I feel like point two kinda goes hard against the idea of a meritocracy the libs are supposed to have. Surely this should've been something about bootstraps or learning to code
I feel like libs largely save those kinds of arguments for the domestic working class though. Imo, applied to international relations they're too openly eugenicist for most libs. Conservatives will openly argue that stuff, but libs tend to just echo imperialist propaganda when it comes to anyone that the US foreign policy blob deems to be an enemy, while pretending that all the dictatorships that they are creating/propping up are 'burgeoning Jeffersonian democracies' or some other bollocks
Meritocracy is a rhetorical, not moral/political, position. You use it to shut up people who want to live in a more fair and just world.
Like the strawfigure-esque whatever OPs picture is arguing against? That woulda been a slamdunk for the other libs.
The whole premise of question 2 seems set up to go full lib "well maybe the exploited should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like [one in a million case of an african billionaire I googled 5 seconds ago" but instead it goes full "human suffering doesn't register to me".
I think this is why a lot of liberals end up fearing nihilism, because to square their ideology they have to be honest about denying humanity to exploited nations. They have to end up believing in nothing and wanting to die.
several decades ago, as an extremely sheltered middle-class teenager, i actually once thought like this... then i got out of my bubble and lived a little and worked a lot and felt/saw a tiny, almost infintesmal fraction of the crushing misery they have known all their lives and i woke the fuck up
thats what living a narrow sheltered life will do to you: you have zero concept that the system can and will do it to you given the chance; people like this have no concept how fickle life can be
Yeah, that was probably part of it for me, too. Teenagers are dipshits.
Ya this is obviously a kid coping. But completely repugnant all the same.
Honestly, I wish all neolibs were this honest as opposed to their fake kumbaya shit/pretending they care about poor people.
Also: Here's the link
"If I don't personally meet them, their feelings mean zero to me."
"fixing that wrong is not my obligation or business"
also, child slavery is basically as bad as annoying summer heat
I really love the new "saying the quiet part out loud" trend we've got. Folks, :trump-anguish: , more and more people are saying it, they're saying the quiet part out loud, it's great folks! There won't be any quiet parts left in a year at this rate, everything's going to be loud folks, and we love loud! We love it.
:angry-place: I'd just like to point out, right now, that it was me, not Joe, who started all this. I'd say the quiet part out loud, people would applaud, they loved it! Now Joe, who's too weak to say it, well, he's got his supporters, the radical left, and they're copying me and saying it out loud too. He never could come up with his own ideas, that's why they stole MAGA from me, made it "Blue MAGA" total fake and phony fraud.
I actually prefer when they're honest because we get to skip all the stupid debate nerd spectacle and I can scream obscenities at them
And this honesty might make a radlib reconsider their stance on life if they have any self reflection or sympathy.
"i do not subscribe to any morality beyond my own very short term self interest"
"hey that sounds pretty evil"
"yes"
"okay, die"
"uhhhhh no ;-;"
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/shhz4j/im_fine_with_exploiting_3rd_world_countries_if_it/
This doesn't really incite any anger from me because this is what I expect most liberals - politically active and cognizant - in the US and developed world to be like. Europeans are especially cognizant of this because they know their history of exploitation, empire, and modern debt traps; they don't have the delusion of the US, of being an exceptional state, that somehow conjures wealth from "innovation".
That reddit user is just a class conscious liberal who chose their side: the exploiter. They're a prime example giving weight to Sakai's thesis in Settlers.
I think the interesting here to take away is that Orcoast19 - the user in that post - recognizes theirs and the masses powerlessness in the global capitalist system to really affect change, and resigns their self to hedonic indulgence and alienation from humanity at large in favor of "treats". If hell is alienation from God and collective humanity, then Orcoast19 declares: "better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven".
If hell is alienation from God and collective humanity, then Orcoast19 declares: “better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven”.
That's a really interesting and poetic way of putting it
I checked the original :reddit-logo: post and there's a 15:107 ratio of up-points to comments. That person is getting dragged hard.
That place hates the post because it says what they're all thinking but would rather keep quiet about.
He isnt getting dragged lol
half the comments are "You are right and everyone feels this and people attacking you are hypocrites cause iphone"
:gulag: LIke for real, people who lack in basic human empathy (all globe emojis) are in need of reeducation
I rolled a 6 and they rolled a 1 when the gameboard was getting set. No one should feel bad about being lucky.
It's fun to see this view coming from someone who (presumably) also thinks that capitalism is at least weakly meritocratic.
Even setting that point aside, though, I'd suspect that something like this view is both common and not well-examined in most people who hold it. Imagine a world where lifelong advantages and disadvantages are literally decided via dice roll: when a child is born, their parents roll a d100, and the higher the number the more wealth, power, luxury, and comfort that child would have. This actually isn't manifestly unfair, I don't think: using something like a random number generator to allocate scarce goods is (at least in some sense) extremely fair, and it's not obvious to me that anyone is claiming that people who rolled 100 in that scenario should "feel bad" for being lucky.
In fact, that kind of world is significantly more fair than the one we live in, because the "randomness" in our world isn't coming from anything like an unbiased dice roll. To make the thought experiment more accurate, we'd have to add something like a weighting (or modifier) to each person's roll based on the roll that their parents got; if my parents rolled a 92 and a 87, for instance, I might get to roll the dice 5 times and take the best one. If they rolled a 13 and a 21, however, I have to roll 10 times and take the worst one. Thus, people who got good rolls themselves are significantly more likely to have children with good rolls, and the worse your parents' rolls were, the harder it is to roll well yourself. This is manifestly less fair, and much more representative of our world.
Even still, I don't think most people are (primarily) claiming that high-rollers should "feel bad" about their rolls. In fact, the moral guilt of high-rollers is worse than useless to low-rollers: it's condescending and actively harmful, especially if high rollers have the ability to make the system more fair through their actions and instead choose to spend their time performing their agonized guilt. This is something that liberals fundamentally misunderstand about the discourse surrounding privilege, intersectionality, reparations, and related concepts: when someone points out that the dice are loaded in your favor, they're not asking you to feel bad about that--they're asking you to help unweight the dice.
We're forced into a system where all of our consumption is more or less predicated on the hyperexploitation of the global poor, modern day slaves, 3rd worlders, at the expense of much human misery etc
Yes! This is the basis of existence in the first world! It is bad and we should work to end it
And this system should continue because I don't care about the starving children etc etc
Thanks for making it easy for us, I guess :xi-gun:
A quick and unremarkable moment against a wall would be fine too.
