☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 300 Posts
  • 200 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Define Liberalism
    71·
    4 days ago

    I agree with that, Liberalism as an ideology exists to justify capitalist relations and protect property rights. The mistake people make is in thinking that Liberalism is somehow progressive to begin with.

    In practice, it’s like a coin with two very different sides. On one face, you’ve got political liberalism that’s all about individual freedoms, fair elections, and human rights. This is the feel-good stuff that’s used to market Liberalism and make it seem universally appealing.

    But flip that coin over and you get economic liberalism, which is really just capitalism wearing a fancy philosophical mask. This side worships markets, treats private property as sacred, and assumes wealth accumulation is basically a human right. Since property rights are seen as the foundation of all other freedoms, the system effectively locks in wealth inequality by making redistribution seem like theft.

    That’s why liberals lose their minds whenever governments impinge on the rights of the rich or regulate corporations. In their worldview, any limit on property rights is a threat to freedom itself.

    I thought this was a great take on the whole thing

    https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth/

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Do you browse hexbear or have an account in hexbear?
    14·
    6 days ago

    It’s a really convenient narrative based on the fallacy of homogenizing Ukraine. Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

    here’s how the election in 2004 went:

    this is the 2010 election:

    As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

    Either you’re intentionally spreading misinformation here, or you’re far too ignorant to discuss the subject you’re attempting to debate here.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Straight from the Horse's mouth
    62·
    19 days ago

    Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn’t a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they’d label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:

    In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.