/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2878925

Listen, you made a long winded post that that I do not have the energy to respond to in full.

Its obvious I touched a few nerves for such a long winded reply: And one of those nerves is that I am (almost) your opposite (and definitely an irreconcilable enemy). Its even down to the fact that I am not even pro-conservative as much as anti/non-liberal, in both economic & cultural spheres.

With that in mind I will make a handful of short retorts. I strongly suggest you cease replies after that, because we will end up wasting our time: I assure you that the root of our disagreement does not lay in the fact that either of us has made errors, is dumb, or not has considered something (such things are secondary). It's instead that in both in our fundamental moral assumptions & the categories & framework in which we see the world we differ from the outset.

—

>restrictions require someone or something to enforce them and that there is always a direct cost to preventing someone from doing something, while there is only sometimes a cost to allowing it.

This is outright false: The cost of allowing someone to do something is the resources (time, energy, inputs including intermediates if relevant) it requires for them to do it when they do it.

This can also include any effects this may have on others that said others deem deleterious.

—

>reducing it to absurdity: "everything is forbidden" (it is forbidden to forbid?) is much more contradictory than "everything is allowed" (it is permissible to forbid?)

Neither of us are making these points. This is a distracting non-sequitur.

It also happened to impose an excess cost in the resources you took in writing it, those it took for me to read it and finally more in my pointing it out.

If this kind of libertarian forum did not exist as it does and were banned, we would have been saved from this and other costly interactions. I will reiterate this point in a broader context later.

—

>economic and technological developments seem to me to resolve even the nudist situation, for the most part. if you do not want to see nudists, it is easier than ever to move to a place without nudists."

This imposes a cost on the non-nudist to move in favor of the nudist.

But even reusing the nudist example is evading my deeper point of "The freedom to do x comes into conflict here with the freedom to live without x occurring."

If we shift the example to a homosexual & a homophobe (or any identitarian categories really), the fact of the matter is that the very existence of one imposes constraints & costs on the other, at the very least in the form of psychological distress.

There is no axiologically neutral agreement they can come to.

>here is where i would again tip into a more libertarian mould: let individuals sort this out themselves. let them play a cat and mouse game of moving across the country

This precisely where your methodological & moral individualist & libertarian assumptions come into conflict with those of us who share neither.

Such a game is costly & unnecessary when upbringing & transportation are strictly state controlled. See the point I make further down using the USSR & DPRK as examples.

If one were to change the example to liquor stores or hard drug pushers, its easy to see that many people would easily oppose this (pushing addictive substances onto the vulnerable is generally not tolerated by most people on earth). It's only the terminally libertarian/liberal view that tolerates this (Hm… The term толераст/tolerast does have its merits after all)

• 
  
  

My main point in all of this is that there is default or neutral state of "absence of restrictions".

Everything you might wish to be allowed is always an imposition on those who wish it were not allowed.

—

Your semi technological determinism completely eschews the issue of relations of production. You completely ignore the fact that all your cited examples occur in a capitalist economy, and a relatively market liberal one at that.

The Soviet Union suppressed ethnic nationalism, pornography, etc. & did so by legal-administrative means in the economy before perestroika.

Nationalist agitprop could not generally access tv studios, printing presses, etc. for production and handle few means of mass distribution. This is not because the technology did not exist, but because it wasn't in their hands to a significant degree. Production heavily relied on external support from diaspora & western state institutional funding, and internal distribution was limited to hand to hand pamphlets.

Consider a modern example: The DPRK. Mass diffusion of various cancers whether it be pornography, social media drama, sensationalist press, or even anime fandom identitarian agitation does not exist to any significant degree. This is not because the DPRK does not have telecommunications infrastructure (hell it even manufactures its own fiber cable), but because its intranet is designed partly in a way where such things aren't possible, and indeed none have means to produce such things independently of state direction anyways.

(Note: It doesn't mean there is zero penetration of restricted materials in either case, just that the velocity & scale of diffusion is orders of magnitude lower. No nirvana like fallacious reasoning please)

—

>a recognition that current conditions are not tenable and that to even build the conditions to fix them, a step in another direction is necessary.

