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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On May 30 2018 07:44 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 07:36 Nyxisto wrote:
It's not just a knee-jerk response to a criticism of neoliberalism. Even Zizek, a Marxist has pointed out the flaw with this kind of reasoning.
I don't get it. Is it the right article?
It's definitely true, that's basically what I'm doing. In the sense of a "knee-jerk reaction" I'm basically giving the thing I'm responding to knee-jerkingly the name "neoliberals" instead of Jews. I love Zizek, I hate that you're using him against me Nyxisto. That's not fair.
But it doesn't really take away from the point that all this soft influence exists, you're just giving the standard excuse to keep things the way they are. "President of Stability" kinda stuff. There's certainly no absolutist control, etc, by a singular force. But the power of regular people is slowly being sapped away by the increasing importance of the financial sector, the hold of corporate interests over governments, and the centralization of power in the EU. Even data is being used against us for financial gain, marketing, political campaigns, etc, instead of for us as it ought to be. It's disgusting.
How do we get this to end other than memeing our way out of it? I can't do shit from my position. I can barely stay afloat and now I'm getting taxed another 1% (as if to doubly spite me) "in order to simplify it" they say. For fucks sake.
Besides, I have this theory where you can unite the "alt-right" and the "far-left" if you make it the neoliberals vs radicals. Otherwise it's gonna be hard to make a dent in "the establishment". The far-left just needs to drop the immigration stuff to meet in the middle of sorts. The alt-right seems pretty susceptible to socialism if you call it something else. But yeah, like Plansix correctly hints at below, we need some charismatic leader to be able to do that.
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The arguments against capitalism are valid, but be wary of the goals of people who employ those arguments and what they plan to do with power if they obtain it.
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On May 30 2018 08:03 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 07:44 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2018 07:36 Nyxisto wrote:
It's not just a knee-jerk response to a criticism of neoliberalism. Even Zizek, a Marxist has pointed out the flaw with this kind of reasoning.
I don't get it. Is it the right article? Besides, I have this theory where you can unite the "alt-right" and the "far-left" if you make it the neoliberals vs radicals.
Of course we can do it, it's easy, the far right has been doing it for a while now: just lie about a few things on the economic front and get some leftist votes.
The better question is whether we should do it, and the answer is no, we shouldn't. We can gain votes from far right people by getting them to understand that their anger is being channeled and is misplaced, but it's really important that we don't lose ourselves in the process. Their world view isn't based on an accurate analysis of reality, and we can't just pretend that this doesn't matter.
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On May 30 2018 08:03 a_flayer wrote:
But it doesn't really take away from the point that all this soft influence exists, you're just giving the standard excuse to keep things the way they are. "President of Stability" kinda stuff. There's certainly no absolutist control, etc, by a singular force. But the power of regular people is slowly being sapped away by the increasing importance of the financial sector, the hold of corporate interests over governments, and the centralization of power in the EU. Even data is being used against us for financial gain, marketing, political campaigns, etc, instead of for us as it ought to be. It's disgusting.
How do we get this to end other than memeing our way out of it? I can't do shit from my position. I can barely stay afloat and now I'm getting taxed another 1% (as if to doubly spite me) "in order to simplify it" they say. For fucks sake.
The rise of platforms like Facebook and Google has thrown a pretty big wrench into this idea that capital controls public opinion. The dominating force are now aggregators who throw all sources and all opinions into a single newsfeed. Hierarchy of opinions is completely gone, there's no differentiation anymore. Twitter trolls get as much publicity as The Economist.
'the establishment' never had a weaker grip on politics than today honestly. In the US a reality TV star has memed himself into office and radical nutjobs who campaign on horseback win against the GOP establishment. The AfD got 15% by putting pictures of Merkel in a burqa on Facebook, everywhere radicals drive the discussions. The mainstream parties have completely absorbed their topics into discourse. The last years of German public TV where a mix of terrorism and immigration debates. Lügenpresse my ass, they're catering to these people 24/7.
