How To Tell If You're A Liberal

Tooze also lacks the appropriate physique to go much beyond words

food politics is a _fascinating_ topic to me

i feel like liberalism kind of leans into outrage a lot. the big difference to me is the liberal attitude is "this is a betrayal of our values" and the red and black are "this is an embodiment of capitalist values".

Maybe you KILL the attitude by killing the person who holds it hehe

Gurner is just saying what 99% of executives already believe and our Federal Reserve has tried to make happen for almost two years now. Quiet part loud, etc..

I say old boy, no true gent of hedge fund management or whatever the fuck untrammelled greed shit you do says the quiet part out loud on a public platform

Maybe you KILL the attitude by killing the person who holds it hehe

While this is true, and obviously Tooze lacks the minerals for such a task, there have to be questions about whether Harvey is any more likely

While this is true, and obviously Tooze lacks the minerals for such a task, there have to be questions about whether Harvey is any more likely

― anvil

of course not, anti-capitalist revolution doesn't hinge on whether or not some 87-year-old white professor kills someone or not. it's not contingent on killing anybody at all. liberals look at phrases like "dispossession of the capitalist class" and automatically impute violence to us, while continuing to ignore the structural violence of the systems they endorse. "eat the rich" is a good slogan, but are any of them even gluten-free? i don't eat gluten.

what's interesting is that tooze is lampshading the violence inherent in the system, if you will... but does he recognize it for what it is?

Probably gonna have to “re-educate” most of the capitalist class, tbf.

Put them to work in a call center.

anti-capitalist revolution doesn't hinge on whether or not some 87-year-old white professor kills someone or not.

I was referring to the other poster who was in two minds about whether it might be best to kill or not. I wouldn't expect Harvey to take part directly, but incitement or stochastic measures could potentially move the needle in a more direct and significant way than words - unless Harvey is talking about taking power via electoral means, which seems unlikely as that would put him in the same camp as Tooze

I'm curious as to what motivated the original post. Lost to time, I expect.

Yes, Tooze seems to think he can be talked around. That it's an attitude issue.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 13 September 2023 11:08 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

if i was being generous to Tooze i might argue he meant "that attitude" in the broader sense rather than specifically Gurner's

but that's irrelevant, it's dumb liberal handwringing either way

― School of RAAC (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 11:16 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think either both or one of you are having a failure of reading comprehension. he’s clearly saying that gurner’s attitude is the one that needs to be KILLed. i disagree that the implied violence is more liberal (pejorative) than Harvey’s tweet, which is just boilerplate and essentially non sequitir. it’s interesting that tooze is so contemptible to uk left to inspire such an uncharitable misreading; in the context of us politics and economics discourse he’s quite far to the left

What implied violence? It was Gurner who used the phrase "kill that attitude", he's merely using Gurner's own language against him.

it's always enlightening when an arrogant melt prick accuses you of lacking reading comprehension because you don't support the status quo and consider some prof posting milquetoast criticisms of capitalism from his comfy seat a bit of a nob.

imo there are 2 ways to read tooze’s tweet

1. tooze is aghast at the violence of gurner’s phrase. “can you believe he said we have to KILL workers attitude of wanting better pay and working conditions?” highlighting the violence of gurner’ phrasing

2. requoting gurner, but now the attitude in question is gurner’s own. capitalizing KILL evokes the guillotine. “we have to KILL (wink wink) this attitude”

xyz and nv seem to be suggesting a third and fourth alternative

3. tooze is emphatically in agreement with gurner. “yes, we do have to KILL workers’ attitudes!”

4. tooze is in disagreement with gurner, but thinks we just have to talk it over in liberal fashion. “i politely disagree that we have to kill worker’s attitudes, and we will debate this like rational liberal gentlemen”

none of which i see any evidence for, either in the text of the tweet itself or in anything else i’ve ever read by AT. the fact that such an interpretation is even considered makes me realize that uk leftists hate tooze to an extent i had not realized

5. He is ironically repeating what Gurner said, perhaps for emphasis.

it's always enlightening when an arrogant melt prick accuses you of lacking reading comprehension because you don't support the status quo and consider some prof posting milquetoast criticisms of capitalism from his comfy seat a bit of a nob.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 3:08 PM (thirty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

the fact that perpetually enraged self righteous moron calzino favours #3 in my taxonomy is, imo, evidence against it

5. He is ironically repeating what Gurner said, perhaps for emphasis.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 3:10 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

thats #1, try and keep up

Not exactly, I don't think he necessarily has to be "aghast."

lol so much convoluted bollox posted in one post over a 7 word tweet, great work.

The criticism isn’t that he agrees with Gurner but that tsk-tsking his words and implying that ghouls like Gurner can be reformed (as a class) is futile and toothless.

You can never make the billionaires better, you can only hope to make them not exist (either as billionaires or people at all, your choice).

3. tooze is emphatically in agreement with gurner. “yes, we do have to KILL workers’ attitudes!”

Are you serious?

Talk about misreadings!

The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you’d “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the ceo of a company in 2023”.

“Mr Gurner should spend more time running his company, instead of using a public forum to regurgitate his dastardly economic theories,” Laxale wrote.

uh oh he's one of those guys:

'I get about 250 different tests of my bloods which will say, ''this month you're deficient in (vitamin) D, your testosterone is up or down''. Then the physios, dieticians, doctors on call set my regime,' he told the Australian Financial Review earlier this year.

'I take about 50 or 60 tablets a day. It's always very specific to my latest results.

