view the rest of the comments
United Kingdom
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
Defence lawyers often get asked how they can bring themselves to defend someone they know is guilty. Prosecutors are rarely asked how they can bring themselves to prosecute someone they know is innocent.
They didn't just knowingly keep an innocent man in prison (after a conviction which was dodgy as fuck even before this new evidence). They knowingly let the real offender stay free to continue offending (as serious sex-offenders nearly always do).
No concept of what their job is even supposed to be (in theory, at least), let alone any intention of actually doing it. Just get a conviction. Doesn't matter who you convict, just make sure it sticks and get your promotion.
Liberal democracy is a fucking sham. Full of nice ideas that only work (in theory) if you completely ignore power.
Liberal democracy is the best system we have - unless you want to suggest an alternative. However all systems ultimately rely on their participants to play their role in good faith. Here, a group of people completely failing to give a fuck subverted the system - and those people need to face consequences.
It is the best system that has been allowed to develop given the pre-existing imbalances of power, sure. But liberals have no theory of power, let alone any intention of redistributing it.
What is the point of a free press if the press is owned by billionaires?
How can you have free speech when power controls the platforms from which you can be heard?
What use is the rule of law if it is impossible to adequately prosecute the wealthy and too expensive to adequately represent the poor?
Liberalism is full of sensible ideas which cannot work in this reality. A reality that liberal leaderships are happy to maintain because they hold, and are beholden to, a big chunk of the power that needs to be redistributed. Umberto Eco offers a nice aside on this, in Ur-Fascism:
Punch left, pander right, act all shocked when fascism takes over.
This is a useful critique of liberalism from a Rawlsian liberal, who admits that even Rawls might not have an adequate answer: The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump. Worth reading in full but here's a click-free taster:
So your suggested alternative, is...?
Already covered.
I don't believe so.
Then you'll have to ask a coherent question.
Let me put it this way, specifically for neoliberalism:
This is as much la-la-land fantasism completelly devoid of any relation to the real world behaviour of human beings in general as the notion that humans can create and maintain a society were everybody is equal (aka Communism).
The jury is still out, IMHO, on whether Capitalism as just a way to structure trading within the Economy in Markets with genuine competition under something else defining broadly how to rule for the good of Society is a good solution, but the current variant we have were Capitalism with low-regulation is treated as the one and only "ideology" to guide every aspect of Society (not just trading) is complete total bollocks and I suspect the ones pushing for this from the very beginning were well aware of it (things like "home economicus" which is the model of a human upon which the whole edifice of Free Market Theories was built, have long been proven to be unrepresentative of real human behaviour).
There's no grand conspiracy and there is no set of rules that will tame the beast.
It's not about individual greed. It is structurally inevitable. Any system which relies on power being in the hands of saintly individuals is doomed to fail.
Power protects itself because it can. Any system with unchecked imbalances of power will devolve into a corrupt oligarchy. Monopoly (the board game) was originally developed to make exactly that point.
I don't know what a genuine Marxist revolution would look like because there has never been one. And I'm not optimistic that there ever will be. The crises of capitalism which create the conditions for a (theoretical) Marxist revolution occur when (and because) labour is at its weakest.
It's fascism that wins out when liberals fuck up. Not least because liberals prefer it that way.
I don't have any answers. But I'm not going to stop looking for them.
It's not a conspiracy, its just a change of motivations for individuals and the whole changes completelly because different motivations at the individuals can result in very different emergent properties of the whole (there's an area of Mathematics for this kind of thing).
Apparently there was investment of money by some very rich people early in the 70s in things like Think Tanks which pushed out the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism (and have been shilling fot it ever since) but most of what happenned quite overtly (the fishyest part was them hidding their aources of funding) and most of whate ended up happenning was really just the natural product of human behaviour and how in a "greed is good" system many will naturally seek power as a shortcut for quick personal upside maximization.
There are tons of effects like that: for example people who see power as responsability towards other and thus feel the weight of holding power, are much less likely to seek it than those who feel no weight of responsability whatsoever and just want it to benefit themselves. Interestingly enough there was a study published in the Harvard Business Review some years ago showing something related to that: specifically they discovered that companies led by people who had not got the CEO position by seeking it (for example, the second in line getting the position because the CEO died in an accident) performed better than those with CEOs who had activelly sought that position.
The point being that if structurally you put personal upside maximization at the core of decision making, given human nature you're going to naturally get emerging properties of the whole such as widespread corruption or legal outcomes depending on a person's wealth more than guilt.
Clear as mud but I'm pretty sure I've already responded to a similar comment. Wall of text but you did ask (I think?).
The fuck is wrong with you?