0 Persons are tagged with #liberal

#liberal

mcv@friendica.opensocial.space
Martijn Vos

Refugee from Nerdica, Pluspora and Google+ looking to reconnect

I don't have much luck with social networks, do I? I used to be mcv@nerdica.net, but nerdica seems to be quite thoroughly dead. Database is corrupt, and nothing can be recovered.

So that means I lost all my posts, comments, contacts, followers, and my place in the Fediverse. I'm trying to cobble things together, so if you recognise me, or even if you don't, please reach out and reconnect. I used to be on #Nerdica , #pluspora and I'm even a #googleplusrefugee.

So I'm not #newhere in the Fediverse, but I am new at this server. I run a #shadowrun #rpg #ttrpg campaign, occasionally post about a #boardgame I played, especially #18xx #railroad games, but also many others. I'm a #programmer , and I'm pretty sure I was also connected to a bunch of people in the #opensource #software world. I'm also interested in #tech, #science, and #computers in general.

I'm also occasionally interested in discussions of #politics, especially of the #leftwing #liberal #green and/or #libertariansocialism kind, though I'm not overly dogmatic on any of them. I #bicycle regularly, use #linux, and after all these social media servers I lost, I'm considering running my own #friendica server. I might even be nuts enough to try to write my own #fediverse software, which would probably end up much like Friendica (or #Diapora, or Google+), but not in PHP.

I'm probably forgetting a bunch of stuff, but I hope this post will help me reconstruct and reconnect what I lost.

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tord_dellsen@diasp.eu
Sunyata ☸ 👨🏻‍💻

Michael Parenti on the ruling class' concern with our thinking/perceptions

"But they don’t care about what we think. They turn a deaf ear to us," some people complain. That is not true. They care very much about what you think. In fact, that is the only thing about you that holds their attention and concern. They don’t care if you go hungry, unemployed, sick, or homeless. But they do care when you are beginning to entertain resistant democratic #thoughts. They get nervous when you discard your #liberal complaints and adopt a #radical analysis. They do care that you are catching on as to what the motives and functions of the national security state and the US global empire are all about at home and in so many corners of the world. They get furiously concerned when you and millions like you are rejecting the pap that is served up by corporate #media and establishment leaders.

By controlling our #perceptions, they control our society; they control public #opinion and public #discourse. And they limit the range and impact of our political #consciousness. The plutocrats know that their power comes from their ability to control our empowering responses. They know they can live at the apex of the social pyramid only as long as they can keep us in line at the pyramid’s base. Who pays for all their wars? We do. Who fights these #wars? We do or our low-income loved ones do. If we refuse to be led around on a super-patriotic, fear-ridden leash and if we come to our own decisions and act upon them more and more as our ranks grow, then the ruling profiteers’ power shrinks and can even unwind and crash—as has happened with dynasties and monarchies of previous #epochs.

We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a #revolution of organized #consciousness striking at the #empire’s heart with full force when #democracy is in the streets and mobilized for the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere yet is sometimes able to carry everything before it.

There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political #institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the #people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic.

--- Michael Parenti, in his book Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies (highlights added by me)

#MichaelParenti #capitialism #oligarchy #RulingClass

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mrd_ill_be_back@diasp.org
mrd_ill_be_back

#hamas #gaza #antisemitism #israel #pogrom #idf #zahal

Opinion | Israeli military action to defeat #Hamas is proportionate to the threat from Hamas

Bildbeschreibung hier eingeben

What is meant by ‘proportionality’ in war? Let’s begin with Michael Walzer, author of the seminal Just and Unjust Wars, explaining what proportionality, in international law and in just #war thinking, is not.

Proportionality doesn’t mean ‘tit for tat,’ as in the family feud. The Hatfields kill three McCoys, so the McCoys must kill three Hatfields. More than three, and they are breaking the rules of the feud, where proportionality means symmetry.

But if proportionate does not mean symmetry, what does it mean? Walzer again:

The use of the term is different with regard to war, because war isn’t an act of retribution; it isn’t a backward-looking activity, and the law of even-Steven doesn’t apply. Like it or not, war is always purposive in character; it has a goal, an end-in-view.