I'm more concerned about completely slipping away from civil discourse into politics as reality television rather than the establishment tbh. The establishment is pretty beaten up already.
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On May 30 2018 09:40 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 08:03 a_flayer wrote:
But it doesn't really take away from the point that all this soft influence exists, you're just giving the standard excuse to keep things the way they are. "President of Stability" kinda stuff. There's certainly no absolutist control, etc, by a singular force. But the power of regular people is slowly being sapped away by the increasing importance of the financial sector, the hold of corporate interests over governments, and the centralization of power in the EU. Even data is being used against us for financial gain, marketing, political campaigns, etc, instead of for us as it ought to be. It's disgusting.
How do we get this to end other than memeing our way out of it? I can't do shit from my position. I can barely stay afloat and now I'm getting taxed another 1% (as if to doubly spite me) "in order to simplify it" they say. For fucks sake.
The rise of platforms like Facebook and Google has thrown a pretty big wrench into this idea that capital controls public opinion. The dominating force are now aggregators who throw all sources and all opinions into a single newsfeed. Hierarchy of opinions is completely gone, there's no differentiation anymore. Twitter trolls get as much publicity as The Economist. 'the establishment' never had a weaker grip on politics than today honestly. In the US a reality TV star has memed himself into office and radical nutjobs who campaign on horseback win against the GOP establishment. The AfD got 15% by putting pictures of Merkel in a burqa on Facebook, everywhere radicals drive the discussions. The mainstream parties have completely absorbed their topics into discourse. The last years of German public TV where a mix of terrorism and immigration debates. Lügenpresse my ass, they're catering to these people 24/7. I'm more concerned about completely slipping away from civil discourse into politics as reality television rather than the establishment tbh
That's cause in your examples you're only looking at the useless media who spend endless amounts of time reporting on every stupid distraction they can find like Muslims, Russians, etc, for the purposes of their own motivations. If you look behind the scenes, there's a certain rootless clique of millionaires and billionaires from various denominations that's been getting away with financial terrorism and murder for 30 years in the absurdist capitalist consumer culture that those same wealthy people helped shape through the very media that they own and on which they all constantly appear. From Hollywood to Football to CNN News to Tabloids and "Dancing with the Stars" it's all millionaires manipulating society for their own benefit, even if on an individual basis rather than any sort of deliberate conspiracy -- although Sinclair is hardly the exception in that as well. The others are just more subtle and less obviously devious in their manufactured consent. Kind of like how everything surrounding Trump is brazenly obvious. It is as you say, reality has become a reality show. But you forget to mention that it has been manufactured to be that way.
And that's why Trump is President, because he is a product of that very thing he opposes in his brazenly obvious conman act -- well, that and the DNC hack. Like handing a fucking bouquet of dandelions to a child in order to sow a field, I'm tellin ya. Anyway, he didn't win because of some kind of "people power". It was the shitty electoral system and so many other things that explain his win -- such as the neoliberal stranglehold on both parties in the US and the chaos amongst the Republicans that allowed his nomination. It's true that the internet grants some power and freedom of communication to people, and that's why Bernie nearly broke through against all odds, but the advertisers and the data miners are working hard to undermine any edge it may give us. The oligarchal corporatists are attempting a hostile take-over of the free internet, one might say. Hell, the Russian hack can be considered to be part of that -- and if it was reflected on in that way in the media, maybe I wouldn't be so annoyed at the endless coverage.
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On May 30 2018 04:57 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 04:25 Acrofales wrote:
Market forces dictate interest rates on a free market. I see effectively no difference between what you say there and what I said. Market forces, aka rootless international neoliberal clique...
No. Market forces are not Mulder's "Man with a cigar". There is no secret cabal controlling the world's economies. But conspiracy theories aside, lets move on to where you specify this a bit better:
On May 30 2018 05:33 a_flayer wrote:
The people working at financial centers, banks and media across the world at Wallstreet, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and their lackeys in the respective governments of those countries. And their owners behind the scenes. Your Robert Mercers, George Soroses, Koch Brothers, Jeff Bezoses, etc.
