I think Era is pretty tight bubble, not only politically but in terms of gaming opinions and whatnot.
If anything this thread is a nice reminder to "bubble check" yourself. Should be something people do more often.
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Bubble check - Is liberalism/progressivism the true path forward? What are some of the critiques? Serious replies please.
- Thread starter RustyNails
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If anything this thread is a nice reminder to "bubble check" yourself. Should be something people do more often.
Just a little self awareness check that we post (and sometimes live) in a relative echo chamber. It's comments like "I can't fathom why Joe Biden is still favored". Yeah, not many people here like Joe Biden for the dem nom but the rest of the country is very different from Era. Even the democratic voters in the country.
Tribalism is what happens when we live in bubbles. It's also why extreme viewpoints form. So many people in this country believe Obama is a muslim arab born jihadist, AOC is a communist hellbent on taking away freedoms, the deep state is working against trump etc etc etc because all these people do is watch fox news, and read conservative fake news sites that are shared on facebook. And once its shared on facebook, any website looks legit. Then they only hang out with other people like them.
Same shit happens on the left.
this thread his like center left, socdems, and leftist literally debating each other rather thoroughly. And even among the leftist there's demsoc and ancoms debating their nuances. I wouldn't at all say this thread is an echo chamber
This thread, no. It's doing its job because it is a "bubble check"
But the site and social media in general, yeah.
I think one of the biggest critiques is liberal's penchant for wanting things discussed and believing good faith on the part of people who are not interested in that, and kind of weakly letting things get to a point of compromise and playing the game on other people's terms due to wanting inclusiveness even in situations where it may not be helpful. Does that make sense? I also think there are a lot of self-professed liberals where all they do to put themselves in that camp is vote Democrat every 2/4 years and while they may have liberal views they aren't really helping in as substantial a way as they could, while progressives and even a lot of republicans are out there pushing their ideologies in other ways that are more likely to shift thought.
Could you give an example?
My interpretation of it was dems trying to take the "high road" despite constant fuckery from the GOP
That's exactly what I mean and in less words haha.
Like, I'm sure the average liberal is likely better educated than the average Republican, and our side gives them too much leeway in the name of compromise. It's just like a liberal culture thing. Liberals may be more likely to platform shitty people because they believe that through reasoned debate our side will win out because ultimately we have the moral high ground, but it seems like some liberals have blinders on to how much "feels" influences people.
I think this video gets into how our side needs to do a better/different job as to how we approach things.
I wonder what effect having the popular vote would have on the US. The current system completely strips the cities of their voting power and cities tend to be way more progressive and left leaning.
But I think most establishment democrats would rather see hell freeze over first and I'm not even going to talk about republicans.
But I think most establishment democrats would rather see hell freeze over first and I'm not even going to talk about republicans.
Republicans would pretty much never win again on their current platform. They would be forced to become more progressive or just disappear. The two parties left would be socialists and social democrats after Democrats splinter.
Politically speaking I'd say the only "bubble" this site resides within is the one that says Trump and republicans are terrible, and I don't think being in a bubble is wrong if it's also an objectively true viewpoint.
There's unfortunately a bit of a complication in this. There is something of a false narrative/culture war going on and the conservative side is gaining some would be moderates because they view the left as being closed minded, violent (antifa), anti-american etc. I literally have friends that abstained from voting because while they said they are traditionally left wing, they said they don't like this direction the left is going in. They would have voted republican if a "more sane" candidate made it out of the primaries. They all grew up in a white affluent CT suburb if that gives you any more context as to why they think this way.
I honestly don't know what the solution to this is because on one hand, you shouldn't be giving a platform to shitty people, and you should be challenging facism/racism, but the right does SUCH a good job at spinning shit to portray the left as some freedom controlling thought police dictators.
They don't do a good job, they just do A LOT of it, and right wingers control the vast majority of media. There are no left wing networks out there, they're at most liberals who want to retain the currently corrupt status quo, so they'll happily go along with the framing of the left wing that the right wing media starts. There's a ridiculous amount of money pumped toward right wing propaganda. There's tonnes of utterly shitty right wing talking heads that got there without any sort of buildup, they just got funded and went from 0-100. There are some that were straight up hired as actors to start a high production value right wing youtube channel, it's nuts.
Yeah that's more or less it. Liberalism is synonymous with progressivism in the US now in common speech. Some people differentiate with "liberals" and capital-L "Liberals".
The European usage is the textbook usage. The US usage is a bastardized version of the textbook usage filtered through our dumb politics.
