It tracks that they’re unable to recognize bravery just like they’re unable to recognize freedom. Their entire world view is programmed and skewed by the overclass of people who control every aspect of their lives because they rely on brainwashed obedience for control.

Bravery is supposed to look like Pete Hegseth criticizing women and trans people in the military while he struggles to do a pull up.

Bravery is not supposed to look like marginalized people refusing to be intimidated into silence by the anti-egalitarian fascists who “joke” about exterminating them.

Freedom is supposed to look like the overclass free of the burden of the laws and regulations that were created to protect us from the overclass. In exchange the people that support them are free to “joke” about genocide without fear of social consequences.

Freedom is not supposed to look like the freedom to stand up to oligarchs for your rights and the rights of others. Including the rights of the morons too dumb to understand who’s interests they’re looking out for when they willing hand over their own civil rights and liberties to those who claim “democracy is incompatible with freedom.”

“Dear earth, writing this letter breaks out cold mechanical hearts, but after careful consideration of our own actions which have indeed caused society to crumble around us, we’ve decided we’re taking you all out with us. For your own good of course.” Love, your benevolent Kings, Dictators, Overclass

Yes, but it’s for our own safety. Because lil Marco, permaliner, and the rest of the gang are the people we should be trusting to know what’s good for all of us.

Kings didn’t own anything. The kingdom was a sovereign, the king was identical with that sovereign, the king managed the kingdom to the benefit of the kingdom. It was essentially a managed commons system.

Right…

I guess the royal family don’t “own” Buckingham Palace and they never did. They just have full and exclusive control over it. I wonder why homeless people in a sovereign were never offered shelter under a palace roof? Why sleep in the palace when they could they could just die in the military on behalf of their benevolent queen?

The same rules would apply if a president declares himself dictator, and used his authority to line his pockets via privatization of government agencies and public services under vague claims about efficiency and getting rid of beuracrats on behalf of the American tax payer.

The hospital was inefficient, so we let the horse loose and told him to go nuts. Why bother to fix a broken system when you can just destroy, and take away any public control?

He could even plate the White House in solid gold with taxpayer money, refuse to ever leave, and use the military to ensure nobody makes him leave. Just like the queen, he also doesn’t “own” the White House, he just has full and exclusive control over it, while the public has control in name only and continues to foot the bill.

Then whoever becomes dictator after him and refuses to leave also wouldn’t “own” it. Nice loophole!

Stalin didn’t own the collective, but when he decided to seize agrarian peasant land and let them die in a famine (while suppressing word of what he was doing from reaching his working class base in cities) he was doing it for the collective. Not for selfish reasons like maintaining power and control. The collective just didn’t need to know all the details about what their benevolent leader was doing for their sake and the sake of the entire Soviet Union.

The road to hell must be paved with state sponsored abuse of authority and terrorism that disguises itself under a mask of benevolent patriotism. Just trust that even as your rights and liberty are being stripped away, along with any public control or autonomy, the authority is simply doing it for your own good. For the common good 😊

🙄 yeah it’s a classic Sophie’s choice.

Would hate to be in their shoes, that they paid a billion dollars to have placed on their feet when they bought the election for Trump.

More like Narco Rubio. Get it? Because he’s a fucking narc ass bitch.

“We believe the women used a combination of siren song and/or witchcraft to induce the seizure”

Was it not obvious? I feel like even if you’re not German, you probably know what a little bitch cosplaying as a WWII Nazi looks like.

He looks like the gym teacher from Beavis and Butthead. Coach Buzzcut

“Hey every woman that ever rejected me, bet you’re regretting it now. What am I up to? Just leading an illiterate army that targets and harms civilian women and children by order of a pedophile and convicted rapist. Look at my lil Nazi duster.” 🥴

Liberalism moved the seat of power from the crown to private property

I’m really not understanding what you mean here. Liberalism removed the seat of power from private property (the crown/monarchy) to publicly controlled power (democracy).

Markets are rationing tools. They INHERENTLY prevent others from accessing equal opportunities.

State protected monopolies and oligopolies do this.

Freed markets (not the monopolies calling themselves free market capitalism) would actually allow equal freedom of competition between all people. What’s inherent to both monarchs and oligarchs is the use of the state to insulate and protect themselves from competition. This is why they find liberalism and democracy so threatening.

