The End of Liberalism.

[Mindful]

I defend to the death your right to disagree.

But exactly who are you disagreeing with? Me? Or Theodore Dalrympe?

Oh, sorry, did you take someone else's words and forget to credit them?

Doing your gotcha games, are you?

I came here to get away from that crap.

 

[sealybobo]

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed. We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate. We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children. We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera. Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the growth of an encompassing state and transnational institutions that make innumerable decisions in politics and economics over which average citizens exercise no control. If this is the form of ‘liberty’ that protesters in Iran aspire to achieve, then any liberation is likely to prove Pyrrhic.

In a world longing for liberty, advanced western liberalism seems to have reached a dead-end. Having promised liberation from any constraint that is not chosen by the consent of the individual, we have created nations of individualists who are now responsible to no-one in particular, but simultaneously subjects of an all-encompassing state and international order. That liberalism has succeeded. It has also visibly failed. Western liberal democracies are in a state of internal crisis: by every measure, they are wealthy, powerful, and unchallenged by any ideological contender. But an internal rot has spread as its citizens feel at once powerless amid their autonomy. Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.

How can we understand this paradox?

The end of liberalism | Coffee House

It’s not liberalism that has made the rich richer these decades since Ronald Reagan. Until him America had a happy liberal middle class. My father didn’t graduate high school but has $800,000 and a pension from working at ford. Today Americans like him go to Walmart. But the republicans have told you the media is liberal when they purchase and sensor it. And they tell you it was democrats who ruined things by spending too much but the republicans spend just as much only they spend it on the rich. Trickle down. Back to the feudal Europe our ancestors tried to escape. The rich have waged war and then cry class warfare if we try to undo what they’ve done. They’ve brainwashed enough Americans to keep getting richer as the middle class disappears.

Who are you? What do you do for a living? Who do you live with? Did your parents come from money? Or have money? Do you work and how old are you?

 

[Mindful]

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed. We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate. We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children. We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera. Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the growth of an encompassing state and transnational institutions that make innumerable decisions in politics and economics over which average citizens exercise no control. If this is the form of ‘liberty’ that protesters in Iran aspire to achieve, then any liberation is likely to prove Pyrrhic.

In a world longing for liberty, advanced western liberalism seems to have reached a dead-end. Having promised liberation from any constraint that is not chosen by the consent of the individual, we have created nations of individualists who are now responsible to no-one in particular, but simultaneously subjects of an all-encompassing state and international order. That liberalism has succeeded. It has also visibly failed. Western liberal democracies are in a state of internal crisis: by every measure, they are wealthy, powerful, and unchallenged by any ideological contender. But an internal rot has spread as its citizens feel at once powerless amid their autonomy. Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.

How can we understand this paradox?

The end of liberalism | Coffee House

It’s not liberalism that has made the rich richer these decades since Ronald Reagan. Until him America had a happy liberal middle class. My father didn’t graduate high school but has $800,000 and a pension from working at ford. Today Americans like him go to Walmart. But the republicans have told you the media is liberal when they purchase and sensor it. And they tell you it was democrats who ruined things by spending too much but the republicans spend just as much only they spend it on the rich. Trickle down. Back to the feudal Europe our ancestors tried to escape. The rich have waged war and then cry class warfare if we try to undo what they’ve done. They’ve brainwashed enough Americans to keep getting richer as the middle class disappears.

Who are you? What do you do for a living? Who do you live with? Did your parents come from money? Or have money? Do you work and how old are you?

What? lol.

I could be a paid assassin, for all you know.