Every liberal does it too, from center right radlibs to far-right “conservatives”: the most extreme right fringe liberals hate the mainstream liberals for not being bigoted enough, the mainstream libs hate the radlibs for not being cruel enough, and the radlibs hate the left for not being chauvinist enough.
Denouncing chauvinism in particular is like a liberal moral event horizon, a cardinal sin against their self-interested belief in the righteousness of the imperial hegemon that keeps the treats flowing at gunpoint.
Liberals put a very high value on awareness of problems yet distrust people that want to do something about them.
As the official pod puts it, liberals live in a world full of victims but no victimizers
I wouldn’t put it like that, it’s more that they don’t see doing nothing as political, and consider being aware of the problem or even minor donations as a sufficiently positive action.
I just had flashbacks of Kony 2012
I still think of that from time to time
it was the greatest presidential campaign in history
Its nice that she became a supreem court justice.
The problem with libs is that they beleve ideas make history. Once you put yourself in that mindset the chauvinism becomes more reasonable.
The west is the richest so they have the best ideas. Since the liberal idea set is self evidently the best the other countries are backward and their idea sets should be replaced.
In reality the reason the west has been richer for the last 3-4 hundred out of 10-14k years of agriculture has les to do with ideas or western culture and more to do with geografic and demografic realities, that are too comlicated for this post. So the libs are wrong.
for any lib lurkers, i recommend reading liberalism: a counter-history by domenico losurdo
In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.
Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery
What’s that song from Sesame Street?
I’m reminded of that Bo Burnham song, How The World Works
I’ve had parts of that song stuck in my head for like a year now, particularly the verse:
And private property’s inherently theft
And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left
And every politician, every cop on the street
Protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate eliteit’s very funny how he turned from Funny Internet Guy #4812 to a communist and probably the only actually good video essay I’ve ever listened to dealt with him and the views in that video are a core jigsaw piece in my personality and thinking
liberals despise anyone and everyone with better politics than themselves.
That blows up on Hexbear whenever someone gets mad at vegans for talking about the actual cost and harm done by the meat industry.
People were mad at the vegan comm because they were aggressive and confrontational dicks to everyone on the site while using the patina of veganism as an excuse.
Its why most of those very same vegans are all mostly banned off the website for their behaviors.
Its one thing to advocate for veganism, its another thing to for example call someone a “r*pe enjoyer” to a sexual assault victim for drinking milk in a thread completely unrelated to veganism.
Its one thing to advocate for veganism, its another thing to for example call someone a “r*pe enjoyer” to a sexual assault victim for drinking milk in a thread completely unrelated to veganism.
I may have missed the worst of that; I wouldn’t have said that myself.
I had not seen any recent examples of that, but the "vegan spoke up, how uncivil" thing percolates from time to time without anything near the insult you mentioned.
It was pretty much the only other experience with meeting other vegans on this site tbh, I was legit excited about more vegans being on the site…up until they started posting lol.
Some hilariously unhinged statements did come from them like:
Hunger isn’t a real thing. It doesn’t exist. If you make conscious decisions about what to eat based on an informed view of nutrition, you will still feel hungry. It’s not some magic signal telling you that you’re not getting enough nutrients, it’s a dumb feeling that exists in your head. You ignore it, and it goes away. The feeling of hunger cannot harm you.
and
Delusions may or may not go away if you ignore them, I have no idea, I’m not knowledgeable on that topic. What I can tell you for sure is that hunger does go away when you ignore it.
It was pretty much the only other experience with meeting other vegans on this site tbh, I was legit excited about more vegans being on the site…up until they started posting lol.
I’m kind of glad I either tuned it out or was just not in those subsections. I believe you when you say that happened and I remember some vegans talking about the mass bans and not liking those, but the context of what got them banned was lost.
Hunger isn’t a real thing. It doesn’t exist. If you make conscious decisions about what to eat based on an informed view of nutrition, you will still feel hungry. It’s not some magic signal telling you that you’re not getting enough nutrients, it’s a dumb feeling that exists in your head. You ignore it, and it goes away. The feeling of hunger cannot harm you.
Delusions may or may not go away if you ignore them, I have no idea, I’m not knowledgeable on that topic. What I can tell you for sure is that hunger does go away when you ignore it.
