Look ultimately words mean what they mean in the context that they’re spoken but broadly neoliberalism is highly socially permissive. Provided, that is, one does this as a responsible member of the capitalist economy and doesn’t disrupt the market.

Like you can have neoliberals that love trans kids, celebrate pride, want more black female drone pilots etc. It is, however, not a neoliberal position say compare the number of vacant properties to the number of homeless people and suggest that perhaps we should just take the unused houses and give them to homeless people? That would violate the principles of private property and free markets. After all: what freedom does one have if you can’t watch someone freeze to death on the doorstep of your vacant investment?

If your friends think that freedom to do that is utterly absurd and a society which defends that is fundamentally rotten then they are not liberals in the academic sense, however their substantially more leftist stance may be called liberalism in the political context you find yourselves in.

To clarify my question. What do you mean ‘actually liberal’ ideologies?

Like what are their thoughts on monetarism?private property? free association? private entities in markets? Debt and paying it, both private and state held?

If they think that the state should provide the means of subsistence of the entire populus, that property should in general be held in common and private property is not sacred, that government entities in a market are often more effective than private and/or that business should be heavily regulated to serve common good, that debts should be cancelled when it is not realistic or fair to pay them etc. Or perhaps even further afield positions like questioning nation States, police, militaries and boarders… well, then they are not in fact liberals haha.

What do they see as different between neoliberalism and classical liberalism. Neoliberalism is mostly a post-Keynesian revitalisation of classical liberal economic positions updated with modern banking practices and globalisation.

… everyone? hence my use of broadly? It has complete and utter ideological hegemony since like the 70s. If you study economics you study neoliberal economics and they don’t even bother specifying. All major political parties in the anglosphere and most of western Europe follow neoliberal ideology, even the green-left is largely neoliberal. There are basically no classical liberals left.

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

I think I misunderstood you.

See my other comment for why I think freedom is sort of a useless thing to frame anything around. At least without further clarification.

Reactionary ideologies are incoherent.

I think it’s tempting to try and be pithy but freedom is complicated. For some people freedom is an absolute, do what you want when you want. For some it is about theoretical possibilities, for example if you ask if people are free to quit there job the answer heavily depends on how someone balances theory vs practice. Others take a practical lens, freedom only counts if it’s plausible to do.

Sometimes freedom is about ideals. you are free to read all the political theory you like, you umm wont because it’s boring but if someone threatened that would you be upset? At other junctures freedom because pragmatic, “what use is freedom to read if I don’t have freedom to eat? I’ll trade one for the other” someone might say.

Some people rate permissions more than restrictions, some the opposite.

I don’t think it’s a concept we can really pin down. Everyone has their own interpretation and it’s not universally values: much as dominant ideologies often insist it is, the rise of fascism should hint that others care much less about it.

Sigh, I’ll wade into this river of shit.

Liberalism is broadly understood as neoliberalism, which is an ideological descendant from classical liberalism. This ideology positions itself as being broadly in favour of individual freedom within a rather tight definition of freedom. Namely liberals are concerned with the ability of people to read what they like, own what they like, marry whomever they like and so on provided they do this inside of a system of capitalist free market exchange.

Modern liberalism tends to frown on heavy government intervention in market affairs, which they see as representing the free (and thus good) exchange of goods between individuals. They also tend to be broadly in favour of the militaristic western global hegemony.

Criticism of this attitude comes from 2 places.

1. too much freedom.

2. not enough freedom.

(1) is people that want women bound up in the kitchen and walk around with an odd gait that makes you remember Indiana Jones films

(2) are people (I’m in this camp) who see liberalism as a weak ideological position that favours stability over justice and, in so doing, ignores the suffering of billions.

Lots of people are wrong. The stuff in Nair attacks sulfur bridges in keratine. This makes it physically fragile so you can scrape it off.

It doesn’t dissolve the keratin though.

In theory you could break it into lots of small pieces by say pointing a water jet down the drain (or plunging or whatever) after treatment. Whether this is enough to loosen it will have a lot to do with other stuff in the drain/geometry/penetration depth. It may just make a gel that plugs the drain.

Yeah but you understand the difference between the state and the people who lived there right? Like Jewish settlers came from Europe, to the place Palestinian people were and had been living in.

They have a connection to the state of Palestinian (inasmuch as it exists given differing degrees of recognition) by way of having moral rights to continue living on the land they live on regardless of what some lines on a map call it.

It challenges something people have been indoctrinated with and causes them to question their moral character.

lmfao people have been vegan thousands of years ago e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ma'arri

beans and rice are poverty foods, not luxury. Meat is a luxury food.

People read this stuff, get mislead, and get fucked up for the crime of wanting to watch a film from 60 years ago.

Using a condom doesn’t require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.

Assuming the government defs doesn’t care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you’re buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren’t expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you’re using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it’s not much of a risk.

If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can’t or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else’s by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you’re antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.

A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn’t mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It’s better than nothing, but shouldn’t be over emphasised.

But what we know for fact is that the human species is incompatible with communism

Sorry what? How on earth would such a thing even be established as fact? This is a very bold claim.

Communism has failed every time.

I’m always really interested in what people mean when they say this. Is it that no organisation that has tried has managed to realise the utopia Marx predicted? Is it that they tend to lose wars with the USA? Is it that great suffering has occurred?

What is a system that has not failed? Like it’s pretty apparent whatever we’re doing now isn’t working. We’re in a mass extinction, the climate is destabilising, homelessness and sickness exist alongside people that personally own jet aircraft.

Genuinely I would love to know what specifically you mean because I see this a lot and it confuses the hell out of me.

Hopeful aside btw. Lord of the flies basically happened once except the kids all banded together and helped each other because humans are actually extremely pro social. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn’t very fun

I don’t have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they’ve always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p