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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   3016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?

Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.

Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.

Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?

"socialism" = "liberal policies I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more socialist they are"

"Far right" = "conservative groups I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more far right they are"

"Neoliberalism" = "things about capitalism I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more neoliberal they are"

Western political discourse is stupid and getting stupider, because we are becoming stupider

I like to use neoliberal to refer to things about the establishment domestic policy I don't like, and the more I dislike them the more neoliberal they are. For the establishment foreign policy I use neoconservative.

Based

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