In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.
There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.
Leftists have a big problem with purity testing. It’s why they never seem to be able to accomplish anything. Instead of joining forces with other leftist groups that share 95% of the same views, they shit all over them for not being 100% aligned.
If they’d suck it up and work together they could actually be a political force and get some of what they want, instead of infighting constantly and accomplishing nothing.
It’s the biggest thing turning me off of leftist ideology. I agree with a decent amount of what they want, but as soon as I say something like “Maybe market economies solve real problems and are suitable for some situations like consumer products” I’m basically turbo hitler to them.
For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”
I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.
I saw someone drown in a pool when I was 11. I noticed there was someone sitting at the bottom of the deep end, told the lifeguard who hadn’t yet noticed, but it was just barely too late. Later learned they had experienced a seizure and sank.
I mostly just remember how pale they were, and being annoyed that pool time got axed for the remainder of summer camp. I never felt much about it. Shit happens, people die, just the way it goes.
I find the opposite as an ADHD sufferer. When I use a dish, it goes in the dishwasher. If it’s full, I run it. If it’s clean, I empty it before I put the dirty dish in which takes all of 2 minutes. It basically forces the routine, and I end up running it almost every night and emptying it while I make my morning coffee.
Whereas with hand washing I end up building a pile in the sink and procrastinate until it gets big enough to take half an hour to get through.
Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.
I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.
Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.
Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”
But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.
Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.
Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.
Rolex isn’t incredibly cheap lmao. It’s mid to high price for luxury watches. The cheapest thing they sell is like $3k. Incredibly cheap for mechanical watches would be around the $100 mark for a Seiko 5 series or something.
Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.
It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.
I’m talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won’t even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you’ve been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn’t get in school.
Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you’ll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.
Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.
I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.
Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.
If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.
Alright dude, now you’re just misrepresenting my views and revealing your own biases and we’re going nowhere. I don’t have time to make a comprehensive response to all that, I’m just going to go outside enjoy the freedom and prosperity that my evil liberal society has provided me. Good thing I won’t have to wait in a bread line at Costco, it’s a real time saver.
This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.
And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.
As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.
When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.
And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).
I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.
I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.
Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.
The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.
The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.
Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.
I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.
Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.
I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.
My entire subscription feed is hundreds of edutainment channels pretty much. It’s my alternative to the discovery/history/science channel for the modern age (and tbh it’s higher quality too in many cases)
It’s also really really good for learning practical skills like home repairs and automotive maintenance.
Some favorite channels:
Nilered
Styropyro
Practical engineering
Technology Connections
Breaking taps
The thought emporium