'We want you to live to 100 but not just live to 100 – but live to 100 feeling amazing, that's the aim.'

incidentally i’m actually not a huge tooze fan. his book on the economic history of nazi germany is a great read (although it mostly repurposes earlier research by Avraham Barkai and Werner Abelshauer—i don’t really get how one ends up a tenured prof in history at columbia for popularization but it’s not my field) but he’s fallen off hard in the last couple years as he transformed into an up-to-the-minute pundit liveblogging the financial times. going back and rereading his early newsletter posts shows a lack of prescience, short attention span, and bizarre mix of priorities and allegiances. but as I said I’m coming from this seeing him as a part of the broader economics/policy discourse (where he’s left of liberal and MMT/post keynesian adjacent), not familiar with him in uk pol. so why do you guys hate him so much?

3. tooze is emphatically in agreement with gurner. “yes, we do have to KILL workers’ attitudes!”

Are you serious?

― Monthly Python (Tom D.), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 3:16 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

did u read the words around it too or did you just skip to that part?

"incidentally i’m actually not a huge tooze fan. his book on the economic history of nazi germany is a great read"

I'm in agreement with you there

The criticism isn’t that he agrees with Gurner but that tsk-tsking his words and implying that ghouls like Gurner can be reformed (as a class) is futile and toothless.

You can never make the billionaires better, you can only hope to make them not exist (either as billionaires or people at all, your choice).

― papal hotwife (milo z), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 3:16 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

milo a vote for #4. i personally don’t see it

did u read the words around it too or did you just skip to that part?

I did but that part was so stupid it kind of leapt out at me.

Probably gonna have to “re-educate” most of the capitalist class, tbf.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

that's the challenge, isn't it? all forms of authority are ultimately coercive... all of us happen to be under forms of authority that disguise their coercion in a largely effective manner. any alternative way of doing things isn't going to have that same privilege, and so isn't going to be effective.

and part of the coercion is deliberately stoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what anti-capitalist governance would _look_ like in practice. portraying those of us who oppose capitalism as taking us on a slippery slope to a repeat of what happened under the khmer rouge.

of course it's a risk. whatever happens isn't ultimately going to be up to me, but yeah, personally, i'm not hugely in favor of violent revolution. if someone else has a gun and i don't, it's real real easy for them to turn that gun against me. plenty of tankies out there, plenty of people pretending to be something they're not trying to attain power for its own sake, power for themselves. tankies are dangerous in proportion to the number of tanks they have access to.

saying the quiet part out loud is a _real problem_, not just for capitalists but for anybody who has power that they want to keep. the liberal myth is that of universality, that we all want the same things, share the same values, are in some sense _all alike_. they see tim gurner as a peer, a fellow human, and they are outraged at his words because they believe he has betrayed _their shared values_. the more direct the ruling classes are in their rule, the fewer people think of themselves as belonging to the _same group_ as the ruling elite.

for a long time i thought of myself as being an "ordinary person", meaning a white cishet man. i lived in indiana and it was ok. i was ok with it. then november 2016 happened and i lost my shit. those of y'all who were here then might remember that, i completely lost my shit. the whole foundation of my reality was based on not saying the quiet part out loud, and now that was gone. suddenly i stopped _wanting_ to belong to the same group as them. suddenly there was nothing i feared more than being _like_ them.

well. i guess i'm not much like them. we don't have much to talk about, people like me and people like them.

you see some trans liberals around. not a lot. usually it's people newer to transition.

if an american pundit quote tweeted a screenshot with the infamous nyt Tom Cotton op-ed with “we have to KILL protestors” where it was clear that the implication was that the pundit was “ironically repeating the phrase for emphasis” (as jimbeaux put it), would you conclude that they were implying that republican senators can be reformed as a class? it seems like a stretch to me

I did but that part was so stupid it kind of leapt out at me.

― Monthly Python (Tom D.), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 3:29 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if it still isn’t clear i was attributing positions 3 and 4 to milo and/or xyz, i personally think it’s 1 or 2 and that those are misreadings

The fact that you thought 3 was a possibility shows the extremely low opinion you obviously hold of certain fellow ILXors - something that, dare I say, has been demonstrated itt - or maybe just of the *spit* UK Left in general.

ok, i gotta split, wading through all of this detailed quote-parsing is _agonizing_

for it's worth I've read 3 Tooze books, and no I didn't think he wanted to kill workers' attitudes in that seven word tweet.

i don’t think adam tooze is endorsing the gurner quote in that tweet

― flopson, Wednesday, 13 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

(xp) He isn't but that's not the point being made.

― Monthly Python (Tom D.), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, Tooze seems to think he can be talked around. That it's an attitude issue.

that's great. I'll be waiting with baited breath for flopson's next detailed analysis of some dull very short tweets

I think we'd get more mileage out of expressing outrage over this dude saying that we need to double unemployment so that workers are once again grateful to be given jobs.

Which, as kate said upthread, is saying the quiet part out loud.

i don't hate Tooze fwiw but i seem to have been exposed to his meltier tweets i guess

YMMV but it seems to me that Tooze is saying that he is a Viking with respect to his sleeping abilities.

honest, The Wages of Destruction is a brilliant read. He clears out lots of myths and weeds that have grown around the nazi economy in other history books. But at end o' fucking day he's just like any other dickhead prof when he posts on politics!

More like Snooze, amiritie

The notion that calzino is a moron doesn’t stand up, “sorry”.

in Crashed he mentions in the foreword about how political discussions with his daughter influenced him, even possibly made him rethink some things. No mention of his grandad!

Someone called Gibby once told me "you've got a brain, Dowd, but it's just not a thinking brain"

Nah you are very well read, but you use too many exclamation marks and too many scary swear words to be considered a brane genius by smug ilx pseuds - we know you’re legit though