I mean, we have Europe as a pretty clear example of that definitively not being the case.
That's simply because they have more right wing folk than left wing folk.
It's a matter of what the balance between left-wing and right-wing is at the time direct democracy is attempted.
Liberals here insist they are progressive, but any modernized FDR scale policy today gets aggressively shredded by the same people.
Whether they are actually "progressive" or whether they simply consider themselves "progressive" are two different ideas. There's always a disconnect between what someone calls themselves, what they actually believe, and what they actually do.
You're right about FDR though. American liberals are more right wing today, economically, than they were 100 years ago. They've lost the spirit of Keynesianism, and I don't even like Keynesianism all that much.
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I think the overall concern for platforming is good, but I don't understand why people treat every single left/right interaction as benefiting the right. Why can't the left be the ones that are being platformed by the right?
Bernie going on the Joe Rogan podcast is the perfect example, because that's Joe Rogan's platform first and foremost. Maybe Bernie brings some Bernie fans to Joe Rogan too, but unless it gets twice the listens of any other episode of Joe Rogan, I think we can assume there's a much higher percentage of Joe Rogan fans being introduced to an non-editorialized Bernie in that episode.
Having people complain that Bernie did that not only makes no sense, it also is just a very bad look because that perception of being unreasonable is a big problem for us.
Don't mean to resurrect a dead thread, but I've been too preoccupied to address this and wanted to take a swing.
I know anarchism stipulates that the state is inherently bad because a hierarchy that cannot be justified should not stand, but it then (according to the videos you provided) permits the populace to defer to experts on matters which they are trained and practiced to speak to... but deferring to experts IS a hierarchy, as it puts a person's opinion over another, albeit on a narrow topic and with the backing of expertise. So there is room for a state in which expert opinion drives policy and one that can be justified, as one of anarchism's seemingly core tenets already provides the primary justification for it.
I've long been an advocate for a technocratic socialist representative democracy without the influence of parties, as they would no longer be required since they wouldn't unilaterally make decisions anyways. Representatives would be elected to the House to speak to the desires of local populations and propose solutions, which would then be passed to a technocratic Senate, made up of vocational experts, the best of the best elected from within their professions/areas of expertise exclusively, to determine the best way forward to make those desires a reality. Who better to decide environmental policy than environmental scientists? Who better to decide how to approach Medicare than the medical profession? Who better to assist the House with social policy than sociologists and psychologists? Who better to assist with urban planning than engineers? The House would still be necessary, as they would set the priorities based on the desires of each region to be sent to the technocratic Senate, until all priorities are sufficiently met.
And there's no room for corruption there, as parties will have no place; there would be no line to tow since they only set the agenda and don't determine the outcome. As well, vocational voting will mean that if a representative does not adequately address what is in the best interests of said vocation, they would be tossed out exceedingly quickly; when it comes to a person's profession, their passion in life, there's almost no room for politicking and therefore corruption would be easily identified and tossed aside. For example, doctors aren't going to elect representatives for medicine that put their ideology before public health, they have a whole oath that they take that mandates that they shouldn't.
And such a system could function within capitalism, but to put an end to the "how will you pay for it" boogeyman, it would inherently trend towards a post-capitalism society by necessity. The preference among some technocrats for post-capitalist economies is communal resource/energy accounting, where all members of a population have equal consumption power based on available resources and the energy required to produce goods/services, including the energy required to eliminate environmental damage. To put it more simply, we'd need an economic system that rewards resource efficiency both economically for all citizens AND morally.
You gain all of the advantages of anarchism this way without removing the state, merely changing its functionality. I'm sure you'd say "you can have all of that without a concentration of power to a select few", and... well... maybe? But it requires a leap of faith to do so. Allow me to explain.
If some abstain from participation, surprise, a hierarchy has just been created! Those who abstain have inherently submitted to the will of another group, narrowing the voices within a collective and thus creating a hierarchy that can't be justified, whether intentionally or not. We see submission to others in our daily lives all the time (a perfect example in my life is the "what do you want to have for dinner" question) and, while disenfranchisement is a major driving factor in abstaining from democracy, there are also those with personal privilege among those who choose not to participate in a democracy, out of ambivalence alone.
One must also consider the hierarchies that would remain in an anarchistic society, despite good intention. Naturally, they would exist at the micro level instead of the macro level, but so long as they exist, they pervert the intention of anarchism from the periphery and could do so with great success. The movement already contends with that before it's been implemented in the form of "brocialists", those who consider anarchism to be something that can exist outside of feminist principles and other measures of equality. Such people would still exist after implementing anarchism, where they could influence society and undermine it by finding ways for hierarchy to insinuate itself.
