You know this kinda makes me think that it would've been funnier if they connected two cities that hate each other more than just like, dublin and new york, which I can't really think of as ever having had beef. Maybe NYC and chicago, or something. You can't really put something like this in texas or LA because nobody fuckin walks anywhere, unless maybe you put it in like long beach or like some random part of Austin or something. Seattle? Does Seattle have beef with anywhere? On the other side, could we connect Dublin with like, London or something? Maybe some city in northern Ireland?
- Posts
- 0
- Comments
- 279
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 0
- Comments
- 279
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
Are new yorkers really that high strung about it? I would think if anything they'd get more mad about like, insults to hot dog carts or something, but that might strike me more as a philly or chicago kind of thing, come to think of it. Maybe bagels? I feel like the average new york bagel is probably a better kind of undersung food hero, compared to the average overpriced to shit new york slice.
Well are we just equalizing based on boob number, or are we also equalizing based on average boob size? Because some men also have boobs due to hormonal imbalance, and that's even more if we decide to count like, fat induced moobs for whatever reason. The hormonal imbalances at least would probably bring the average back in favor of slightly more than one boob. If we've equalized it to boob size then we'd probably all have like small A cups or something.
That doesn't really seem very equivalent. The closest equivalence I can think of is either the terrorism of the founding fathers, which is too far back to really strike the same chord, or maybe like, american drone strikes or something. Or, maybe if I was feeling particularly cheeky, I might compare it to the violence enacted by the civil rights movement, since that was also a domestic american liberation movement maybe comparable to the IRA, but, I dunno. not really any american style equivalence there.
asimptote
? what does this mean
I’d churn my own butter
vile, never heard it said this way before, I'm stealing this for personal use
damn, these kindsa guys are really gonna bring about the human-prion shit huh
"free" means nothing though, it's just a substitute for other values. It's not just free as in "if it doesn't harm me, you're allowed to do it". As another commenter pointed out, one person, they would espouse the freedom to have and own and use guns for self-defense, right? I could just as easily make the argument that guns, collectively, when this right is enabled, impinge on my freedom not to live in a gun-free, potentially less violent, or at least less lethal, society. The freedom provided by publically subsidized or collective single payer healthcare, vs the freedom to "not have to pay for everyone else's healthcare. If I just rely on freedom as a value, it indicates nothing. It's a sock puppet ideology. There's always another value there which is being substituted for it. Liberalism can't just equal freedom, or else it's just totally meaningless. While it does have a broad specific meaning as it refers to a specific school of thought, it's not totally meaningless as it otherwise would be.
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy which espouses the merits of the free market as a collective decision making structure, which can allocate resources according to price signals. I.e. take resources in the economy and allocate them to where they best need to go, which is sort of what any idea of the economy has to do. It also generally espouses an idea of a naturally occurring meritocracy and rational actors, which the free market relies upon to be of real merit. At the extreme end you get shit like idiot anarcho-capitalism and the austrian school of economics, which is very resistant to government interventionism and kind of holds a religious adherence to free markets and their freedom from governance or regulation by governments. Guys like adam smith. Maybe in the middle you have more standard forms of liberalism, that still support free markets, but also support a pretty decent government and sort of see the two as being opposed to one another. Probably that would slot in a little more into neoliberalism, on the side of markets, and then classical liberalism leaning more towards government intervention. And then on the far end you get shit like nordic government and social democracy more broadly, which would try to engage in capitalism while still building out large support structures, as generally opposed to democratic socialism which seeks to basically eliminate conventional capitalism altogether. You also maybe get "market socialism" somewhere in there, inasmuch as a kind of inherently contradictory ideology like that can exist.
None of what I said really has any commentary on general social issues. You won't find it in there, in any of those mostly economic philosophies, you won't find positions on gay rights or trans rights, generally, civil rights more broadly, or drug use, or crime and punishment. There's not any position on civil rights more broadly which is specifically intrinsic to any of those philosophies. Nothing on "open-mindedness". The same could be said of communism, or really any economic philosophy outside of like, normal fascism, which everyone kind of has a hard time defining. Libs, mostly, but I won't elaborate on that one until you press me on it.
In any case, that's what liberalism as an economic philosophy all tends to mean, tends to refer to, that's the larger, broader category. As you might intuit, it's mostly just kind of, "capitalism", in it's many different forms. None of this is meaning-twisting, this is all just shit that's existing in the academic literature for a long while. I'm not a language prescriptivist, so I'm not going to say that it's wrongly used, when it's not strictly conforming to academic definitions, and I will freely admit that most of the reference I see to it in colloquial conversation is kind of just like, to mean "woke", you know, to refer more to socially progressive outlooks more broadly. But I think it's important to question kind of why that is, why it's seen as this thing that's only kind of half-invisible to the population, why it's completely divorced, colloquially, from any economic definition, and instead just refers to like, ahh, that guy, that guy's a lib, that guy thinks black people should have rights, what a lib cuck, kind of a thing.
Tracking the warping of language is a pretty important thing to do, because it tells you all about the intentionality with which it's used, the broader political strategy, the core philosophies of the people using it, it tells you where they've come from and what they're referring to. More specifically, these kinds of changes of meaning that take place within certain words, they serve to cordon off, or, serve as an evidence of the cordoning off, of certain populations from others. The word is transformed in such a way as to make communication between groups impossible, and is also transformed in such a way as to totally eliminate that to which it previously was in reference to.
