I’ve been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism” and “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic” and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they’re replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling – in retrospect I’m pretty sure I could’ve built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that’s what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) – and the only reason I’m not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
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Generally true, yes. In most cases, the leftists using that sort of terminology are tankies, meaning they are explicitly pro-authoritarian. They just want the dictators to be communists (or claimed communists) rather than capitalists (despite said dictatorial communism usually being about seizing all the money for themselves anyways and often results in full on capitalism regardless, China is a great example).
So you don’t even need the word replacement thought experiment. Tankies are openly authoritarian.
People really don’t want to acknowledge that politics is more than one axis.
Like communism is the opposite of capitalism, not democracy. The opposite of democracy is a dictatorship.
And when a dictator calls their government Communist, it’s pretty much a guarantee it’s not even a communist economy anymore than when North Korea or Russia claim to be democracies.
Very true. Reading a lot of Socialist lit has made me very critical about the regular framework I see regularly posited as Socialism being a direct opposite of capitalism and being some kind of inevitable slippery slope toward Communism.
Like as a system it is very distinct from Communist ideologically speaking and represents a sliding scale of public ownership versus private ownership but never fully occludes private ownership, currency or the very basics of capitalism systemically and any one person’s veiw of where that balance should rest is itself an end point and fully formed political belief. You can believe a mix of liberal / capitalist and socialist things that are not strictly contradictory. Capitalism is a sliding scale we are just currently dealing with it’s deep unstable and predatory end. Admitting some capitalism is okay and can be made more ethical doesn’t disqualify you from the left nor does it nessisarily make you “centrist”. It also doesn’t make you automatically a fan of everything capitalist or the status quo.
The number of “That’s not Socialism! Socialism means only (posit one potential facet out of the massive cloud of policies/stances of the ideology) or " That is only the secret aim of Communists to tip the teeter-totter towards our/their goals!” is a very paternalistic view. Socialism is DEEP and diverse. There’s not a central author or even a neat handful of authors one can point to. The more you read the more internal variations you find.
People generally seem to just want an enemy to point and hiss at, they don’t want to look at things as a potential series of sliding scales or people of mixed ideological stances as valid in their own right.
Socialism requires that the workers own the means of production. So no it’s not on a sliding scale with capitalism. Those are called hybrid economies and are a concept in their own right. In fact basically all modern economies are hybrid economies.
Socialism does include many systems, but none of them are capitalist, they are mutually exclusive. They can have markets, currency, and other things, or they might not. Communism is just a subcategory of socialist society. The reason people think socialism leads to communism is because of the marxists who use one as a platform to achieve the other.
Socialism requires no such thing - most of the rhetoric which treats worker owned production as the only definition of Socialism stems from Marxist frameworks and leaves any writing done on the subject since which has fleshed out the philosophic roots untouched. There has been a lot of writing on the subject in the 200 years since . Ownership of the means of production is by no means the only form of public or social property.
Dismissing mixed and hybrid economic theory as “not Socialist enough” is more or less what I am talking about with the nature of false dichotomies. So often socialists are dismissed on this platform directly because they don’t buy into every binary maxim of all Socialism through the lens of Communist philosophy. Socialism works in mixed systems because it is kind of the political overlap of a lot of things. Where it can and does integrate into “hybrid” economies because it is not fully “anti capitalist”. It is it’s own sphere of political thought and buying in to one specific “hybrid” branch still makes one socialist. While Socialism certainly isn’t capitalist in itself and does curtail capitalism somewhat by existing in the same space it’s no more “anti” than two roomates sharing an apartment and divvying up responsibilities and resources mutually would be considered “anti-roommate”.
I am quite frankly tired of Marxists or even other Socialists trying to impose their own overly narrow definition to what amounts to a range of different socialism factions or treating hybrid socialist ideologies like liberal socialism or ethical socialism like they aren’t socialism.
