Where? Where does accountability kick in? We’re all walking hypocrites indoctrinated by a capitalist and patriarchal system.

You’re not wrong BUT this is only one side of the issue. Patriarchal norms undercut men’s ability to form meaningful relationships and capitalism is making us wage slaves. The behaviors you’re pointing to are symptoms of a larger problem.

It’s not just women having the choice to marry. Women are flooded with choice through dating apps. It puts men in competition, costs money, and is overall a humbling experience. The amount of effort (and money) an average looking average height man has to expend pushes men to stop trying and focus on bettering oneself. This is where the Rogans and the Tates come in. The left isn’t speaking to these boys so the right wins by default.

Yes, there is a third option. I’m not sure Americans will take it.

This is an exploit or be exploited society. And most people don’t even have a choice. Workers will make money for someone else or they will starve.

We all agree that the system is corrupt and ineffective. Republicans subvert that truth in order to undermine the law and cut government programs. In other words, while Dems are complaining about overreach of presidential power, Reps take that same energy towards SCOTUS.

I myself am on the far left so this is not an endorsement, but rather an observation on their clever tactics.

Fair enough, I read too much into your comment

The history of these countries cannot be seen in a vacuum. Socialist countries were historically enemies of the United States. The U.S. did everything in its power to weaken them (including economic policy and assassinations) in the USSR, South America, and Asia. And then people knowingly proclaim that socialism can never work.

Yes there was corruption, bureaucracy, oversight, and abuse. Of course, there were missteps and injustices. The same can be said, however, for the U.S. today. At least the communist countries have the excuse of having to stand against the richest and most powerful country in the history of the earth. They did not have the luxury of developing an alternative system in peace.

If history were different, we would still live under the “divine right of kings” and people would argue that parliamentarianism is an untenable mob rule. So we surfs should just continue to work the land and suffer the abuses of the king and his vassals. But our course of history has proven this a lie; we know that the status quo only serves the interests of those who exploit the labor of others.

I guess the Apothecary Diaries is really good?

I’m stealing this lol

Damnit Bobby

book of warnings lol

But did you watch the video though? Chris Hedges is a legit intellectual, his YT channel is worth your time

We are in the “hard times create hard men” part of the cycle.

I’m having a hard time understanding your view. Do you think that morality is relative to each person’s view point or do you think that moral facts do not exist at all?

To recapitulate: If you condemn an action or practice, slavery for example, then this is typically understood as a moral judgment. You have judged that the practice of slavery is bad rather than good. But you said you do not believe in objective facts about morality. So, in order to understand your view, I took you to be substituting moral reasons for practical reasons. So instead of saying slavery is bad for moral reasons, you’re saying that it has consequences that are undesirable. Hence, I argued above that this is to act as though morality is objective even though you do not think it is. The analogy with numbers was meant to illustrate the salience of such a view, but it seems this is not your position.

Now on to my view. For someone who thinks that facts about the moral goodness/badness of actions are as objective as facts about the physical world the question “who decides the facts?” is erroneous. “The Earth is a sphere .” = true. “One person murdering another.” = morally bad. Even if everyone gets together to decide that the Earth is flat, this would not change the descriptive fact about the world. Even if everyone gets together to decide that murder is okay, this would not change the normative fact about the world.

Since you claim that morality is objective I would assume that you would be capable of tracing where this objectivity comes from, how it emerged, and how it stays that way.

I have my own philosophical views about why morality is objective and how we can make moral judgments. I wrote this in other comments, so I will paste them here:

“Personally I go for Kantian deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).”

“Immanuel Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis, for murder, stealing, etc.”

“Why should we think that morality comes from our own reason? In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.”

Also, if it were objective for all people, I imagine we would all know its content.

Not necessarily. I personally think that we can know right and wrong, but our epistemological access to moral facts is not required in order to think that the moral facts are objective. Again, consider the analogy with objective facts about the physical world. The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle that we did not know about for most of human history. It is only recently, in conjunction with discovering the scientific method, that we have gained access to facts about the Higgs Boson. The point is, objective facts about the world are not dependent on our ability to know them. The same is true about normative facts. Morality can exist objectively without our yet having a method to determine what the moral facts are.

While internalized racism is real, this is borderline implausible.

Ah I see. In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.

He gives different philosophical arguments for these positions in The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason. Unlike science, where we can appreciate the result without combing through the evidence, the philosophical arguments have to be understood in their entirety to see the salience of the conclusion. I’m willing to give a sense of the view (see the foregoing), but I’d rather not recapitulate the entire work. If you’re interested, I would read the following entry page on the issue. You might find Kant’s arguments convincing: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

So your suggestion is that we can keep our moral judgments out of practical considerations without espousing the objective truth of moral facts? This would lead one to act as though they believed in objective moral truths. Which is fine! It would be like thinking numbers don’t exist (perhaps because you don’t believe non-physical/abstract entities exist) but acting as though numbers exist because it is useful to do so. I don’t hold that view, but I can see your perspective.

The question of who defines morality is potentially a category error. We don’t ask who defines descriptive facts about the world. The Earth is round, that is a fact, and its truth does not depend on anyone’s opinion. It is our job to develop ways to figure out whether it is true. Similarly, there are normative facts about morality and aesthetics. Some things are morally or aesthetically good, and it is our job to determine whether it is good.

Admittedly, we have had more success with descriptive facts than with normative facts.