Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

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

in the united states its the same thing bc americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general) if you look at the numbers & they vote against their self interest bc racism

oh i see mordy argued against this pov earlier and i missed it, now he'll get mad at me.

i do think its actually about xenophobia and racism more than you do, theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determination which i find p compelling, suggests that a lot of what mordy's talking about re: absurd expectations of Happiness is true but also intertwined inextricably with race

theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determinatio

lol rly? hasn't this been obvious for hundreds of years

idk seems to me the notion that we can 'reform' our way out of racism instead of seeing it as a cornerstone of the philosophy of our very conception of man is pretty dominant

cf all the 'progress' we've made, or the utopian vision of civil rights 'i have seen the mountaintop' etc., part of the reason Coates has struck such a chord is bc his POV is pretty insurgent on both the left and the right for taking a more pessimistic pov

americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general)

The right wing tries to do the same thing in America re: minorities, esp. African-Americans, but it usually blows up in their faces. (e.g. "Why do blacks keep voting for the Democrats that want to keep them on the plantation," etc.)

I'd be surprised if the public has become organically more racist than it was when successive Tory leaderships under Hague, Howard and Duncan Smith tried to turn general elections into referendums on immigration and got their hides tanned. We have had a massive economic crash and austerity programme, with political and press scapegoating, since.

I've been under the assumption for a while that at least some white people are undergoing an existential crisis about the fact that they might live to see themselves become a minority population. About which, I know, boo hoo, but I can see where that mindset might account for an uptick in racist sentiment.