Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

  • 0 Posts
  • 96 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle



  • Look ultimately words mean what they mean in the context that they’re spoken but broadly neoliberalism is highly socially permissive. Provided, that is, one does this as a responsible member of the capitalist economy and doesn’t disrupt the market.

    Like you can have neoliberals that love trans kids, celebrate pride, want more black female drone pilots etc. It is, however, not a neoliberal position say compare the number of vacant properties to the number of homeless people and suggest that perhaps we should just take the unused houses and give them to homeless people? That would violate the principles of private property and free markets. After all: what freedom does one have if you can’t watch someone freeze to death on the doorstep of your vacant investment?

    If your friends think that freedom to do that is utterly absurd and a society which defends that is fundamentally rotten then they are not liberals in the academic sense, however their substantially more leftist stance may be called liberalism in the political context you find yourselves in.


  • To clarify my question. What do you mean ‘actually liberal’ ideologies?

    Like what are their thoughts on monetarism?private property? free association? private entities in markets? Debt and paying it, both private and state held?

    If they think that the state should provide the means of subsistence of the entire populus, that property should in general be held in common and private property is not sacred, that government entities in a market are often more effective than private and/or that business should be heavily regulated to serve common good, that debts should be cancelled when it is not realistic or fair to pay them etc. Or perhaps even further afield positions like questioning nation States, police, militaries and boarders… well, then they are not in fact liberals haha.







  • I think it’s tempting to try and be pithy but freedom is complicated. For some people freedom is an absolute, do what you want when you want. For some it is about theoretical possibilities, for example if you ask if people are free to quit there job the answer heavily depends on how someone balances theory vs practice. Others take a practical lens, freedom only counts if it’s plausible to do.

    Sometimes freedom is about ideals. you are free to read all the political theory you like, you umm wont because it’s boring but if someone threatened that would you be upset? At other junctures freedom because pragmatic, “what use is freedom to read if I don’t have freedom to eat? I’ll trade one for the other” someone might say.

    Some people rate permissions more than restrictions, some the opposite.

    I don’t think it’s a concept we can really pin down. Everyone has their own interpretation and it’s not universally values: much as dominant ideologies often insist it is, the rise of fascism should hint that others care much less about it.


  • Sigh, I’ll wade into this river of shit.

    Liberalism is broadly understood as neoliberalism, which is an ideological descendant from classical liberalism. This ideology positions itself as being broadly in favour of individual freedom within a rather tight definition of freedom. Namely liberals are concerned with the ability of people to read what they like, own what they like, marry whomever they like and so on provided they do this inside of a system of capitalist free market exchange.

    Modern liberalism tends to frown on heavy government intervention in market affairs, which they see as representing the free (and thus good) exchange of goods between individuals. They also tend to be broadly in favour of the militaristic western global hegemony.


    Criticism of this attitude comes from 2 places.

    1. too much freedom.

    2. not enough freedom.

    (1) is people that want women bound up in the kitchen and walk around with an odd gait that makes you remember Indiana Jones films

    (2) are people (I’m in this camp) who see liberalism as a weak ideological position that favours stability over justice and, in so doing, ignores the suffering of billions.







  • We appear to be imagining different scenarios. Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive, or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

    I’m sorry, I could have been more explicit. It seemed obvious to me discussing a dead hand was silly but being the internet it’s worth clarifying these things.


  • wait what? that’s an extremely unusual stance!

    What do you mean separated from the whole? all the non hand parts of me are also no longer whole but I am willing to believe amputees, even multiple amputees, even people who have lost the majority of their body can feel pain if their brain is alive and mostly intact.

    This is consistent with my belief that pain experiencing happens in a centralised mass of nervous tissue we call a brain.

    If you don’t think centralised masses of nervous tissue are needed to experience pain (required for plants to, given that no brain is something we can prove) what do you think is? Why would a patch of grass have that thing but not a blade of grass (grass lacks localised organs afterall) or my hand?


  • Ok, and I opened by acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness but you never actually said that you disagreed with my assertion that my amputated hand doesn’t feel pain.

    Do you think my amputated hand feels pain? It would seem that you would have just as much (more maybe! given electric shocks or heat to the fingertips will make it recoil) evidence for it feeling pain as grass. And that all your arguments about grass signalling also apply to my amputated hand.

    If you don’t think my amputated hand feels pain (or could be considered at least as likely as grass to) why don’t you?