'Conservatism' is neoliberalism with spikes

[BigMoaner]

Naive

Why is to niave to give any credence to obvious fantasy and stunning hubris? Show me a sensible conspiracy (if it’s sensible the it’s no longer a conspiracy) theory and we can go from there. There maybe grains of truth in all of them but those grains of truth are not a conspiracy.

I personally don’t give much credence at all what is called “reality” but I do have some faith in shared delusions. “Reason” operates in such delusions and I am happy to debate with those who share it, hence I can argue with any conservative because we share the same delusion. I can’t do that with a conspiracist. We operate with what we have and what is given to us, including some semblance of the factual.

 

[BigMoaner]

All this proves is that the people they'd previously considered respected allies were stupid. Why is this surprising?

I have always wondered at the ability of most people to excuse the most blatant stupidity, as long as the person espousing the stupidity qualifies as an ideological ally. There are people who choose the right option for stupid reasons. Then they choose the wrong option, and suddenly everyone notices, and has to explain it away.

See no issue at all with calling conspiracies stupid. Incoherent, fantasy made up to provide emotional satisfaction to the thinker. What’s to like? If we start giving such shite credence then “truth” will empty of all meaning far more than it already has.

 

[BigMoaner]

That's a name I haven't heard in a while. Ivan Karamazov goes on the piss with Arnold Schopenhauer, hilarity ensues.

Tbf he's vastly under-rated, not to say ignored. I think it's because he had a cup of tea with the Iron Guard in 1923.

He’s an nihilist extremist which is actually his amazing strength. He doesn’t tell the readers but there’s incredible healing and beauty in his message too. Fundamentally a religious man I reckon in all but name, but he keeps that hidden too. One of my favs and go toos if I need guidance lol

 

[BigMoaner]

All this proves is that the people they'd previously considered respected allies were stupid. Why is this surprising?

I have always wondered at the ability of most people to excuse the most blatant stupidity, as long as the person espousing the stupidity qualifies as an ideological ally. There are people who choose the right option for stupid reasons. Then they choose the wrong option, and suddenly everyone notices, and has to explain it away.

Always like to bring this down to two mates talking to each other. One would pull up the other and say stop talking shite. A lot of people don’t scale this out though.

 

[RD2003]

“[Happiness] cannot be characterised by the Logic of optimisation. What characterises happiness is that it is not at one’s disposal” Byung Chul Han

Read that then look out into the neoliberal world and see the hamster wheels spinning. I’m on my own one as we speak. It’s a cruel kind of slavery, a trick.

The most thoughtful on the right will also be seeing this, I hope.

No matter what your political views, the trouble comes when you realise that all you've ever believed in, should it come about, can only result in a gross caricature of what you spent your life anticipating. And that there is no escape from this inevitability-it's the experience of humanity since ideology became 'a thing.'

 

[BigMoaner]

No matter what your political views, the trouble comes when you realise that all you've ever believed in, should it come about, can only result in a gross caricature of what you spent your life anticipating. And that there is no escape from this inevitability-it's the experience of humanity since ideology became 'a thing.'

Or if it comes about, it will lead to 10,000 (infinite?) other problems with it.

 

[RD2003]

All this proves is that the people they'd previously considered respected allies were stupid. Why is this surprising?

I have always wondered at the ability of most people to excuse the most blatant stupidity, as long as the person espousing the stupidity qualifies as an ideological ally. There are people who choose the right option for stupid reasons. Then they choose the wrong option, and suddenly everyone notices, and has to explain it away.

I suppose it isn't surprising when you've reached the stage where nothing surprises you anymore. The trouble is that it takes some time, and an unworthwhile amount of agonising, to reach this stage. Some people never reach it, or else deny it when they do.

 

[ouirdeaux]

Always like to bring this down to two mates talking to each other. One would pull up the other and say stop talking shite. A lot of people don’t scale this out though.

The thing is, nobody tells them to stop talking shite when the shitetalker is supporting them, but giving reasons for that support which, frankly, are quite silly. Support is the only thing that counts. Very few people have the guts to criticise idiots who happen to be on their side.

