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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • If the term conflates the policies of a man who threw communists out of helicopters and banned labored unions with the policies of the US democratic party, which is the strongest supporter of labor union in the US, then it is a useless term which, again, was defined by philosophy departments at ivy league schools. It is already meaningless. It’s a useful way for people like you to conflate moderates with jackbooted thugs from 3rd world banana republics. It is an intellectually dishonest way to convey your political opinions: just label everyone who disagrees with you as a “neoliberal”

    I have to assume your here to sow descent in discourse.

    There’s the trademark extremist schizoid disorder. Take your meds


  • The historical meaning of liberalism was the same as what is called neoliberalism today

    This is not true; liberalism was created as a reaction to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, as a way to prevent sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants, and later as a way to prevent violence between rival states. I am sure there are people who believe in inequality based on wealth, but that is not what liberalism is, and that is not what US Democrats, for example, believe in.

    You argue as if good arguments win, and ideology matters - it doesn’t work that way. Ideology is merely a tool. There is only power, or money that you can exchange for power. And those who desire nothing except power have a competitive advantage to gain more power and shape the world over people who want other things. There is a selection process that has been going for decades that precludes normal people like us two.

    I’m not so ignorant to as to miss that what you are describing is the Marxist idea of dialectical materialism, which I personally believe is overly reductive in explaining history. Ideas do matter. The ways in which people esteem themselves and their groups do matter. It’s not all just a cynical power grab by a bunch of godless lizard people pulling the strings on us.

    What you are doing is kind of denying that economic power (or capital, or billionaires) have an overwhelming influence on politics and policies. If you say that the conservatives or democrats or whoever does this or that for ideological reasons, you deny political reality and obscure paths to improve things

    That is absolutely not what I am saying, nor is it even relevant to what we are talking about.

    So no, neoliberalism is not a derogatory term that should be avoided. It’s reality. Or how else do you explain Elon Musk running DOGE?

    Your question is so bizarre as to be meaningless. You’re asking me “There exist people who believe that the government should be restrained in how it treats people. Otherwise, how do you explain a man who believes government should not be restrained in how it treats people?”

    Neoliberalism is just a catch-all for any policy right of center that leftists conflate with actual honest-to-god jackbooted fascism.


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    11 days ago

    No, you are saying that if someone disagrees with you, it is because they are misinformed. This is a kind of narcissism: you believe that your opinions are so correct and unshakably true that you cannot conceive of a world in which someone with equal access to information legitimately disagrees with you. You assume that if someone else disagrees with you, then they obviously haven’t read up on the matter; that they are ignorant, stupid, or malicious. It IS a personal attack, because you’re not attacking my words, you’re attacking the speaker of the word because you’ve spent so long in an internet echo chamber that you are no longer capable of imagining a reality in which you might be wrong.

    Conversely I could say that if your first recourse to someone disagreeing with you is to copy paste a Wikipedia article as proof that a term merely exists, I would wager you probably haven’t read much about the topic other than mean internet comments. I would further wager that probably most of what you read is mean internet comments


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    11 days ago

    You should probably read more.

    Grow up. Attack ideas, not people.

    The article only says what I’m saying: it’s a term given to certain people as a pejorative, and not an actual ideological program endorsed by people who are labeled by it. You’re telling me that there is a fundamental similarity between Augusto Pinochet, who threw communists out of helicopters, and the US democratic party, which is categorically unwilling to inflict any kind of political violence against their opposition? Pinochet was not a neoliberal, he was a fascist, and if you can’t tell the difference, then I encourage you to not only read more, but to get outside more and talk to people who have actually grown up in fascist and communist countries and see if they think that living in the US is anything like growing up in a fascist state.