They're all in the same neoliberal boat of wanting to keep extracting as much as they possibly can from society and Earth.
Any anti-semitism is imagined on your part.
And you, Nyxisto, you're doing the exactly the reverse of what you're accusing me to do. You've internalized anti-anti-semitism so much that whenever you see someone criticizing the banks and media you think they're complaining about the Jews.
The Koch brothers, Soros and the Mercers have exactly two things in common: they are filthy stinking rich, and are politically active. You assume that this qualifies them to be all together in some "neoliberal boat". That's like saying that because you and I both post on TeamLiquid and are both politically active we must agree on anything else as well. I find it far more likely that if you put the Kochs, Soros and the Mercers in a room together (lets throw Buffet and Zuck in there too, just for giggles), one of them would end up bludgeoned to death with a golf club than that they end up with some plan on how to rule the world. Hell, Pinky and the Brain are more likely to be ruling the world than some global cabal of heterogeneous billionaires.
And that is not even the main thing you get wrong here. The main thing you get wrong is that you think the financial institutions of the world work for these guys, and that they give a shit about the Italian government, and are somehow manipulating Italian government bonds to reach whatever their objective is. Whereas in actual fact, Italian debt is owned for the most part by Italian "domestic financial institutions" (aka pension funds), and apparently 18% of it is owned by the ECB. So, for starters, if EU stability is what the "neoliberal cabal" wants, then destabilizing Italian debt seems like a really fucking stupid way of going about it. More to the point however, is that these pension funds are not "controlled" by Soros (or any other self-absorbed billionaire), but rather the choices for where to invest are made by a department of middle-class administrators and accountants. Their boss is the Italian working population paying into those pension funds, and *all* they want is to get a nice pension payed out in 10-50 years, so they instruct their funds to under no circumstances invest in unstable high-risk stuff, and always make sure their money is safe, first and foremost. If Italian government bonds are going to shit, it's because funds like this are looking at the Italian government and thinking *whoops, that is going to hell in a handbag* and decreasing their investments there.
And even if we accept that these are not the guys destabilizing, and it's all the fault of the 35% that is in hands of "foreign investors", we are still assuming that in order to reach your conclusion, these guys are not *reacting* to the instability in Italian government, but are instead selling their bonds in order to *cause* the instability in Italian government...
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The common purpose that they all back is extracting wealth from the world. They are all uniformly behind this, because otherwise they wouldn't be rich. That's just their ordinary jobs basically, which is bad enough. Then there's the supplementary roles they play in society. One billionaire does this by actively funding politicians who will ruin us (your Mercers et al), another billionaire likes to influence public opinion with "philanthropy" (Clinton, Gates, etc), some fund bogus science to deliberately cover up environmental damage (Koch Brothers, etc), some millionaire plays a judge on "Dancing With The Stars" where they mention the word "diversity" and effectively makes sure the conversation on TV is about race. The latter is not on purpose, mind you, they think they're being "progressive" or "thoughtful of race issues". There's thousands of ways in which they can act independently from one another, yet contribute to the same problem. They don't even need to be malicious.
Your "main thing that I get wrong" is based on a faulty interpretation of what I'm trying to say, probably because I phrase it very simplistically and don't appear to take the complexity of society into account. They're not actively conspiring to work together, but the effect of their combined actions based on their personal self-interest remains the same. The public is distracted with nonsense while they're looting the world, trading in fictional papers and paying off shareholders with the blood sweat and tears of ordinary men and women. Even the notion that some of their actions - as with the Italy example - are actually a reaction is irrelevant to the consequences those actions bring about. That's like saying "well, its not the alt-rights fault that they vote for racist climate-denying retards, its just their xenophobic reaction to all this immigration and media coverage about brown people" -- which is a fair enough point, but it doesn't really excuse the damaging consequences, does it?
