this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
188 points (93.9% liked)

You Should Know

33190 readers
75 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.

Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.

It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.

In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.

So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] utopianfiat@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Turning the other way while migrants drown in the Mediterranean isn't "Identity Politics" and the insistence on cultural homogenization and labeling plurinationalism "Identity Politics" is very typical of European right-wing social ideology that pervades the parties in power.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now you're just using an "appeal to emotion" falacy.

A person who genuinelly wants to help others LOGICALLY starts by the ones most in need, and those are mainly those living in horrible conditions in refugee camps, not those who have a few thousand dollars to pay a trafficker.

Your barelly disguised neoliberal take on Equality with "oh so obvious" late XXth century marketing shaped appeals to emotion and eternaly repeated unthinking slogans which are fashionable within certain tribes (and hence social tokens of group membership amongst that crowd, who really are just in it for the sweet social ego-stroking) isn't left-wing, it isn't even a genuine want to do good by others, since it doesn't obbey even the basic logic of "to do the most good you start by those in most need" something which would force looking at wealth inequality.

The internal-inconsistencies needed to exclude wealth inequality from that bundle of easilly parroted marketing slogans that portrays to be a political theory that fights Equality are so large, that even the idea that help should be allocated by need not by "insert easilly visibly characteristice people were born with" is seen as a threat.

[–] utopianfiat@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Caring about migrants' lives isn't an appeal to emotion.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your very first sentence on your post was about how those who disagree with your politics are "ignoring people dying".

People making genuine, logical and well-founded arguments don't start by claiming that those who disagree with them are closing their eyes to the death of others.

Yours wasn't just an Appeal to Emotion Falacy, it was a particularly bad taste and sleazy one.

[–] utopianfiat@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's particularly notable that you've spent a great deal of time accusing me of leveraging logical fallacies while you've spent basically no time denying my contention that across the political spectrum European parties are starkly against immigration whatsoever, with the farthest right wings of them arguing that there's no obligation to recognize the citizenship of colonial nationals.

If that doesn't work for you we can talk about how Romani are treated in Europe too.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I pointed out the error in your implit assumption in your "argument" that Identity Politics counts as being leftwing.

A self-proclaimed fight for Equality that doesn't address the worst kinds of equality out there (usually wealth-related) is at best a "theatre of equality" and at worst profound hypocrisy.

Now, if the Democrats more broadly weren't quite as lavishingly a "party of business" and "relaxed about wealth" one might say that perhaps it really was a party fighting for Equality and were Identity Politics was but a facet of a greater fight, in which case it would all count as leftwing, only that's not at all the case - if you loudly help a few whilst activelly fucking up the many (often covertly fucking up the very people you just loudly proclaimed you helped), that's just the far too common image management anchored on late XX-century marketing theories, not acting out of principle.

So there really isn't much leftwing-anything in the US Democrats.

As for your idea of the European politicial spectrum, it really doesn't match what I've seen having lived in 4 different countries in Europe and speaking the language of a few more - you might be confusing what gets shown about European politics in the English language media you frequent (which is usually the loudmouths saying outrageous things and a handful of government measures here and there which can be spinned - whether they really are or not - as anti-immigrant) with the actual totality of the European political spectrum.

From what I've observed, even now when there are a lot more anti-immigrant populists on the scene than in the heady pre-2008-crash days, they still represent maybe at most 1/4 of all the political spectrum (granted, I don't know the politics of EE that much, so maybe it's more there)

PS: And just for clarity, I'm not saying that in social terms the Democrats aren't more "fair" than a lot of Europe's political spectrum, what I'm saying is that because of their positions on every other angle of equality and on advancing the general principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number" (which they are not, at all, advancing, quite the contrary) their seemingly socially more fair side might very well be just theatre and even if it's not, it's not enough leftwing to make up for the broader concern with making the most people live better (as imperfect as it is) in most of the European Political Spectrum.