Ok, cool. I’m asking out of genuine curiosity. How does this post make you feel? You’re in the overlap of the targeter and the targeted.
As a show of good faith, let’s commiserate. I agree that our “founding fathers” weren’t good people by today’s standards, but I’m in the camp that their ideas of classical liberalism were fine. I feel shame that our country is built on genocide, slavery and exploitation, but at the same time, I want to hold our current leadership to a higher standard and ahem prosecute them. I understand that you don’t agree with classical liberalism, and that’s fine, I’m not looking to pick a fight. But I imagine you feel some confusion and conflict as I do?
Hey, i appreciate the chillness and will try to respond in kind. I can understand feeling conflicted, but personally I severed any emotional connection with this country several years ago after I could no longer reconcile my shrinking self-conception as “an american” with my growing self-conception as a human being. It’s not just that they were seperate; they were fully att odds with each other in a very physical, material way. If I recognize that there is no deep fundamental difference between my humanity and anyone else’s, and if I consider myself part of the human family, I can’t ignore the devastation that this military-economic-cultural thing we call America has wrought on our family. If I see myself as a cell in the body of nature, I can’t help but look at the effects of America and see it for a cancer. That doesn’t mean everyone in it is “bad” or “evil” of course, and i personally don’t believe in these concepts to begin with. The reality is more messy and complex than any quick moral assessment can say, but at the highest level the practical assessment is simple: America is a boat anchor on the neck of humanity. It’s military enforces an economic system that’s killing the world, the ideology it spreads is parochial and antisocial, and we who live inside it are both it’s victims and it’s accomplices, forced to work our lives away for rich pedophiles while economically supporting atrocities on other people elsewhere.
The desire to hold leaders to a higher standard is totally understandable, but the question of what they lead renders it moot in this case. American leaders are people who sit at the helm of a world-spanning death machine, and no decision they make, no matter how high-minded and well intentioned, can change it’s basic function, which is to churn human, plant and animal life into profit. Like Darwinism, the evolutionary pressures of capitalist imperial politics actively selects for these wretched people, and against anyone who might even try to rein in it’s excesses, even as ineffective that would be. The only way to hold the leaders of this system to a higher standard is to hold the system to a higher standard, and the highest standard this system can realistically be held to is to be dismantled and replaced with something capable of producing stable and equitable results. Capitalism itself is like a nanobot Grey Goo apocalypse: instead of breaking down everything to produce more nanobots it breaks everything down into profit. I consider it an existential threat to life on earth,and anything that upholds capitalism or stands in the way of it’s destruction to be an acceptable loss for the preservation of the biosphere.
I hope I haven’t gone on too long, but I feel that gets to the heart of it. For the love of humanity and all living things, I’ve forsaken any attachment to this predatory so-called society.
Respectfully, your position doesn’t make sense. Liberalism brought us here. Liberalism was built on top of the slave trade, of colonialism, of plunder. This system produces people like Epstein and Trump.
Do you know how many enlightenment figures were wildly racist, how many of them profited from slavery while pretending to stand for freedom? Scientific racism is a direct evolution from this.
As for whether liberalism now would lead to more of the same, of course it would, it has no built-in method for people to not be exploited, to discourage greed, to stop genocide, etc. How would you suggest we prevent any and all of this within liberalism?
I’ve been thinking for a long time that any large-scale organization will lead to greed, corruption, injustice, et al. It’s only since I’ve been reading about ML that I learned I lean anarchist. Vanguard parties sound like a bad idea to me.
Ok, cool. I’m asking out of genuine curiosity. How does this post make you feel? You’re in the overlap of the targeter and the targeted.
As a show of good faith, let’s commiserate. I agree that our “founding fathers” weren’t good people by today’s standards, but I’m in the camp that their ideas of classical liberalism were fine. I feel shame that our country is built on genocide, slavery and exploitation, but at the same time, I want to hold our current leadership to a higher standard and ahem prosecute them. I understand that you don’t agree with classical liberalism, and that’s fine, I’m not looking to pick a fight. But I imagine you feel some confusion and conflict as I do?
Hey, i appreciate the chillness and will try to respond in kind. I can understand feeling conflicted, but personally I severed any emotional connection with this country several years ago after I could no longer reconcile my shrinking self-conception as “an american” with my growing self-conception as a human being. It’s not just that they were seperate; they were fully att odds with each other in a very physical, material way. If I recognize that there is no deep fundamental difference between my humanity and anyone else’s, and if I consider myself part of the human family, I can’t ignore the devastation that this military-economic-cultural thing we call America has wrought on our family. If I see myself as a cell in the body of nature, I can’t help but look at the effects of America and see it for a cancer. That doesn’t mean everyone in it is “bad” or “evil” of course, and i personally don’t believe in these concepts to begin with. The reality is more messy and complex than any quick moral assessment can say, but at the highest level the practical assessment is simple: America is a boat anchor on the neck of humanity. It’s military enforces an economic system that’s killing the world, the ideology it spreads is parochial and antisocial, and we who live inside it are both it’s victims and it’s accomplices, forced to work our lives away for rich pedophiles while economically supporting atrocities on other people elsewhere.
The desire to hold leaders to a higher standard is totally understandable, but the question of what they lead renders it moot in this case. American leaders are people who sit at the helm of a world-spanning death machine, and no decision they make, no matter how high-minded and well intentioned, can change it’s basic function, which is to churn human, plant and animal life into profit. Like Darwinism, the evolutionary pressures of capitalist imperial politics actively selects for these wretched people, and against anyone who might even try to rein in it’s excesses, even as ineffective that would be. The only way to hold the leaders of this system to a higher standard is to hold the system to a higher standard, and the highest standard this system can realistically be held to is to be dismantled and replaced with something capable of producing stable and equitable results. Capitalism itself is like a nanobot Grey Goo apocalypse: instead of breaking down everything to produce more nanobots it breaks everything down into profit. I consider it an existential threat to life on earth,and anything that upholds capitalism or stands in the way of it’s destruction to be an acceptable loss for the preservation of the biosphere.
I hope I haven’t gone on too long, but I feel that gets to the heart of it. For the love of humanity and all living things, I’ve forsaken any attachment to this predatory so-called society.
Respectfully, your position doesn’t make sense. Liberalism brought us here. Liberalism was built on top of the slave trade, of colonialism, of plunder. This system produces people like Epstein and Trump.
With all due respect, that’s sounds like leaps of logic, like saying he scientific theory leads directly to and only to nuclear warfare.
Does classical liberalism only lead to slave trade/colonialism?
Do you know how many enlightenment figures were wildly racist, how many of them profited from slavery while pretending to stand for freedom? Scientific racism is a direct evolution from this.
As for whether liberalism now would lead to more of the same, of course it would, it has no built-in method for people to not be exploited, to discourage greed, to stop genocide, etc. How would you suggest we prevent any and all of this within liberalism?
I’ve been thinking for a long time that any large-scale organization will lead to greed, corruption, injustice, et al. It’s only since I’ve been reading about ML that I learned I lean anarchist. Vanguard parties sound like a bad idea to me.
Are we talking about liberalism or neoliberalism? My understanding is that liberalism is, ostensibly, grounded in enlightenment ideals.
I’m guessing I got downvoted because I said I’m fine with classical liberalism?