Yes, and its called further degradation & poverty, war, disease, etc. Ironically I have some sympathy for libertarian degeneration at least in the first world, because it weakens their imperial power (I mean every bourg. & petty bourg. that chokes to death on their own vomit from a drug overdose is a tiny victory).

The imperial core is the least likely to pull off a successful revolution for material reasons, both in the present & historically. Its weakening is therefore necessary to facilitate revolution elsewhere.

>my direction of travel is "vague socialist > communist > communist with a surprising dose of libertarianism"

>not to protect the electricity, water, gas, etc, companies from market competition,

>it's really something closer to dengism

If you are not liberal/libertarian trolling us, you may in fact be fooling/deceiving yourself in believing that you are communist.

I mean it doesn't even require marxism to realize that network infrastructure is more efficient when there isn't duplication of infrastructure and/or network fragmentation and/or in investment & logistical & discoordination due to competition.

Still, I am not surprised at all that you are from the UK & into Dengism & libertarian fancies.

If I am allowed a small bit of sentimentality: As your Greek ideological enemy it kind of fits perfectly for me. Revisionism, individualism, libertarianism and being from a country that was our recent contemporary oppressor.

It's like you managed to perfectly meld a number of distinct things I despise into one elegant disgusting whole, hahaha!

—

Please do not reply further. We are simply irreconcilable enemies.

I shouldn't have come back here out of boredom, but this perfectly illustrates my point about liquor stores I made early. I have an "argument addiction" & relapsed due to exposure.

The costs of forcing lgbts to be in the closet and in relationships with straight people they’ll never be happy with are higher than allowing them to be together in functional “true” relationships even if it causes psychological distress to homophobes.

>>2878968

Could be. It could also be thought that the anti-lgbt agitation that it generates also outweighs the benefits.

My own preferred solution would surpression of identitarian competition media generally, via nationalization & state control of media apparatus.

I am not really making an argument about that though; Its rather against the idea that behaviour do not have costs (both direct & opportunity, the latter of which depends on what behaviour is considered good)

>>2878850
It already has been a thing for years but you fat mobility scooter ass motherfuckers cant even bring yourself to also study the events in the west, hegemony internationalism ass pieces of shit

>>2878970
Generally anti lgbt sentiment goes down the more functional, healthy lgbt people and couples one encounters in your real life. The people most vulnerable to culture war agitation in one direction or another are isolated, often suburban and rural, and experience a higher ratio of their world through media. Which is why I agree with you on media nationalization.

>>2878978
Stop telling on yourself.

>>2878978
>>2878981
Are transwomen not allowed to be horny?

>>2878966
I considered your reply reasonable and not at all nerve-touching, i just like to expound at length. I will restrict myself as much as possible and reply only to points I cannot leave alone. this is a compromise between sympathising with your position (i too have surely wasted my time given the two types of people who'll reply are: thoughtless idiots, and a thoughtful person irreconcilably opposed to my view but uninterested - for valid reasons - in arguing fully.) and being unwilling to leave certain points unaddressed. If you are to reply again with something simple, like "I disagree", I will fully understand and we can call it a draw.

• i think you abstract allowing/not allowing too much. the cost of not allowing something is not free because you have to enforce the prohibition. the cost of an unenforced prohibition is the same as an allowance - e.g. the resources assigned to doing the thing. instead of weighing up the costs of drug use against the world in which no drugs are used, they have to be weighed against the various forms of enforcing the prohibition. it is quite possible to wind up with a combination of expensive anti-drug enforcement and high drug use. (as in the US, for example.) it may also be possible to combine purely unofficial enforcement with low drug use. (e.g. drugs are legal, but socially scorned, like right-libertarianism.)
  

we should return here to where i began, however, because originally i was referring implicitly to much more vanilla social issues: homosexuality and transgender rights, ethnic and cultural minorities, freedom of association, and so on, rather than adopting a very hard "everything is permitted" stance. i am much less interested in drug use and the like.

