Harmful Liberal Policies Mega-Thread

[mmKay]

The purpose of this thread is to further build upon Leo's blog post. Use those guidelines for posting 

 

 

Edited April 6 by mmKay

[Bobby_2021]

Unchecked immigration and open borders has to one of the biggest liberal fallacies. Most probably they themselves live in a gated society with strong security. It's not like they are going to accomodate all these people that are swarming into their country.

It's also a big "fuck you" for the people who take the legal route to citizenship.

Leftism has this tendency for punishing the meritorious & hardworking while incentivising the unlawful and lazy crowd.

In reality people follow incentives and avoid deterrents. You need to keep this in mind while designing a society. 

If you make jumping border easier to get citizenship than going the legal route, then expect people to jump borders.

This is so bad since this will lead to the society itself regressing a stage or two.

[Bobby_2021]

That's a great post  with a comprehensive list.

I like to think about conservative vs liberal as a matter of perspective.

Think about a circle. When you are looking at the from inside it, you are a conservative. As you go closer to the edge of the circle and slowly pushing the boundaries, you are becoming a liberal. If you push outside of the circle into the open boundary, then you are a liberal. All you see is conservatives inside the circle. And from inside the circle, you see liberals outside of it. 

[Bobby_2021]

I have two disagreements with that list.

I don't think technological accelerationism and globalism, unlimited free trade, outsourcing is inherently bad.

It's not bad at all. In fact that's the best of liberalism. It's creating hundreds and thousands of jobs overseas, even though the jobs involve people working to death. That's still a better alternative compared to them not getting any job at all. The jobs they already have might be even more brutal than the Apple manufacturing unit and sweatshops. It's also bringing so many dollars they so desperately need.

I think the real liberals are the tech accelerationists. They are the ones who bring forth real change in the society that brings a lasting impact. So we need to max out technical acceleration. 

[Bobby_2021]

Nukes have done more to bring peace to the world than UN. 

[BlueOak]

The right:
Cause the wars.
Cook the planet, dry it up, and weaken its food supply.
Cause mass migration by the above actions, and a vast economic disparity by me me me attitudes.
Overfill us with guns globally.
Cause all the tension between cultures and races.
Fight wars against drugs, rather than decriminalize their intake (at a bare minimum) to get at the people with the real power/money. They elevate criminal kingpins by making those buying their product HATE the police, and they actively work against the police because they are the target of their policies.
Criminalizing everything is a childish way of dealing with a complicated, difficult problem, and my own country is completely backward on every drug policy it has, leading to gangs and other authorities ruling over drugs and communities. Things like people getting records for often nothing but harming themselves, and getting institutionalized. I come from a family whose brother has been hooked on drugs since he was 13/14 and now he's 40.

The right hates immigration and the problems it's caused. They use it as a political tool all the time, while still causing it, and requiring it for their economic numbers.
They hate the social problems they pour fuel over to burn them twice as bright, rather than address them with meaningful leftwing policies

The right has been in power in America and the UK for example, for longer than I can remember, what's it been 14 years here in the UK now? We still blame the left, for what, being ineffectual? Non existent? America's parties have been right-wing most of my lifetime.

They grade everything by economic output, there is much more to life, and I am speaking as someone below the poverty line who struggles financially.

None of this talks about countries aging populations, or the requirement of younger labor. Nor the corruption corporations have on larger contracts, which means we never get integrated with large high-speed transport systems, which would facilitate movement for work without resettlement. Brexit and the anti-immigration push, were among the second biggest disasters in my life, after the banking corruption causing a crisis in 2008, which we never totally recovered from because people are more than a number on a sheet. That betrayal in 2008 and lack of trust/justice stayed with people. Brexit has only made everything in our day-to-day life worse, as with protecting banks from their own bad practices.

Note: For Americans, both parties are the right. This is not an I hate X political party post.

In context, I want to emigrate from Britain and have done so for a lot of years now, as things get worse here and people get more and more inward-focused its not going to get better. Killing globalism is going to undo the economic benefits everyone is talking about in this video, it is doing with the BRICS vs NATO crises going on worldwide. Countries, certainly the UK cannot do everything themselves and remain competitive, nor can Sweden. Killing immigration means your younger generations are going to be carrying more older people on their backs, and they can't do all the jobs.

Edited April 6 by BlueOak

[BlueOak]

29 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Nukes have done more to bring peace to the world than UN. 

Diplomacy is a more effective tool than a weapon, but with diplomacy the result is not 'your or my way', its whatever can be agreed.

