look libs, i know hes talking abt going around trump and that makes you feel safe and happy, but this former general/security advisor to presidents/thumb person is saying that the military industrial complex has a deep state and it will go around the commander in chief if they think they know better than the elected officials. dont listen to what the president says, hes not in charge...who is in charge, & how will he be 'convinced'?
this is bad actually
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/U.S.-will-defend-Japan-Taiwan-if-Trump-wins-election-H.R.-McMaster
fully agree but actual libs aren't the problem. we think there's a long term value to having institutions etc, even when they don't give us what we want. the problem is whatever we're going to call the "blue no matter who" types happily spun up by cable news, social media echo chambers and elite Dem apparatchiks. @Teri_Kanefield has been kindly trying to bring them back to reality for a while now. more liberals are what we desperately need, on the left and right.
You have authoritarians going around calling themselves liberals, which is just wrong.
@sj_zero @Teri_Kanefield @toussaint
some defend liberalism when people are trying to silence views they like, only to try to then silence views they don't like when they are getting attention. ala anti woke conservatives now calling everybody who attacks Israel antisemitic.
and conservatives who call everyone left of them liberals. they should use progressive imo.
but my bigger problem is just lefties calling everybody who isn't left enough liberal.
we need a better term as I said above.
Liberalism has a definition, it's had a definition for centuries. What is called liberalism today there is very little resemblance to liberalism. Just as you said, you have two factions both trying to silence speech they don't like, well arguably neither one of them is liberal in that regard.
I've heard some deep conservatives make a good argument that while liberalism is good, it is also a blank slate that can't be the sole basis for an ethical system. You have liberalism as the basis of how a state behaves, but there must be a moral foundation so that the people when given the freedom to behave however they want, choose to behave in a way that is prosocial and beneficial to the liberal society.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the fact that some of the constraints on our lives aren't necessarily social or economic, but just constraints based on reality. It doesn't matter what economic system you live under, you need to eat food and drink water or you die. It doesn't matter what social mores say, for the human race to continue we need to procreate and ensure that our offspring thrive. Liberty therefore is always constrained by reality, and if we are a wise species, then alongside our Liberty we should be passing on the lessons of how to survive and thrive and attempt to pursue happiness.
Becoming a father was a little bit of a gut punch for me, because I never expected it to make me happy, but it does. I never really expected fatherhood to be fulfilling on a fundamental level, but it definitely is. Meanwhile, if the only thing that you care about is Liberty then of course you would not want to have children because they are going to just tie you down. But sometimes being tied down isn't such a bad thing. Sometimes it's those constraints and the responsibilities that you take on that give life meaning.
Anyway, going back to my initial point, one of the ways that you can end up with multiple meetings layered over an initial concept is that people will always look to the most powerful concept around to justify what they want. I once work somewhere with a very strong union, and if you asked people everything that they wanted was exactly what the union said that they needed to have even though that was false. When I worked in a place of a very strong safety culture, everything that they wanted had to be done because it was related to safety. And society that is extremely focused on liberalism, whatever people want will be reframed in terms of how liberalism demands it, and so I relatively simple concept ends up getting tied down with 100,000 individual social and political causes not because it necessarily follows but because that's how those individuals get what they want. Unfortunately along the way it also means that a relatively simple concept ends up becoming really complicated.
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I call myself a left liberal. Left ala Moral Foundations Theory. I agree people need to have ethics, motivations etc outside of liberalism to give life meaning. It's probably not possible not to. but if we don't loosely hold to liberalism also, the society will be at constant war with itself. it's a basis for people who disagree to live together well. I don't think it can work as a dominating ethos either, as that would suppress other core parts of being human. difficult but essential.
One of the reasons that liberalism does need to be something of a value is that we do need to coexist with people that we don't strictly agree with, and the better we can do that tomorrow more harmonious our society. Of course there's going to be people that you just can't coexist with for example if I want to live and you want me to die then we can't compromise I'm not going to die just a little bit. On the other hand, for the most part that's not really the sort of things that people disagree over. We tend to disagree on things that may seem life or death but perhaps aren't necessarily.
I've told people on here before that I don't necessarily even agree with everything that I say so it's pretty important to find ways to coexist with people I don't agree with!
Ideally it becomes sort of a two-way social contract, where you leave me alone to live how I prefer even when you disagree, and I leave you alone to live how you prefer even when I disagree, and maybe we can come together on the things we agree with. Especially if we both happen to agree on some very important things.
That's one of the things that I find most mind-blowing about some of the current political back and forth is fundamentally I think that most people agree on big things, whether they're left or right. Instead of using that commonality as a starting point, we fight over the stuff we disagree with, leaving the stuff we could agree with and do something about on the table.