Communism is also not strictly socialism. The two ideologies may be related but the definition of Communism leaves no real space for hybrid systems hence the ideological distain for “hybrids” ane why calling Communism “just a subsection” of Socialism is misguided. Marx may have coined and popularized the term but early writers who adopted the label socialist very quickly became something unique and the term essentially became the safe space of at least partial criticism of Marxist/Leninist revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology. The difference between the two that eventually emerged as literally one having a tolerance for mixed systems and one not. Only one of them is strictly anti-capitalist.
Anarchists are anti-capitalist and have little to do with Marx.
Why would you want any form of a destructive and exploitative system like capitalism to remain? I think you just aren’t happy people are calling out your pro-capitalist and reformist bullshit.
Capitalism isn’t always a destructive system, we are just living the deep end of unfettered capitalism which is. At its absolute basic having a business owner who forks over the initial investment and pays for both materials and labourers while profiting a modest amount isn’t automatically exploitation. Investment capital isn’t just big hedgefunds and megacorps. It’s literally just having any form of private ownership of a business regardless of size.
What makes capitalism exploitative and terrible is not combatting its worst aspects. Things like people being incentivized or at very least not being punished for allowing profit to be king instead of looking at business success as a many spoked wheel including a duty to worker welfare, a responsibility to the community, ethical sourcing and so on. When you have a culture of milking everything dry to appease shareholders being normalized and routine grabbing of public resources for pennies considered legitimate then yes Capitalism is exploitative but there’s plenty that can be done to literally disincentivize that system. The way the stock market works is not on its own an integral part of capitalism. It’s an option. Laws and oversight can do a lot to bring the system of exploitation into check. Inventivizing co-op and worker owned labor is great but so is expanding tax structures, government public services and safety nets and strengthening environment protections or increasing indigenous repatriation and sovereignty. A lot of that is making Government more airtight against private sector tampering.
End of the day if a business is playing by the rules and doing their bit to what they owe society then who owns it becomes much less relevant.
People love to talk about protections and safety nets enforced by governments and committees but you find in most countries with capitalism the government is corrupt including in the US and UK. They essentially do what businesses tell them to do because they spend money on lobbying and line politicians pockets. There isn’t really a way to fix this under capitalism to my knowledge.
The media too is bought and paid for by the big business players. That’s the nature of capitalism as a system. It corrupts everything.
I have a friend who has come to reflect this exact behavior to an extraordinary degree of accuracy.
It’s interesting because the near puritanical nature of their responses to nearly anything has become more extreme than even the most devoutly religions individuals. Obviously the focus of their evangelizing is very different, but it has become difficult to even have a conversation.
I’ll give you an example: I saw a new game called Pal World, which looked absurd, mentioned and was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.
Additionally, there seems to be an immense amount of hypocrisy in regards to what is good and what is bad, largely driven by what best I can refer to as their “leftist Zeitgeist.” As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?
Of course, I have a much more varied and complex set of moral and political values that likely don’t fall under a singular label… But what do I know about anything.
This is kind of like saying Helldivers 2 is bad because it’s about forcefully spreading “democracy” (pretty obviously it means capitalism) to other planets.
Yeah, it is, but it’s hugely satirical and makes blatant political statements through satire.
Pal World isn’t that deep, I don’t think there’s much depth to their forced labor system other than parodying Pokémon and slightly highlighting how the Pokémon universe is full of forced labor and isn’t that kind of funny
was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.
If this is true, it should be constantly called out. You’re shrugging at slavery?
Edit: I don’t play or care about this game. Obviously I don’t give two shits if creatures are slaves in video games as long as there’s nothing about it that makes it seem like a good idea for sentient creatures
Fiction is fiction. This is the same kind of logic that adults used when I was a kid because Harry Potter promoted witchcraft, or when the country had a moral panic because Call of Duty had their children killing people. Nothing in the game literally advocates for or glorifies IRL slavery, that would be absurd.
