Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism. feel like if we lived in venezuela we'd be blaming our troubles on state-planned economies. maybe life is just hard no matter what economic or political system you live under, and though "suck it up buttercup, life could be much worse" isn't really a satisfying panacea to get ppl to vote the right way, it's really the only honest answer?

^this is why we need the humanities. (only half kidding)

what do you blame it on mordy

the boogie what else

@tinyrevolution
Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy

ppl lack the awareness + education to know how most people in the world, today and historically, have lived. contemporary western society has raised expectations significantly and so ppl who otherwise live historically extremely high standard of living lives get bitter when things are not utopian. moreover there's a huge degradation in trust in institutions and in general sittlichtkeit. families lack cohesiveness, communities are broken, ppl feel no sense of identification with anything larger than themselves. which is not to say that there are no problems w/ the modern capitalist lifestyle (which is itself responsible for a lot of the alienation being felt) but that it's not like there's a magic bullet out there. like it's not that there is a magic bullet but ppl are confused and think it's xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment instead of what it really is. there really isn't a magic bullet. there's no way to make life perfect. we can mitigate problems, and there are reforms to our system that would make a huge impact, but where is this other model that works much better than the model we have? how could it be that the western world is doing the best out of any other system in the world but is simultaneously irrevocably broken?

morbz you maybe don't see this but you have never made a post that contained any level of insight or anything interesting in it. everything you write is dumb and it is humiliating to you and to the rest of us who are humiliated watching you make a fool out of yourself. why don't you read a fucking book or two so you actually have something real to say that you didn't dream up in yr fevered consciousness.

3-VOL oRSON wELLES BIO IS NEXT, YOU TOXIN.

wow i'm sure that will teach you a lot about politics. but seriously, you sound like an idiot. get yrself an education.

"And I said unto him, be fruitful and multiply... but not in those words." - Woody Allen, 1964

look at the title of this thread. does it say "repost dumb tweets" or "quote woody allen" in the title? no? so then what the fuck are you even doing here?

if you put your cursed brain into a dog, it would walk backwards. buh-bye

There was a giant economic meltdown in 2008, and much of the world has still not recovered. It's not as if modern society is humming along, but people feel some weird kind of ennui. The world did actually, for realz, break.

seriously - i cannot believe that you post things like this -- Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy -- and think that you're adding anything. it is the lowest level of thinking a human being can do without just shutting their brain off during an episode of keeping up with the kardashians. it's just kneejerk reaffirmation of the same idea you already believe without any particular insight or novel idea. is it that your brain is so addled that you can't tell the difference between an original thought and the same idea you've expressed literally a thousand times in the last month alone? how could it be? do you not know what interesting thinking looks like? how could that be?

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.51110193.6052/flat,800x800,075,f.jpg

you're a shitposter. it's not that there's anything necessarily wrong with your ideology (except that it's prepackaged adbusters bullshit), but that you have nothing interesting to say ever. it's telling that 90% of your posts are just copy-pastes from twitter.

like if i thought you had any sincere interest in becoming a better poster i'd suggest that you think before hitting the submit post button and ask yourself "am i adding anything new here or am i just saying the same thing i always say that everyone has heard before"? bc like maybe you think that the way the world works if you repeat yourself enough ppl are just impressed with your stamina. but actually the way it works is that after the 10th time of regurgitating the same talking point ppl just want to know when you're going to go away so they can start to have a real conversation without the peanut gallery piping up.

Mordy people dislike you too

that's fine - my point to morbz has nothing to do with his likability. he could be unlikable and still write interesting things.

he could even be likable and write boring shite. the problem is that he's unlikable and writes boring bullshit and writes it everywhere on every thread he can find. it's a toxic combination to be a bad person and a dumb person.

Morbs is a troll on the political threads. Mordy just has wrong opinions :) It's not quite comparable.

polisci is boring BECAUSE WE ARE ALL FUCKED, YOU MANIACS

like conrad - i started this thread 5 years ago explicitly to have discussions that were maybe not everyone's on ilx's cup of tea - to ghettoize off some of my interests and possible "wrong opinions" from the hivemind. it's the complete opposite of morbz' technique of posting on every thread he can with his same stupid one-liners. he's the ilx equivalent of a crazy dude on the subway yelling at you about jesus.

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism.