 

[RD2003]

Or if it comes about, it will lead to 10,000 (infinite?) other problems with it.

Yes. Striving for power ultimately only means striving to take the blame when it all inevitably goes wrong, even if it might still be better for the right kind of people to be in power when the shit hits the fan. Even then, though, they won't behave like the people they thought they were, if only because it won't be a option.

(Fucking hell, I'm even depressing myself now.)

 

[BigMoaner]

Yes. Striving for power ultimately only means striving to take the blame when it all inevitably goes wrong, even if it might still be better for the right kind of people to be in power when the shit hits the fan. Even then, though, they won't behave like the people they thought they were, if only because it won't be a option.

(Fucking hell, I'm even depressing myself now.)

Hope springs eternal, don’t worry we can’t turn it off

 

[RD2003]

I am even pessimistic of these types of mainstream narratives. 'Conspiracy' as far as I can see is used to throttle democratic debate. I would say that being skeptical of power should be normal. The only thing that bothers me is when people pretend they have the whole world worked out when they do not.

I have been interested in the JFK assasination - very intriguing, I think there is something to it but I am not 100% sure. More information needs to be published. It wasn't Lyndon Johnson honest.

Conspiracy theories throttle democratic debate more than most things, as there's no reasoning with them. The main effect they have is to make people infantile.

 

[BigMoaner]

Even negation is affirmation. Even nihilism affirms something. As teh Zen masters say, "yes become unattached (without hope and desire) but don't become attached to non-attachment.

no way out. We will all keep on keeping on

 

[RD2003]

Even negation is affirmation. Even nihilism affirms something. As teh Zen masters say, "yes become unattached (without hope and desire) but don't become attached to non-attachment.

no way out. We will all keep on keeping on

There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke...

 

[BigMoaner]

i like the old hindu (I think) saying (i paraphrase)

go follow teh guru - you're fucked (you become a boring non-attached spiritual bore who can't enjoy life)
don't follow the guru - you're also fucked (attached, anxious, living in constant grasping hell)

the no way out of this some would say is the heart of Zen and liberation in the mahayanna buddhist sense.

seeing the hope in nihilism and the nihilism in hope is another way of putting it, for the individual to remember as a way of being. it certainly ends thousands of tiny voices in the mind, btu not all of them (who would want that? - boring).

 

[BigMoaner]

and yes can imagine some educated stuffy conservative following similar lines of thinking.

 

[RD2003]

i like the old hindu (I think) saying (i paraphrase)

go follow teh guru - you're fucked (you become a boring non-attached spiritual bore who can't enjoy life)
don't follow the guru - you're also fucked (attached, anxious, living in constant grasping hell)

the no way out of this some would say is the heart of Zen and liberation in the mahayanna buddhist sense.

seeing the hope in nihilism and the nihilism in hope is another way of putting it, for the individual to remember as a way of being. it certainly ends thousands of tiny voices in the mind, btu not all of them (who would want that? - boring).

In my experience, the few people I've met who imagine themselves to be striving for 'non-attachment' luckily never achieve it. They can often still be quite boring however. Usually they've achieved only an unacknowledged reconciliation with those who still strive for mostly unattainable goals, if only because they secretly continue to harbour those goals themselves. I've never yet met a person who imagines he or she is 'spiritual' and 'non-attached' who doesn't either have a private income or is reliant on the very social safety net their views often lead them close to regarding as irrelevant...

 

[BigMoaner]

In my experience, the few people I've met who imagine themselves to be striving for 'non-attachment' luckily never achieve it. They can often still be quite boring however. Usually they've achieved only an unacknowledged reconciliation with those who still strive for mostly unattainable goals, if only because they secretly continue to harbour those goals themselves. I've never yet met a person who imagines he or she is 'spiritual' and 'non-attached who doesn't either have a private income or is reliant on the very social safety net their views often lead them close to regarding as irrelevant...

They are doing it often to get a “better personality” too.

 

[RD2003]

They are doing it often to get a “better personality” too.

Quite often the 'unattached' have been the emotionally coldest people I've ever met. The interesting ones are those for whom this is simply a pose, and to observe them when it all-again inevitably-explodes in their faces can be an experience.