Also, you and I are in fact politically aligned because we vote for the same party.
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On May 30 2018 08:03 a_flayer wrote:Besides, I have this theory where you can unite the "alt-right" and the "far-left" if you make it the neoliberals vs radicals. Otherwise it's gonna be hard to make a dent in "the establishment". The far-left just needs to drop the immigration stuff to meet in the middle of sorts. The alt-right seems pretty susceptible to socialism if you call it something else. But yeah, like Plansix correctly hints at below, we need some charismatic leader to be able to do that.
Nope, the far-right is much closer to neoliberals than socialists, when they're not straight neoliberals themselves like the AfD. Look at the Lega's flat tax, Macron introduced something similar for capital incomes. The far-right is 100% antisocialist (for them socialism = taxes + immigration, the two things they hate the most), when in power there is every chance that they will drop their social rhetoric and sell out to big business faster than you can blink.
Also in your pact with the devil, what does the far-right drop? The left is supposed to "drop the immigration stuff" which is to tantamount to abandoning human rights, humanism and universalism (and even antiracism, because immigration in the eyes of the far-right does not concern only newcomers, but is a proxy for people who already settled and their descendants), but what does the far-right abandon? If the far-right is crypto-socialist as you believe, why wouldn't they be the ones who drop their xenophobic demagogy for the greater good?
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Cause they're national socialists.
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On May 30 2018 18:55 a_flayer wrote:
Cause they're national socialists.
Ah OK, so we're supposed to ally with nazis now, good to know
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Stop being so scared of memes. They're human beings with thoughts and feelings, like anyone else. There's a lot of difference and steps between stopping immigration because they don't want to give a nation's resources away to foreigners coming into the country and actually putting immigrants in concentration camps.
Why not trade the lefts policy of "open immigration" for the rights removal of their opposition to socialism in key areas such as green energy, reusability, infrastructure, housing, some other things or what have you. What difference does it make if we get babies from immigrants or through spending a part of the increased taxes for the rich on allowing women (or men, or whatever you call yourself and however you want to define your relationship with a spouse - I'm just going with their point of view) to stay home and take care of their families instead of being forced to rely on two incomes and not spending time on either making or taking care of the kids.
And don't give me that nonsense of having immigration for the sake of brown people in Africa. Brown people in Africa might even be better off if the entrepreneurs amongst them didn't seek wealth elsewhere. We're importing a hundred thousand of them and a hundred million are born in the same time in the Africa. We're not making a dent in that, neoliberals just want more smart hard-working people here so they can continue their information ownership of the world.
At any rate, if the moderates amongst alt-right come to our side cause they just want to see immigration ended rather than gassing everybody (with CO2 if not in an actual chambers, see how I always mean multiple things at once? annoying isn't it?), then we can stop them from having the power to do exactly that.
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On May 30 2018 09:40 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 08:03 a_flayer wrote:
But it doesn't really take away from the point that all this soft influence exists, you're just giving the standard excuse to keep things the way they are. "President of Stability" kinda stuff. There's certainly no absolutist control, etc, by a singular force. But the power of regular people is slowly being sapped away by the increasing importance of the financial sector, the hold of corporate interests over governments, and the centralization of power in the EU. Even data is being used against us for financial gain, marketing, political campaigns, etc, instead of for us as it ought to be. It's disgusting.
How do we get this to end other than memeing our way out of it? I can't do shit from my position. I can barely stay afloat and now I'm getting taxed another 1% (as if to doubly spite me) "in order to simplify it" they say. For fucks sake.
