I should make sure to say that Western prosperity isn’t liberalism the philosophy of liberty & self-determination. These are distinct things. That the longest running democracy is also an empire of exploitation is a case of multiple things being true, not the same thing.
Why does it necessitate that? I don’t think that having civil liberties & self-determination require any of that exploitation & murder. That we have those things is, I think, a holdover from what preceded liberal democracies, & a manifestation of nationalism & greed.
To be clear, I do not think that war crimes & genocides are a given. But so far in all of recorded history, we can see that they have been perpetrated by and within every system of gov’t so far. Why do we think another system, which may lack self-determination & civil liberties, would be better?
It’s not a handwave so much as that every system of gov’t that’s existed has a documented history of war crimes & genocides. So with that as the basis of our understanding, if all systems come w/ those things, is liberalism really not the best of what’s been tried so far?
Considering that every political philosophy has its own literal pile of corpes, is it useful to point out that liberal political systems have also waged war & persecuted people? It certainly seems a preferable ideology to the various authoritarian ones we’ve otherwise seen throughout history.
The UK has as much a culture of moneyed interests in politics as we do (our system is derived in large part from the UK’s). Which begs the question: what’s actually different here that ends with inaction compared to the UK & Ireland?
that is a white hot take 😆
They made a lot of mistakes in their founding era, many of which haunt us still. But to their credit, they were very unambiguous that people with the characteristics of trump must never be allowed to be president, or that violent rebellion should be met with the full force of the state
the problem in blue states is that living here is so desirable and building here is so onerously difficult that hundreds of students at like, UC Santa Barbara are effectively homeless. Blue states need to fix their housing in order to take advantage of this! bsky.app/profile/just...
Fucking RAD