Send me bad puns. Good puns welcome too.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • The problem here is twofold: First, the American political spectrum lies to the right of that of most of the first world (though many are playing catch up now), so Americans feel the need to distinguish between liberals and conservatives far more than between liberals and anti-capitalist leftists, therefore the latter two get tossed together. Second, “liberal” in America includes social liberals, which in the rest of the world would be called some variety of social democrat, but it can also refers to classical liberals (with the right marketing, i.e Harris and the Clintons), again making distinguishing between these groups difficult. So the distinction you want is the one between social liberals and classical liberals, which is as follows:

    Social liberalism[a] or progressive liberalism[9] is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses social justice, social services, a mixed economy, and the expansion of civil and political rights, as opposed to classical liberalism which favors limited government and an overall more laissez-faire style of governance. While both are committed to personal freedoms, social liberalism places greater emphasis on the role of government in addressing social inequalities and ensuring public welfare.

    Classical liberalism (sometimes called English liberalism[1][2][3]) is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech.[4] Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.

    They’re both liberals in that they both believe in capitalism and a free market economy, but they differ on the details of what the government ought to do or not to do within said free market economy. So to directly answer your question: In North America “liberal” usually refers to social liberals, while in the rest of the world it refers to classical liberals.


  • we’d give up on cars? Electricity? Beef? Because having those things, as I like to say, your “hot showers and cold ice cream” is what is destroying this world’s habitability. It’s not just the billionaires but our demand for the shit they sell us, regardless of the economic paradigm that delivers it.

    Probably not, but we could get that stuff sustainably. I get what you’re saying, and until a couple decades ago this would’ve been 100% true, but clean energy—the thing we need for our hot showers and cold ice cream—is essentially a solved problem, and it’s being solved better and better every day as more advancements are made. Beef and other environmentally destructive consumer products are harder to fix, but it’s at least in theory possible to make them more efficiently, eliminate them or replace them with cleaner alternatives. There’s a certain amount of destruction that’s hard or impossible to eliminate, but multiple times that happens because someone somewhere doesn’t want to spend money doing things sustainably (and, more broadly, because the system selects for people who don’t do things sustainably). It’s less about everyone having a sustainable amount of wealth and more about the people most invested in the status quo (rich stakeholders) being removed from power; imagine the progress that could’ve been made towards net zero if not for pro-oil lobbying and misinformation for example.

    s the world wants more beef, the rainforest gets the axe so ranchers can graze their cattle on its ashes.

    Alternatively, the world can only ask for more beef because there’s rainforest to cut down. If an external force prevents that from happening, the people who want more beef (and the people who already get a lot of beef) will adapt. Yes, that will make beef less available and therefore more expensive, but then it can be replaced with more sustainable alternatives. First world eating habits don’t necessarily need to be kept around in this hypothetical, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to provide everyone with decent quality food; that food will just need to include more vegetables and legumes and less meat.

    Let’s say the first world standard of living downgraded just a bit, and the third world standard of living was elevated to first world standards overnight, do you think our demands of the planets resources would diminish?

    If this elevation took place under current economic, absolutely not. If, say, concurrently every vehicle and factory was replaced with an alternative based on clean energy, then with small modifications (say, more vegan food and less meat) it’s not impossible; even poor countries consume a lot of energy in 2025, and because they don’t have the resources to buy, say, solar panels most of it comes from oil instead. It’s inefficiencies like these that could and should be reallocated to sustaining the 10 billion people the world population is projected to peak at, but under capitalism it’s not profitable for that to happen so it doesn’t.


  • Industrialism is inherently destructive and exploitative.

    Sure, but we’ve destroyed and exploited enough to sustain eight billion people (and, given the insane amounts of food waste in the first world, even more than that). We’ve already cut down enough forests, taken over enough natural habitats, emitted enough greenhouse gases and generally been enough of a cancer already, so we don’t need to do more of that to survive. The reason forests are still being cut down and CO2 is still being emitted isn’t because industrial civilization requires it, but because capitalism requires it. Brazil isn’t cutting down the Amazon rainforest because their life depends on it, but because rich people’s yacht money depends on it. Removing that incentive to destroy the environment even more would do a lot to protect the ecosystem. That, not the strawman you painted, is the intersection with socialism.