For example, a domineering husband who pressures and/or threatens his wife not to participate in democracy has thus helped to institute a hierarchy through intimidation. If several of them do so, patriarchy gains footholds. Patriarchy doesn't simply dissolve with the implementation of an anarchistic government, it just goes back to hiding in the confines of one's private residency. Young children reaching the age of majority, likewise, can be similarly influenced through both intimidation and indoctrination to either not participate in anarchistic democracy or participate in a way that upholds the interests of a larger voting bloc.
One could suggest that the simplest way to erode such a plurality of micro-corruptive elements like this would be to institute mandatory democratic participation. But as has been shown in places that have implemented this currently, it is not a deterrent. Part of the reason why is that most of these mandatory voting laws are toothless with minimal to no punishments because doing more than that erodes personal liberty. So, what, you jail non-participants? Threaten them with violence? Those are not solutions, either. In the example of the wife with the domineering husband, threats relating to non-participation just put her between the devil and the deep blue sea: anger her domineering husband and risk violence or disobey the law and risk jail/violence. Some choice.
So much of anarchism relies on the idea that instituting it will provide freedom and cause an enlightenment of the population to all be on the same page, and.... no, sorry, I ain't buying it. Even without capitalism, there will still be means and motives for corruption and hierarchy, they'd merely come from the bottom up instead of the top down. I'd agree that such corruptive influence is better than what we have today, but it's still not good.
This is why I am more in favour of hierarchies constructed to resist corruption on the basis of what humanity would rightfully fight hardest to defend and what is least susceptible to manipulation through fear and greed. In my mind, fear works in current politics because it can be used in a way that does not risk the sanctity of our institutions to do so. If the very legitimacy of necessary professions were in jeopardy because of the actions of our government as they would be in a technocratic representative democracy, you risk all of human society trying to corrupt them in totality and they would thus be defended from corruption to the death by those who have dedicated their life to said professions. THAT is how you resist corruption.
But that's just... like... my opinion, man. And make no mistake, there's so much that anarchism gets right (for example, no "top of the pyramid" through use of rotating delegates to represent regional needs on a larger scale is a really smart idea). But the things it gets wrong are just too important to gloss over or brush aside.
The problem is that you've jumped from a state with corruption to anarchism without considering that there's a possibility for something in between, so you'll forgive me for assuming that you've done so because you believe in the capacity for all humans to be corrupt.
I know anarchism stipulates that the state is inherently bad because a hierarchy that cannot be justified should not stand, but it then (according to the videos you provided) permits the populace to defer to experts on matters which they are trained and practiced to speak to... but deferring to experts IS a hierarchy, as it puts a person's opinion over another, albeit on a narrow topic and with the backing of expertise. So there is room for a state in which expert opinion drives policy and one that can be justified, as one of anarchism's seemingly core tenets already provides the primary justification for it.
I've long been an advocate for a technocratic socialist representative democracy without the influence of parties, as they would no longer be required since they wouldn't unilaterally make decisions anyways. Representatives would be elected to the House to speak to the desires of local populations and propose solutions, which would then be passed to a technocratic Senate, made up of vocational experts, the best of the best elected from within their professions/areas of expertise exclusively, to determine the best way forward to make those desires a reality. Who better to decide environmental policy than environmental scientists? Who better to decide how to approach Medicare than the medical profession? Who better to assist the House with social policy than sociologists and psychologists? Who better to assist with urban planning than engineers? The House would still be necessary, as they would set the priorities based on the desires of each region to be sent to the technocratic Senate, until all priorities are sufficiently met.
And there's no room for corruption there, as parties will have no place; there would be no line to tow since they only set the agenda and don't determine the outcome. As well, vocational voting will mean that if a representative does not adequately address what is in the best interests of said vocation, they would be tossed out exceedingly quickly; when it comes to a person's profession, their passion in life, there's almost no room for politicking and therefore corruption would be easily identified and tossed aside. For example, doctors aren't going to elect representatives for medicine that put their ideology before public health, they have a whole oath that they take that mandates that they shouldn't.
And such a system could function within capitalism, but to put an end to the "how will you pay for it" boogeyman, it would inherently trend towards a post-capitalism society by necessity. The preference among some technocrats for post-capitalist economies is communal resource/energy accounting, where all members of a population have equal consumption power based on available resources and the energy required to produce goods/services, including the energy required to eliminate environmental damage. To put it more simply, we'd need an economic system that rewards resource efficiency both economically for all citizens AND morally.