I appreciate the quoted bits of Hexbear history. Maybe some of the site’s cultural reactions toward vegans are more than lingering
cliches. Unfortunately.I actually saw that comment first hand and it was in the middle of a thread I was in and I got so fuckin mad. As someone who has been food insecure myself for most of my life and currently cannot afford a kitchen and will be hungry till I get to work and heat up my little bowl of 3 bean chili honestly seriously fuck that person that said that and I am glad they are gone.
BUT IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN IT’S MY TREATS!!!
note that my disparaging attitude towards carnists and vegetarians on hexbear also carries over to whoever banned me from c/vegan 2 or so years ago for not being reductive and racist enough about indigenous people
also note that if you aren’t vegan you aren’t allowed to have an opinion on either indigenous veganism or my ban
I’m vegan and I don’t expect people outside of cities to be vegan. Expecting indigenous people who are systematically put into food deserts would be just silly IMO. But anyone in the city should go vegan. Tbh I still don’t get how people who don’t forage and hunt as the means of getting food aren’t vegan. The costs of animal products are wild.
There’s also some really really good alternatives that are actually cheaper. Especially if you can find a discount store. Though in a similar note I am really lucky in that I work in one of those discount stores.
Liberals are incapable of understanding politics.
Period.
They’re used to only dealing with some form of Fox (or Fox Business) Conservative. Like, thats the only other form of politics they can fathom outside of some vague adherence to “smart government.” And when it comes to “getting stuff done” they think it’s just a numbers game: just get enough good Libs elected and things will be gooder, or some shit.
Like, forget war - which for some reason Libs can’t wrap their heads around that war is fucking bad. What’s the Lib response to climate change or failing healthcare or inexplicable income gaps? Vote harder? California is a Super Majority D state. Obama had Congress sewn up for 2 years. Conservativism is effectively dead where the majority of people live. So what’s the endgame? When does shit get better?
And that’s where Libs are left with an identity crisis because to admit any one little (but really fucking big) thing is beyond repair is admitting there are systemic problems that cannot be solved with the only tool in the shed: voting. And that’s basically the Lib version of staring into the abyss.
Everything a Lib knows is a fucking lie.
Liberals are incapable of understanding politics.
Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.
For liberals, war is a purely economic calculation whose criteria of justification are decided by whether or not they contravene principles whose evolved historical function is the preservation of capitalist social relations and the imperialist world system (whether the liberal in question is a mystified rube or a demonically englightened ghoul). Similarly, criteria of success or failure in war is based on economic calculation. Look at the U$ yankkkie defences of their proxy war in Ukraine: “no Americans are dying, it will weaken the Russian economy, we must secure our interests”. Of course we also know, as evidenced spectacularly by the U$ terrorist bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, that the key objective is always the preservation of U$ economic hegemony, keeping a competitor economically disadvantaged, taking their economic customers in Europe and forcing them into economic dependence on America LNG.
It’s not always that what they know is a lie. Liberals often do know quite a bit, especially the more ghoulish ones. Most of them, yes, are rubes in a lot of respects. But the most basic normative axioms of their thought are detached from reality in a particularly striking way.
Of course when they fail by their own criteria (see: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc…) they are never honest about this and use mental gymnastics to avoid responsibility, because that matters more, because the legitimacy of their views must be defended at all costs. This is inculcated into liberals as a matter of liberal cultural necessity because if it wasn’t, they would not be able to adequately defend those same capitalist and imperialist socio-economic systems they rely upon and in terms of which they determine their own self-worth.
same reason people hate vegans. they know their right and they feel cognitive dissonance.
I disagree. People dislike vegans because vegans (understandably) often get angry over an atrocity that other people don’t see as an atrocity and insist on being abusive to people who disagree on subjective matters.
Libs don’t dislike us for getting angry, they dislike us for a range of reasons, including disagreement on objective facts, contradicting material interests, subjugation to capitalist propaganda, etc. We shitpost and get mean, but I don’t see us being abusive to people unless good faith discussion has already been long tried and failed.
I think the degree to which vegans are “abusive” toward carnists is ridiculously exaggerated because of people’s cognitive dissonance (and thus uncomfortability about being reminded of those atrocities) over eating meat. i.e., how many people dislike vegans because they’ve actually had a vegan start screaming or getting outrageously angy at them personally over eating meat vs. they’ve just heard of vegans getting angry in a cringe compilation youtube video or from a comment on reddit, and chose to accept that as something representative of veganism and dismiss it because actually thinking about vegan arguments makes them uncomfortable
Particularly up until the last few years, normal society has been a lot more hostile to vegans than vegans have been to individual carnists (as opposed to the meat industry and ideology of carnism as a whole). And I think socialists have a lot more enemies whom they definitionally need to hate (capitalists, petty bouge, chuds and liberal ideologues who are materially invested in capitalism) than do vegans who see the vast majority of carnists as people to be convinced.