The rise of platforms like Facebook and Google has thrown a pretty big wrench into this idea that capital controls public opinion. The dominating force are now aggregators who throw all sources and all opinions into a single newsfeed. Hierarchy of opinions is completely gone, there's no differentiation anymore. Twitter trolls get as much publicity as The Economist. 'the establishment' never had a weaker grip on politics than today honestly. In the US a reality TV star has memed himself into office and radical nutjobs who campaign on horseback win against the GOP establishment. The AfD got 15% by putting pictures of Merkel in a burqa on Facebook, everywhere radicals drive the discussions. The mainstream parties have completely absorbed their topics into discourse. The last years of German public TV where a mix of terrorism and immigration debates. Lügenpresse my ass, they're catering to these people 24/7. I'm more concerned about completely slipping away from civil discourse into politics as reality television rather than the establishment tbh. The establishment is pretty beaten up already.
The dominating force are the algorithms in place, keeping people in their respective filter bubbles. So still the same system like before, just different (and way more effective) means. 20 years ago you took in what your paper of choice supplied, which also is just nothing but a filter bubble since newsrooms have their political tendencies. Go up the ladder to the big publishers and you exactly have the same thing that social media does - one line of thought but presented in a variety of colours to make the individual consumer think they'd get a balanced view. I completely disagree with your point, the establishment could have the tightest grip on the content average joe is consuming if they had not slept on the internet. I think powerful people nowadays have the best means to control public opinion since the days of general illiteracy and the only book available being the Bible.
AfD guys will only read about rape epidemic, you will read only about the rise of anti-semitism. Both are real problems but way overblown and almost always taken out of context. There is no rise in antisemitism in this country at least, the nutjobs who think Jews run the world have been and always will be there and you won't change their opinion, ever. They are so little in number, you can easily ignore them and they won't affect anyone. But there is a real rise in imported antisemitism, which isn't antisemitism as much as it is antizionism in my mind. When you add this up it offers an explanation as to why a party with an openly xenophobic agenda can get 10-25% of the public vote in Germany in 2017.
Mainstream politics and media alike for a long time ignored problems reported by a good part (10-25% maybe?) of society, because a bigger part of society didn't want to hear about them. That's the real reason why now we have a debate on these topics on the daily. We allowed right-wing idiots into our parliament not only because of stupid people who vote AfD, but as well because of stupid people who cry antisemitism or racism everytime they just get the scent of someone being offensive and people being sick of having to control their thoughts. Being openly antisemitic in Germany gets you destroyed completely, you're not welcome anywhere anymore and you will lose your job, especially if you are in the public spotlight. I'm totally fine with that, but when you can't have a casual debate in private anymore, without someone accusing you of every possible 'ism, people are just going to go into hiding and start being subversive, becoming an actual threat to the peace within society.
"The establishment", read rich people, are having one party after another on the cost of lower class citizens with politicians serving as their bouncers, I don't get where you're getting the "they're beat up already" from.
Boldened the part where I directly address what I believe to be the message of your post.
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Northern Ireland22212 Posts
so uhhhh..does this go in this thread?
basically handing the kremlin an easy explanation next time they actually order someone murdered
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At least one reporter is saying that the murder was staged deliberately as part of an Ukrainian special operation. It's pretty crazy if this new reporting is true.
+ Show Spoiler [Press Conference] +
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On May 30 2018 19:06 a_flayer wrote:
Stop being so scared of memes. They're human beings with thoughts and feelings, like anyone else. There's a lot of difference and steps between stopping immigration because they don't want to give a nation's resources away to foreigners coming into the country and actually putting immigrants in concentration camps.
Why not trade the lefts policy of "open immigration" for the rights removal of their opposition to socialism in key areas such as green energy, reusability, infrastructure, housing, some other things or what have you. What difference does it make if we get babies from immigrants or through spending a part of the increased taxes for the rich on allowing women (or men, or whatever you call yourself and however you want to define your relationship with a spouse - I'm just going with their point of view) to stay home and take care of their families instead of being forced to rely on two incomes and not spending time on either making or taking care of the kids.