Putin has normalized nukes use as an open threat now, which has weakened some of the fear associated with them. The unspoken fear of a nuke was more effective than a threat repeated 20 times but never acted upon.

[Bobby_2021]

1 hour ago, Bobby_2021 said:

I don't think technological accelerationism and globalism, unlimited free trade, outsourcing is inherently bad.

If it wasn't for globalism and free trade, I would be working in some dead end job in India, working 70 hours a week, while a bottom of the barrel job from the United States only requires me to work for less than 20 hours a week while getting double the pay.

All hail globalism. We need more outsourcing & legal immigration of skilled jobs. Win win for all. 

[Bobby_2021]

1 hour ago, BlueOak said:

Diplomacy is a more effective tool than a weapon, but with diplomacy the result is not 'your or my way', its whatever can be agreed.

Putin has normalized nukes use as an open threat now, which has weakened some of the fear associated with them. The unspoken fear of a nuke was more effective than a threat repeated 20 times but never acted upon.

Nukes are a viable option for self defence. The security of mother Russia is indeed under threat. So Putin is not joking when he says he might use nukes. 

The western overlords agreed to not expand NATO eastwards. They couldn't keep their promise. That's when diplomacy died. 

What diplomacy are you talking about? Western gangsters don't gove two fucks about diplomacy. They want to bully you and jeopardize the national security in the name of fREedOm. Putin is forced to respond to secure their sovereignty with whatever means necessary. 

All the west cares about is their military industrial complex and seeling weapons to kill more people. When you support the west you are doing free propaganda for the military industrial complex. 

[BlueOak]

26 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Nukes are a viable option for self defence. The security of mother Russia is indeed under threat. So Putin is not joking when he says he might use nukes. 

The western overlords agreed to not expand NATO eastwards. They couldn't keep their promise. That's when diplomacy died. 

What diplomacy are you talking about? Western gangsters don't gove two fucks about diplomacy. They want to bully you and jeopardize the national security in the name of fREedOm. Putin is forced to respond to secure their sovereignty with whatever means necessary. 

All the west cares about is their military industrial complex and seeling weapons to kill more people. When you support the west you are doing free propaganda for the military industrial complex. 

1) Diplomacy or war. Pick one. Things don't happen 'just because', people either talk, negotiate, and reach an agreement or they fight.

2) There is no point in being angry at politicians for ensuring their job security and job rewards. They always will, it's like yelling at the wind. If you don't want money to motivate politicians, advocate for taking it out of politics. If we don't want Putin using fear/war as a way to stay in power, that needs to get out of Russian politics.

Oh yes poor Putin, his 8th war against the evil west? Oh wait, no, they were against former USSR border states.

Perhaps the decades, no centuries,, where Eastern Europe has threatened, meddled in Russian elections, and continuously invaded it? Oh wait, no that was Russia too. Hmm, let me think.

I know, perhaps because there are no individual countries at all, and you are right this NATO country keeps expanding. No wait, these countries join NATO, a defensive alliance, so that isn't it. I wonder why that could be, let's think.

Could it be that Russia creates the cycle it doesn't want with its own aggressive expansionist attitude? 

That it is constantly demonizing that which it isn't? So much so it needs to completely absorb its neighbors into an amorphous, oversized blob to desperately control everything around it out of fear? It says it's multicultural while doing everything it can to promote two cities at the expense of the cultures it absorbs. 

No surely not, Russia couldn't have any part in what happens to Russia right? I was like that at 20. I sat there and blamed the world for my actions. I didn't have any responsibility, what could I have possibly done to get myself into my own situation? I was the victim, right, yeah. It was this outside evil that I was fighting. I also drank a lot, like Russians do, to forget my own problems and further absolve myself of any responsibility to change who or what I was. A fearful man who needed to control every aspect of his existence. - Russia.

If you are expecting me to now defend the two right-wing parties in America and their crazy fascist alignments toward perpetual war, for example, you are talking to the wrong person. They helped build the worldwide collective fear we now all stew in and suffer from? Sure. I'd go further than what you are talking about, America, like Putin, wanted to make the world America. Its motivation was greed, not so much fear. Politicians in America don't have long terms, so they don't create situations to keep themselves in power, they create situations to make themselves money instead. Something the fascists in America want to start having instead is longer terms. Then an American president might act more as Putin does, creating situations (fear of the other) to keep themselves individually in control of that fear.

3) Holding Russia in Ukraine, keeps Putin, an uncertain leader acting out of fear with a need to control everything, in a certain place. It's really simple.

