crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
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User ID: 111
Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?
Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.
And there's the root of the problem, of which the OP doesn't get. You can't paper over ideological differences like that. What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing? What if we don't agree on the role of American hegemony? Can the Americans back away from their own empire if they want to?
If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?
I'd like that very much, actually. That sounds great.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
16hr ago
Drama is a great component of good rhetoric.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
16hr ago
Bernie Sanders isn't a liberal. Neither am I. That is not a novel observation. I am telling that I am not a liberal. Observing this is not as effective of a strike as you think it is. And to say 'people pursue policies they personally think are good' is also a observation of little worth. Everyone does this. I am not totally cynical to believe that everyone is lying about their priors. I don't deny they have principles: I just think they're fatally compromised, stupid, quokka principles.
Frankly, we're not really arguing, because you're just stating the obvious and believing that it supports your position.
I am not an American. I do not care about America in the way an American would. But let me tell you this. A free-market capitalist economic zone is mutually exclusive with the vision of America as a Christian nation. There is no 'good policy' that is seen as good by partisans of either. Just ask anyone about the 'trans genocide' and how policy on one end can be seen as the malicious politics of revenge by the other. This is where I am actually cynical. People profess support for self-destructive policy all the time for no other reason that it gets their enemy's goat all the time.
You must accept that people are willing to hurt themselves, and very badly, just so that those who have it coming get what they richly deserve.
But if you don't understand the human impulse for justice, then there's no point in continuing the conversation, either. Darwin's dodos didn't understand humans either. Go hang out with TracingWoodgrains as he embarks on his quest to find the principled liberals of America. Eventually, someone will listen to him. Maybe they will even write a sternly written letter to the illiberal in charge. Who knows? God makes everything possible.
Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.
That's not as much a decisive argument then an acknowledgement of the facts.
Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.
It would be very nice if the institutions were run by liberals. I wouldn't mind being governed under liberal rule. But the people who ruled in the immediate past were not liberals, and were not constrained by liberals. It is the failure of liberals to rule properly that has led to this point and given the choice between the terrible experiences of the past, I'm willing to gamble on the excesses of the current regime. If no one cares about liberal principles, then at the very least the power of the state can crush the oppressors and petty tyrants of the previous decade.
Allowing liberals to be in charge again will only lead to tyranny, because liberals have no defense against the feminine prerogative of the progressive class. If the state must be powerful, if it must be strong, then it must avenge these slights to win my vote. I don't want a government that lets these people off easy. The men and women of the previous regime made an enemy of me, and made promises to sweep me into the dustbin of history. Now they quiver in fear and beg for mercy that I do not have, and demand the continuation of privileges I made no promise to give.
Ha ha. No. You call it revenge: I call it justice, finely ground and granulated.
And you may object to this. But to that, I say...
"If you kill your enemies, they win." QED.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
Unsounded is great. Alderode is a ethnat police state with strict castes, Cresce is a child-sacrificing horror communist monarchy, and Sharteshane is the worst of Dickesian Victorian capitalist apathy.
How can you care for anyone, in such a soul crushing world?
Without spoiling anything, I think Cope answers that question quite well.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
The best depiction of the heroine's journey is, unironically, the schlocky Princess Diary movie, which plays it so straight that it is practically canonical. A awkward but virtuous heroine discovers her inner beauty and refinement and prevails over circumstances to end up with a good man. She overcomes her own insecurities and the judgements of others to become a princess in heart as well as in fact.
And this is an internal journey, for the most part: complementary to the masculine hero. If you watch media that women genuinely like to consume (like magical girl anime and Disney princess movies) the fighting and bluster is largely secondary to the dramatic arcs of feminine self-realization.
The perversion happens when you combine the superficial aspects of the masculine journey with the contemplating-one-navel nature of the feminine one. If you're a supercompetent girlboss you have no virtues to realize in the feminine sense or to learn in the masculine sense. Stagnancy. The only arc that is possible is 'the world doesn't recognize how awesome I am, and so it must suffer'. This narcissistic plot is utterly repugnant and is rejected by all but the most hidebound ideologues.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
3d ago
Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?
If you say yes, then you're in favor of majority-minority gerrymandering, which is the cause of the most egregious electoral maps in the United States. If you take a look, you can see the individual buildings carved out to create a electoral district in the name of equity. Yes, this is for the benefit of black people in urban districts. Yes, they are primarily Democratic - even in deep red states.
This has been the status quo for so long that people forget that yes, it is a scandal.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
4d ago
You must consider that the boyfriend is not being pigheadedly stupid and recognizes the offer on the table: and she is really that bad. That even a life of easy living is not worth the trouble of marrying this particular woman.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
5d ago
You can only be a principled liberal if you've been oblivious to the progress of the discourse of the past decade or so. (And indeed, I was right: they were just too young to have lived through the events of the oughts.)
And although their lack of exposure to these seminal events may give them a belief in liberal idealism, it doesn't incline me to take them seriously. When you start going on about 'we freedom fighters' there's a lot of 'who, whom' to be asked about.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
5d ago
Well, good luck with that. It won't work. If you're young as you say, you haven't yet experienced the crushing disappointment of realizing that the institutions that ostensibly protected these things have all been hollowed out and taken over by illiberal enemies. There's no going back. It sucks.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
5d ago
lol, lmao even like, you can have that self-narrative for yourself, and that's cool but where were you in the past twenty years? you haven't done anything. Now the right has the stick of power and you retreat to principled liberalism? I don't buy it for a second. Show me your scars. Your medals. Your badges of honor that would have made you a pariah for twenty years. You don't get to claim stolen valor to defend the parasites of academia. You haven't fought for shit.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
5d ago
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
5d ago
You seem to think that there is a tit for tat MAD argument to be made for restraint. Uh, no, there isn't. A politician promising to punish the hicks for having the audacity to touch the academy is less a political platform and more the hysterical overreaction of a crazy person. There's a popular thread of argument that goes 'but imagine if it was happening to you'. In this case, I don't have to imagine: conservatives have been driven out of everything from literature to knitting to table-top RPG games. Your consequences have already happened. Deterrence doesn't work if the opposing side uses the imagined bad end as a frequently-executed goal that often succeeds.
So yes, we are justified. Oderint dum metuant.
I disagree with WITS as measure: it doesn't matter if dates and feta cheese are duty-free if it's averaged out with protectionist tariffs for trucks and other heavy industry. Tariffs aren't even the whole story when it comes to protectionism. There are subsidies, designated country of origin, etc...
But that's beside the point. There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck. The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair. The general collapse of the affordability of housing. I could go on and on.
The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?
I expect the business owners and manufacturers to be unhappy about the tariffs: their profits are made at the expense of the people and communities they live in. Skin in the game is a good model of demonstrating sincerity, provided that access to the table is possible. It hasn't been for a very long time. Well, now our problem is your problem. The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually. Whether it be putting soldiers in your streets or giving you bloody shaves by taxation, the end result is the same. Pay up, liberal. What are you going to do, write an angry letter to your congressman?
It didn't work for us: why would it work for you?
It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?
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