To the liberals of the American Revolution, individual freedom included the right to buy and sell slaves and no king was going to stop them from doing that. To the liberals of today, that’s distasteful, but so is abolishing private property or using the government to ration life necessities.

You’re right. No king was going to stop them. People fighting for their rights and liberty and the rights and liberty of others (equality) and calling out the illogical reasoning and hypocrisy of slave owners, plus a war fought against oligarchs who owned slave and opposed democracy, is what ended slavery.

So post liberalism?

The values of liberalism are in contradiction with the mechanics of liberalism.

It enshrines the power mechanics of liberalism which are in contradiction with its value

Not sure what you mean by this? Liberalism simply promotes equal values and protections for everyone. Owning land isn’t inherently contradictory to liberalism as long as everyone is allowed opportunity to own land. When the law is abused to favor land owners in a society and prevent others from accessing the same opportunities, it is opposed to liberalism. However the laws that stack the deck in favor of land owners are typically created by anti-egalitarian conservatives to ensure wealth is maintained within the same families by passing estates down from one generation to the next without taxing them.

Taxing land is not only a liberal policy it’s one of the most justified forms of taxation along with inheritance tax, yet conservatives paint both forms of taxation as government tyranny. So filling the Senate with people who aren’t opposed to justified taxation would seem to solve that problem very quickly. Again, you seem to be inadvertently making popular arguments that are often used by the right when attacking liberalism.

Nudging Toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism

Liberalism has been an easy target in recent years, blamed for everything from climate change to homophobia to racism. Conferences on the crisis of liberalism are as ubiquitous on college campuses as Au Bon Pain. And it is certainly true that, especially since 2008, liberal shibboleths of individual autonomy and human rights have come in for serious criticism from both the right and the left. And yet, as Daniel Luban has recently argued in these pages (“Among the Post-Liberals,” Winter 2020), it is also true that this crisis talk is overblown, and that the critique of liberalism is often more rhetorical than real. Many critics begin with an utter parody of the liberal tradition, according to which liberals view human beings as isolated monads. This allows any invocation of community to fashion itself as post-liberal, ignoring the fact that every liberal worth their salt, from Locke onward, has been committed to various forms of sociability. Much of the criticism, then, is better understood as an internal debate within the broad confines of liberalism about which forms of community ought to be valued, and why.

The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch. This kind of true opposition to liberalism has a long history in our country, most prominently among apostles of legal segregation. And in our own strange times, it is mounting a comeback. This is apparent at multiple levels, from the rowdy “Proud Boys,” who stand up for the rights of white men supposedly under assault, to the genteel climes of the academy, where a number of writers and thinkers are adopting flamboyantly illiberal postures, imagining quasi-medieval visions of social harmony as an antidote to the putative aimlessness of modern consumerism. It is hard to know how seriously to take any of this. It can often seem like a bit of playacting from people who know very well that the basic structures of American society—whose liberalism allows them to speak in the first place—will remain intact. And yet, as our current president knows, the line between reality and reality TV has become blurred. Thinkers and politicians who seem to be half-joking can become, when the tide changes, deadly serious.

One of the most serious and dangerous critics of liberalism today is a Harvard Law professor and recent Catholic convert named Adrian Vermeule. Less ambitious conservatives hope to reinvigorate Christian virtue with the tools of persuasion and localism. This has been the position of Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, for instance. Vermeule recognizes, rightly, that this is unlikely to work. He styles himself as a defender of “integralism”—the idea, essentially, that the state be subordinated to the Catholic Church, and that the state use its awesome power to create and defend the particular moral community that the Church imagines. The exact contours of this state are hard to discern, especially as many of his recommendations are made with a Trumpian smirk (albeit masquerading as a Swiftian one). It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.

You’re right and we don’t have a difference of opinion on the historical facts, but we do disagree on why previous attempts to repair the foundation have failed to prevent future attacks, and who actually benefits most from burning it all down and stripping away the rights and protections oligarchs have been fighting against for hundreds of years.

How the south won the civil war: Democracy, Oligarchy, and the fight for the soul of America

As Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom, the seeming paradox of American republicanism was the simultaneous emergence of slavery and freedom in the colonial world. From the outset, the American idea of freedom was exclusive: It was for property-owning men only and was based on the enslavement of people of African descent. The Virginian founding fathers solved the problem of inequality by simply enslaving a racially outcast working poor and at the same time elevating the status of all white men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike.