• i am merely having fun here, so you can refuse to answer: presumably in the case of the nudist, you believe the state should step in and enforce the wearing of clothes. but why? we could equally imagine the state stepping in to create a culture in which it's broadly tolerated, and so on (East Germany for example ultimately came to tolerate such practices). my "why?" here is not a request for a justification or well argued case, just an invitation to explain why you lean the way you do. i will not "argue" against it, if you reply. (you may also correct me if my presumption is wrong.)
  
  
• as a callback to >>2878698 i am obliged to "yes but" the point on drug/alcohol pushers: "yes, but" this is an argument only for restricting their ability to push drugs/alcohol on the vulnerable. it says nothing about what we should do with the responsible.
  
  
• regarding the quote about protection from market competition, i must repeat the UK context: they are privately owned, and bad at their jobs, but protected from competition by the government. in my ideal world they would be state owned and competently run, as happens even in capitalist countries. the UK, however, lacks the institutional capacity to deliver this in any way, hence the positive reference to market competition. it is a choice between two evils.
  
• i dispute the point on network infrastructure: a network without duplication is a network vulnerable to outages. a network without some degree of fragmentation is itself a single point of failure. there are costs involved here, but the exact balance between cost, redundancy, and fragmentation varies on a case-by-case basis. it is my view that the UK is in a position where the costs of incompetence outweigh the costs of a more fragmented and redundant alternative, where starting fresh with fragmentation and redundancy are easier than curing incompetence. as i say: a choice between evils.
  
  
• i resent the charge that i completely eschew relations of production given my earlier point about rent-seeking petit full bourgeoisie form the financial base of the current reactionary turn in the west, and the reason i de-emphasise it is that many of my cited examples have, in fact, occurred even in AES states. (e.g. ability to control STDs, collapse of religion, equal workforce participation, retirement pensions, etc, have occurred regardless of mode of production, and you can see the DPRK's TFR has dropped in line with these factors.)
  
  

ironically I do not consider you an enemy at all. your arguments have on the whole been at a higher level and overall of a reasonable approach, rather than the /leftypol/ standard of getting bogged down in your distaste for this or that identity group or focusing on superficial personal attacks. i have not been bored by our discussion, and as i said way back in >>2878698 novelty is part of my motivation.

>>2878582
Fat and ugly

>>2878741
Conservatards are stupid thoughbeit

>>2878970
>>2878968
Imagine deciding wheter someone gets to be free based on how much it "benefits" society. This is capitalist thinking 101

I think some "leftists" will have to come to grips that will have to work with socially conservative people in order to build socialism.
I worry the moralism that most of the western left will not allow this and nothing will get accomplished.

>>2879009
People’s personal happiness has profound societal effects, the part doesn’t exist without the whole and vice versa

>>2879015
The issue is delineating conservatism from chauvinism or bigotry especially in the imperial core

>>2879020
If we can channel that cauvinism and bigotry it might be effective.

Alot of it is already being channeled at Israel and its supporters.

Channeling the chauvinism is a harder battle.

>>2879015
the problem is that there are two ways of interpreting this: that social conservatives who can control their power level and prioritise socialism should be tolerated, or that socialists should pander to the spooks of people who are primarily socially conservative in a doomed attempt to win them over. the former has some merit but puts most of the difficulty on the social conservative, while the latter is just stupid.

more generally it's the distinction between someone who is incidentally prejudiced because of some nonsense idea they picked up somewhere but would change their mind, versus those who really are committed to defending their bad and stupid gut feelings.

>>2879023
It’s like feeding a dog human flesh, it will try to taste yours

>>2879024
I agree the 2nd answer isnt most fruitful.
I do wonder if the left while still agreeing on it puts some social issues on the back burner until a time when those issues can be settled.
For example trans kids playing sports in a minor issue, we should be focusing on ending imperialism.
Language policing people when the say Jews instead of Zionists is another one the left needs to drop especially when 90% of hews support zionism.