In other words, the goal pursued by military action must be proportionate to the ongoing threat faced. Israel’s goal is the removal of Hamas as the controlling political and military power in #Gaza is proportionate because 7 October made clear that Hamas now poses an existential threat to #Israel.

Israel’s goal is proportionate to the revelation that the mass slaughter of all the #Jews of Israel will be attempted again and again by Hamas and #Palestinian #Islamic #Jihad until successful, with whatever technology and weaponry can be acquired or supplied, under the guiding hand and financial support of a nuclear threshold state religiously committed to Israel’s destruction, #Iran.

Although Hamas has declared this eliminationist goal openly, again and again, western #liberal opinion has refused to take it seriously. What Paul Berman calls our ‘liberal naivete’ (‘No, they can’t mean that! No one can mean that!’) has routinely trumped what Hamas, as the kids would say, literally tell us, in words and, as on 7 October, in deeds.

Here is what Hamas has said.

Muhammed Deif, then the Hamas bomb-maker, now one of its leaders, said in 2005 after Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, ‘We promise that tomorrow all of #Palestine will become hell for you.’

Hamas ‘foreign minister’ Mahmoud al-Zahar said in 2006, ‘Israel is a vile entity that has been planted on our soil, and has no historical, religious or cultural legitimacy. We cannot normalise our relations with this entity.’

Ahmad Al-Jabri, the Hamas military commander killed by Israel on day one of the 2012 conflict, called Jews ‘rats’ to be killed in the cause of liberating ‘Jerusalem, the West Bank, and then Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv’.

And, infamously, the Hamas Charter, its set of founding principles and its programme, adopted in 1988 and never revoked, declares: ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until #Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it’, and ‘[Hamas] strives to raise the banner of #Allah over every inch of Palestine’, so ‘Jihad becomes the individual duty of every #Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation’. And no, ‘Jihad’ does not here mean ‘spiritual struggle’. It means the #slaughter of 7 October. And all the slaughters they plan for the future. ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them’ says the Hamas Charter, quoting a hadith. ‘Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”’

On 7 October 2023 the word became deed. That day should have brought an end to the games that westerners play with these #genocidal Hamas statements, to their clever-clever ‘translating’ of them into mere ‘rhetoric’, the ‘language games’ liberation movements play, just another ‘text’ or ‘discursive surface’ expressing the degree of its oppression and never the depth and intensity of its eliminationist antisemitism.

If you want to play those games you will find abundant resources within western intellectual culture to do so. (Actually, you will find little else these days.) But Israel’s neighbourhood is a bit different to the Modern Languages Association annual conference. In that region, when someone says they intend to kill you, they really intend to kill you. All of you.

After 20 years of Hamas terror attacks, suicide bombers, indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks, terror tunnels, drones, incendiary balloons, came a long-planned, meticulously prepared pogrom on such a scale that one has to go back to the Holocaust to find as many Jews murdered on a single day. And a pogrom of such a nature – Holocaust survivors shot in the head, #babies shot in the head, decapitations, #woman #raped and #executed, Jews burnt alive, young Jews hunted down and massacred en masse at a rave, Jews surviving by hiding under the dead bodies of their parents, atrocity videos uploaded to the internet – to make reasonable comparisons between Hamas and the #Nazi Einzatsgruppen units who carried out the Holocaust in eastern #Europe. (I taught the Holocaust at university and I could write an entire article just on the parallels: the eliminationist #antisemitic #ideology, the spirit of bacchanalia among the perpetrators, the monstrous baby-killing, the echo of those smiley photographs of cruelty the #German #troops sent home during the #Holocaust in the atrocity videos Hamas ‘militants’ (copyright: BBC) uploaded, sometimes to the social media accounts of those they were murdering, and more.

And it isn’t just the future threat from Hamas that is existential. It is existential now. No country, not the #UK, not the #US, not #France, not anybody, would accept the permanent mass trauma of citizens faced with a permanent threat of pogrom, or the possible depopulation of swathes of its country as fearful citizens flee from that threat.

