How To Tell If You're A Liberal

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

idk who any of you are but flopson was the first person to point out that melt tweet was a literal quote of davos prick, and therefore that the most likely interpretation was "davos prick quote illustrates that elites are waging violent class warfare against workers"

i don't know who adam tooze is and i refuse to care

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.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, September 13, 2023 3:02 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this seems otm though, although hopefully off-tm when seen in context (posting in ilxor.com)

xxp
I'm dyslexic and bad at editing, sometimes I scan posts twice and miss out that I've posted double words - but fuck editing out exclamation marks!!!!!!

xxp nobody cares, don’t talk to calzino like that.

idk who any of you are but flopson was the first person to point out that melt tweet was a literal quote of davos prick, and therefore that the most likely interpretation was "davos prick quote illustrates that elites are waging violent class warfare against workers"

It didn't need pointing out. Unless you're assuming everyone else reading the tweet or watching the video is a dolt.

Well this has gone a few places while I was away lol

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

― School of RAAC (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 13 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Def not a Tooze hater. His twitter is a pretty amazing account, which is him looking at data points on world events (most of which aren't headlines). He then sorta tries to use his substack to write history as it's happening, which is a dubious enterprise but I can read him and appreciate the hard work.

But as NV and calzino say the guy has melty politics. My reading is based on past behaviour, and it was very funny to contrast him with Harvey (no room for irony or funnies, just straight up "we have to kill them"), but it was just a short tweet so if my reading comprehension is gone then join the queue...plenty of ilxors say this, and worse, about my posting.

i like and value poster calzino fwiw, my point was just about the substance of the meaning of the tweets, but i'm not sure it's even worth trying to discern

i hate melty dolts just as much as anybody, but it seems to me that the point of a message board is to talk about this sort of thing, so it strikes me as unhelpful that those who do are implied to be pedantic cryptolibs

Wanna chat to him

A letting agent pulled a gun on a woman and her children during an illegal eviction. Two and a half years later, he was fined £400. Incredible reporting by @hajmedd (and editing by @CharlottEngland) https://t.co/NvAcv8OYjj

— Rivkah Brown (@rivkahbrown) September 13, 2023

https://www.afr.com/property/residential/tim-gurner-deeply-sorry-for-wrong-comments-about-tradies-job-losses-20230914-p5e4mi

“My comments were deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families across Australia who are affected by these cost-of-living pressures and job losses.

“I want to be clear: I do appreciate that when someone loses their job it has a profound impact on them and their families, and I sincerely regret that my words did not convey empathy for those in that situation.”

So he's not apologizing for the actual ideas, just that he didn't make them sound warm and fuzzy enough. Figures.

I heard from a radio report that he's worth 600m and was born into inherited money, so I doubt he appreciates much at all about how soul destroying poverty can be

I think he appreciates it in the sense that he fucken loves it

it's a basic fact that unemployment is an important tool of capitalist employers. it's pretty bleak that people are suddenly claiming to be shocked by this

A Liberal (or a right winger in a lib newspaper) often talks up a "people's revolt" to discipline the market. Imagine revolting over something as paltry as the high street?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/14/developers-tory-killing-high-street

I heard from a number of sources that liberals bed down with fascism really easily. So not sure how you'd spot one if there wasn't a fascist nearby.
Never not seen in the same room together?

fascists are liberals' shock troops they keep them in the basement until they're needed to protect some property or suppress an uprising

liberals despise all the basic principals of democracy just as much as fascists do, they only really like democracy when evil or even worse is on the ballot in a two party system. To liberals the most heinous thing you can do is attempt to overthrow this precious democracy, which I think is a fine idea and even a fascist scumbag like Trump attempting to do it doesn't dissuade me at all from this being a good idea.

There's a ton of this exact same kind of liberal-bashing from the right. Turns out the "liberal" is just a convenient label that means 'people who argue with my premises'.