Can someone explain to a theorylet how the social issues that arent directly related to economy and class (the so called "woke idpol" will be solved through the abolition of capitalism alone? Leftists always say that everything is tied to class and use this to say that class is the only thing that matters. How would you prove someone who calls ypu a class reductionist wrong? Im not trying to start an argument, i just want to understand how the change of economic system will solve those seemingly "non class related things" that make up the bulk of the issues that leftists struggle against.

>>2878650
being economically right wing because you are selfish is extremely reactionary and it is strange seeing you word things as though it is somehow "acceptable". i would much rather someone who has a collectivistic instinct with some of these involving the general preference for particular cultural values (as is the case in china for instance), than someone who just views people as atomic units and is fine seeing homeless people being "free" to walk around forced to search the trash for food but are fine with trans people (but they may even be against the funding of surgeries for trans people and not care about collectively helping trans people that are forced into homelessness and prostitution)

from my perspective if you are still a neoliberal in the current year and god forbid you even support zionism, that is basically nazi shit, yet there is a strange tendency for people among the left to accept liberal zionists over people who are anti-zionist but are otherwise socially right. here >>2878991 you are trying to imply "oh why not just change the culture to have people accept nudists", but at that point you are holding some abstract libertinism over the actually existing culture of real people. this is of course what liberals love doing when they justify regime change by emphasizing the social conservative tendencies in foreign nations. there is a tendency for liberals to not understand that really they are imposing their own atomized metropolitan culture and worldview upon the rest of the world. they do not see how this is often a chauvinism dressed in a veneer of objectivity. for me socialism is fundamentally about collective self-determination and this is more important than the individual's ability to follow whatever base impulses they want

>reducing it to absurdity: "everything is forbidden" (it is forbidden to forbid?) is much more contradictory than "everything is allowed" (it is permissible to forbid?)
see the thing is that liberalism is actually far more self-contradictory than conservatism. for instance, there are many liberals that curiously do not extend the same "live and let live" attitude to pedophiles. somewhere in them they can not accept the sale of child sex dolls even though if they are not modelled upon CSAM, they are technically "not hurting anyone". furthermore, why are they against people fucking children if the psychological distress caused by such relationships is often only present retroactively and is conditioned upon resultant self-evaluations that may be culturally interpellated (for otherwise cognitive behavioural therapy would have no efficacy .. and of course throughout human history the child brides have not at all been unheard of)? the sexual harassment that would constitute a fat balding man walking around naked in a metropolitan area meanwhile is not taken seriously, and the reflexive reaction is that it is anti-nudist culture that should change. moreover, there are liberal tendencies such as the sexual revolution that bring such contradictions to a climax. if sex becomes a fundamental human right, then what about people that can only be attracted to children? is suppressing them a "human rights violation"? in many cases conversion therapy does not work for such people either. despite (or perhaps precisely because of) such considerations, the liberal is often irrationally angry at even the mere existence of pedophiles whether or not they act upon such an impulse, and the general hysteria has progressed to the point that they will even police two year age gap relationships. social conservatives meanwhile do not run into any contradictions as they do not operate upon such premises to begin with

>>2878850
>>2878858
how has this thread gone on for so long without addressing the marxist-leninist elephant in the room? if we look at history and even today, pretty much everyone who has achieved some form of socialism with lasting results could be called "economically left, socially right", a lot even very much homophobic, and would have very much scorned many of the trends of the sexual revolution. even when they werent that socially right, their base certainly had socially right wing tendencies

but also yes if you look at even catholic social teaching developed at times where they were trying to push back at socialism, they still ended up at a position that was economically left relative to neo-liberalism. the american solidarity party is left wing economically while being against abortion, ivf, and some other catholic qualms. personally i think it would be better for most people if that was the main face of american conservatism than what we have today

to me many socially right wing tendencies (of course excepting straight up nazis) just represent the cultural customs of a people that are a holdover from long practiced traditions and reinforce collective identity. meanwhile economic right wing tendencies represent a methodological individualism that disparages collective relationality