How Israel sets about achieving the goal of removing Hamas as the power in the Strip is, of course, limited by prudential concerns (which I wrote about last week) and by the non-negotiable effort to minimise #non-combatant #casualties and maintain humanitarian corridors (which Jack Omer-Jackaman and I argued for in Fathom). The ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths achieved by Israel in previous military operations to restore deterrence in face of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks has been consistently better – far, far better – than anything achieved in its wars by the US, the UK, not to mention #Russia. Every effort should be made to make it so again.

In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, pogroms didn’t have consequences for the pogromists because the Jews were powerless because stateless. Well, not any more. Since 1948 there is a Jewish state with the IDF on its ramparts. Hamas is going to find out that pogroms now have consequences. Its total removal from Gaza will be a proportionate response to its total threat it now poses to the only #Jewish homeland in the world.

https://fathomjournal.org/opinion-israeli-military-action-to-defeat-hamas-is-proportionate-to-the-threat-from-hamas/

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harryhaller@diasp.eu
harry

The Union's Manifesto expressed a "plebeian mistrust" of every political party, as well as the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia. The group looked at these as obstacles to "the direct communion between the Tsar and his people". This struck a deep chord with Nicholas II, who also shared the deep belief in re-establishment of autocratic personal rule, as had existed in the Muscovite state of the 1600s. It also stood for the russification of non-Russian citizens.#trump #biden #left #liberal #conservative #gop #usa #canada #eu #europe #russia #history #fascism #liberalism #uk #deutschland #france #italy #urp #czar #unionoftherussianpeope #Союзрусскогонарода #jamesstewartmartin #allhonorablemen ">

Union of the Russian People - Wikipedia

This seems to be close to what Trump stands for.
The article mentions that some consider it an early form of fascism, but it isn't - certainly not the fascism as defined and practised by Mussolini - who gave the word it's modern meaning. (he also called it "Third Way" and "Corporatism").

Fascism is based on a liberal[1] elite - as we saw in the italian and german economies which were turning into cartels and monopolies. Thus the hunt in 1945 in Germany by James Stewart Martin for the archives of the corporations - Krupp, IG Farbe a.s.o. He was sent by Eisenhower, with the express backing of Truman. along with the front line troops to get to the archives before they could be destroyed. He wrote a book - which you can (should) read/download here.

These entrepreneurs were the "good" Nazis - they used forced labour a.s.o. - because they were business people....
Some got sentences - but were released early - and, yes, despite denials, they were the power behind the fascists.... just read the book.

So the idea that one or the other is the lesser evil is binary thinking - whether in North America or Europe we have to get out of this dichotomy.
Liberals, of course, can do marketing better and have always had a greater influence in the media because of sponsoring through their adverts and because the media itself is a liberal business.

They are both right-wing and extreme.

[1] liberal means those who have mobile wealth - the middle class, the french revolutionaries, the bourgoisie, entrpreneurs, factories, child labour, sweat shops, importers, exporters, commerce, a.s.o.
The conservative have the immobile wealth - old money - land, buldings, mines agriculture, junkers, landed gentry, plantations, slaves.

The difference were once crass, then became less so - especiaaly when conservatives became libreals - except in name, just as the soeuropean "socialist" parties are 100pc liberal - except in name.

But now the differences are once again becoming crass - the liberal foreign policy is to force the open-door policy on the whole world - globalism is it is's newset manifestation - but it started with th eopium wars, gun boat diplomacy with Japan - "you will trade with us, on our terms, whether you like it or not" - recognise it? Sound familiar?

The conservative foreign policy is protectionism - like the Corn Laws in the UK of the 19th Century.

Union of the Russian People - Wikipedia

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anonymiss@despora.de
anonymiss

Researchers test #AI models according to their political views

source (PDF): https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.656.pdf

A team of researchers from various universities has looked at AI and classified them according to their political #orientation. Different disciplines are supposed to find out. The result: #OpenAI programs such as #ChatGPT and GPT-3 tend to respond in a more liberal and left-leaning way, while #Meta's #LLama and #Bert appear more right-leaning authoritarian.

