Isn’t that rather an ethical one than a moral one?
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cultures are only relative when it’s his culture vs your culture. My culture is the place where I stand when I proclaim that all cultures are relative, except for mine.
More Abrahamic thinking (109:1-6)
Say: O disbelievers!
I worship not that which ye worship;
Nor worship ye that which I worship.
And I shall not worship that which ye worship.
Nor will ye worship that which I worship.
Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.
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Goldberg was a guard at a notorious prison camp. As an editor, I regard him similarly to how I might, if an interrogator from Abu Ghraib were put in charge of a venerable periodical.
He belongs hung from a mizzen, not on a masthead. Here, his vile, apartheid mind is only further exhibited and given authority to so charge others.
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Don’t conflate neoliberalism with liberalism.
So basically you want to disingenuously judge all the people you think of as liberals based on examples like Jeffrey Goldberg, despite the fact that the people outraged at his decision are almost all people you’d categorize as liberals.
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“If you cannot say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.” ~ The Last Emeperor
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Not at all.
I can source hundreds of comments of threats against conservatives, all over the internet, due to nothing else than their beliefs, some only slightly right of center, some even somewhat liberal.
It’s turned me, and many many others away from that vocal extremist left. I know not everyone shares those feelings, but if you let extreme views be the loudest and never speak against them, you end up with what we have now.
Middle-ground fallacy. People are individuals. Individuals have differing views. For any given person who doesn’t fall prey to that notion that a position’s value depends on where it sits on some simplistic political spectrum, their positions on specific issues will be uncorrelated to how “extreme” they are.
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I agree with your nuance: it is real. Part of the problem here though is that playing with the idea of whether they can possibly be serious with the absurd things they say 'haha, only serious" is explicitly part of the Nazi playbook on how to trolley ordinary decent people.
But toying with the idea of projection and whether Nazis, alt-right, fundamentalist christians, and Republicans believe the horrible things they say misses a greater point: it’s what you do and what you say that matter. Not what you, in the dark of night, and in the depths of your soul, believe. Did the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion believe the nonsense they wrote? Who cares? It’s not important. The discourse was polluted by it. So just as Goldberg doesn’t believe that this Nazi believes these things, the discourse is polluted with it.
Maya Angelou was right.
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why not? what is the basis of neoliberalism, but literalized application of john locke—happiness and/as pursuit of property?
i think criticizing liberalism as a tendency and system of political thought (underpinned by institutions, e.g. nytimes, the atlantic, universities) is different than criticizing individuals—that is to say, people who identify as liberals. i’m not saying that individuals are immoral or amoral or have no moral compass—in fact, there’s enormous truth to “bleeding heart liberals”. and yet—i am saying that liberalism as system of how to talk about politics is faulty, and when liberals are outraged (and they genuinely are), their outrage is directed at individual leaders: editors, administrators, presidents, but not at the whole endeavor.
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thinking more on this, i think there are other strains of modern liberalism—john rawls comes to mind, which rely more genuinely on moral arguments, but there are very few (non-radical/revolutionary) institutions that operate with a rawlsian point of view. the aclu comes to mind, the nlg another—but are these liberalist institutions, or are they something else? perhaps we need to refine our language when it comes to these different liberal strains.
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Neolibs are more conservative than progressive. Liberal is largely a epithet these days. Most people are unfamiliar with Locke and other early Enlightenment philosophers.
You’re painting with such a broad brush as to be cartoonishly vague. You may not mean to, but you are. Drill down.
Once again, liberal isn’t a term most progressives would apply to themselves nowadays. And people focusing outrage on prominent cultural figures isn’t a “liberal” characteristic, it’s a human characteristic however much conservatives and fascists who think they’re traditional conservatives want to believe they’re immune.
The ACLU is civil libertarian and liberal only in the classical sense of the word, not the modern insinuation.
This is why I largely avoid talking about -isms, it devolves into sophistry. Issues are much more productive topics of discussion.
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I do not understand what the word means in the modern insinuation. In the public discourse, it appears to have become synonymous with ‘wicked’ - or is simply an inarticulate snarl with no semantic content whatsoever.
You mean libertarian? Upper-case Libertarians and ancaps have ruined it, as have the people who indulge them in pointless arguments. But anyone who really cares can look up civil libertarian on WP.
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I actually meant ‘liberal’ - a word that even the leftmost of our politicians rush to distance themselves from and the whole Right uses as a meaningless snarl.
I know what a civil libertarian is. Until things fell apart, I described myself as a small-l libertarian small-c conservative, but without changing my politics, I now find myself far to the left of the Overton window.
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It’s basically an insult at this point unless one is talking about history or the much more general concept of liberal democracy. That’s one reason I remain a little skeptical of the motives of the individual I engaged earlier. You’d have to be pretty clueless not to know the modern connotations.
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…which, as I might not need to remind anyone on this forum but do nevertheless, is a result of US-American bullshit bingo, and until recently was restricted to US-American context.
And believe it or not, even with all their inherent antiamericanism, the European extremists are now borrowing from this bullshit bingo, because learning from the US always payed off in the past or something.
The term liberal is already sometimes replaced by “independent thinker” by those who want to distance themselves from the perceived “liberal mainstream”. Whatever that should be, I haven’t seen much true liberal mainstream in the past four decades.
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Do not count upon it.
(tl;dr - Weinstein asked the “Between the World and Me” author if there were a conservative writer who he finds interesting or compelling. Coates chuckled, then hesitated and chuckled again, saying he always reads Williamson’s work.)
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I can source hundreds of comments of threats against liberals, all over the Internet, due to nothing else than their beliefs, some only slightly left of center, some even somewhat conservative.
This says something very important about the Internet, and about the level of discourse that goes on over the Internet, rather than saying anything meaningful about any definition of liberals and conservatives.
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I tend to agree. There is no need to debate lousy ideas. Lousy ideas are…lousy. (and distract from making progress)
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