Neo-liberals get so upset when you mention that leftism actually begins at the desire to see capitalism and such businesses end. They still believe in a free market is self regulating when that’s not the case at all, a free market will result in monopolies. Neo-liberals are left of Republicans but we’re talking a small matter of degrees. Neo-liberal policies and economics are what got us into this mess, they won’t get us out of it.
“In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic…”
-Phil Ochs Introduction to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)
Liberals won’t take on the ecocidal billionaires incinerating the planet because they own too much of the incinerators stock.
Liberals Can’t Address _______________ Because It Means Confronting Capitalism
You can put a LOT of stuff on that line
We can use whatever is proven to work better for healthy people and the climate and follow proven models. We can see how getting off fossil fuels is a good thing for human health. This is the only safe blue dot we have, yet so many think it’s disposable and can’t wait for some better life later in a magic realm. They trash the planet and don’t support politicians that want to help, if they ever have enough majority. It’s tribalism and dualism, two peas in a toxic pod, and won’t change if the wealthy keep getting their way.
It’s not actually confronting capitalism. It’s about holding the responsible parties accountable while phasing out products that damage and/or change the ecosystem.
The responsible parties are the capitalists who profit off the status quo. So yeah, capitalism.
Reigning in socialized costs while appropriately taxing the practiced profits would be a good start.
Capitalism needs a great big continuous series of swift kicks to the balls.
I’d say start with Musk, but knowing of his broken pp problem and his eternal cuckness, he’s probably already into this sort of treatment.
One time I had a guy try to get me to do this to him, and I couldn’t hold back and started to make fun of him. But he ended up being so earnest and pathetic, that I had to stop making fun of him. For all of you that are into this (except musk and other evil people and evil people supporters), I hope you find what you’re looking for.
I love seeing it. We’ve got a party in power that’s rolling back environmental protections, rolling back regulations, increasing the amount of pollution companies are allowed to dump, while backing a far-right dictator to take over and decimate the Amazon rainforest but, BUT, it’s actually the minority party that’s been thwarting their efforts’ fault.
See I figured the people trying to ban cancerous pesticides and fund green technology would be the good guys, but now from this article I see that actually they’re the bad guys all along!
Guess this election I’ll just stick my thumb up my ass and dance around the living room to the sound of my own superior thinking instead of voting. That’ll show’em 👍
The world is more complicated than deciding who is the bad guys and who is the good guys.
One party would let companies sell you cancerous pesticides and call it infant formula if the bribe is right.
The other will spend all of their time and effort attacking marginal issues which don’t directly affect the bottom line of the fossil fuel companies.
It looks like they’re trying to save the climate but, as it turns out, we’re not going to reverse centuries of industrial activity by providing $500 off a plug-in solar unit or making it so that pesticides can’t be applied 4 weeks before harvest instead of 2. They pick their battles, and their chosen battlefields are ones that are in no danger of disrupting the fossil fuel hegemony.
You should still vote, just don’t buy into the idea that neo-liberals, R or D, are going to make meaningful changes which would harm fossil fuel companies. There are some leftest candidates running, support them or vote for the lesser evil.
Not voting is always the wrong strategy.
The rule is, always vote for the left-most person running that has a chance at winning. Progressive socialists are the only way forward. But sometimes you gotta hold your nose and vote for the person that’s simply not running on the protect-the-pedophiles platform.
The choice isn’t as hard as people are pretending that it is
Until you factor in that both of them are pathological liars.
What a load of horse shit. Liberals have been addressing climate change for decades. We’ll doo a lot better without this bullshit created to divide the left on every issue.
Mods need to stop allowing this psyop propaganda.
liberalism is a capitalist ideology. it requires capital to move its policies. therefore the policies are dictated by capital. meaning that the ecological barrier between life and death on planet earth is filtered through capitalistic economic beurocracy before it is dealt with on a timeline that is suitable for reality. meaning.
we are fucked if we continue to pretend capitalism will ever address climate change in any meaningful way as long as there are rich people who believe that human rights have a dollar value.
that is liberalisms fundamental flaw. it waits for 1’s and 0’s before it moves in any meaningful direction, and if there is no backer to put up the capital for it. it isnt happening. and there is far more capital pushing for climate collapse than there is pushing against it. even if the capital holders dont realize what they are “voting for” with their wallet.
to over simplify this scenerio. liberalism says that you have rights (life, liberty, persuit of happiness, food, water, shelter, entertainment, a clean environment, etc) but only if you have the capital to say that you have those rights. if there is no capital to push those rights, then you dont have them.
