“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Post got removed in .world for not being a “news source” even though Klippenstein is definitely a very established independent journalist, so trying again here I guess.
Interesting to point this out. This seems more like a liberal radicalized out of circumstance than a Marxist or Anarchist. I wonder what his course would have looked like had he channeled his energy into organizing and reading theory, would he have made the same decisions, or not?
Yeah based on his goodreads and other social media he’s definitely more of US style Libertarian or conservative. He tweeted some stuff about wokeness and DEI, some of the new athiesm junk about how athiests replace Christianity with worship of social issues, and seemed to like Elon Musk. He also didn’t seem to be fully committed to the ideology though, he had real criticisms of Jordan Peterson and he seemed to be an environmentalist. He honestly just kinda seems like a normal, if privileged, person. He has a mix of political ideas, some which don’t necessarily mesh, and is willing to criticize some of the people he agrees with.
But if anything him being someone who seemed to like CEOs, who grew up pretty wealthy, being radicalized by the industry is kinda a stronger message about how unless you’re one of the corporate elite you don’t matter to them.
Very few people fit neatly into a political label. We tend to be all over the place on political issues.
Yes and no. Among leftists, most do fit into fairly neat labels, because leftist ideology is that of consistent frameworks. Among liberals, there doesn’t need to be as much consistency because its the status quo and doesn’t need to be consistent ideologically.
Not many people are pure leftists though. We all have our inherent biases based on things like social class, upbringing, religion, nationality, etc. Just because a consistent framework is there doesn’t mean people just fit so well into it.
That’s the funny thing about an ideology being objectively logically and ethically correct. The framework of theory also consistently addresses those exact points and material conditions.
Do you have resources expanding on this? Beyond the communist manifesto?
Cowbee has an intro reading list: https://lemmy.ml/post/22417306
Thanks for sharing it, comrade 🫡
The anarchist library is pretty good if you’re interested in anarchist theory.
The FAQ is a great starting point, I’d recommend jumping around though, it’s easier to get specific answers than reading straight through imo.
The librarian picks would also probably be a good place to look, one of the recommendations there is Emma Goldman who is great.
The left-right dichotomy is not about political philosophy, but attitudes towards the status quo and hierarchies.
The frameworks are consistent and have “correct” conclusions, which means over time individual biases erode into established tendencies.
It’s important to distinguish within a political philosophy the normative values that inform it and the actual strategy, if any, that it prescribes. Especially on the left, there is an extremely large amount of common ground with respect to normative values, and what distinguishes the different tendencies almost always boils down to little more than arguing about why the other person’s strategy will actually not work and why their strategy is what we need to be doing. But like something else I notice is very rarely do people actually engage with the context of situations and they also think in very absolute terms which makes them feel like by identifying with a particular tendency they are attached to and constrained by it. What’s even more interesting to me is this common ground doesn’t even end at the left and quite frankly even the average politically disengaged individual will agree with so many of the normative values expressed by leftists, and with a thoughtful rhetorical approach can usually be made to see all of these issues for what they are.
this is all to say that the idea of being any particular kind of “-ist” in the sense that it means you can’t be also at the same time critically engaging with or even simultaneously identifying with other kinds of “-isms” has for a very long time felt extremely incoherent to me and even worse is when people try to project these labels with certainty (typically at the exclusion of other possible labels, no less, other labels which are simply assumed to be impossible to synthesize together) onto others on the basis of random public statements they have made.
Rarely. Humans can be very inconsistent due to their inherent biases and emotions. If what you say were true we would have been able to observe it take place by now.
We can and do, that’s why tendencies are well established.
I think it’s also the fact that there tends to be a ton of specific labels for different leftist subgroups too, stuff like anarcho-mutualism is similar but not the same as syndicalism, or blanket libertarian socialism, etc. That and the fact that most people will self identify as one of the moderate labels like conservative or centrist or liberal, and do so in spite of their beliefs, not because of them. People who reflect enough on their ideas and desired policies will tend to be a bit more consistent about them and the labels they use to describe them.
Definitely yeah, stuff like the political compass have been awful for nuance in discussions.
Spoken like an OG D&D player 🤌🏼
Funnily enough my only exposure to D&D was from Baldurs Gate 3. I’ll take it as a compliment though.
You know… as common as it is to label and group and classify people online, I just don’t think that generally works the vast majority of the time.
Usually people acting for ideological reasons have ideological motivations.
US neo libertarians are taught by the Koch brothers to despise all government regulation and enforcement agencies, except those that keep poor people from taking rich people’s money