#politics #technology #science #news #liberal

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twinky@podling.oksocial.net
Twinky

I'm #newhere and trying to meet people. But: #

my favorite hashtags don't work. So I'm going to use the ones I see on "Public Activity" a thousand times every day.

#linux #politics #news #space #current-events #environment #earth #nature #music #science #facts #religion #liberal #conservative #maga #racism #fascism #trump #russia #NATO #bombs #bullets #knives #guns #ammo #arrows #slingshots #pizza #beer #rock-and-roll #rap #country #classical #punk #emo #guitar #piano #banjo #violin #kazoo #violence #beauty #antifa #anticapitalism #feudalism #communism #serfdom #slavery #monarchy #democracy #socialism #antidisestablishmentarianism #vaccine #healthcare #medicine #conspiracy #friendship #betrayal #fakenews #foxnews #fucknews badnews, and of course #politics-politics-and-more-politics

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tpq1980@iviv.hu
T Q

The big #problem with #British #politics is that it doesn't exist. #Read some #political #history and #philosophy and you'll soon realise there is a de facto one party state in the #UK.

#Conservatives = neoliberal-globalists.
#Labour = neoliberal-globalists.
#LibDems = neoliberal-globalists.
#Green = neoliberal-globalists.
#ScotsNats = neoliberal-globalists.

The only real choice is the #colour.

The Conservatives #conserve nothing, grow #government, permit mass #immigration, support #speech crime, support thought #crime, increase #regulations, support "#multiculturalism", support "LGBTQIA+", hate #autochthonous British people, borrow #money at interest, print #currency, support #globalism, support foreign #wars, support net zero, support offshoring #industry, take part in #cronyism, don't support free market #capitalism, want to give illegal #migrants #amnesty, support the #corrupt #Ukraine puppet government, supported illegal #lockdowns, supported illegal #medical #mandates, supported #unscientific mask wearing, support illegal on-the-spot #fines, support #biometricID, support ignoring #paedophilia, support ignoring crime #statistics regarding #race, support the World Economic Forum, support #agenda2030, support "the great reset", support low #birthrates, support #miscegenation and support #depopulation.

Labour support everything the so-called Conservatives do and they don't support the #working classes and in-fact appear to hate the autochthonous British working classes and consider them, in the words of Jack Staw, a people "not worth saving."

Lib Dems are neither #Liberal, in the classical sense, or #Democratic. They wanted to overturn the #EU #referendum and reject the Democratic #vote on membership and they're #neoliberals, which is a philosophy that includes attacks on classical Liberal concepts like free speech, free thought and free inquiry. They also support everything the so-called Conservatives and Labour party do.

#Greens support the the reduction of #CO2 from the current 400ppm to zero, which will kill all life on #Earth as it will prevent #photosynthesis occurring, therefore preventing #plants growing and eliminating them as a food for #humans, #insects and #animals, destroying the food chain and the Earth's #biosphere. They don't understand how the #climate or biosphere works and are ostensibly useful idiots for plutocratic #elites and big #corporations. They also support everything the so-called Conservatives, Labour party and Lib Dems do.

The #SNP wants to take #Scotland out of the UK union and give the Scots "#independence" by signing them up to EU union. Essentially all this does is transfer dependency from #London to #Brussels and exchanges the #English for the Franco-Germans. Scotland will be no more independent and in some ways even more dependant. The SNP also support everything the other neoliberal-globalist parties do too.

In short, there is no political #choice beyond colour because there is no meaningful differentiation between political philosophies, or outcomes of voting. Whatever party you vote for, you get the same policies, the same lies, the same #corruption, the same #cronyism, the same #sophistry, the same national trajectory, the same everything, only with some minor and ostensibly superficial differences in packaging and delivery.

British politics is a total #farce that doesn't even engage in any recognisable political #debate because other than faux ad hominems, jeering and lip-service to non-existent political #principles there's nothing to debate, because they all agree...