#neoliberal apathy

[boof-chamber]

[nando161mando]

[underlockv]

politics post again, under a cut.

This video sucks a lot when you consider most leftist's opposition to democrats in the USA is based on them explicitly endorsing the murder of children and Palestinians in general via their proxy Isreal who they fund without question or limit. who's current leader they hosted in congress just this past week with zero pushback beyond Rashida Tlaib who is /not/ supported by her democratic peers.

"listen if we dont eat at the shitty restaurant ppl will literally kill us with poison, how could you a selfish idiot say bad food is basically like poison" meanwhile peoples relatives are being raped and tortured while held unlawfully without charge in Isreali prisons and killed by air strikes and snipers (who are explicitly targeting TODDLERS) while the "restaurant" in this metaphor funds it. so, yeah. the "food" IS poison.

unfollowing ppl reposting this smug garbage like the people who criticize democrats in the USA don't understand the stakes already. "trump would be worse" in this issue? it would be the same.

painting any opposition to democrats as yielding to republicans is baby brained bullshit.

[yavo]

Immiseration of the Masses

when the working class is entirely apathetic to its own suffering, the revolutionary will always struggle to keep away from adventuristic terror; because they cannot meaningfully ask the working masses what actions are the demands of the masses, what is too much or too far, what specific actions to what specific ends, and cannot ensure that they are firmly tied to mass organizations and accountable to them. revolutionaries who lack the masses' organization and input are incapable of virtually any action other than that which will result in their isolation and death, no matter how hard they try to avoid it.

there will not be and cannot be heroes to save us, we must save ourselves. and we can only make things better by doing it together, not separately.

[kitty-pelosi]

literally every liberal administration in the west collapsing is profoundly hilarious. bulwark of democracy my ass lmao

and it’s particularly visible in the parties that compose the neolib blocks in France and the United States. reeling off elections which are indisputable, overwhelming rejections of centrist apathy and austerity, yet within these parties there is a total closing of ranks around the chauvinist neoliberal leadership. they are cementing total control over their factions just as their factions fall into utter powerlessness.

people like Nancy Pelosi, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron are not clever. they are selfish, greedy parasites who would rather feast off of a half-life of an institution, than step down and give it a chance to thrive. (Not that these institutions are worth saving) they aren’t protecting anything, just their little supply of blood. totally out of touch with their “universal truth, broad coalition” marketing strategies. when you fall for this kind of bullshit politics you get to experience profound consequences. welcome to the club, Canada!

[n04s]

really funny seeing people spread this around uncritically when Joyce here (a neoliberal) is saying that making anarchist art is a waste of time because it will just "reinforce capital".

her ideology in general is drenched with apathy and nihilism because everything has already happened, history is already taken its course, and now there's nothing to do but go along with the system.

but, in fact, one of the main themes of Disco Elysium is that art *does* move people, it *can* save people, it just won't bring about systematic change on its own.

[familyabolisher]

At times in the writing of wine history, wine itself has been treated as a historical actor. This is the case in many of the sweeping histories of wine, such as Hugh Johnson’s original Vintage: The Story of Wine, Paul Lukacs’s recent Inventing Wine, John Varriano’s Wine: A Cultural History, or Marc Millon’s Wine: A Global History. These lucid and entertaining histories, written by great narrators with serious wine expertise, follow a similar narrative arc. Wine is the central protagonist, the potable Zelig, popping up in different historical moments in different parts of the world. The story begins in the Fertile Crescent, where Wine is born, or in the ancient Mediterranean, where Wine enters a boisterous adolescence in the symposia and bacchanalia of the ancient Greeks. The reader is invited to pause and appreciate the wine-themed mosaic and shards of amphorae. The story then skips a few centuries and a few hundred miles, to medieval Europe (we are left to wonder what Wine has done in between), where Wine joins forces with powerful and institutionalized Christianity and canny monks create a patchwork of orderly clos on the Côte d’Or: bless them! Wine remains in France, or perhaps summers in Germany, and Bordeaux emerges in the seventeenth century, eventually finding its way to Britain (we are treated to a Samuel Johnson quote, or Pepys). Port and sherry have their seafaring adventures. The nineteenth century opens with Champagne surviving war, producing widows and conquering Russian markets; France produces Pasteur, who produces better wine, a triumph of science and the Enlightenment; wine is enjoying its golden years. Then, three-quarters of the way through this drama, tragedy strikes, in the form of the vine disease phylloxera. Wine is dealt a staggering blow and its very survival is threatened. Fortunately, a new world of scientists, mavericks, and neoliberal entrepreneurs emerge: capital is found, the plucky New World steps in to help, and new vines are grafted. Wine is saved! This cannot be criticized as being a Eurocentric narrative, because the tale concludes in California, or Uruguay, or China. Undeniably, at the conclusion of this story there is incredible momentum and optimism. Global wine production is the highest it has ever been, consumption of wine is high, and wine is (relatively) cheap. Were he a wine historian, Francis Fukuyama would declare it the end of wine history.

