalism? I don't mean the dictionary definition, I mean terminally online Twitter debate bro definition.
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May 13, 2022 01:21
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