You gain all of the advantages of anarchism this way without removing the state, merely changing its functionality. I'm sure you'd say "you can have all of that without a concentration of power to a select few", and... well... maybe? But it requires a leap of faith to do so. Allow me to explain.
This is where anarchism tends to fall away for me, that it requires all members of a collective to participate and that no hierarchies can exist in order to maintain itself and... I don't have much faith in that, as it would require everyone to be on the same page.
If some abstain from participation, surprise, a hierarchy has just been created! Those who abstain have inherently submitted to the will of another group, narrowing the voices within a collective and thus creating a hierarchy that can't be justified, whether intentionally or not. We see submission to others in our daily lives all the time (a perfect example in my life is the "what do you want to have for dinner" question) and, while disenfranchisement is a major driving factor in abstaining from democracy, there are also those with personal privilege among those who choose not to participate in a democracy, out of ambivalence alone.
One must also consider the hierarchies that would remain in an anarchistic society, despite good intention. Naturally, they would exist at the micro level instead of the macro level, but so long as they exist, they pervert the intention of anarchism from the periphery and could do so with great success. The movement already contends with that before it's been implemented in the form of "brocialists", those who consider anarchism to be something that can exist outside of feminist principles and other measures of equality. Such people would still exist after implementing anarchism, where they could influence society and undermine it by finding ways for hierarchy to insinuate itself.
For example, a domineering husband who pressures and/or threatens his wife not to participate in democracy has thus helped to institute a hierarchy through intimidation. If several of them do so, patriarchy gains footholds. Patriarchy doesn't simply dissolve with the implementation of an anarchistic government, it just goes back to hiding in the confines of one's private residency. Young children reaching the age of majority, likewise, can be similarly influenced through both intimidation and indoctrination to either not participate in anarchistic democracy or participate in a way that upholds the interests of a larger voting bloc.
One could suggest that the simplest way to erode such a plurality of micro-corruptive elements like this would be to institute mandatory democratic participation. But as has been shown in places that have implemented this currently, it is not a deterrent. Part of the reason why is that most of these mandatory voting laws are toothless with minimal to no punishments because doing more than that erodes personal liberty. So, what, you jail non-participants? Threaten them with violence? Those are not solutions, either. In the example of the wife with the domineering husband, threats relating to non-participation just put her between the devil and the deep blue sea: anger her domineering husband and risk violence or disobey the law and risk jail/violence. Some choice.
So much of anarchism relies on the idea that instituting it will provide freedom and cause an enlightenment of the population to all be on the same page, and.... no, sorry, I ain't buying it. Even without capitalism, there will still be means and motives for corruption and hierarchy, they'd merely come from the bottom up instead of the top down. I'd agree that such corruptive influence is better than what we have today, but it's still not good.
This is why I am more in favour of hierarchies constructed to resist corruption on the basis of what humanity would rightfully fight hardest to defend and what is least susceptible to manipulation through fear and greed. In my mind, fear works in current politics because it can be used in a way that does not risk the sanctity of our institutions to do so. If the very legitimacy of necessary professions were in jeopardy because of the actions of our government as they would be in a technocratic representative democracy, you risk all of human society trying to corrupt them in totality and they would thus be defended from corruption to the death by those who have dedicated their life to said professions. THAT is how you resist corruption.
But that's just... like... my opinion, man. And make no mistake, there's so much that anarchism gets right (for example, no "top of the pyramid" through use of rotating delegates to represent regional needs on a larger scale is a really smart idea). But the things it gets wrong are just too important to gloss over or brush aside.
Just want to chime in and say the idea of this thread is a good one. Always good to check yourself.
Era in general is a fairly tight bubble politically (at least in comparison to the USA's political compass). One clear example of this is the favorability of Joe Biden; this site does not seem to be in concordance with the USA overall. That's totally alright, but it's good to know that the opinion you see reinforced is not necessarily readily applicable to the "real world."
Era in general is a fairly tight bubble politically (at least in comparison to the USA's political compass). One clear example of this is the favorability of Joe Biden; this site does not seem to be in concordance with the USA overall. That's totally alright, but it's good to know that the opinion you see reinforced is not necessarily readily applicable to the "real world."
The question comes from a good place but in a way it's miaguided. You don't have to subscribe to some ideology wholeheartedly. You can always agree with parts and disagree with others. Don't be dogmatic, think for yourself and rise above partisanship and other nonsense.