>>2878845
i do think that many strands of conservative thought, especially when they are simply grounded upon the idea that "the traditions have always worked that is why we should stick to them", very much fail in the face of technological determinism. but at the same time, i do not view technological development as a linear trajectory of progress, see for instance yuk hui's cosmotechnics. furthermore, just because a technology exists does not mean we should not ban something. for instance, we could develop biotechnological weapons of mass destruction, but even if we had such technologies, it would not be an insane stupid idea to want to place a ban upon the production of such things, even if it might infringe upon individual liberty. even if such technologies had already been in use for a while, wanting to now impose a ban after their deleterious effects have been made manifest is not necessarily just foolishness. still i do sympathize with the notion that it would be difficult to try and forcibly turn back the clock in many respects. the present, after all, always contains residues of the past. at the same time, there are enough social conservatives that, within a framework of localist self-determination, they could organize together and form their own communities much like the amish and the menonites do. i am not outright against such things as long as perhaps free association between localities is permitted. personally i see myself more of a localist than much of a conservative or a progressive. that axis to me already presupposes a linear trajectory of cultural and technological development (often hiding the presupposition of a particular liberal modernistic framework being the organizing centre), as though collective particularities and trajectories of evolution can be arranged in such a uniform aspect

>>2879015
this was basically the entire point of "maga communism". i feel like haz has a very strange way of communicating things, wherein he would often performatively exaggerate certain tendencies in order to make a point. it is sort of stupid and easy for people to misunderstand what he is doing

>>2879053
i am honestly not sure they would. socialism to the extent that it often secures collective self-determination, naturally preempts any further progress in capitalism's deterritorialization of everything that is solid. however, there is often a strange tendency amongst leftists to just assume that economical left wing positions immediately entail some cosmopolitan humanism that precludes national determination, when if we look at actually existing socialist countries, the opposite is always achieved

>>2879058
>national determination
Isnt the idea of the nation considered bourgeois by communists?

"I'm economically [X] and socially [Y]"!
"Critical support for [Z]!"
Uh-huh sure. How does that manifest in the real world.

Aka "I want the clout of being a communist without the responsibilities of being a communist"

>>2879066
Every real communist government would have sent your bitch ass to a labour camp.

>>2878892
>it is not conflating technology with liberalism to recognise the liberalising effects of a given technology. previously prevailing norms around sex, for example, cannot survive the invention of a cheap birth control pill
what technological achievements have come from the birth control pill?
This is like saying its good to be "pro fat" because of the technological breakthrough of the tripple wopper.

>>2879015
the cool thing about being a communist is being cool with both maga hat and cat ears and convincing them we need to jump the nazi

>>2879058
expanding more on the haz thing. people like talking about how the maga communism and barista thing or now marxism = islam, but we often forget the time when he was trying to argue that we already live in socialism which is another on its face stupid thing to day. at the same time though my initial reaction was definitely that this guy was just a fucking moron but over time i have come personally to the conclusion that there really was a real grain of truth in what he was saying on that point. there has been a convergence of the economic and political spheres with financialization and monopoly capital that blurs previously established boundaries. we are most certainly not living in an anarchy of production anymore at the very least though we should probably not literally see it as socialism..

btw i am not part of the acp or even the infrared community but if there is popular demand i can explain the marxism = islam meme lol. ive taken my own interest in islam for other reasons but i dont feel like converting to the religion. it is actually somewhat thought provoking

>>2879062
to some extent yes, but if you look at the ussr, china, and other AES countries, the national question has been consistently developed into a positive direction. the material realities of imperialism no doubt accentuate this tendency. at the same time i dont think cosmopolitanism should be outright dismissed either. the national question should still be integrated within a larger globalist framework of cooperation and interaction. ive only thought a bit about this privately but i believe it is important. perhaps there needs to be an elaboration on the philosophical "place" concept