I don't think using liberal to mean "socially progressive" is necessarily the wrong way to do things, but I do think that the academic definition, the academic reference, the idea there, it still has a lot of value. If one serves to obfuscate the other's shorthand, I would find that to be kind of a tragedy.
added, should I begin at the beginning or are there recommended episodes I should listen to first over others?
Yeah, I can't change your mind on any of that then, it's already made up. Just don't complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don't really tend to be very religious either, I'm an atheist, but I'm also not willing to pretend that I'm above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it's specter.
I'm also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don't think that's a role that you could fill with a "secular alternative" to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it's meaningless in reality, there's a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there's not just one Bible. There's different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it's fundamental literal form. There's different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I'm not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won't do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone's manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that's basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I'm not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.
yeah nobody remind em of the WMD fiasco
I was gonna write a longass comment in response to this but I'm kinda burnt on that because it's 11:54 and nobody ever tends to read them, so I'm just gonna link one I previously left that's pretty much on the same topic. Tl;dr, uhhh, I dunno. Just read the post, I'm just gonna end up saying the same shit at the same length if I try to summarize it.
this is some damn 2011 millennial humor
yeah I bet there's a lot of weird things you'd come across huh buddy
depends on the reading, I think, could also refer to gay dudes.
Do you support high heels? Makeup? The stereotype of women wearing dresses usually, that social standard, that gender norm? It's not as though lots of things in western society aren't basically on the same level, or don't basically stem out of the same set of things, set of religious oppression. The problem isn't the opposition to those things, it's the double standard, it's seeing the muslim version of oppression as being unique because it's unfamiliar and alien.
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit, and which women might partake in voluntarily as it's a part of them practicing their faith. There's not really a lot of oppression that comes about as a result of wearing the headdress alone as like, a kind of stylistic or ritual choice, it's most everything else that goes along with it, that entails the oppression.
It's more complex than lib vs non lib, or, freedom vs non freedom. Freedom can't be the highest value, there, there has to be something more at the core there. Freedom is usually just a proxy for whatever other value you're implicitly substituting. One person says, I need the freedom to have my guns, for self protection. Another person, they say they want the ability to be free from a society in which gun ownership is seen as necessary for self-defense, or is common. You hear boo boo platitudes like "my freedom ends where yours begins" and shit like that as an attempt to cope with it, but it's totally meaningless. There has to be a core value there.
In this case, the core value is basically just the belief that islam is a false religion, and is bigoted and oppressive. Possibly correct for many muslims, perhaps the majority, but still, would be a generalization, and would still be based on a very specific reading of the text, just like it is with christianity, or extremist violent folk buddhism that people in the west don't usually get exposed to, or, hinduism, which is where the basis for their caste system comes from.
The idiocy, I think, so far as I see it, is that they decry the religion itself, because they see it as all being the same, rather than decrying this or that specific practice as being bigoted. Not even the hijab necessarily, but like, the patriarchal aspects. Much harder to decry these on the basis of the religions themselves if you're not versed in the religions themselves, too, which is a pretty hard sticking point.
In any case, it's sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah's witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites. But then they don't realize it also entails liberation theology, rastafarianism, the ethiopian church, or even just small unaffiliated churches, and shit like that. Smaller in number than the oppressive megachurches, and still exist within an overarching system in which religion is kind of oppressive, but still, I think, retains some value as a cultural or ritualistic practice, and retains it's link to history and tradition, which, despite, you know, the common post-historical liberal cries, you know, the idea that the west is post-enlightenment, we have no need for tradition, yadda yadda, is still something that people find really appealing. We still see that with people wanting to return to some idealized version of the 50's that never existed where everyone was able to afford a suburban home and 2.5 kids, without understanding that those things were not available for everyone, weren't sustainable, your wife was on opioids, you worked a 9-5 in a steel mill, your kids went either unsupervised or helicopter parented every day, and the indoors were full of smoke while the outside was full of leaded gasoline fumes. The appeal to tradition, to belonging as part of an in-group, is extremely powerful, even if it doesn't tangibly exist for someone in physical reality. It's escapism, but it's escapism through which someone travels with it back into the real world, a changed person.
That's all to say. Uhh. Yeah, islamophobia is bad, probably. The middle east is still pretty fucked up. So is the west, which is mostly not much better, despite the cries in opposition. Our freedom loving leader, their despotic dictator, etc. I'm sure liberating all that oil from iraq and killing a million people helped that one out plenty, helped them be more progressive, helped civilize them, right? I'm sure the like. US foreign intervention and fucking with the arab spring really helped everything out. I think it's libya or syria that still hasn't recovered, right? Don't know. This video goes out to the brave mujahideen fighters, is what I'm saying.
there's also the idea that you go to a college, possibly a community college, and then transfer to an out of country college for the degree, which I have heard is a great way to be able to live in a country, acclimate, and work from there
I just hope it'd be more like trans krakoa and less like trans genosha
I mean it was kind of inevitable on lemmy.world, right? An ostensibly centrist instance that kind of tries to brand itself as the "mainstream" socially acceptable lemmy instance. It was basically liberal from the start, you know? Appealing to users flooding in from the reddit exodus. The more explicitly leftist influenced things are going to act more, you know, liberal with the banning out of self-preservation, and so are inevitably going to kind of like, paradoxically, cordon themselves off into little, I mean, basically echo chambers, so they're not going to appeal to a kind of broader audience as much.
It's all kind of inevitable from the structure of the site, I think.