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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Do you think the philosophy of liberalism can be separated from the atomized individual acting in a market?

    Those ideas underpin all philosophical liberalism that I’m aware of. We can’t have liberal social relations or philosophy without a market to act as a replacement for the often feudal social relations and theocratic philosophy that existed before liberalism.

    Consider Protestantism if you want a great example. It was only possible because the market allowed a class of people access to a new social relation and they needed a new system of beliefs that fit it.

    You can’t separate any part of liberalism from the elevated position of the market.

    I’m really not trying to be aggressive or only make pithy, in your words mic drop replies. The question you asked is very broad and I’m not able to summarize it without glossing over lots of stuff. I also don’t have the time to type, source, check, proofread and edit a reply that covers the last 800 years.

    Like I said, if you want something more specific or that you’re familiar with just name it and we can talk in those terms.


  • You didn’t ask why, you asked how. It’s really broad question so I was gearing up to answer how by starting with what the two (overly broadly classified) schools of thought called the why.

    Then I pushed reply instead of preview and realized while editing my post that I don’t want to reply to you the way I started because it would be long winded and you probably aren’t interested in reading that and I’m certainly not interested in writing it.

    Liberalism creates the conditions for revolt and reaction in a lot of different ways but primarily it’s through a combination of pursuit of profit leading to unaccounted for externalities buttressed by primacy of the powerful disguised as freedom in the marketplace and in word and deed.

    If you want specific examples or you want examples related to a time, place or event you’re already familiar with just let me know.

    It’s hard to summarize hundreds of years of history and philosophy in just a few sentences while on break so please do me the courtesy of not nitpicking my overly broad statements.





  • There’s a lot of criticism of the bot implementation and mbfc in this thread but no criticism of why it was implemented.

    The whole point of mbfc bot was to reduce the mod workload. By (hopefully) exchanging a bunch of posts examining the source of a link, mods hoped to have fewer fights to wade into.

    A person could say that’s just what happens when you run an English language community during American election years, and there’s a degree of truth to that.

    I think that the mods of the world communities the bot is in want some way to restrict speech along the lines of their own combination of political axes and see the bot as a way to do so under the guise of “just checking facts”.

    I am not invoking free speech as a negative criticism here.

    What would be possibly more healthy for the mods is to develop a political line and clearly say “if you speak outside this system of understanding you may be modded upon”.






  • I actually agree with your last sentence. it’s a no-win situation for the democrats and there’s a seemingly growing contingent that thinks the best loss they can take is one where a new candidate or set of candidates are introduced to the electorate.

    polls are wrong all the time, you’re right. what does it look like if against all odds, biden wins? the man has shown himself to be incapable of cognitive function. should voters fall back on trusting his cabinet and handlers “our competent administrators, their unelected sycophants” style?

    hes facing significant opposition from the other branches of government and even at the end of his life when faced with a supreme court ruling that gives him the legal go ahead to enact his administrations policies he won’t do it.

    that’s not looking like a great second term. if he lives through it then they’re the do-nothing democrats who can’t accomplish their agenda and abandon their constituents, if he dies then they’ve got kamala who would be very funny but is incredibly disliked.

    the democrats are between a rock and a hard place right now because they ran on trump being a dictatorial fascist who will crown himself god-king and now that hes going to win they’re at fault for cynically using the threat of fascism to get votes instead of building the kind of base to oppose fascism that one and a quarter centuries of history would dictate or being the boy who cried wolf if it turns out there’s a peaceful transition of power in 2028.

    basically there’s no way forward with their current messaging and platform because when trump wins and institutes american fascism (it’s already here, but i’m typing from the perspective of democratic strategists) they’re naive buffons who pissed away their time and resources trying to get people to vote for an inadequate candidate on a shuffling the deck chairs platform and when trump doesn’t send the brownshirts into the streets and has a largely uneventful second term theyre the people who pissed away their time and resources on a candidate and platform which aren’t up to the challenges we face because of orange man bad.

    they’re done for and the best possible outcome is an uneventful trump presidency with a smooth handover complete with “restored faith in our electoral process”. in that case it’s best to go ahead and start getting their benchwarmers out on the field to find out whos up to the task in 2026 and 2028.


  • There’s also a cost to transitioning to the new technology.

    Normalizing arbitrary size removable media makes physical exfiltration much easier because no one is asking why you’re using an illegal technology in the government building.

    Floppy disks are not able to identify themselves as a keyboard and release a payload of keystrokes on command, or hide entire soc computers complete with network adapters.

    There is also the matter of retraining on an institutional scale, and if you think it’s as simple as “put this into the computer, not that” you’re woefully underinformed.

    Just as an aside, it’s pretty fraught to compare a language transition caused by centuries of forced resettlement to switching the kind of computer thingy government employees use over the course of two years.