And don't give me that nonsense of having immigration for the sake of brown people in Africa. Brown people in Africa might even be better off if the entrepreneurs amongst them didn't seek wealth elsewhere. We're importing a hundred thousand of them and a hundred million are born in the same time in the Africa. We're not making a dent in that, neoliberals just want more smart hard-working people here so they can continue their information ownership of the world.
At any rate, if the moderates amongst alt-right come to our side cause they just want to see immigration ended rather than gassing everybody (with CO2 if not in an actual chambers, see how I always mean multiple things at once? annoying isn't it?), then we can stop them from having the power to do exactly that.
What's going to happen is not that their moderates are going to come to our side. What's going to happen is that our moderates are going to come to theirs. The policies of the far right are much easier to implement cause they target people who have no power. The side that has the easier task and that is mostly free from backlash because it is free from facts has the natural advantage.
I can see how you'd think it makes sense in theory to have a socialist party that is also nationalist; but the nationalist wing of that party is immediately and always going to take center stage within it, and you'll be the one losing in that trade.
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The so-called moderates amongst the far-right are called conservatives. They are the problem. They, in their everlasting feeling of superiority have created an economy that is actively transferring money from working people to non-competetive industries - state owned or private - to keep an oligarchy alive that is meant to be dead, and on top of that they refuse any discussion about taxing any form of land-value or other capital based on pseudo-socialist arguments.
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On May 30 2018 18:49 TheDwf wrote:
Nope, the far-right is much closer to neoliberals than socialists, when they're not straight neoliberals themselves like the AfD. Look at the Lega's flat tax, Macron introduced something similar for capital incomes. The far-right is 100% antisocialist (for them socialism = taxes + immigration, the two things they hate the most), when in power there is every chance that they will drop their social rhetoric and sell out to big business faster than you can blink.
The far-right might be close to a certain sort of nationalist capitalism of the Trump sort, but you can't really accuse neoliberalism of pandering to the right. Globalisation, multilateralism, individualism, immigration, the national state is not the unit that neoliberal politics happens in. Also neoliberals of this sort like Blair or Clinton are not in the business of hacking the welfare state apart.
Thinking about it Macron doesn't really make that much of a neoliberal, to begin with. The anti-immigration rhetoric that he's adopted, his 'France first' approach to foreign politics in Africa. He's still a staunch defender of French unilateralism.
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On May 31 2018 02:26 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2018 18:49 TheDwf wrote:
Nope, the far-right is much closer to neoliberals than socialists, when they're not straight neoliberals themselves like the AfD. Look at the Lega's flat tax, Macron introduced something similar for capital incomes. The far-right is 100% antisocialist (for them socialism = taxes + immigration, the two things they hate the most), when in power there is every chance that they will drop their social rhetoric and sell out to big business faster than you can blink.
The far-right might be close to a certain sort of nationalist capitalism of the Trump sort, but you can't really accuse neoliberalism of pandering to the right. Globalisation, multilateralism, individualism, immigration, the national state is not the unit that neoliberal politics happens in. Also neoliberals of this sort like Blair or Clinton are not in the business of hacking the welfare state apart.Thinking about it Macron doesn't really make that much of a neoliberal, to begin with. The anti-immigration rhetoric that he's adopted, his 'France first' approach to foreign politics in Africa. He's still a staunch defender of French unilateralism.
No need when their predecessors already did it.
I don't know why you seem to think "neoliberal" means "liberal-progressist" or implies pro-immigration positions?
As for Macron not being a neoliberal... LOL
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So what does neoliberalism mean according to you?
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On May 31 2018 03:22 RvB wrote:
So what does neoliberalism mean according to you?
Those two definitions from the Wikipedia page should do:
[Neoliberal] ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980.
Currently, neoliberalism is most commonly used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing state influence on the economy, especially through privatization and austerity.
But regardless of the definition taken, neoliberalism is about economic policies, so I don't see why Nyxisto postulates an automatic link with diplomacy/geopolitics or an incompatibility with nationalism or anti-immigration positions.
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EPT
