Tom Palmer’s words hit with precision: “[The American right] wants to destroy the world around them. There’s not one single principle or transcendent value. There’s just the will to dominance.” #LibCon2025
www.youtube.com/shorts/NxNSD...
“By being more patriotic than the supposed patriots, you can win that back, and you don’t have to sacrifice any liberal values to do that.” - Alexander Sikorski, #LibCon2025
"Authoritarian consolidation is Trump's true Operation Warp Speed." - @shikhadalmia.bsky.social, ISMA President and Founder of @theunpopulist.net, at #LibCon2025
"[The American right] wants to destroy the world around them. There's not one single principle or transcendent value. There's just the will to dominance." - Tom Palmer, #LibCon2025
At #LibCon2025, Francis Fukuyama exposed how Trump’s opportunism is the motivating force behind his foreign policy, rather than any principle of sovereignty.
I wanna be clear, I really enjoyed #LibCon2025! The meme is to make fun of this Abundance conference and not to denigrate the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference by making the comparison!
Videos of ShikhaCon (aka #LibCon2025) are starting to be posted. This was a good panel. Well, three out of four at least. youtu.be/hteJgUI2AEE?...
It was a privilege to hear Vladimir Kara-Murza at #LibCon2025. Here is his call to activists and freedom fighters around the world: "the autocrats are very good at cooperating with each other, and learning of each other, and taking each other’s experiences...Why don’t we do something similar?"
Text of Vladimir Kara-Murza's terrific speech at #LibCon2025, including introduction by Institute of Humane Studies president Emily Chamlee-Wright, and video:
One of my favorite moments from #LibCon2025 was Russian dissident @vkaramurza.bsky.social's powerful dinner keynote address.
Here it is in @theunpopulist.net in its entirety. Please read and share widely.
i leave a little dirt under my pillow for the dirt man #libcon2025 in case he comes around
i leave a little dirt under my pillow for the dirt man so he won't take me down
i dont know how to adequately convey that your ideology is a fucked-apart dead thing #LibCon2025
making the government paperwork more efficient can make people feel like the government is working for them -saffron huang discussing AI and liberal democracy at #libcon2025
we're fucking cooked. nobody in attendance should ever run for anything #libcon2025
last comment on #libcon2025 it sure seems like a lot of people really want to get some of that mamdani energy and mamdani campaigning and mamdani messaging and mamdani strategy without those mamdani policies
ok thats enough #LibCon2025 hashtag reading because people are getting excited by the new once-in-a-generation paradigm-shifting liberal idea of Reaganomics for fuck's sake
anyways #LibCon2025 "what is LibCon2025" it's a big conference of libs just held in dc. i have... thoughts. let's start with the critical: this was a conference of shell-shocked people who know they need a new answer... and don't have one.
conference.ismaglobal.org
oh shit it's ya girl at #LibCon2025 explaining that if blue states don't deliver on the price of housing and the cost of living the american people will be right to distrust us
...and also how incredibly frustrating it is to see progs deploy the language of social justice to distract from this
C-SPAN has now posted video of yesterday's Liberalism in the 21st Century conference, from which I did a few posts yesterday. #LibCon2025
Three people in selfie.
With two incisive defenders of free speech, @sarahemclaugh.bsky.social (FIRE) and @mchangama.bsky.social (Justitia). #LibCon2025
Yesterday Vladimir Kara-Murza spoke at #libcon2025 about Putin's tactics, and he told a story of how Putin brags about his "recruitment" skills and gave three examples (involving 3 US Presidents) about how good he is at telling them exactly what they want to hear... and how they always fall for it
I’ve been at #LibCon2025 and I keep telling people I’m on Bluesky, and they keep wrinkling their noses and saying they only get yelled at by leftist fanatics here, and it’s weird because that’s not my experience at all.
Pinker says the left needs to lay off the identity politics, and offers Italian Americans and Irish Americans as examples.
Man, I just dunno.
#LibCon2025
Liberalism is often blamed for the decline of close-knit religious, family and small-town ties. Pinker says it’s two-sided: culture and music over the past century are full of testimony to how women, young people and others felt constricted by the demands of those communities. #LibCon2025
Okay but actually I really like Pinker's answer, which struck me as Smithian. He basically said that when societies get richer they just do start redistributing, sociologically speaking.
#LibCon2025
Derek Thompson asks about how redistribution relates to liberalism, claiming redistribution is a new idea.
Condorcet, Paine, Krause, the Jubilee tradition, Sismondi, and JS Mill have entered the chat.
#LibCon2025
Two guys on stage.
Derek Thompson interviews Steven Pinker about what kind of liberal he is. #LibCon2025
My question will be: "Your progressive critics dispute that they have any particular allergy to acknowledging progress. It's not how we perceive ourselves. But to somewhat undermine this, do you think now in particular is an apt time to clutch our pearls about acknowledging progress?" #LibCon2025
Steven Pinker says progressives hate the idea that we've made progress. I think this is a phantom in Pinker's mind.
#LibCon2025
"I'm pro culture war. I think we need to get in there and fight it." - @lkatfield.bsky.social
#LibCon2025
Spotted from an attendee (used with permission) during our current panel: The Philosophical Roots of Illiberal Movements. #LibCon2025 panels are worthy of note-taking!