>>2879058
it is reactionary to be selfish, but it is not stupid. you can ultimately bring a selfish person over to the socialist camp (provided, of course, he will be better off, which almost everyone will be.) but someone who is fundamentally stupid is much more challenging. if someone sincerely believes in god, and sincerely believes that god hates socialism, all bets are off.

i will clarify immediately that i do not support zionism and, indeed, regard Israeli society as something of the logical end-point of rightist political drift.
anyway,social conservatism must be considered in its material context and in terms of its direction of travel: e.g. the USSR should not be judged relative to contemporary America, but to Tsarist Russia. Stalin, granted, reverted some of the liberalisation of Lenin (which - with only a little cope - we may say jumped the gun and advanced faster than the underlying productive forces) but the USSR at collapse was a much more socially liberal place than Russia in 1916. quite famously, the merger of East and West Germany represented a step backwards for LGBT rights in the East. (before culminating in a step forward in such rights in the west.) insofar as there was a large socially conservative population in the USSR, i would read this off as an artefact of its later stagnation and implosion as national chauvinism took hold. speaking personally, i would sympathise with the atomised metropolitan centre imposing its wishes over the collective self determination of petty nationalists if the result were a continued USSR.

i think you are too cozy with established traditions: a tragic reality of the world is that modernisation entails essentially obliterating such traditional ties and relationships. a substantial chunk of the divergence between China's rapid rise and India's later-and-slower rise can be attributed to the simple fact that Mao successfully declared war on the deadwood traditions of the past while India, a bourgeois democracy, allowed a more conservative streak to take hold. (Most apparent in their approach to marriage law. Indian marriage reforms began at the same period as Chinese, but while China simply pushed the reforms through, India's parliament rejected them and the minister responsible resigned in protest.) the Soviets acted similarly, particularly against religion, even if this was later toned down. all of this is a necessary part of development and (except in minor cases which can be tolerated, such as the amish) the alternatives at the national or supranational level are doom or regression to capitalism.

i think - and here i really disagree with the other anon - that new collective identities are on the whole superior to old ones. that i am a communist (even an unpopular one with atypical views) is much more meaningful than being british, or european, or white, or any of these old collective identities. this would be true also for fandom or hobby identities. i will concede that it is not all positive (i think the global Trump cult is on the whole worse than the local, often anti-american nationalist movements it has displaced) but the general trend is for a dissolution of these arbitrary group ties in favour of chosen ones, which ultimately makes uniting the workers of the world easier rather than harder. (not for nothing are socialism and communism more popular than any time since the fall of the USSR, despite socialists and communists themselves being no better at organising.)

finally, despite all of this, as a practical measure i am also basically sympathetic to localism. i think most localities will be subject to economic and technological pressures that will pull them in a certain direction (certainly this is what the Swiss experience would suggest) but, as the amish show, some are willing to pay those costs. this coheres with the prior point about new collective identities because there is a strong case for both: day-to-day services are delivered locally and you have to be able to live with the people around you, while higher-level interests and relationships are distributed all over the place (e.g. we are discussing socialism and communism right now). in such a world, a strong central monoculture controlled by a strong central authority ceases to be necessary, even if the result is bipolar collectivism rather than vulgar individualism.

>>2879095
the birth control pill is the technological achievement.
your example makes my point: we invented the triple whopper, people got fat, and despite a lot of self-righteous fat-shaming, obesity rates went up and up and up until we invented Ozempic, at which point they started to fall back. insofar as adopting their views would've avoided a lot of ineffective nastiness, fat-rights activists were correct. yes yes, you can go "but they don't like ozempic!!" and pull up some nutter. you can find any crazy person on the internet! you're talking to a communist who thinks real neoliberalism has never been tried!

>>2879109
a point to make regarding cosmopolitanism is that while china may not have embraced the standard human-rights liberalism package, it is china and not america which goes out to argue for free trade and international rules and norms today, while it is america that does its damnedest to undermine these things.