If you can’t parse fiction from reality, then you aren’t fit for just about anything. Movies, music, video games, books, etc. Every medium frequently depicts things you shouldn’t emulate. Even the literal Bible has depictions of slavery, rape, incest, and murder.
I guess i fucked up assuming that if someone protested slavery, it was real, not imaginary 🤦♂️
Hahaha, no worries, sorry for coming at ya so hard!
No they are protesting the slavery of pokemons by another name
If you consider the game slavery to make monsters work for you, then I guess. Problem is that covers a huge amount of games beyond palworld.
Yo dipshit I don’t play this game and assumed if someone called out forced labor then it was actually a real thing
Yeah well who’s the dipshit now? 😉
Yeah probably the person who thought words gave meaning
Wait until you hear about cookie clicker.
I don’t give a fuck if a game has actual “human” slaves, it’s not real and anyone who can’t figure that out has a lot more issues
I believe they are doing the PETA and Pokemon bit, where the Pals are enslaved, though this is a bit of a weird anecdote and not representative of the broader, grass touching left.
As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?
Watch it before you rage downvote…
The Most Dangerous Thing In The Western Hemisphere: American Liberals
That’s a no from me. I don’t need some jerk on youtube to know that liberals aren’t the “most dangerous blah blah blah.” It’s the same rhetoric the right has been spouting for years. So just go piss off with your hyperbolic BS.
It’s not hyperbolic and “some jerk on YouTube”, they have 1.7 million subscribers. Instead of remaining ignorant you could learn a few things from it. He’s a Leftist account.
Lol, thanks dad. Still not going to watch PragerU.
I mean, you’re a Dem so you’re closer to the GOP than the guy in the video. Enjoy
Not a dem but thanks for the label.
Stop trying to divide the working class against itself.
We are all working class.
I am being called a fascist for voting for a left of center politician who is not far enough left of center, and I am the one dividing the working class?
Tbh, I wouldn’t think someone calling you a fascist for voting Biden should be taken seriously. Although, as an abstentionist, I disagree with your strategy. I value other ways to act and can’t resolve myself to vote for this kind of politicians.
That being said, we have our estimates of what will actually stop fascists and what cannot. Voting, imo, is a strategy. If someday I’m not able to contribute meaningfully to the type of political endeavors I’m taking part in, I’ll probably start voting for this kind of candidates.
My own motto would be “do as you believe us best, as long as you’re trying to do something to slow down of repel the fascists. We’ll see what was and wasn’t effective later”
This is it tbh. In the vast tapestry of society we all find our own places and our own ways to contribute, and there’s never just one answer. Resistance to fascism in all contexts is a good thing.
The only thing I really challenge people on is a) a shared understanding of our history and where that’s put people today and b) the desire to connect with a community, support others and be supported themselves. Those are the pieces, the structure and implementation is up to others to build for themselves.
Ten years Biden would have been called conservative.
The only reason he’s not now is because of how batshit insane Republicans are now.
Democrats have markedly moved left on things like climate change, gay rights, and abortion.
Immigration policy I’ll agree though, that seems to be an old Republican viewpoint for Democrats at this point, which is disappointing.
I am being called a fascist for voting for a left of center politician
And here I’m the one who keeps getting banned from .ml for not worshipping Stalin hard enough.
If you’re fighting against reform and shill for China and Russia then you’re acting against all of our own best interests, don’t get mad when people retaliate over your bullshit.
This^
The more we infight the more time the billionaires have
Interestingly, Bertrand Russell made a similar argument about Marxism and Christianity, so you’re not alone in feeling this way.
I think the tendency you’re describing is real, but it only holds among a tiny minority of people, who happen to be quite loud in mainly online spaces. There’s no significant organisation of any kind that holds those views or is doing anything to implement them as any kind of policy, anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of evangelical Christians!
My advice dealing with either is to politely engage, explain your views and, if they start being rude, stop talking to them.
Bertrand Russell made a similar argument about Marxism and Christianity
Of course he did. He wrote entire textbooks on philosophy of language that amounted to “X is actually just like Y for some mathematical transformation T”.
