When I was but a mere whippersnapper, relatively speaking, I would have classed myself as a Socialist. A European/UK style socialist not quite ready to become the version of Socialist that would strip everyone of their property and ensure we all lived equal lives of misery and squalor.
Everything in this post, from the quotations you cite to your discussion of them, could be converted from Trump to covid without changing much other than replacing some key words.
In fact, back during covid, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus had temporarily tagged in for Trump as principal heel, there was an op-ed column in the NY Times that almost exactly paralleled the comment from the homeowner quoted above: as I recall, the writer was a woman living out in the country, probably relocated from the city Prince Prospero-like to escape the Red Death, who praised her neighbor for doing primitive, neighborly things like plowing the snow from her driveway, and she was just so torn as to whether to treat him like a human being since he was (or maybe she just assumed he was) not sufficiently enlightened about either the plague or Trump or some combination, I can’t remember.
"Socialisn't" is a wonderfully succinct way of putting it. Having known real socialists, the kind that'd try to live together in a commune, I'm well familiar with the real thing, that only works small-scale and only as long as the wrong'uns are kept out, and the current thing which really isn't socialism in any way shape or form.
Nor is it conservatism or fascism or classical European (British/Scottish to be precise) liberalism. What is it then?
It's an ideology dreamed up in the 1930s (no, not that one, I already said it's not fascism) by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises among others at a conference in Paris in 1938. They associated all types of "collectivism" as they put it (such as public transportation funded by taxes, or tax-funded schools for working class people, or public hospitals, drains, sewers, public anything really) as the first step to the kind of totalitarianism they had just fled from (Austria). To their minds, the only way forward was to make everything public and remove power from elected officials and move it where such could not get at it. For details, Hayek lays out neoliberalism in his "Road to Serfdom", a book that has since been used as a blueprint by post-WW2 progressives and liberals whether in office or in offices on how to reach serfdom for the masses.
(Because a text, especially an ideological or religious one, is like a sword - it has two edges and they both cut both ways.)
And since 1947 and the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberalism has more and more ruled the roost, as democracy became bureaucracy and power over legislation was moved away from democratically elected parliaments.
The problem is that neoliberalism yields two effects: the negative aspects of totalitarianism, and the negative aspects of capitalism. Cojoined, they form the current Western order. Trump is in no way upsetting this. What he is doing is rearranging the curtains and the furniture.
That what he is doing is enough to upset the average media consumer speaks more about the media and said consumer, than about Trump and his policies.
Neoliberalism will end. Either with a return to nationalistic democratic rule after a period of violent authoritarianism under one symbol or the other - or it will end due to demographic replacement and the end of Western Europe as it has largely looked since Hastings.
To use what a professor told me: "Following an ideology is like driving according to a map, that's placed on your windshield."
These people are losing losers. They shall not prevail because, when it comes right down to it, they are stupid, misguided and wrong about absolutely everything. And of course, their cocks are soft, male and female genders alike.
What is best in life? To see these fools driven before us, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
A bit harsh maybe, but I'm feeling a bit of a Genghis Khan mood coming on regarding this idiocy.
We got this as long ago as 2016, Facebook friends declaiming “if you voted Leave, unfriend me now!”. During The Tyranny, “if you’re unvaxxed you are a literal fascist!” They can’t cope with any challenge to their paradigm. Diversity in everything except opinion.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
What is the more compassionate depends on the circumstances. If he is too hungry to fish you feed him. If he is like me and is ineducable when it comes to fishing and would rather watch paint dry, sell him a fresh or frozen fish at a reasonable price.
Hehe, me too, though I quite like to fish - it's the fish that doesn't like me.
"Teach a man to fish, then hit him over the head and take his fish, then tell him he'd better have another one for you tomowrrow" is the neo-liberal capitalist version.
Strangely enough, it is identical to the communist version.
Everything in this post, from the quotations you cite to your discussion of them, could be converted from Trump to covid without changing much other than replacing some key words.