>>2879114
>the birth control pill is the technological achievement.

the triple wopper is the tehcnololgical achievement

i'm at the point now where i'm just done with middle-class white guys in terms of listening to their political views and giving them the benefit of the doubt, they're all conservative by default until they prove otherwise. and honestly they've been hogging the soapbox and being at the center of western political discourse for long enough, i'm tired of always hearing the middle class white guy's myopic hot takes about everything.

>>2879119
i'm giving you a (you) only because your inability to read or spell does more to justify my worldview than a chart ever could.

>>2879123
you've said nothing beyond "be socially liberal because of birth control "technology" "
what a retarded fucking take that can be applied to literally anything

>>2879121
no one else is taken serioiusly anymore this isn't 2020

>>2879114

it's not fast food portion sizes causing the united states increased obesity rates you white liberal reddit moron, it's poverty. that's all it is, poverty. any time people talk about the "obesity epidemic" or the "drug abuse epidemic" what they are really talking about is economic inequality and they're shifting the blame for consequences of poverty onto the poor and their consumer choices instead of the system.

>>2879119
unironically, the technical and social achievement to create an agricultural operation which produces at great scale to feed into a food processing industry which preserves food with such efficiency that the base ingredients for a hamburger can be transported to basically anywhere in the US and assembled into a burger of your choice is a big technological achievement.

>>2879132
cool now show how that has anything to do with promoting morbid obesity

>>2879130
the idea that the whopper is the underlying cause of obesity is >>2879095 's idea, not mine. i simply ran with it to illustrate the more pertinent point: rates went up and up and up until a technology was invented that eliminated the problem. it is precisely against an attitude of blaming the individual that i made such a point. (whether the cause is poverty or magic burgers doesn't matter so much: did bullying fat people work at stopping the rate from growing? no. did ozempic? yes.)

that said: i think "poverty" is too easy an explanation. while i think poverty is a major cause of US obesity, i do not believe that 40% of americans are impoverished. i will stick with UK numbers, which i know better, to show that there's still a lot to explain.
in the UK, 28% of men in the least deprived areas are obese compared with 34% of men in the most deprived areas (and the UK is very segregated by area) so there is a correlation between obesity and poverty, but the ~6% gap isn't very impressive compared to the high "base" rate, while the most obese male group by employment category (30% obese) is actually petit bourgeois small employers.

bourgeois liberals are incapable of empathy and understanding poverty, so they have utterly braindead takes about things like substance abuse and obesity. they can't comprehend the fact that a significant percentage of americans are poor and live in shitty third world areas with no resources or opportunities and their lives are miserable and they're always stressed out about money and struggling to survive and when they're not busy working and being exploited at some grueling low-paying job they're drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and eating junk food to take the pain away.

>>2879146
the point isn't that the wopper is the underlying cause of obesity but that "support liberalism because liberal ideas led to X random technology" is udderly retarded and can be applied to anything imaginable

>>2879147
on the contrary i fully sympathise with this, which is precisely why i emphasised that obesity rates are determined by forces far above the individual. do not misinterpret my point about poverty being an "easy" explanation as disregarding the interaction between obesity and poverty. all i am drawing attention to is that there are a lot of fat middle and upper income people too.

>>2879148
i didn't say "support liberal ideas because they lead to x random technology", you dunderhead, i said "x random technology lead to liberal ideas taking root". you have it precisely backwards. learn to read.

>>2879161
>i didn't say "support liberal ideas because they lead to x random technology", you dunderhead, i said "x random technology lead to liberal ideas taking root". you have it precisely backwards. learn to read.
ok then you're just off topic