― Mordy, Friday, June 24, 2016 10:16 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClumsDnXEAEsst9.jpg:small

Last line of that graphic is the key one. Lots of the areas that have traditionally voted for Labour but voted against the EU were poor to begin with. I think the minimum wage has outstripped inflation but it's still the minimum and lots of people who are either unemployed or on zero hours contracts wouldn't be earning that. Idk if the real hourly wage referred to would count tax credits or other benefits that have recently been cut, let alone public services.

There is also a huge time frame there, covering both the boom years and the economic collapse of a lot of those communities.

A lot of areas, particularly more wealthy ones, voted leave for other reasons though.

there's a similar phenomenon with trump voters who as an average are wealthier than clinton + sanders supporters

They tend to be a lot older for a start. Economic neglect of the bulk of the country is absolutely critical to why leave won.

i saw a chart i think posted on the uk thread that showed that the leave areas had received much higher levels of economic support compared to the stay areas. not dissimilar i imagine to the US where the most republican right-wing areas are southern states that receive far more assistance from the gov than blue states.

like we can quibble about what is the underlying cause of this but for ourselves we can be honest and say that right-wingers are mostly full of shit and believe things that are misaligned w/ reality.

the levels of support don't necessarily - almost certainly don't - reflect an accompanying upsurge of prosperity tho. places receiving the most support are the most economically and socially barren, there aren't people looking around going "look at this pleasure dome the EU built for us"

right-wingers are full of shit, sure, but disenfranchised and impoverished right-wingers are not really ignoring the blatant evidence of their day to day experience i don't think

Yes there is economic support in the sense of unemployment benefits or the subsidising of bad jobs, keeping people just around the poverty line, and economic support in terms of creating lasting employment opportunities and thriving communities. It has most been the former in the places voting to leave. London has boomed beyond all historical measure at the same time. When the recent round of cuts came in, it was the poorer communities disproportionately affected.

what day to day experience tho? who knows how to judge this shit objectively - it's not like their homes are being bombed out, or they're starving bc food hasn't been sent to the city in weeks, or they've run out of toilet paper. their serotonin levels more-or-less self-correct and like i said from a historically (or global) perspective they're all doing pretty okay. it's not like if they were doing 10% better they'd necessary feel differently. this kind of thing i don't think actually arises from a real phenomenology. and even if it did, it's not like it's particularly rational to cut off your nose to spite yr ugly face.

people are starving, people are living in shitholes, people are struggling to gain access to basic services like a GP

there is no pleasure dome under a different system. a. they are choosing the solution that leads to worse results for them and their family and b. there isn't a right choice they could make that would make their lives a pleasure dome. we don't live in the pleasure dome world.

it's almost as if voters in a representative democracy are sometimes mistaken as to their own best interests

We literally have hundreds of thousands of people who can not afford to feed themselves while the government's subsidising a semi-private garden bridge across the Thames to the tune of tens of millions of Pounds. It is like parking Dubai next to Banja Luka and wondering why people are angry when you keep building empty skyscrapers.

how dare these peasants not appreciate their good fortune

is it really that dire? by hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to feed themselves you mean who are relying on social services to feed themselves? bc the NYT has stories about 94% of Venezuelians haven't eaten today. i haven't seen similar horror stories about dire food shortages and starvation coming from the uk.

a semi-private garden bridge

where alph the sacred river runs

https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/

The Trussell Trust’s 400-strong network of foodbanks provides a minimum of three days’ emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis in the UK. In 2015/16, we gave 1,109,309 three day emergency food supplies to people in crisis.

nothing to see here

This is not Venezuela. We have the money to cover basic human dignity. Social services do not cover food bills for everyone so people have to use charity food banks.

anyway, i'm still not clear that these are the ppl who voted en masse for leave, and there were still very many people who were doing significantly better who voted leave which still leaves you wondering what they're hoping for. it would be easier if this were a movement of simply the most impoverished dire situations (at least bc it would mean that remain would've won). but it's not - it's also ppl who should know much better.

Yes, there are lots of wealthy older political conservatives who did not want to join in the first place.

they are not solely the people who voted to leave. many of them will be the people who didn't vote at all. when the right has power it's always as a coalition of the cynical powerful and the misinformed poor

even if you accept that millions of brits are starving to death, why would leaving the EU make that better?

and if holes in the social safety net are the problem, why do poors keep electing conservative governments?

http://www.fabians.org.uk/brexit-voters-not-the-left-behind/

say what you will about the US at least we never left a decision like his up to a fucking referendum

trolling aside this is basically about xenophobia/racism not economic self interest, right