In fact, back during covid, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus had temporarily tagged in for Trump as principal heel, there was an op-ed column in the NY Times that almost exactly paralleled the comment from the homeowner quoted above: as I recall, the writer was a woman living out in the country, probably relocated from the city Prince Prospero-like to escape the Red Death, who praised her neighbor for doing primitive, neighborly things like plowing the snow from her driveway, and she was just so torn as to whether to treat him like a human being since he was (or maybe she just assumed he was) not sufficiently enlightened about either the plague or Trump or some combination, I can’t remember.
When Trump is gone, this mentality will remain.
"Socialisn't" is a wonderfully succinct way of putting it. Having known real socialists, the kind that'd try to live together in a commune, I'm well familiar with the real thing, that only works small-scale and only as long as the wrong'uns are kept out, and the current thing which really isn't socialism in any way shape or form.
Nor is it conservatism or fascism or classical European (British/Scottish to be precise) liberalism. What is it then?
It's an ideology dreamed up in the 1930s (no, not that one, I already said it's not fascism) by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises among others at a conference in Paris in 1938. They associated all types of "collectivism" as they put it (such as public transportation funded by taxes, or tax-funded schools for working class people, or public hospitals, drains, sewers, public anything really) as the first step to the kind of totalitarianism they had just fled from (Austria). To their minds, the only way forward was to make everything public and remove power from elected officials and move it where such could not get at it. For details, Hayek lays out neoliberalism in his "Road to Serfdom", a book that has since been used as a blueprint by post-WW2 progressives and liberals whether in office or in offices on how to reach serfdom for the masses.
(Because a text, especially an ideological or religious one, is like a sword - it has two edges and they both cut both ways.)
And since 1947 and the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberalism has more and more ruled the roost, as democracy became bureaucracy and power over legislation was moved away from democratically elected parliaments.
The problem is that neoliberalism yields two effects: the negative aspects of totalitarianism, and the negative aspects of capitalism. Cojoined, they form the current Western order. Trump is in no way upsetting this. What he is doing is rearranging the curtains and the furniture.
That what he is doing is enough to upset the average media consumer speaks more about the media and said consumer, than about Trump and his policies.
Neoliberalism will end. Either with a return to nationalistic democratic rule after a period of violent authoritarianism under one symbol or the other - or it will end due to demographic replacement and the end of Western Europe as it has largely looked since Hastings.
To use what a professor told me: "Following an ideology is like driving according to a map, that's placed on your windshield."
These people are losing losers. They shall not prevail because, when it comes right down to it, they are stupid, misguided and wrong about absolutely everything. And of course, their cocks are soft, male and female genders alike.
What is best in life? To see these fools driven before us, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
A bit harsh maybe, but I'm feeling a bit of a Genghis Khan mood coming on regarding this idiocy.
LSWCHP
“Wrong about everything and their cocks are soft”
A bit harsh you say. How about a lot stupid.
Terry, you're a lawyer. Nobody cares what you think.
Unlike you, people pay me to hear what I think.
We got this as long ago as 2016, Facebook friends declaiming “if you voted Leave, unfriend me now!”. During The Tyranny, “if you’re unvaxxed you are a literal fascist!” They can’t cope with any challenge to their paradigm. Diversity in everything except opinion.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
What is the more compassionate depends on the circumstances. If he is too hungry to fish you feed him. If he is like me and is ineducable when it comes to fishing and would rather watch paint dry, sell him a fresh or frozen fish at a reasonable price.
Hehe, me too, though I quite like to fish - it's the fish that doesn't like me.
"Teach a man to fish, then hit him over the head and take his fish, then tell him he'd better have another one for you tomowrrow" is the neo-liberal capitalist version.
Strangely enough, it is identical to the communist version.
I've noticed those people who talk most loudly about "compassion", display the least of it.
🙌 VERY true!
This probably will not end well ...
Interestingly, my very first blog post (in German; end of 2018; later moved to substack: https://dochdoch.substack.com/p/entscheidungen-uber-entscheidungen) was about examples of such reasoning.