>>2879114
>but it is not stupid
it IS stupid because it fundamentally misunderstands human existence. the idea that humans are individuals and not social animals goes against even basic anthropology. believing in the existence of god can be far more rational than believing that we are just atomic individuals

you try and try and relativize the actions of the ussr to the time in which it takes place but this partially ignores how the ussr liberalized over time and accepted more western influence not just socially but also economically. the ussr's dissolution was not a nationalistic gesture but rather a concession to globalistic liberalism. the move was greatly unpopular amongst the actual populace. we are forgetting as well how china is still socially conservative compared to the west and despite what happened in the cultural revolution, confuscianism is still very much latently present within chinese culture compared to here. we now see as well the government of china encouraging and celebrating chinese traditions such as tai chi. in my opinion a lot of the excesses of the cultural revolution came down to a conceit that eventually gave way for a more mature understanding of cultural expression. i think a similar happened with the ussr. in both cases they had this initial conception that as marxists they should be militant atheists that curb against superstition but with time they realized that these things were not actually as necessary to curb as they initially thought. they also initially identified more strongly with an idea of a world revolution and seeing themselves first and foremost as communist until eventually they settled on socialism in one country. western leftists are still in the former stage of ideological development where we still hang on to these overly cosmopolitan pretensions but i am not convinced these pretensions actually hold lasting weight. as i already pointed out, the erosion of many traditions is not merely a "tragedy of modernity" but a product of capital's deterritorialization. if that is eliminated there is no reason to assume that it would still be an ongoing affair. this would be to superimpose a whig history abstracted from the actual relations of production

i also dont believe in necessarily clinging to old collective identities, and indeed i think in the future new collectivities may develop (but at the same time, these may not at all be manifest as some humanism abstracted from nation and locality). i just dont see such a deep dichotomy, and in some cases there may be ironic turns where something that integrates older traditions ends up having the last laugh. personally i dont identify too much with any already established tradition, but i am skeptical of the sexual revolution and interested in establishing my own new tradition that might incorporate some practices and ideas of the past. i also dont think such economic and technological pressures are always as necessary as you might think. as i said technological development is not at all linear (the development of birth control did not at all happen in a vacuum), and a municipalist form of governance would likely only further enforce local identities, and maybe even lead to the organic development of new ones

btw i think the real reason why socialism has been more popular has not been the increased acceptance of neoliberalism. as you had already pointed out there has been a growth in the trump cult and hyper-nationalistic right wing sentiment within the west. moreover, there are a lot of democratic socialist in america that take patriotic postures which nevertheless resonate with a lot of people. the real reason that socialism has become more popular has been the success of china. we are all seeing what china is doing and how it is working, and people are being tempted to try and emulate those economic policies. china meanwhile, although it has a cosmopolitan geopolitics, when it comes to national politics it is still relatively socially conservative. it is largely indifferent to many of the trends that have become the rage in the west

>>2879161
not that other anon the whopper example actually really emphasizes my point about the idea of linear technological progress being absurd. in a socialist governance, whoppers would never get developed and the government would largely ban their production as it is a product that is largely predatory. the development of the whopper and subsequently ozempic is a product of the capitalist mode of production, first the exploitative tendencies of the fast food sector, and then the cynical movement of the medical industrial complex to create a cheat solution for the underlying problem, you can not divorce technological progress from cultural determinateness and material relations of production as again it paints an abstract narrative of progress that overshadows actual particular realities

>>2879147
>they can't comprehend the fact that a significant percentage of americans are poor and live in shitty third world areas with no resources or opportunities and their lives are miserable and they're always stressed out about money and struggling to survive
This is why I assume all the first worldists bitching about their being no proletariat in Burgeria are just the sheltered failsons of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie who only interact with other suburboids and think the rest of the country is as annoying as their peer group. It's a fairly standard r9k normie resentment complex with some marxist jargon attached to it.

>>2879146

yeah but you see the uk didn't have this thing called plantation slavery where a large percentage of the population were enslaved black people whose descendents are now an impoverished marginalized underclass with no access to decent food or healthcare.

>>2879175
this seems to be a common trend where ever they are regardless of a history of plantation slavery

>>2879098
Im a good communist the "leftists" at my local DSA meetings, not so much.

>>2879172
Trvke

>>2879187
>this seems to be a common trend where ever they are regardless of a history of plantation slavery

it's almost as if some kind of terrible confluence of racist european empires spent the last 600 years robbing every uyghur on the face of the earth