    To try to label the policies of Pinochet and the policies of the US democrats with the same term is either an expression of ignorance or privilege. Again, neoliberalism is a term which was made up by liberal arts and philosophy departments, not economists


  • Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself

    I’m sorry but you’re simply wrong. “Neoliberalism is a far right ideology” is inherently NOT a fact; it’s a normative statement. It’s an opinion. You can’t present your opinions (or those of people who think like you) as facts. If I said “Neoliberalism is a moderate or even left wing ideology”, I would also say that that is not a fact; it’s my opinion, and the opinion of people who think like me


  • shortrounddev@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world"Today"= 18 Months Ago
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    11 days ago

    I believe your argument is reductive, and ignores the complexities of the politics of people who call themselves liberals. Neoliberalism is not a coherent political or economic ideology, it’s an insult for moderates used by leftists. Most liberals are not ideological; they pick their policy preferences pragmatically, though nobody can truly claim to be perfectly unbiased and non-ideological.

    And if you had argued to me in 2010 that democrats and republicans can both be described as “neoliberals”, I might agree with you, but since at LEAST 2015, republicans have completely turned their back on the most basic aspects of liberalism, becoming the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, isolationist party with no respect for the rule of law or the principles of equality or personal freedom. There was maybe a 10 year period in which republicans paid lip service to these ideals throughout the 1990s, but today Republicans can better be described by Hungarian President Victor Orban’s prescription for “illiberal democracy”, though lately they’re not too hot about democracy either.

    Republicans, in contrast to liberals, believe in enforcing cultural conservatism through state power, state intervention in markets to benefit in-groups, majoritarian ruling with very slim electoral margins to the detriment of marginalized groups or opposition parties, and a general hostility to freedom of speech or the free press

    Yes, liberals ARE pro-capitalism, but capitalism has been the ultimate mechanism for REDUCING inequality. Since the 1970s (the heyday of so-called neoliberalism), the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone from rougly 50% to about 10% today, accelerating in the 1990s with the downfall of communism across Europe.

    To reiterate: thanks to free trade and capitalism, most of the world no longer lives in extreme poverty for the first time in human history. It is in very wealthy countries where we are able to take this for granted because we’ve been living very high standards of living since the end of the 2nd world war, which has coincided with a large gap in wealth equality. However, the living standard of the average American today is still MUCH higher than the living standards of the average American in the 1960s or 1950s.

    Healthcare in the United States is not actually really a free market. The specifics of how our system works lives and dies by the letter of the law. What many blame on deregulation is in fact due to specific regulations which were written by the insurance companies. To be clear: this is called regulatory capture, which is NOT a principle of liberalism. Liberals believe in a fair and unbiased bureaucracy which serves the public and not special interest groups. The American healthcare system is a failure to live up to liberal principles. This can be said of most other policy failures in the US: housing has exploded in cost because of regulatory capture in zoning commissions, reducing supply.


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    11 days ago

    neoliberalism (democrats) is a sincere belief in inequality based on class / wealth

    This is actually a misconception! Liberalism (or neoliberalism, as the pejorative goes) is about allowing individuals the ability to dictate their own life on their own terms. Liberals want most of the same things you do, probably: clean air, a reduction in carbon emissions, everybody has a roof over their heads. guaranteed access to healthcare, and dense, walkable cities. The difference is the means by which liberals want to achieve these things. Liberals believe that the government should play as small a roll as necessary to guarantee these things, usually through economic incentives and staying out of the way of the free flow of commerce. Liberals do employ government action when necessary (i.e, making it illegal to dump toxic waste in to rivers).

    Liberals also believe that the government should strongly guarantee legal equality and should generally do what it can to provide equal opportunities to everyone. Liberals think it should be illegal to discriminate against someone based on sex, race, sexual orientation, and other factors of one’s birth.

    The point of liberalism is to lower the horizons of government. In the 16th century Europeans were quite busy slaughtering each other over what the official religion of their kingdom should be. Liberalism emerged as way to manage sectarian conflict from spilling over into actual violence by disestablishing state churches, or at least significantly reducing the political power of clergy. Liberals apply this principle to other aspects of governance