This hagiography of Wine is a great read: a mouth-watering tale of high drama, blind monks, and supple tannins. And it is not necessarily inaccurate. But it is, on the other hand, what British historians have called a Whiggish narrative: one that presumes continual progress, culminating in the current era, which is assumed to be the best ever. This Whiggishness may overlook some of the current difficulties in the market, or shrug off past problems in the wine industry, since all ended well. Geographically and chronologically it is uneven, such that the producers studied here generally do not merit inclusion until they have become major global actors. This type of narrative structure is what gives the false impression that South Africa produced a great wine called Constantia in the eighteenth century, and then produced nothing again until 1994. The place of Wine as the embattled protagonist who overcomes many hardships (vine diseases, consumer apathy, high taxation) and emerges triumphant and affordable in the late twentieth century, is also what is known in Marxist terms as “commodity fetishism.” As Bruce Robbins has argued, in the new commodity histories, “each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism.” The commodity itself, rather than the social and economic relationships that led to its production, becomes the driving force of the narrative.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the Empire Made Wine's New World

[sapphia]

i wanna tell the US the thing actually good about NZ's democracy.

because we have a lot of things that suck. we have a single house. we have some of the weakest lobbying laws in the world, and at this very second we have a government selling out our environment and our future to mining and oil and tobacco companies because of it. we have an MMP system that gives too much power to far right parties while somehow limiting the power of the left. we have a central right party that spent two decades sponsoring our further right libertarian party into parliament in an underhanded way that has pushed this country to the right in a divisive manner. we have a total lack of accountability for pre-election promises, and a modern political discourse built on lies and manipulation and neoliberalism.

but the one thing we do have is this guy:

this little orange man rises like a cryptid every three years to incessantly tell the people of aotearoa to vote. you will find him in your mailbox, in your phone, on your tv, at the end of your bed, at your local mall, and if you are not careful, while you are walking home at night when he spots you from his orange van and kidnaps you to enrol you by force.

okay, that last one isn't true. but he's the mascot of our electoral commission and they will do anything to get you to vote. australia have their democracy sausage to bribe people but here, we just make things literally as easy as it possibly can be to participate in democracy. there are sign-up stations in every language in every city and town for months before the election. people go around door-knocking to sign you up. you can sign up on the day and still vote. if you don't have an address or a phone number or ID to use, they'll probably give you one. the philosophy is generally that everyone who is entitled to vote should be fully facilitated to do so.

and then our early voting opens weeks before election day so people can just... vote whenever they want. about half of the country do. for three weeks or so, aotearoa turns into an orange maze of pop up voting booths and pensioners. they're in every mall, every school, every hospital, half our workplaces, they drive around retirement homes and villages, they will assail you as you walk past stores -- literally, during our pandemic elections, i was heading into my local shopping center from my car when some middle-aged lady all but leapt out at me from a hidden alcove to ask me if i'd voted yet. i'd only gone down to buy some groceries, but i came back from the shops having spent approximately 2 minutes from start to end casting my vote for my preferred party. democractic duty done.

it actually makes me sometimes tear up with pride a little to think of the work that goes into encouraging voter participation in this country, and just how important it is that that the work done is seen is bipartisan and a key consideration for a strong democracy. what is most broken about american politics, in my opinion, is your established voter disenfranchisement; the years of blatant racism that has made a sport out of the right preventing your poor and your minorities from voting. nz is perhaps a bit different on this front culturally, as we put (perhaps too much) pride in being the first country to give women the vote, and our early indigenous representation in parliament and later MMP system has gone a long way to ensuring our maori voter enrolments are upkept, which is strategically sort of the same as democrats signing up black voters, we've just been much more successful and long-term about it.

but the outcome, oh the outcome -- not only are our eligible voter percentages so much greater, so our are voter turnouts. 77% voter turnout in the last election. sure, we got from it the worst government since muldoon, but even in our year of democratic apathy and exhaustion, three quarters of our population voted.

if there's any hope for us, it's got to be in that.

[eebeesee]

This should really be a bigger fucking deal

It's wild to me that we can get regular stories like this and so many leaders will shrug and go "what a shame. That's really too bad."