 

[RD2003]

Anyway, to get back on topic, sort of, I know this has been posted in other threads already, but it's interesting if only for the way it hits on our likely political future. Neo-liberalism may be on the wane economically, but its destructive effect on societies has resulted in a social legacy.

Naomi Klein’s Journey Into the Unnerving World of Naomi Wolf

After years of being mistaken for one another, Klein tried to find out why Wolf went down the conspiracy rabbit hole—and why so many people have followed her.

newrepublic.com

'The case of Naomi Wolf, however, is a multipart problem. More puzzling than how anyone could mistake her identity is how she could make the claims that she has made, and how she could ally herself with figures like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump. There’s a story here about the set of forces that guided Wolf specifically toward the conspiratorial fringe, but also a wider story about the swaths of people who have recently made similar journeys. These are the people who over roughly the last five years have gone off the deep end, as it were. “Almost everyone I talk to tells me about people they have lost ‘down the rabbit hole,’” Klein reports, “parents, siblings, best friends, as well as formerly trusted intellectuals and commentators.”

People who could once be expected to trust the same institutions and espouse similar values may now differ vastly. Klein recounts the bewildering experience of canvassing door to door in the district where her husband was running for office in British Columbia. She is hopeful when she approaches a house with solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the driveway. But nothing goes as expected. Although the woman who opens the door has long voted for the socialist New Democratic Party, she has soured on the party, which she believes has been taken over by “the globalists,” and she is not open to any further discussion. At another house, a woman in yoga pants riffs on “bodily autonomy” and “sovereign citizenship” and her “strong immune system”—all the reasons she opposes vaccines. When Klein’s husband politely reminds the woman of the dangers that immune-compromised people face in unvaccinated communities, she simply states, “I think those people should die.”

To be sure, these encounters are jarring on an interpersonal level. “People who were familiar” have “somehow become alien, leaving us with that unsettled, uncanny feeling,” Klein observes. But they’re also difficult to make sense of politically, seeming to defy traditional forms of left-right identification. One of the strengths of Klein’s book is the clarity with which she traces the composition of the “strange-bedfellow coalitions” that have coalesced since the pandemic, encompassing the traditional right and the conspiratorial hard right, as well as “alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left,” parents who are angry about school closures (and a range of other culture war issues), and small-business owners badly affected by lockdowns. What is happening here is not a process of political conversion, with onetime leftists defecting to the right—as, say, members of the Old Left did in the 1960s and 1970s to help found the neoconservative movement. Figures like Wolf continue to claim the mantle of liberalism and feminism even as they align with Bannon and Trump and claim that their peers are the ones who have betrayed those commitments; they present their so-called political homelessness as a sign of their integrity.'

 

[RD2003]

Houellebecq was right all along. For all his flailing about trying to be controversial, which appears to have led him to an unfortunate place politically, he was right about the New Age and the hippy legacy. 'Atomised,' which is likely to be the only novel for which he is remembered, hit home with me for its 'outrageous' assertion that the extreme individualism at the heart of the counterculture is easily hijacked by fascistic impulses, as I'd already heard some of its adherents expressing ultra-right sentiments even if unwittingly (New Age 'philosophy' tends to encourage air-headedness). As the above-linked article outlines, we are now seeing it, thanks to neo-liberalism's tendency to fragment societies, encroaching on the mainstream, with nobody being able to do all that much about it.

 

[phildwyer]

Conspiracy theories throttle democratic debate more than most things, as there's no reasoning with them. The main effect they have is to make people infantile.

But Conspiracy Denialists are even worse. They willfully render themselves blind about the real workings of the world.

There are still people around who believe JFK was killed by a lone nutter. They believe it because they want to believe it. There is a certain personality type who simply cannot stand the thought of a conspiracy.

 

[phildwyer]

Fundamentally a religious man I reckon in all but name

Apophatic theology innit.

 

[friendofdorothy]

How has this thread gone into theology!