For Richardson, the American paradox is a bit different: Slavery and democracy were opposing forces rather than constitutive of each other. She traces the birth of oligarchy, democracy’s enemy, to the ship that brought about 20 enslaved Africans to the British North American mainland in 1619. From then until today, she argues, the history of the United States has been a history of the conflict between democracy and oligarchy. For Morgan, American democracy was based on slavery; for Richardson, though she relies on Morgan’s book, American oligarchy has always rested on combining elite domination with racial and economic inequality. Ever since the arrival of that ship, she maintains, the American republic has allowed its elites to conflate “class and race,” thereby giving them “the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.”

At many points in American history, oligarchy—from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—has had the upper hand. But repeatedly, ordinary Americans, especially those who were disenfranchised, like women and African Americans, have pushed back, leading to the triumph of democracy with slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and the enactment of the New Deal and civil rights legislation. By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction, Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind, which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic forces that resisted it. While Robin situates American conservatism in the longue durée of a Western reactionary philosophical tradition, Richardson locates it in a quintessentially Southern political tradition of oligarchy: anti-statism combined with virulent racism and misogyny. For Robin, too, the proslavery ideology exemplified American conservatism. But for Richardson, after the Civil War, the West and eventually the Republican Party helped reinvent the South’s language of oligarchy with an appeal to individualism that overlays a reactionary commitment to racial hierarchy and opposition to a welfare state.

I very much agree with Richardson, and believe the battle of oligarchy against democracy is easily traced to the origins of not just Trump, but also the national conservative movement and Project 2025.

Your enemies, the Trumpers and ICE and whatever, are not trying to destroy America. They are trying to reform it and bend it back to the foundations.

I think we partially agree here, but I think you’re ignoring the fact that there has always been pushback by Americans against oligarchy and hypocrisy in favor of democracy, and that by downplaying or pretending that pushback and rebellion against the hypocrisy didn’t exist, you’re ignoring very important social battles fought following the civil war and the civil rights movement, and you’re inadvertently accomplishing the goal of the New Right/Nat Cons, which is to argue that some fictional idealized past they seek to return to, was a past that ever existed.

The founding fathers signed their names to paper documenting their hypocrisy, but they didn’t build this country. This is not their country and it never will be. Slavery built this country, women built this country, marginalized people built this country and fought very hard for the rights they knew they deserved. Immigrants who came in different waves faced and continue to face backlash and discrimination, yet with each new wave they continue to build this country and make it great.

After the civil war and following the civil rights movement the Republican party embraced the southern strategy and a (failed) Goldwater campaign for presidency. From there the roots of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 begin to emerge, and although the origin of the new right movement is often associated with the pro life movement, this is incorrect. The Heritage foundation and the moral majority can be traced to Bob Jones University and anger over the fact that the federal government would not grant segregation academies tax exemption status.

The founder of heritage and the new right movement Paul Weyrich, literally stated in 1999, that he had accepted conservatives had lost the cultural war, but believed the failure of the movement was in trying to change American institutions rather than creating new conservative institutions. In 2001, his mentee at the Free Congress Foundation helped him compose the conservative manual The Integration of Theory and Practice

"Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions…" "We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today’s American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously." "We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. … contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. … We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture."

2024 The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building

Rather than working to conserve the past, this book argues that the New Christian Right is fundamentally a forward-looking and proactive movement focused on remaking the political landscape in the United States.

The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy “prefigurative traditionalism”—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.

You seem to be confusing my opinion differing from yours with me being “confused.” I’ll assume this is just a simple misunderstanding, because as a member of the reality based community, I really don’t like when people try to gaslight and create other people’s reality for them. It’s kind of a shitty and manipulative thing to do.

This is still America, at least until THEY destroy it, and it’s important to me that we’re still allowed to disagree even if you don’t see things that way.

In his recent book Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman refers to this tendency as “Jeffersonian progressivism,” or a preference for “pushing power down and out” over the more “Hamiltonian” strategy of building strong, centralized institutions to serve progressive goals. The Jeffersonian-versus-Hamiltonian dichotomy is a little too schematic, but it does gesture toward a real tension within the American left. On the one hand, the left needs a muscular state—capable of overseeing large-scale infrastructure projects and redistributive programs—to realize its vision. On the other hand, there exists a strain of leftist thought that is inclined to reject anything that smacks of hierarchy, centralization, formal rules, and decisions made through any process other than consensus. Some leftists find themselves negotiating an uneasy compromise between these twin imperatives; others embrace one or the other.