You realise the term liberal means different things on both sides of the ocean right

If "liberal" is intended to mean "a member of the Liberal Party", then it would be helpful to make that distinction. Otherwise, it's six of one and a half dozen of the other in terms of defining one's enemy according to whatever is most convenient to dismiss them as wrong or evil.

This particular discussion has been had a million times.

Didn't think you needed to be told this, Aimless. Don't you know everything?

It's hard to have a discourse if we can't agree on what words mean.

Liberalism as an economic and political project is as coherent as any really - I mean you can also argue about the definition of fascist, communist, social democrat, etc. The reason it's become a byword for "left of center" in the US is that any kind of credible left had been very effectively marginalized and erased from the mainstream. As this changes, the US definition of liberal starts to resemble that present in Europe - and obviously a lot of US liberals feel uncomfortable with where that positions them.

it would help if people didn't pretend these isms are perfect ideal types with clear boundaries

it makes most sense to me to define liberalism as the hegemonic common sense of the societies where most of us live and because that's not always the same liberalism isn't always the same and it has the same tendencies towards faction and syncretism and opportunism as any other political tradition but that doesn't make the word any more meaningless than "christianity"

xp There still isn't much of a "credible left" in the U.S. Meanwhile, the American right has been able to characterize centrist and slightly left-of-center liberals (in the U.S. colloquial sense) as radical leftists.

Turns out the "liberal" is just a convenient label that means 'people who argue with my premises'.

lock thread, we got it sorted

Well, according to xyzzz's post quoting the "Liberal" and "Commie" positions, I qualify as a Commie, since it was clear, succinct and agrees with my perceptions of the world. By comparison, Tooze's tweet was so ambiguous that it was impossible to extract any particular position from it, which is one of the most common complaints about liberals.

jimbeaux, that is why I said "as it changes", not "now that it's changed". Nonetheless all sorts of leftist positions are now popular, though nowhere near dominant or consensus, amongst left of centre ppl in the US that would have been viewed as insane extremism 20, 30 years ago. The move away from liberal as a self-identifier comes with that, I think.

I honestly can't think of a single political position that meets that description, but that's probably a failure of imagination on my part.

Well I don't live in the US but I can say I was speaking to liberal identifying Americans online and reading liberal identified US publications since the early 00's and the idea that there hasn't been a general leftward shift amongst these demographics AT ALL since the Clinton years...that does sound like we live in paralell universes, yeah.

it's been pretty wild hearing americans saying positive things about labour organising over the last decade or so I thought it would never happen

remember when everyone told the story about getting in trouble for moving a chair like it was something that had actually happened to them

also the Trumpian rhetoric that get's widely amplified in the US is wildly inaccurate and quite barmy. Like Kamala and Biden are communists and Marxists etc. Mind you it's almost as barmy as Starmer getting derided as a "lefty lawyer" by Sunak, really.

Tooze is a very old-school liberal. Likes investment, isn't obsessed with means-testing, sees a lot of dangers with the way the right have been turning out in Europe.

The ones in the UK have totally lost the plot since Brexit and Blairism.

xp Oh, no doubt there has been a leftward shift among a, perhaps sizable, part of the U.S. electorate. This is probably mostly among the younger demographic. However, to say that the positions they are taking would have been insane extremism 20-30 years ago ignores the political history of the U.S. There really is nothing new under the sun; if anything, the political left of the Boomer generation was more radical than its successors. If there have been any shifts that would have been unthinkable 20-30 years ago, they have come mostly in the realm of the personal, e.g., same-sex marriage, which truly was a fringe idea just a couple of decades ago.

if anything, the political left of the Boomer generation was more radical than its successors.

A certain portion of it were so during their youth, sure (I hesitate to make grander pronouncements because I do think a lot of the boomer self-mythology is far from representative of the generation as a whole), but they didn't stay that way! By the time you get to the 90's for instance the economic orthodoxy of the boomer generation is pretty cemented and a lot of the ideas that came crashing down in '08 still taken as certainties.

You'll get no argument from me on that. Of course, that happens to a lot of leftist movements, at least in the so-called "developed world," as their constituents age.