But that’s the thing about mathematical transformations. You potentially lose a bunch of information when you transform an apple into an orange by saying “They both look like fruit to me.” And Russell spent a bunch of time tackling the problem (ultimately unsuccessfully, as evidenced by the modern state of data compression) in a way your average Reddit-tier philosophy undergrad rarely does.
Nobody making money from being a tankie doesn’t really make tankies better
Are you having a bad day or something?
Sorry, I don’t understand the relevance of this comment. I didn’t mention money and nor did OP. I don’t think tankies are better than Evangelicals, either (which I assume is what you meant). I just think the Evangelicals are more of a problem, because of their greater influence.
There’s no significant organisation of any kind that holds those views or is doing anything to implement them as any kind of policy, anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of evangelical Christians!
You’ll make it really hard to have a debate with you because I have an absolutely no idea what you’re saying.
I think you’re trying to suggest that tankies are some kind of political organization the same as extremist Christians. They are absolutely not. They have no real power they’re basically just annoying online people they effectively do not exist in the real world.
The difference is that revolutions HAVE happened throughout history, and have been successful.
Comparing a political act that has historical precedent to a bible story with no basis in fact is probably the most flaccid “both sides” centrist argument I’ve ever heard.
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So how long does it take to go from “overthrowing the new warlords” and “we have to stay this way because this is the way it is”?
Like I know you didn’t mean to, but you just made a pretty good argument why a revolution isn’t inherently a bad thing: it’s replacing warlords.
Be a use even if you’re right, and every single prior revolution has resulted in warlords gaining power…
That doesn’t mean the next one will too. And the alternative is living under a system that’s inherently corrupt and was created by warlords whose main desire would be maintaining power and preventing change at all costs.
Like, you can say you don’t want to try, but why try to talk others out of the chance to make things better for everyone including yourself?
Why shit on people who want to make the world better just because they care to even talk about trying?
Why shit on people who want to make the world better just because they care to even talk about trying?
I almost think that’s the intent of the original post. Lots of people are doing important justice work, but in some circles they are treated like traitors to the cause if they aren’t threatening class warfare.
and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
I feel like that’s the important bit of what OP typed.
OP wants to make 20 claims in one comment, and expects anyone that replies to address all 20 in depth.
That’s known as a Gish Gallop. The point of it is to overrwhelm someone with so many false claims that they can’t respond to them all.
OP is claiming that instead of people doing that, they stop and address the first untrue thing OP has claimed…
Which is apparently their first sentence the majority of the time.
But the fundamental overall point of complaints like OP, is they feel there shouldn’t be standards if you’re on the same “team”. Which ironically is what it’s like for devout religious followers.
No matter the small disagreements, at the end of the day you’re on the same team.
The left tends to have more varied standards of what’s ok, and an unwillingness to compromise personal morals to fit in with the “team”.
Most people think that’s a good thing. The opposite is how we keep ending up with fucking nazis all the time.
OP wants to make 20 claims in one comment, and expects anyone that replies to address all 20 in depth.
No, I mean that I wrote a comment with five sentences and you literally only read the first one.
For the record, I wrote that sentence in reference to the post I linked to in the body. Take this chain, for example. Or this one where someone admitted point blank to not reading a single word I wrote.
Now. It would be incredibly hypocritical of me to not respond to the rest of your comment after chewing you out for not responding to the rest of mine, so I will. I do not think it is unreasonable, if I agree with 90% of your positions but disagree with the remaining 10%, to expect not to be treated like a fully fledged enemy. I absolutely do not think that saying I’m on the same team should be sufficient to demand respect, but I do expect to be given the benefit of the doubt, and to be able have a civil discussion about why the less-drastic methods I prefer to achieve the same aims you seek are insufficient. I was not in the thread I think you are referencing.
Can I offer a little advice…? I recently started doing this myself.