Edited April 6 by BlueOak

[TheAlchemist]

One of the major challenges is that this conversation can't really be constructively had in the current political climate, the identity of both left and right is contructed largely on being an antithesis to the other. So if you start bringing up the excesses of the left (rightfully so) it is vacuumed up and weaponized by the narratives on the right.

Neither side has a clear and compelling vision for the future, the movements are largely fuelled by resistance to the other, so downplaying the resistance of one side feeds the other, as of course the resistance itself does too.

This is a very difficult predicament to break out of. We have to find some kind of synthesis that takes into account the underlying core needs that drive both the left and the right. The solution isn't some compromise or either side "winning", it is some (still invisible) path that will emerge and provide a compelling vision forward. Not something that somehow magically unites the left and right into some one big happy hippy human family but just trancends and includes these sides enough through a more positive and meaningful vision for the future that it gains more attraction than the drive towards engaging in the culture war. I think that us getting tired of the polarization itself as a phenomenon is a subtle signal of what is coming. 

Edited April 6 by TheAlchemist

[BlueOak]

24 minutes ago, TheAlchemist said:

The problem is that this conversation can't be constructively had in the current political climate, the identity of both left and right is contructed largely on being an antithesis to the other. So if you start bringing up the excesses of the left (rightfully so) it is vacuumed up and weaponized by the narratives on the right.

Neither side has a clear and compelling vision for the future, the movements are fuelled by resistance to the other, so downplaying the resistance of one side feeds the other, as of course the resistance itself does too.

This is a very difficult predicament to break out of. We have to find some kind of synthesis that takes into account the underlying core needs that drive both the left and the right. The solution isn't some compromise or either side "winning", it is some (still invisible) path that will emerge and provide a compelling vision forward. Not something that somehow magically unites the left and right into some one big happy hippy human family but just trancends and includes these sides enough through a more positive and meaningful vision for the future that it gains more attraction than the drive towards engaging in the culture war. I think that us getting tired of the polarization itself as a phenomenon is a subtle signal of what is coming. 

I can't even get people onto the political compass as a way of reasoning, getting them out of a simple right/left dynamic is all but impossible.

I've come to realise the duality is too well represented by it, until recent times where the left dropped off completely, the system on a meta level is still maintained even without half or more of it functioning within the system, which should demonstrate its durability.

The momentum is also useful for governance, and while individuals are still more important than groups, a single individual, personality, and face is enough for people. This fits the dual system very well: Good and bad, right and wrong etc The way our minds work, an individual in mind is easier to remember and relate to than a group, or even symbol.

That's the crux.

How do you get people to relate to a group or (many groups/people at once) more than they do a single individual?
*How do you get people to see everything as a functioning whole, not a separated right left dynamic?

 

Edited April 6 by BlueOak

[Carl-Richard]

Isn't the answer almost always not "not this" but "balance"? Give me one example of something leftists promote that conservatives do not promote at all. 

This sort of hearkens back to an earlier point I've made about how when you have a certain wideness of perspective, every conversation like this just becomes an exercise in rehearsing concrete examples of a phenomena, of refreshing your understanding of an already understood abstract concept.

For example, merely mentioning things like "socialism", "drug legalization", "open boarders" is simply a way to cue our minds to the larger concept ("harmful", "going too far"), because in reality, we know that all these things largely depend on their degree of implementation, not whether or not they're implemented. Nobody really thinks government should have zero say in people's lives (unless you're a fool). Nobody really thinks drugs should be under either 0% legal control or 100% legal control (what does that even mean?). Nobody really thinks boarders should be either 100% open or 100% closed.

That is not to say these conversations are useless. It's just interesting to point out how it's less about specific "policies" (the "whats") and more about how they're implemented (the "how much", "in what way", etc.), but that we still decide to mention specific "whats" to create a conversation. Maybe an interesting conversation could be to try to identify if there is a common pattern in degree of implementation that can be identified across different cases that leads to harm (a sort of systems thinking inquiry into the notion of balance itself).

Or maybe even more interestingly, are there patterns of behavior or societal and psychological drivers that predictably lead to these failures in degree of implementation? Isn't that what Daniel Schmachtenberger and his ilk are doing with concepts like the Metacrisis, Moloch, Meaning crisis, Game 1 vs. 2? Isn't that what a lack of wisdom is (a lack of balance)? And how do you implement these concepts in practice and in a wise way? That's probably the most interesting conversation you can have.