an example being. if you are hungry. and you walk into a store. but have no money for bread. and you take some bread from the store to feed yourself so you dont starve to death right then and there. the store owner who has capital, and owns property, can call the police or security. and have them perform state sanctioned violence, because you took something which imho, should be a human right in every society. so, if you dont have the capital to say you are entitled to food, a right. then you dont have a right to food.
i detest and hate conservative capitalism. but liberalism is also a scourge of unfetered capitalism in the modern era, the overton window has shifted. liberalism just understands that workers need a few more scraps from the stable for longevity of productivity. and thats basically it. the rest is just fancy marketing and highschool level psychology tricks to keep people voting for them. no lasting meaningful change that cant be undone by larger capital, just crumbs and broken promises.
capitalism, and all its sub ideologies are a poison to the planet and everyone who calls it home.
people have a tendancy to say one thing, and do another. especially when there is an incentive (like capital) to do so.
^ and there ya go ^
LMAO… if anyone wanted an example of the type of person that believes the divisionist psyop rhetoric….
Liberals have burned down the world. Read The Climate Book.
Good news: with every passing day, it’s becoming more and more obvious that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and ecology.
Bad news: we’re still about to pass environmental thresholds that will have irreversible consequences, and likely lead to an ecological catastrophe.
I mean you say “becoming increasingly clear” but it’s been clear as day for about two centuries for socialists. Any progress happening now on that front is just retaking lost ground.
I think it became clear when the oil companies had their internal climate scientist prove it was them, and had that information leaked, and I believe that research was done 30 or 40 years ago?
Longer – closer to 50 years ago.
Of course. I meant ‘more and more obvious’ for the general population.
Two centuries of worry from socialists and we’re still where we’re at. They seem pretty fucking useless, ngl.
“We’re still where we’re at” says the person presumably working a 40 hour work week.
I don’t, thank you for 200 years of concern for climate change. Well spent!
Because most people are ignorant and stupid, case in point.
Seems like smugly dismissing people as ignorant and stupid is an ignorant and stupid way of creating change. No points for good thoughts and no action!
I’ve taken plenty of actions on top of voting. E.g. helped set up a local community food sharing network, volunteer my time on an anarchist community, built my own house, grow my own vegetables, and try my best to support leftist candidates. How about yourself?
Well don’t you know, they wrote those comments!!
Ah yes, all those socialist climatologists from the 1800s were warning of climate disaster.
(Just pointing out that their wording specifically referenced the environment and it was in response to an article about climate change)
Really? Can you point to a democracy that has done much of note that doesn’t have an economic system based on free market capitalism?
NASA spearheaded the tech behind megawatt wind turbines. Bell Laboratories built the first practical silicon photovoltaic cell. England and the US perfected Hydroelectricity.
Unbridled capitalism is the problem. Well regulated and taxed free market capitalism has proven it’s self quite well.
Really? Can you point to a democracy that has done much of note that doesn’t have an economic system based on free market capitalism?
*points to a bombed-out shell of a city*
*points to a council massacred by some suspiciously well-armed drug gangs*
*points to a nation that has survived centuries of economic siege*
For some reason, wealthy liberal democracies get kind of angry whenever you try something other than strictly regulated neocolonial capitalism.
Can you be specific where you are pointing as I can find all that stuff in countries that were attacked or interfered with by non wealthy liberal democracies…
The core problem here is that unbridled capitalism has a very strong tendency to emerge from well regulated capitalism, because the rich won’t stop until they’ve turned the former into the latter. It’s a stopgap measure but it doesn’t fix anything on a long timescale. Case in point: The developed world today.
And authoritarianism seems to develop from poorly implemented big S socialism. Humans are quite good at thwarting any system to their own benefit…
What? You mean global cartels controlling a plurality (if not majority) of the world’s wealth break the free market? Say it ain’t so!
Seriously, getting everybody to forget the basic fact that the fossil fuel industry is a cartel is one of the first priorities of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda playbook. This article might as well be written by one of their FUD propagandists.
Cartels are natural parts of capitalism, I don’t know why you’re pretending they’re somehow not capitalist for using the mechanisms of capitalism to gain control of capital.
The ability to weaponize capital markets doesn’t make them inherently bad.
Nobody said that, I’m simply pointing out that cartels are part of capitalism, free market or no, and don’t “break” anything. They’re an inevitable consequence of the system.
Confronting capitalism means they might have to set aside their comforts for once, which they won’t do.
The obstacle preventing liberals from addressing climate change is conservatives.