If the language starts to become emotional, nope out asap. These people just want a fight, and you won’t get anything else out of them.
At best they are emotionally immature and might grow out of it some day, at worst they are trolls trying to drain your energy so it can’t be used elsewhere.
That’s known as a Gish Gallop. The point of it is to overrwhelm someone with so many false claims that they can’t respond to them all.
I’m not really sure that a gish gallop can happen in a written medium. In this case, someone could very well just make an extremely long drawn out post that addresses all 20 points. It’s not like a live chat or a conversation where someone can talk over you, or actually just raise a bunch of new points that don’t make a lot of sense when bunched together.
In this case, someone could very well just make an extremely long drawn out post that addresses all 20 points.
And that would take a lot of time and effort…
For no chance of it working, your time is just being wasted
Why comment in the first place with only a single point that has absolutely no chance of working, then?
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Meaningful change happens through incremental progress
Name one large change that happened slowly over decades that wasn’t a slow build till the dam burst.
It’s be nice if you used America, but you’re not gonna find an example.
Minimum wage increase? LGBTQ rights? Hell, even segregation took a few decades to fully go away, and depending on who you ask, it still hasn’t.
Of course we should be disruptive and protest and riot. But let’s also focus on one issue at a time instead of saying “anything short of perfection in a single step is not worth fighting for at all”
Minimum wage increase?
…
Uh…
The federal minimum wage was last updated in 2009…
What was the campaign slogan of the president who won the 2008 election? I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure his campaign wasn’t about sudden change was bad and we should move things slowly.
Besides, we’re talking about incremental change. And I guess “every 15 years” would be an increment, but Biden hasn’t talked about raising it, and trump won’t, so the best we can hope for is “every 20 years”?
Like, you didn’t get three words in before you started arguing my point homie.
You’re too hung up on labels and not on how most voters want the same stuff.
If you want incremental change with the federal minimum wage, neither party is giving you what you want.
You know, when I wrote in the original post that leftists didn’t read more than the first sentence of a comment before writing a reply, I thought I was exaggerating.
What about LGBTQ rights and segregation?
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Or do you think that the UK and Canada got our healthcare systems through violent rebellion instead of parliamentary action?
What?
Do you think the only sudden change is violent rebellion?
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Cuba. Haiti. The Chiapas. Uhh, probably brazil. I dunno, I guess my point would just be to kinda of gesture at anticolonial action more broadly, but yeah.
This simply isn’t true. Throughout history you will observe longs periods of stagnation followed by a period of rapid change. This pattern is noticable in many things but especially in human political arrangement. Feudalism didn’t decay capitalism and capitalism won’t decay into socialism
Incrementalists reject the idea of punctuated equilibrium.
To be fair, the Socialist Revolutionary Party split up right before the election, and the right-wing retained the name. The Internet didn’t exist, so the public largely wasn’t aware. The left wing program won the majority of votes, even though the right wing SRP, who did not support the left wing program, won the vote.
Adding onto this, there were 2 governments, the constituent assembly, and the Soviets. The constituent assembly additionally did not recognize the october revolution or the legitimacy of the Soviets.
Lenin then took the Bolsheviks, disbanded the Constituent Assembly, and took power through the Soviets, where they had the majority support.
All that to say, the constituent assembly election was largely a mess, and it can be reasonably argued that if the decision to retain the constitient assembly and retain the right wing SRP had witheld, the popular will of the people would not have been upheld and the White Army likely would have returned Russia to Monarchism under the Romanovs.
It really wasn’t a situation with a clear democratic process at any time, neither before or after, which is the reality of a revolution during war time, so we can only speculate from hindsite what might have happened.
To be clear, I completely understand and agree with your point. However, posts trying to convince people to vote using half-baked metaphors like these are, to use the evangelism analogy in this post, the equivalent of internet atheist edgelordism. In some ways, they do more harm than good in conveying the point.