I won’t at all deny that society has historically been a lot more hostile to vegans than vice versa. I grew up a vegetarian me whole life and that got enough of that unwarranted abuse as it is. But I’ll be honest, in my personal experience, I’ve met about a hundred vegans who weren’t bothered to talk about it (but were frequently harassed by others for their veganism anyway), five vegans scream abuse at me, and between zero and one who wanted to engage in a conversation or saw me as someone to be convinced. I just think it’s a different kettle of fish.
yeah… I was a liberal once, and it was definitely informed in large part by wanting to be “good” and correct. I became kind of a debatelord for a minute there. But, what I didn’t do, was shit my pants and demand the mods ban them when it became clear I was on the wrong side of something, I lived and learned and moved on (generally leftward). You gotta be able to take the L sometimes.
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I thought it was because, despite wanting things like universal healthcare and welfare supports, they don’t want to let go of capitalism. I’m not from here, and not all the way to where you are, but that’s my outside view.
despite wanting things like universal healthcare and welfare supports, they don’t want to let go of capitalism
That’s called social democracy. It is fed by imperialism and shits out a labor aristocracy. The capitalist class uses social democracy in the imperial core to appease the workers and postpone revolution. But it requires exporting suffering to the “developing” (colonized) world.
You see this in the so called “nordic” countries. People will admire the nordic countries without questioning how imperialism keeps them afloat.
Thanks for the response. That second map is really helpful to put into perspective how much my country (the US) is screwing me, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the bottom section.
A few questions if that’s okay:
The capitalist class uses social democracy in the imperial core to appease the workers and postpone revolution.
What is the imperial core?
But it requires exporting suffering to the “developing” (colonized) world.
Does this mean things like mining lithium, or exporting labor to other countries because it’s cheaper?
Sorry if these questions sound dumb. I’m a liberal with dreams of socialism in my head, but Hexbear makes me feel like maybe I don’t understand what those dreams actually mean, so I’m trying to get a better understanding.
Just to add a bit of context, there’s a quote about how ‘fascism is imperialism turned inward’.
It helps to think of the imperial core as like a hierarchy of layers. The US ruling class is at the top of this hierarchy, and the ruling classes of other imperialist nations are next. As the contradictions of capitalism continue to pile up, there is a cannibalization that starts at the furthest periphery. This started with colonization/exploitation of the global south. But over time this has become less effective for various reasons (BRICS being the new big one). There’s a lot of mechanisms the core uses to affect it’s desires on the periphery (IMF conditioned loans, sanctions, embargoes, currency manipulations, capital flight, etc). As these mechanisms are dulled, the exploitation in the periphery starts to encroach up the layers of the hierarchy over time.
The 2014 coup in Ukraine was a clear step along this path, but it was not the first one by any means. Balkanization was one of the earlier ones, as was Greece. So this is something that will continue as BRICS and other elements of multipolarity increase around the world and particularly in the global south. Capital wants profits via exploitation, and if the profits in the global south become marginal due to the eroding of capital’s power, then capital finds new places to exploit. Often that means turning inward.
But over time this has become less effective for various reasons
Like the connectedness of their internet and the ability to share with many others when a company is exploiting resources?
Thanks for the in depth explanation. I had to read it a few times, but I think I understand. It’s so complicated, all the things the wealthy elite can do to change the outcome of things. What you said were strictly institutional, but they can do a lot of things to affect the way the public views these actions and their effects too.
YouTube search: Yellow Parenti
Here’s the “Yellow Parenti” speech @Pandantic@midwest.social , originally titled “US Interventionism, the 3rd world, and the USSR”.
A certified banger from 1986, smack dab in the middle of the Reagan years, when the USSR still existed. I relisten to this lecture at least once a year, Parenti is incredible
Holy shit I just wrote up a whole big long comment and accidentally deleted it. I will recreate it later on PC.
Thank you for sharing this, it was really great to listen to. I will respond more later… 😖
Been thinking about what he said about guerilla warfare: “Why do we support the guerillas there” (Ukrain), “and fight against guerillas there?” (Vietnam).
