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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I was lazy picking Wikipedia when everyone knows it’s got an American brainrot problem. That’s entirely my fault.

    It is true that “conservative opposition to liberalism” is a thing that has exist and currently exists, but the issue is that “conservative” is a relative term, it refers not to an absolute ideological tendency (like liberalism does) but to the necessarily relative value of seeking to conserve the current order of things. This is relative because the order of things can be different, and that changes the question of if you want to conserve it (conservative), go back to some past state, real or imagined (reactionary), or advance to some future state of greater development (progressive).

    So when liberal revolutionaries set the west on fire, conservatives were in conflict with them because the conservatives were trying to preserve the feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order that the liberals opposed. Now that the liberals in the west are no longer revolutionaries but overwhelmingly the establishment and without any serious contest, the acting of promoting liberalism over other ideologies is conservative and the old position of promoting a feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order is reactionary. The rise of neoliberalism, in particular, represents the overwhelming historical victory of liberalism over both reactionary and progressive forces (“There is no alternative,” the perfect conservative slogan).

    Of course, a political ideology can be a mix of conservative and reactionary or conservative and progressive (I’ll let you decide on reactionary/progressive), and I’d say that former pair is pretty important for understanding the ideology of the Republicans, but don’t let that exaggerate in your mind the piddling degree to which the latter pair applies to Democrats.

    Is that a better explanation? Whether this is how you personally want to use the words or not, this will help you understand how socialists use them.




















  • First of all, no one except for straw-anarchists are saying not to vote. Everyone who objects to Harris says to vote third party. Of course, some people will respond to what’s going on by not voting, but we (leftists) encourage them to vote instead.

    There is no viable risk, a plurality of people already either don’t vote or vote third party, the people like me are already accounted for since I wasn’t about to support neoliberals anyway and have already voted third party.

    So the only ones left are people who are just starting to vote third party. Let me say simply there is no way for us to just speak into existence a new voting bloc of around 15% of the population of the entire state to spoil your favored cop’s chances of winning. If things were that easy, we could have a communist President within, like, 3 election cycles. No, things move much more slowly than that because you can’t just manifest “Well what if everyone laid down their arms voted for Elizabeth Warren?” on a population like you made a magic wish.

    The voteblue philosophy is one of fear, of an overriding fear even at things that are impossible in material reality, and using that fear as an excuse to never fight for someone who is better than center-right while always promising that on some future day we will finally have something better. It’s a psychological hamster wheel, you’ll keep running on it forever and never make progress, so the only solution is to get off.