Conservatism now isn't a theory. It has become a bunch of self serving -will say anything if it gets me to the top - neoliberals with more than a smattering of bullshit and conspiracy. The govt now are the most right wing and uncompassionate in my lifetime.

This lot now make Thatcher look reasonable with conviction of principals. I disagreed with everything she said but at least she truly believed in something - a smaller state, monitarism, individual responsibility.

Can't believe we are in a position where Thatcher would seem like a moderate.

 

[BigMoaner]

How has this thread gone into theology!

Conservatism now isn't a theory. It has become a bunch of self serving -will say anything if it gets me to the top - neoliberals with more than a smattering of bullshit and conspiracy. The govt now are the most right wing and uncompassionate in my lifetime.

This lot now make Thatcher look reasonable with conviction of principals. I disagreed with everything she said but at least she truly believed in something - a smaller state, monitarism, individual responsibility.

Can't believe we are in a position where Thatcher would seem like a moderate.

I kinda predict that a lot of those on the right will/are actually seeking refuge amongst left wing circles. Stick with me, lol...I can imagine "thinking conservatives", especially of the highly educated form, will recoil from Trumpism and the like and want to be around left circles. There is somethign in common there, for sure. Would thatcher, a good example, feel more comfortable in a forum of say Trumpists or Urban, lol. I bet it's the later. Thatcher is a very good example to use actually - what's her fundemental outlook: work hard, be civil, focus on your immediate community and family, take responsibility. This is actually a far different message to "conservatism" today, especially in the culture wars. She was fundementally wrong of course, with all sorts of cruel consequences, but that's not the point - the right today feel so different.

 

[8ball]

Emil Coiran my favourite.

He's a lot more fun than he's given credit for.

 

[8ball]

There is a certain personality type who simply cannot stand the thought of a conspiracy.

It involves people working together.
There's a certain kind of socialist who recoils from the idea as if it was a syringe full of strychnine.

 

[8ball]

Would thatcher, a good example, feel more comfortable in a forum of say Trumpists or Urban, lol. I bet it's the later. Thatcher is a very good example to use actually - what's her fundemental outlook: work hard, be civil, focus on your immediate community and family, take responsibility. This is actually a far different message to "conservatism" today, especially in the culture wars. She was fundementally wrong of course, with all sorts of cruel consequences, but that's not the point - the right today feel so different.

This strikes me as nonsense on stilts. That "fundamental outlook" thing was just a persona, and it worked very well as a smokescreen.
The agenda she actually lived by was to turn the human soul into an atomised husk that could only exploit or be exploited.

 

[krtek a houby]

I kinda predict that a lot of those on the right will/are actually seeking refuge amongst left wing circles. Stick with me, lol...I can imagine "thinking conservatives", especially of the highly educated form, will recoil from Trumpism and the like and want to be around left circles. There is somethign in common there, for sure. Would thatcher, a good example, feel more comfortable in a forum of say Trumpists or Urban, lol. I bet it's the later. Thatcher is a very good example to use actually - what's her fundemental outlook: work hard, be civil, focus on your immediate community and family, take responsibility. This is actually a far different message to "conservatism" today, especially in the culture wars. She was fundementally wrong of course, with all sorts of cruel consequences, but that's not the point - the right today feel so different.

Thatcher was absolute poison to communities in Ireland and the UK.

Today's conservatives may well be visiting other horrors upon the people, but whichever iteration - it's still a party of soul destroying demons.

 

[BigMoaner]

Thatcher was absolute poison to communities in Ireland and the UK.

Today's conservatives may well be visiting other horrors upon the people, but whichever iteration - it's still a party of soul destroying demons.

oh i know, for sure. I'm j ust comparing "forms" of conservatism that i grew up with waht is today. Neoliberalism began really with her and Regan. The point I was trying to make is the Tories that I grew up with that were presented in the media seem so different to what I see today. Maybe it's the medium(s) rather than the message.

Like all ideologies there's is fundementally flawed with disasterous consequences of course.

 

[BigMoaner]

Emil Coiran: "what do you do, from morning to night? I endure myself". "I sit all day and watch the hours pass. This is better than trying to fill them."

i love him so much and glad I have him in my life, tbh.