Mamdani and some other high-profile figures of the socialist left, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have shown a pronounced interest in the uses of state power and public administration. But the left’s anti-bureaucratic wing, influenced by C. Wright Mills, Students for a Democratic Society, and other pillars of the New Left, remains alive and well.

Instead of retreating into facile cynicism about the safety net and regulatory state, people on the left should be trying to occupy the bureaucracy at the state, local, and, after the MAGA putschists are finally expelled from power, federal level—not simply because we need good people in those jobs, but because enough good people in any given department can change its internal culture for the better.

The foundations were a problem. The response to the problem was reconstruction (not demolition) and the civil rights movement, and both faced opposition and subterfuge while they were being built.

To me, if I needed a home, and somebody gave me an old house with a fucked up foundation that had already been repaired a few times, and had a lot of bad memories attached, it’s more rational to repair the foundation again, and know that I’ll need to reinforce it in the future because it’s just a fact of reality that houses always settle and shift over time. Then I would remodel the house to make it my own instead of just burning it all down and starting from scratch.

Especially when burning the house down is also the goal of my enemy who wants to steal the land and rebuild a house that I won’t be welcome to live in.

This is the point. Public employees are supposed to be held to the same standards of conduct, but they’re not.

It’s true of police and members of Congress and other government agencies. Corruption becomes normalized, and once it’s normalized, it’s easy to rationalize as “I’m a cog in a corrupt machine. If I don’t do it somebody else will.”

The goal of rebuilding a better government should be to make corruption the less rational option.

I’ve been thinking lately about indestructible machines and the cogs they depend on to run them, and it made me remember this article I read a while back.

The people who control the machine, didn’t build it, they just hijacked it and intentionally corrupted the majority of cogs the machine depends on to run.

It seems to leave us believing there are only two options: we either help tear down the machine that took nearly 300 years to build, (which inadvertently accomplishes the long term goal of the men who have hijacked it hoping to replace it with their own), or we take out our frustrations on the individual cogs who have been corrupted, who will then simply be replaced to keep the machine running while we’re distracted. Neither is a great option.

What if a 3rd (less exciting, more time consuming and frustrating, but still important) option is to corrupt the machine they’ve created by inserting our own cogs? What if we just take back our machine piece by piece using their strategy?

the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.

There really should be no divide between white collar and blue collar street level bureaucrats. If we ever hope to successfully gain control of the machine and make it better than what we lost, we have to move forward with the expectation that each one of these beuracrats is an important piece of the machinery. When you lump them into their trade rather than including them all as important parts of the same community system, you create distance and leave their trades (as well as the bureaucrats within each trade) more vulnerable to corruption.

For example, it’s much easier to corrupt a police force than an entire community, right? But, police are supposed to be members of a larger group with accountability and loyalty to their local community before allegiance to a trade. (To be clear, I don’t mean this in any way to be taken as a knock on unions, even though that’s an important and not unrelated aspect of accountability to local communities for all civil servant trade unions, that ties into rights and protections under a competent federal government. For simplicity of this argument, just pretend that this future federal government is competent enough to protect those rights for all workers).

There are a million and one examples of a lack of police accountability that certainly justify the hesitation to view them as neighbors and members of a local community, but that separation from the community, also enables the lack of accountability. It becomes a cycle where less accountability an agency is expected to provide to the public, the further away it drifts from its place within the community and public oversight.

Eventually, the removal from oversight and accountability for corruption becomes the norm within the department or agency, and even the people who may have joined for admiral reasons, often find themselves in a position where they eventually rationalize their own corruption, because if they didn’t do it somebody else would.

It doesn’t excuse or justify their corruption, but it also isn’t an irrational decision. That same scenario goes for every bureaucrat in every department and agency at every level of government.

Over time, a lack of accountability creates distance from the public, and that distance makes it possible to justify and rationalize new standards of conduct. Over time that conduct becomes the norm. If you don’t make corruption the irrational choice to make, then you’re always going to be left with corruption as the norm and individuals rationalizing their own corruption.

Hell fucking yeah, patriots!

This is our country. Let’s take it back from the fascist oligarchy that exploits us.

