Liberalism remained slightly kinder than pure reaction — not quite so racist, not so terribly brutal to the poor — but even these commitments were subsumed by the ideology of pure competence. Bigotry wasn’t evil, it was just stupid, an impediment to growth. Health care reform and the welfare state were not moral necessities, they were the best means of keeping workers healthy and productive. The notion that knowledge asymmetries lay at the root of all political conflict was quickly transmuted into the basis of policy itself. If liberals became masters of the world due to their superior respect for facts, then education — not redistribution — was the only hope for the dispossessed. If liberals believed in climate change because scientists told them they should, then the trouble was not the metastatic excesses of capital but the failure of reactionaries to bow to empirical consensus.

Emmett Rensin, The Blathering Superego at the End of History (via dialectical-devitoism)

There are numerous flaws and omissions in this analysis, and zero real ideas for the way forward, other than, yay-radicalism, but I am glad to have seen this, and will put this here to refer back to as an example of anti-liberal views from a known proponent of political violence.

gcintheme:

I think one of the proudest moments of my life was probably almost ten years ago (that long ago?) a soldier was sexually harassing my mother at a checkpoint like they almost always do.

My father was not standing near us but he finished his check and came over and told the soldier bothering her to stop.

The soldier said in broken Arabic, “Is she your wife?”

And my father responded in perfect English “She is a human being and this is her country, not yours.”

Even the other soldiers stopped what they were doing and just looked guilty.

This is beautiful.

Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

climateadaptation:

Lol.

One reason for Karp and Tumblr’s silence? Last week Verizon completed its acquisition of Tumblr parent company Yahoo, kicking off the subsequent merger of Yahoo and AOL to create a new company called Oath.

In addition, at the all-hands meeting at Tumblr last month, all three sources say Khalaf gave a speech that shocked much of the staff. One source described the talk as “a whole bunch of terrible, shitty corporate speak,” in which Khalaf used military metaphors to explain how Tumblr could use content as “a weapon” to beat out its competition.

…Khalaf chose Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. “Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to [make] a ton of money.”

—-
Khalaf is the CEO of Oath, the guy that David Karp reports to now.

Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.

Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, cited by Thomas Edsall in The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them

Or, as Peter Beinart says, 

it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

(via stoweboyd)

This is exactly what makes me uncomfortable with both the right (which goes without saying) and the illiberal left, that has a lot of representation on this site.

altruistech:

The only people that don’t see cryptocurrency taking over cash in the future are the same people that thought the iPhone would fail because it didn’t have a keyboard, or people that thought Tesla’s wouldn’t sell.

Yes, but which one, and how will that affect the markets. I know, that’s the Ƀ1,000,000 question..