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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • Liberalism is not fully mutually exclusive with regulation, but liberal regulation is to try to maintain capitalist markets against their own failures. Yes, they can be willing to engage in some regulation to try to maximize future markets and capitalism. But they are pro-oligarch and pro-inequality, liberals are trying to maintain it long-term even if the most extreme excesses of oligarchs must be reigned in for the short term.

    But most importantly, Oligarchy and monopolies aren’t an “upset” or disruption of markets, but the obvious and natural outcome. Profits are optimized by consolidation and removing competition. And even if competition is maintained, once one company wins the competition there is monopoly, and the fact that most capital intensive industries have a natural barrier to entry (it would take billions of dollars of venture capital to enter and be a very weak competitor with the incumbent) means that markets have oligarchy and monopoly as their natural and necessary outcome.

    A homeless guy can’t just immediately become a billionaire by saying that there should be a competitor of genetic testing with 23andMe.





  • Classical Western Liberalism created this dysfunctional government and is defending and trying to maintain it. The entire reason there is an opening for fascism is that the current liberal government is so dysfunctional and failing. And since both parties are anti-left, the only real option for opposing the failures of the status quo is joining the MAGA-fascist right. This is a repeat of the 1920s, showing how Liberalism enables Fascism.




  • Interesting analogy I have found. There is a plethora of psychology and sociology studies that show that children in abusive relationships end up hating the parent that refuses to stand up to the abusive parent more than the parent doing the abusing. Even if the child wouldn’t phrase it this way, there is an acceptance that abusive alcoholics exist. It is the supposedly good and sober parent letting it happen and enabling it that generates the greatest anger and hatred in the child.


  • Hating the government is right and good. The problem is the crushing of the left, the popular front, and the Democrats taking up all space for opposition to the Republicans, while wanting to be “polite Republicans” and maintaining the status quo above all else is what gave opening for hating the government to take this reactionary form.


  • It is never the party’s job to appeal to voters. There is one designated party that is just owed support and should never have to craft another appeal besides “The Republicans can’t fill out the paperwork properly, that is why we will build the wall faster, put people in concentration camps at greater numbers, and do fascism better and more politely than the dumb, knuckle-dragging fascists”


  • No, Democrats and Liberals using Trump 2 as an excuse to be vocally pro-genocide and forcing people to accept pro-fascism is what caused Trump 2, since the party cannot fail only be failed by voters willing to accept fascism but not turned off by crude, ham-fisted forms of fascism. The problem, supposedly, is people that oppose Trump’s policies, rather than just needing the Trump policies being polite. It is the Democrat’s need to always adopt all of the previous Republican policies, and their only goal is being the Republicans, but polite. If Genocide and fascism is not a red line, but completely acceptable to support, as long as you can imagine another regime doing the genocide slightly worse, there is no evil you will not work for and support.




  • It is not merely wealth distribution, but the fact that in capitalism that wealth immediately translates to power over society and people’s time in a more direct way than all previous systems. And sure, I am considering new systems, that is why I took exception to your framing of it not being “left vs. right”. Nearly, by definition, Right wing is preserving a current society or regressing back to a previous system, Left wing is, by definition, about change and new systems. Left wing isn’t necessarily being urban or having dyed hair or whatever conservatives try to obfuscate with. Being anti-elite is nearly always left wing and being pro-elite is nearly always right wing, right wingers try to obfuscate and channel that resentment with lies and bullshit. Like claiming a barista is an “elite” by having a bachelors degree and pronouns, despite making minimum wage, while a millionaire business owner is “working class” because he wears blue jeans and listens to country music in his pickup truck.







  • It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.