I don’t even blame them. I mean I do blame them, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious making them into a target won’t fix anything.

People usually rationalize their own corruption because they believe if they didn’t do it somebody else would. That’s not an excuse or justification for what they do, but it’s also not incorrect or irrational.

If you remove one cog, it will just get replaced with another. In this case, it will also be used to help the machine generate it’s victimhood narrative and propaganda, which then is used to justify the bullshit they’ve preemptively laid out in NSPM-7.

That’s why they even hire these people in the first place. They’re basically paid scapegoats so that the machine can always carry on while society is focused on punishing a cog.

I really wouldn’t be surprised to learn that both Charlie Kirk and that CEO of United healthcare were murders for hire carried out by the same networks of wealthy shadowy conservatives. Neither of those murders actually changed anything except increasing the likelihood of more reactionary or copycat violence.

Two cogs are gone, but they have already been replaced. Two men (probably patsys who believed what they were doing would make a difference), are in jail for attacking pieces of the machine, but the machine is more powerful than ever because it now can justify its own propaganda and preemptive crackdown against the people it antagonizes. Make sense?

And they will not ask for forgiveness. They will tell you that you should apologize for trying to stand in the way of their progress, while they send society back to the stone age.

It almost feels like some districts are purchased by people with a lot of money to burn in order to give people the illusion of choice, and that way no matter which side or which candidate wins, we all lose.

This may be a controversial thing to say, because I know a lot of people feel that regulations and public oversight stand in the way of progress (while simultaneously demanding more accountability?), but it kinda seems like allowing uncapped and untraceable shadowy super pac money into politics, has made things so much worse.

Also, while I do feel there are cases where society definitely benefits from public-private partnerships (For instance, publicly funded research to develop a vaccine during a pandemic partnered with a private company that already has the capacity to manufacture that vaccine for millions of people, while still being monitored for compliance with federal regulations and guidelines), it seems that many private industries feel their role in these partnerships proves they’re an invaluable asset to society, and therefore should be allowed unchecked power and authority free of any regulations and oversight, in return for their “burden” of profiting from and saving humanity.

One might argue that even when the private industry has been called upon to help the American public, and achieved some really incredible things, private industry was never the “savior” of America. They were a product of the great country that allowed them to flourish. They were doing the bare minimum by returning what they owe America for their success, especially given the U.S. government generously (foolishly?) allowing them to rake in trillions of untaxed profits over several decades, with way less oversight and accountability than should have ever been legal (Sackler family).

Yet, when their country called on them to finally return the favor, and the private industry was simply asked to do what was owed to American society during the pandemic, (while still fucking profiting greatly), as always, they felt entitled to more.

Somehow, they always feel entitled to more, while they bleed America dry in return for less and less. They automate and outsource jobs, cut corners to save untaxed pennies, kill innocent people with their irresponsible greed, crash the economy, receive tax payer funded bailouts, destroy standard of living and opportunity, and still expect the United States to keep saying “thank you,” for their generosity and allowing them to repeat the cycle over and over again.

If we return to investing, it must be cautiously and linked to US policy stability.

I think about 99% of the problems in the U.S. are linked to businesses inserting themselves into government. Admittedly those are mainly U.S. businesses, but it’s also Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others.

On the one hand, I can understand how having so much money to spend, could be a helpful investment for a county, but what inevitably always seems to happen, is that the government winds up incentivized to keep corporations and other governments happy to keep the money flowing, while the needs of the American tax payers are just kind of discarded. But of course, we’re all still expected to keep paying taxes for policies and projects that usually don’t benefit us in anyway.

Kinda seems like corporations paying such low (and often no taxes), should be incentive enough for their investment, but they always feel entitled to more. It becomes a real problem when businesses invest in a government or government contractors, because they always want to maximize returns on their investments, as if it’s no different than putting money into a private company. Inevitably they demand more and more control over the returns, which equates to more control over government. Meanwhile the tax payers are still footing the bill to keep a government going that now just exists to be a middle man for allocating the invested money into projects that don’t benefit the average American in any way, and then using tax dollars to bail out private companies when their endless greed and stupid fucking ideas inevitably crash the economy once again (AI).

Wild suggestion, but perhaps if the U.S. just collected taxes from corporations, they wouldn’t need to rely on “investments” that ultimately just become a backdoor allowing billionaires and foreign governments control over the United States.