None of the people profiled in this Seattle Times piece (below) did anything wrong by liberal standards. They work good jobs, they make decent money, they're trying to spend responsibly, and yet, they can't really afford to live here. And instead of getting help, they're responded to by leaders with apathy. Electeds who are charged with making life better for their constituents are actively fighting zoning reform and affordable or social housing funding. It's infuriating.

It's stories like this that make me yearn for communal living. Not just because I think the lifestyle would be nice, and because I want to build a place where my polycule can be together, but because it seems like that will be the only way to survive this neoliberal hellscape of a city.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barely-getting-by-in-the-seattle-area-on-one-income-youre-not-alone/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9.10.24+Equity+%26+Inclusion_9_10_2024&utm_term=

[vecran]

Looking at turnout and vote share, it is perfectly clear that the protest vote for Reform destroyed the Tories, allowing Labour to win by virtue of being the next biggest party in most Tory seats. No one was truly excited to vote for Labour and nearly half the electorate stayed home. This is not a true win for Labour, no matter how they spin it, this is just another perfect example of our national apathy and a terrible voting system leading to years of more of the same politics as usual, with more shitty neoliberal privatisation and austerity on the horizon, I'm sure.

Labour promised nothing good in their manifesto and didn't even bother to cost anything, they won by default and I'm sure the political class will learn the worst possible lesson from this - ignore the 50% of people who felt that no one represented them and so didn't vote and instead court the far right protest vote.

I'm ecstatic the Greens did so well (7% vote share is a massive gain for them and they quadrupled their seat number), and my own historically Tory constituency came very close to flipping, within less than 150 votes, but all I'm seeing is the Tories losing votes and Reform picking them up, no real desire for a Labour government, just a desire for NOT a Tory one.

Anyway, the most positive way to look at all this is that (at least) 249 Tories are out of a job, including Liz Truss.

[bottledfool]

Why is the first step of any discussion with a liberal them demanding an original explanation for every criticism of liberalism ever which they won't listen to and could have been answered just by scrolling the liberal tag? I can't with this shit anymore man

It's certainly frustrating, yeah. Keep in mind, liberalism is ultimately about the control of others through maintenance of a status quo that is comfortable for the liberal in question. It doesn't even necessarily need to be particularly good, because part of the fiction liberalism tells is that while it may not be perfect, it's the best the world can do, and change must be slow so as not to accidentally trip and fall into something much worse. Their irrational fear of making things worse by changing oppressive systems "too quickly" is at the heart of the average neoliberal.

Once you understand that, to a neoliberal, radical change all at once is the worst thing a person could do from a political standpoint, the more you start to understand why they argue the way they do: They ask for entirely original explanations because, to them, sophisticated theory and criticisms of their worldview are wrong by default, because they're coming from a place of not believing that neoliberalism is the best and most humane way. They look the other way in the face of atrocities committed and perpetuated by their leaders because apathy is comfortable and because it's easier for them to believe the person with a D next to their name on the ballot really is doing their best to help people.

Human beings are resilient, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. If things are bad, it often feels easier to just grow accustomed to the bad things than it is to change them. If things are getting worse at a gradual pace - gradual enough for people to acclimate to them - it's easy to forget just how bad things have become. Liberalism is a bunch of people who have acclimated to things getting worse telling everyone else that this is as good as it gets, then getting angry when they're told it could be better. But even so, they want to believe that they're always on the cusp of things getting a little bit better, if only everyone would just let the well-meaning Democrats in congress do their jobs in peace.

That's why they so aggressively insist Harris wants a ceasefire in Gaza, even as she's said she will continue to arm Israel. That's why they continue to cheer both Biden and Harris despite the two of them being to the right of Republicans they would rightly hate. That's why you start to see the polite fiction arising that presidents like George W. Bush were actually reasonable and fine. It feels easier for them to acclimate to the bad than to fight for something better.

[boof-chamber]

Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived as Deceptive and Lacking in Credibility

[nando161mando]

[pumpacti0n]

its not within the bandwidth of the type of people who are on the leash of the dems to accept that their strategy is also death march that's set to different music. the people who want to consider endorsing dems a strategic and pragmatic maneuver to avoid the worst possible scenario often don't bother with opposing the other dem supporters who see this election as a clear-cut binary of good versus evil and they are still liable to rail on non-voters for their apathy, hence why they're constantly flipping the script onto their opposition by leveraging claims that they're armchair activists or that they don't understand the complexity of the issue, that they are being unrealistic, that we have to wait 75+ more years for a resolution and end of the occupation...

