Very loose definition of "leftist" there but we take a W where we can.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I've started replying "ok, dozer" to anyone who complains about "wholeness" to me. The ennui I have with the regressives is just beyond description anymore.
I like this word to describe those responsible for us all going backwards now: regressives.
I'm going to start using this
what do you mean by complaining about wholeness?
Autocorrect for 'wokeness'?
Dozer sounds too cool, now bout nappers? It sounds like the british word for diapers
If you believe in equality, you're woke. You're also a socialist. Because since fascism is a sincere belief in inequality based on identity, while neoliberalism (democrats) is a sincere belief in inequality based on class / wealth.
So yeah, this belief in equality or basic human decency needs to be destroyed in order to maximize profit. Invest in this propaganda, great ROI guaranteed!
neoliberalism (democrats) is a sincere belief in inequality based on class / wealth
This is actually a misconception! Liberalism (or neoliberalism, as the pejorative goes) is about allowing individuals the ability to dictate their own life on their own terms. Liberals want most of the same things you do, probably: clean air, a reduction in carbon emissions, everybody has a roof over their heads. guaranteed access to healthcare, and dense, walkable cities. The difference is the means by which liberals want to achieve these things. Liberals believe that the government should play as small a roll as necessary to guarantee these things, usually through economic incentives and staying out of the way of the free flow of commerce. Liberals do employ government action when necessary (i.e, making it illegal to dump toxic waste in to rivers).
Liberals also believe that the government should strongly guarantee legal equality and should generally do what it can to provide equal opportunities to everyone. Liberals think it should be illegal to discriminate against someone based on sex, race, sexual orientation, and other factors of one's birth.
The point of liberalism is to lower the horizons of government. In the 16th century Europeans were quite busy slaughtering each other over what the official religion of their kingdom should be. Liberalism emerged as way to manage sectarian conflict from spilling over into actual violence by disestablishing state churches, or at least significantly reducing the political power of clergy. Liberals apply this principle to other aspects of governance
Liberals are pro-capitalism, which is the ultimate mechanism for inequality.
"Neoliberalism" isn't a pejorative, it's a political philosophy that has dominated the Western world for about 50 years, though it has roots much further back. It is a philosophy embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. It's about privatization of services, lowering taxes, and deregulating corporations. It's why we have for profit healthcare in the US, for example.
I believe your argument is reductive, and ignores the complexities of the politics of people who call themselves liberals. Neoliberalism is not a coherent political or economic ideology, it's an insult for moderates used by leftists. Most liberals are not ideological; they pick their policy preferences pragmatically, though nobody can truly claim to be perfectly unbiased and non-ideological.
And if you had argued to me in 2010 that democrats and republicans can both be described as "neoliberals", I might agree with you, but since at LEAST 2015, republicans have completely turned their back on the most basic aspects of liberalism, becoming the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, isolationist party with no respect for the rule of law or the principles of equality or personal freedom. There was maybe a 10 year period in which republicans paid lip service to these ideals throughout the 1990s, but today Republicans can better be described by Hungarian President Victor Orban's prescription for "illiberal democracy", though lately they're not too hot about democracy either.
Republicans, in contrast to liberals, believe in enforcing cultural conservatism through state power, state intervention in markets to benefit in-groups, majoritarian ruling with very slim electoral margins to the detriment of marginalized groups or opposition parties, and a general hostility to freedom of speech or the free press
Yes, liberals ARE pro-capitalism, but capitalism has been the ultimate mechanism for REDUCING inequality. Since the 1970s (the heyday of so-called neoliberalism), the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone from rougly 50% to about 10% today, accelerating in the 1990s with the downfall of communism across Europe.
To reiterate: thanks to free trade and capitalism, most of the world no longer lives in extreme poverty for the first time in human history. It is in very wealthy countries where we are able to take this for granted because we've been living very high standards of living since the end of the 2nd world war, which has coincided with a large gap in wealth equality. However, the living standard of the average American today is still MUCH higher than the living standards of the average American in the 1960s or 1950s.
Healthcare in the United States is not actually really a free market. The specifics of how our system works lives and dies by the letter of the law. What many blame on deregulation is in fact due to specific regulations which were written by the insurance companies. To be clear: this is called regulatory capture, which is NOT a principle of liberalism. Liberals believe in a fair and unbiased bureaucracy which serves the public and not special interest groups. The American healthcare system is a failure to live up to liberal principles. This can be said of most other policy failures in the US: housing has exploded in cost because of regulatory capture in zoning commissions, reducing supply.
Words have definitions often with histories.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That's just a fact you can look up yourself. It has almost nothing to do with classical or social liberalism which is about freeing people.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself
I'm sorry but you're simply wrong. "Neoliberalism is a far right ideology" is inherently NOT a fact; it's a normative statement. It's an opinion. You can't present your opinions (or those of people who think like you) as facts. If I said "Neoliberalism is a moderate or even left wing ideology", I would also say that that is not a fact; it's my opinion, and the opinion of people who think like me
Neoliberalism is very much a far right ideology.
You should probably read more. This is from Wikipedia. Neoliberalism is about freeing capital not people.
Neoliberalism has become an increasingly prevalent term in recent decades.[16][17][18][19] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[20][21] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[22][23][24][25] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[26]
The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[27] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[7][28][29] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[7] By 1994, the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades
You should probably read more.
Grow up. Attack ideas, not people.
The article only says what I'm saying: it's a term given to certain people as a pejorative, and not an actual ideological program endorsed by people who are labeled by it. You're telling me that there is a fundamental similarity between Augusto Pinochet, who threw communists out of helicopters, and the US democratic party, which is categorically unwilling to inflict any kind of political violence against their opposition? Pinochet was not a neoliberal, he was a fascist, and if you can't tell the difference, then I encourage you to not only read more, but to get outside more and talk to people who have actually grown up in fascist and communist countries and see if they think that living in the US is anything like growing up in a fascist state.
To try to label the policies of Pinochet and the policies of the US democrats with the same term is either an expression of ignorance or privilege. Again, neoliberalism is a term which was made up by liberal arts and philosophy departments, not economists
how refreshing :)
He is such a good role model for being wealthy.
He is, when it comes down to it, pretty wealthy. But we are talking about the guy who created the kernel that now runs nearly every Internet service, all Android phones, most streaming devices, and a lot of various embedded devices. Anyone else with that much impact would be a billionaire many times over.
But he's got a comfortable amount and has not exercised unreasonable ambition. A man who did someone very valuable and was well rewarded and sees no point in being any better off than he is.
I didn't know any of this man's views, I shouldve started using linux sooner
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