Also corporate funding.
Corporate funding of projects that change climates, to be be precise.
Corporate funding of political campaigns and lobbying for laws that benefit and shield them from consequences.
An entire article about capitalism and the economics of fossil fuels? Surely they’ll mention the fossil fuel industry is NOT a capitalistic free market, allowing it to actively suppresses the process of internalizing externalities (via environmental cost accounting), right?
No mention? Bummer.
They’re arguing the opposite? Whacko.
Free market is a buzzword capitalists use to confuse the reality that capitalism’s basic goal leads to anti-competitive cornering of the market.
Why do you all think so goofily?
Either free market is a buzz word and so is liberal, which in this instance is being used as a straw man
Or they’re both genuinely definable and it’s clear what they mean which makes neither a buzzword they’re just… words.
Listen, if you can’t tell what is propaganda and what is not you probably shouldn’t bother commenting.
I was not speaking to the term liberal. It is not a buzzword, but it definitely is a masterful piece of propaganda that masks the reality that everything a liberal “stands for” is instantly thrown out the window when money is involved.
This is seen in the two-tiered justice, political, and economic systems liberals are so proud of.
I find the kind of absolutism found in the headline, extremely unhelpful, not to mention total horse shit.
“Liberals” (and I’m not even getting into what people here define as “liberals”) absolutely can confront capitalism in order to address environmental concerns, they just don’t like to and find it very difficult. But it is certainly possible, and, with enough cajoling, absolutely can do so.
This “us versus them” attitude, and this level of absolute defeatism only makes the job much more difficult for everyone. Instead, I suggest we all focus on how to get the job done rather than focusing on all of the barriers in our way— unless it’s on how to overcome them.
You don’t want to get into definitions because it makes your entire point moot. Liberals are capitalism. Its the driving force of liberalism. They go hand in hand. The liberal revolutions were capitalist revolutions. This is an inescapable fact. The most core component of liberalism is private property, which is what capitalism is built on.
Liberals will never abandon capitalism because they are capitalism.
Y’all realize that the fossil fuel industry already isn’t a capitalistic entity, right?
Oh, so “liberal” means whatever you want it to mean
Gotcha
If by what i want it to mean you mean what it has literally always meant for 300 years yeah sure.
There’s a lot of daylight between “the exact thing a word means” and “the messy group of people who can currently be vaguely be defined that way”. Most ‘capitalists’ are just working class people who’ve been tricked or don’t do a lot of thinking. It’s wrong to conflate them with the rigorous meaning of a word that predates any living person.
Tricked or not its what they support and what they vote for.
A couple things. The Americans who call themselves liberals didn’t vote for this, and the American liberals who did vote for it were aided and abetted by the most radicalised and financially empowered conservative oligarchs in literal human history. So if your only goal is to put as many people as possible into a toilet and flush it, great job. If not, you might have lost your way.
Edit: Some of y’all hated being told it’s preferable to care about human beings, but why so quiet?
Yet, you still can’t seem to define it in any meaningful way. Just vague references to other subjective vagaries.
Case in point
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pretty sure my definition was extremely meaningful. Which is why you have gotten so huffy about it.
Says the person who has to project their feelings onto others because they couldn’t defend their position. Or even explain it.
And while I’m very happy for you that you take a great deal of meaning in those vague and subjective references in your previous comment, if you can’t even define them, how can you expect anyone else to take any meaning from it?
I understood it perfectly well. What part were you confused by?
Thank you for a sane take. You are correct in every way.
It also doesn’t help that it seems to conveniently forget that the fossil fuel industry is an international cartel. It breaks capitalism by virtue that it can control its entire market and a great many markets (and governments) to which it’s connected.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
You do not understand capitalism very well if you think cartels are abberant.
They do not break capitalism.
They are capitalism.
Either oligopolies or monopolies are the theoretical end point of basically any possible unregulated capitalist market structure given enough time, or enough corruption (‘subsidies’).
If you think thats not correct, please do tell me how global financial markets work.
I’m sure its just very close to that theoretical idea of perfect competition and a near infinite number of nearly equillvalent actors, right?
And money itself, currency, definitely not like a cartel, I’m sure.
Greatest trick the devil pulled on you was just telling you a childish fantasy was reality, and then you just kept on liking that idea, because it made for simple heroes and simple villains.
I think we are all well aware capitalism is working exactly as intended.
It’s so frustrating how left will literally blame themselves before they blame conservatives.
Complete non-sequitur. No leftist absolves conservatives of blame for the climate crisis.