Edited April 6 by Carl-Richard

[TheAlchemist]

31 minutes ago, BlueOak said:

The momentum is also useful for governance, and while individuals are still more important than groups, a single individual, personality, and face is enough for people. This fits the dual system very well: Good and bad, right and wrong etc The way our minds work, an individual in mind is easier to remember and relate to than a group, or even symbol.

That's the crux.

How do you get people to relate to a group or (many groups/people at once) more than they do a single individual?
*How do you get people to see everything as a functioning whole, not a separated right left dynamic?

 

Those are some really solid questions. Somehow, I think this all ties to aversion to insecurity. The idea of the world as infinitely complex and ever changing conflicts with our desire for a solid and secure identity, and these models and simplifications of the world provide relief. 

The idea of the world as an infinitely complex functioning whole which we are an expression of challenges other core assumptions we hold about the duality of man/nature and even the rigid distinction we make between self/other. This is exposing the "operating system" which is mostly invisible to us, just like any ideology is from the pov of those living in/as it. This feeds insecurity and a drive towards overcompensation through simplifying the world and desperately clinging to some past identity and idea about our place in the world. 

So thinking about the "how", the way forward probably needs to be something that addresses this core insecurity, some way of feeling secure despite constant change and despite a lack of concrete, "true" identity. Or a kind of identity based on paradox.

Edited April 6 by TheAlchemist

[Yimpa]

On the proposal of fully legalizing cannabis in the USA outright, I disagree with. I propose we start with legalizing it in all 50 states for medical purposes only and work from there. 

(and for the states that already legalized it both recreationally and medically keep it that way)

Edited April 6 by Yimpa

[Yimpa]

As for the point of Confusing children with gender fluidity and queer gender ideology, I would argue that there are some kids stuck in private school systems that have 0% room for gender exploration.

I was one of those kids, and it caused extreme distress for me for the rest of my teenage and young adult life.

We need quality systems that allow for exploration for the (few) kids who are clearly different in their expression, instead of gaslighting and immediately labeling them as autistic or mentally ill. We don’t have such systems yet in our current mainstream systems.

Edited April 6 by Yimpa

[Schizophonia]

I swear I already replied to an identical topic 🤔

[Emerald]

It seems like people on this thread who are talking about harmful leftist policies aren't actually referring to specific policies... but more general philosophies or even straw men of general philosophies.

For example, the people who are saying "open borders" as a harmful leftist policy...

I challenge you to find literally ANY policies in any nation on Earth that actually reflect open borders. You won't find any.

And in America, the term "open borders" is just a Republican straw man to characterize their Democrat opposition as weak on the border in the eyes of their constituents so that they can position themselves as "the party that cares about the border" and fear-monger about criminals flooding in if the Democrats get in office. 

Republicans have really been leaning into the notion of Biden being weak on the border... which isn't true at all. In fact, he's kept many of the Trump-era border policies in place. And he even had an immigration reform proposal some months ago that gave Republicans most of the things they wanted (if memory serves, there was something non-immigration related that Biden was hoping to get in return by compromising so much with Republicans regarding immigration).

But the Republican politicians outright rejected his proposal... because they wanted to be able to maintain the optics of being displeased with Biden being weak on the border and to continue to claim that he's pro "open borders".

Now, back to the prompt...

Truthfully, the challenge here is that you won't find many truly leftist policies because most of the current power structures in the US function mostly off of a center-right framework. And whenever there is an actual left-wing policy, it's usually ineffectual or doesn't go far enough. So, you don't get to see the excesses of the left in US politics.

But here are a few harmful/problematic leftist POLICIES worldwide (I'm sure there are more. This is just as far as I felt like researching)...

• No private land ownership in China. All land is public and the Chinese government owns it. (This is true for some other Communist countries too)
• Censorship laws against criticism of Socialist/Communist leaders (like in North Korea) 
• Plastic Straw bans in some U.S. states - This doesn't address the real issue and makes it harder for some disabled people who need plastic straws to drink to go out to restaurants

Basically, harmful leftist policies are ones that either come out of authoritarian Communist countries where the government is given all the power without checks and balances... OR there are ineffectual leftist policies in Capitalist countries that don't address the problems they're trying to address and instead just create annoying negative side consequences for people in those countries.

[Thought Art]

Being overly sensitive about Cultrual appropriation, but also wearing Palestinian scarves 

[Thought Art]

@Emerald Okay, but the plastic banning straws thing is a good idea. The whole diables thing is a moot point because exceptions can easily be made. They are a small % of population and there are easy alternatives to plastic straws that need not be single use plastics.

Edited April 6 by Thought Art