Um.... what.... aka, this is the dumbest thing I've ever read

[Catsidhe]

Because it’s even more hypocritical about it.

My $0.02:

(Right) Libertarians are “leave me and mine alone, also provide more police to protect what’s mine.”

They tend to not really have any real economic policies. I mean, they’ll talk about the sanctity of contracts, but that’s not an economic policy any more than a stack of used 20s is an economy.

Neoliberals take that general idea, scale it up to the nation-state, and provide economic chops via Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, the Austrians, and the Chicago School of Economics.

They upended libertarianism by redefining a corporation as an economic person and declaring its rights to be a participant in the economy (locally, regionally, and globally) in its own inalienable and total right. Because when you get down to it in their equations, that’s all a “person” is. A unit which buys and sells things and shows some sort of preference. Scale is irrelevant. (Just one of the ways that neoliberal economic theories crumple into dust and blow away when exposed to reality.)

Neoliberals want to shut down government and governmental restrictions on “economic actors”, except 1) to expand the neoliberal system, and 2) to protect those actors who can afford to pay for it. (In more advanced neoliberal systems, even that is degraded, until police forces and armies are totally privatised, which anyone with an awareness of history will recognise as a return to pre-modern systems, going back to outright feudalism.)

Which is to say, that built into neoliberalism is a deep and abiding love of police to protect capital, and armies, to acquire more capital. The difference is in who they answer to.

While (right) Libertarianism obviously naturally devolves into a war of all against all almost immediately, neoliberalism assumes it, and designs its political and social structures accordingly.

Naturally, corporations and billionaires have always loved both neoliberalism and libertarians, but for different reasons: Libertarians are easily manipulable idiots, by and large. Neoliberalism is the structure which is by its nature both authoritarian and libertarian, depending on how much freedom you can afford to buy. As billionaires can afford all of the freedom, they don’t see a problem with it.

[mindysan33]

@KeybillyJefe

how is this neoliberalism so different from the “get the government out of everything and leave me and mine alone” libertarianism ideology?

There’s a good deal of ideological cross-over there, I’d argue. But @Catsidhe has some nice distinctions there…

@Catsidhe

Libertarians are “leave me and mine alone, also provide more police to protect what’s mine.”

That’s accurate to their worldview, but neoliberalism scales that up to all of society. I think a lot of people who consider themselves “political thinkers” on the libertarian side of things certainly have familiarity with the Austrian and Chicago schools. But the ones that don’t tend to be rather pro-corporate, in that they agree that the free market is the best way to make everything work, and that everything should be about profit.

@Catsidhe

They upended libertarianism by redefining a corporation as an economic person and declaring its rights to be a participant in the economy

Maybe, but doesn’t that just slot nicely into the libertarian view that is pro-corporation, who tend to call themselves “anarcho-capitalists”?

[Catsidhe]

@mindysan33

Maybe, but doesn’t that just slot nicely into the libertarian view that is pro-corporation, who tend to call themselves “anarcho-capitalists”?

I think there’s a spectrum, or a progression, there.

Like, the inevitability of an emergent new feudalism is implicit in right-libertarianism, anticipated in anarcho-capitalism, and actively planned for in neo-liberalism.

[mindysan33]

And at this point, the end point that they’re planning seems to be the whole technofeudalism of the neoreactionary set… the whole “dark enlightenment” shitheads… And they seem to be having some success, in part because of how much the neo-liberal mindset has colonized the right and center (at least here in the US)… I guess that gets back to the ideas that @tornpapernapkin is touching upon up thread.

Anyway, rugged individualism is a hell of a drug…

[KeybillyJefe]

thank you both, catsidhe and mindysan, for answering with your insight and knowledge. political science has never been my strong suit.
i appreciate your willingness to answer my questions with actual information that i can now read up on and, perhaps form my own, better informed take on this.
thank you.

[mindysan33]

That reminds me that Crash Course did a series on political theory recently… here’s the start of the playlist…

I watched a couple of them, and they seem pretty good.

[KeybillyJefe]

thank you, again.
i have queued that up for after tonight’s feature presentation.
(mum wants to watch a movie)

[mindysan33]

What you gonna watch?

[kxkvi]

Thanks for all this discussion! I’ve very weak on this stuff.

Didn’t some of this cult of individualism in the US come from people wanting to be like their pioneer forebears whom they imagine had the freedom to do anything they wanted? Glossing over the “provided they could find shelter and feed themselves” of course. I’ve often thought of this while driving through the exburbs and seeing these big houses with huge manicured lawns and spotless pickup trucks in the driveways, owned by people who imagine they are self-reliant despite depending on electricity, cell phones, gas stations, grocery stores, roads, etc., etc.

[womanhood_deferred]

[Shuck]

[danimagoo]

From the article:

After months of Musk acting as Donald Trump’s chainsaw-wielding right-hand man, Democrats are conflicted about Musk’s pivot Thursday to criticizing the House-passed megabill and its gutting of clean energy tax credits. But they’re slowly starting to realize that they should use him to their advantage.

“Musk and I have had deep disagreements on his approach at DOGE, but on this issue he is correct,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of Musk’s chief antagonists in the House, said in an email. “Democrats should be able to recognize that.”

Just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn’t mean I should toss my perfectly functioning clock out the window and replace it with the broken one. That is one of the dumbest fucking articles I have ever read. It’s literally just “Musk is right that the Big Beautiful Bill shouldn’t have gutted EV tax credits, so Democrats should ally with him.” WTF.

[womanhood_deferred]

@danimagoo

WTF.

[Millie_Fink]

@PsiPhiGrrrl

I can just imagine people indoors or in other non-smoking areas saying, “It’s ok, because this is not a cigarette.”

I have a relative who says exactly that. No concern about her own incipient “popcorn lung” is one thing, but the refusal to listen to my complaints that the vape crap coming out of her mouth is bad for others is a big reason I spend less and less time with her.

[Grey_Devil]

I find vapes less offensive than cigarettes but I am sensitive to certain smells, at best its annoying and in the worse case the smell can give me migraines.

I’ve told this story at TOP. This reminds me of the time years ago when I was a movie theater and “Puff the vaping douche” was billowing giant vape stacks during the movie. I ended up complaining to the manager twice about it before they went in and talked to the guy, who then proceeded to say that he was told he could vape during the movie by an employee and then glared at us for the rest of the movie

[womanhood_deferred]

[IronEdithKidd]

Kidd Jr. calls vape ‘cancer candy’. GenZ knows what’s up.

[timd]

One of several columnists employed by the Telegraph to provoke breakfast spluttering among the gammon classes.

[Shuck]

Curtis Yarvin, from a New Yorker interview, which at multiple times, in just this excerpt, had me screaming, “This is so stupid! How can you be this fucking stupid?” at no one in particular.:

That this absolute idiot is treated like a great political philosopher by the VP and others in power is just… I don’t… this country is so depraved and intellectually degraded right now.

[chenille]

The article quickly became illegible to me. That man is distilled engineer’s disease, trying to reinvent government from first principles he made up without knowing a trace of history, philosophy, or anything else that might be relevant.