...and according to them, to do anything else, including putting direct (i.e., not purely legal and bureaucratic,) pressure on the politicians and corporate entities that are most directly responsible for it is a grave error and just what the gop wants, somehow. these types of people are unwilling or incapable of admitting that this system doesn't work for them, or us, much less those in the so-called 3rd world and everyone else under white-supremacist colonial rule within the imperial core.

they'll walk backwards, saying "yes, but--" all the way to the state's dungeons and chopping blocks before realizing that they, too, are dispensable, and this theoretic trolley problem also includes them on the tracks and yet no one is actually at this imagined lever to pull it anyway.

to turn and face their true enemy, not ~The Left™~ would mean they'd have to abandon a lot of the myths that built this empire, the respectability politics, the anti-black & anti-indigenous racism, the ever-broadening scope of capitalism and its war against the environment, all of it...instead they'll have to re-construct their political analysis to accommodate this less romantic and patriotic vision of what their country is and always was and become its enemy.

this process is way more difficult and isolating than the alternative, which is toeing the line for the wealthy white capitalist elite class of the imperial core as well as simping for other would-be "socialist" dictators of the state-managed capitalist enterprises outside of it. the dusty bones of the McCarthyism era and the red scare did a fucking doozy on us, in part because it also destroyed our sense of urgency around the collective problems everyone, everywhere, faces and the imagination and attitude it would require for humanity to have any hope of surviving it intact.

weaning ourselves off this feeling of helplessness and dependency on authorities to solve these issues is paramount. we cannot expect solutions to manifest in a reform here or a think tank there, or projects that won't come to fruition for another few decades at best.

we need solutions for the here, and now, on the small scale, with the most disaffected and marginalized at the center, a revolution from the bottom up, and we'll have to leave a lot of these relics behind. anything less is obliteration. "vbnmw"-types always want to give us ultimatums, so now's our chance. what will it be? autonomous direct action for liberation, or become a slave to the neoliberal fascist dystopia? survival or submission?

[crescent-coral-base]

Perhaps it's time to roll up some guillotines and gallows in front of the homes of prominent Democratic donors pulling the strings of the weak, wobbly democratic legislators demanding that Biden withdraw, throwing the race into chaos and practically guaranteeing a Trump victory in November and the concomitant death of American democracy.

It's verrrrrry interesting that Bernie, AOC, and most of the progressives and marginalized are sticking with Biden and Harris and that it's the "neoliberal corporate shill" wing of the party that wants to remove both Biden AND Harris from the ticket and sow electoral chaos.

Perhaps WE need OUR OWN January 6th movement to put the fear of God and THE PEOPLE into these rich, gutless, backstabbing cowards.

Yes, I AM angry. How the FUCK do you Machiavellian morons expect us to counter voter apathy, cynicism, and learned helplessness in the face of rising fascism when YOU'RE the ones spending the last few weeks confirming young voters' worst fears and suspicions about a system they do not trust.

How fucking DARE you, you worthless smug elite bastards sniffing each other's farts of the political, media, and donor classes? How dare you when the stakes are this high?

Remember, YOU faithless fuckers are gonna be among the FIRST against the wall when Mad King Trump returns to enact his vengeance. And YOU will deserve every bit of it.

Millions of the rest of us, the most marginalized and vulnerable, don't.

[enarei]

I think systemic, non-individualized criticisms of the military are important for dismantling it and anything less is useless liberal moralism for internet points. At least you feel better than other people though, the individual is what matters after all just like my neoliberal government taught me

I think you misread what phenomenon I was making fun of in an attempt to suck yourself off. The average US citizen (including a significant share of leftists) lionizes individual members of its armed forces, systemic critiques notwithstanding, and american leftist assessments of how best to dismantle its current neo-colonial role often place an undue amount of revolutionary potential on former (and sometimes current) members, whether through sabotage or the idea that they're most fit to lead armed uprisings or whatever. There's also a disproportionate amount of leftist discourse attempting to rationalize voluntary enlistment as being primarily driven by economic pressures — the idea that american wars are fought by the poor is widely disseminated, even though recruits are disproportionately upper and middle class.

I'm merely highlighting the fact that this mentality is an exception rather than the rule and outside of the developed world the common attitude towards people who deliberately enlist often leans towards apathy and ridicule. Because again, when you're not living in the imperial core it doesn't take an education to intuit that the institution they're joining has a massively inflated budget, and the average citizen is not under the illusion that they're a politically neutral entity, much less one aligned with interests that'd benefit the working class.