What ultimately helped me get out of the strict revolutionary mindset were actual anecdotes and examples. The ultimate idea fueling these people is that the system is designed to screw everyone over, and in some ways it is. But you have to show them that it can be an effective method of harm reduction at the very least.
Metaphor can be helpful, but it has to tread a fine line. If it’s too exaggerated then it comes of as unrealistic or condescending.
That’s just my take on this though.
I don’t understand what you mean by a strict revolutionary mindset and how that precludes voting. Plenty of revolutionaries believe in voting. At least in countries where one party is markedly better than the other, which is becoming more difficult in the US and to a lesser extent the UK.
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Don’t worry about getting banned. You didn’t post on the .ml instances after all! ;)
Seriously though, you’re not crazy. My advice is to not get emotionally invested in any of those types of interactions. If they’re being too stupid for you, just block them. You’re mental wellbeing will thank you for it.
In the long run, blocking them just cedes the floor to them.
Outside of the word “capitalist,” literally nothing presented in the top half of the image is even political, let alone authoritarian 🙄 it kinda seems like you’re just using popular negative words against things you dislike.
“Any attempt at actual progress makes you a liberal” isn’t political? “I have a right to tell you what media you should watch” isn’t political?
What are you talking about?
You know, “Any attempt to make actual progress makes you a lukewarm Christian” is kind of a weird and ambiguous statement and seems like someone was working backwards from the starting point of being anti-leftist.
Related: one glaring thing of note is anti-leftist sentiment routinely conflates liberal and leftist together.
I’m still confused. The Tumblr OP explicitly did not do that, and neither did I. I acknowledge the difference so that I can be left of center without having to associate myself with people who think that voting for Joe Biden instead of <insert third party candidate here> makes me a fascist.
What do you mean? It specifically says leftist, and even you quoted in reference the part that used liberal.
That’s not the argument. Leftists are fine with incremental change and improvements, they just do not believe continuing Capitalism counts as an incremental improvement. If a country isn’t moving towards Socialism, concessions are nice, but insufficient to count as meaningful change.
I think a lot of this whole “liberal vs leftist” stuff here roots in defederation, creating 2 large echo chambers with some bleedover but no actual crossing over. This results in a lot of (usually incorrect) assumptions and good-faith misreadings of original points and takes.
Additionally, Leftists are usually very confident in their views and takes, because usually they have at least read some theory, whether that be Marx, Goldman, Lenin, Kropotkin, or so forth, while Liberals usually form their world views based on their personal experiences and view of the world. Some leftists are very aggressive in confronting liberal views, which in turn can push liberals away, instead of learning more.
The second comment has been removed, but the first one seems fair to me (I hope you won’t dismiss this out of hand as an authoritarian leftist, I’m not authoritarian at all). Trans people don’t choose to be trans, so calling them sinful just to endear yourself to a church member doesn’t seem materially different from saying to a regressive Mormon that, sure, black people bear the mark of Cain.
It just labels a vulnerable group as inherently problematic. It’s not authoritarian to be surprised or upset by that.
I elaborated more on why I conceded that point further down that thread. I would like to emphasize that I sincerely do not believe that being trans is sinful or in any way unnatural or problematic. Trans people have existed for millenia and history is rife with records of them. I realized that, since the person I was arguing with was not thinking rationally, I could not convince him with reason (plus, as stated in the post, it was really late at night for me (we lived nine timezones apart) and I really wanted the argument to be over so that I could go to bed – at least half of it was “fine, you can have this point, since I don’t have the energy to argue with you”) so, since I could not get rid of his transphobia, I tried to convince him, if he must be transphobic, to at least do so in the privacy of his own head.
I apologize for the insult to the trans community, and I will stress again that that concession in no way reflects my actual beliefs, but I believe it was a necessary evil.
In cases where convincing people not to be transphobic is not an option, convincing them to keep it to themselves reduces harm more than getting into a big fight over whether it’s sinful (which, since no two interpretations of the bible are the same, one cannot possibly win) and giving the transphobe ammunition with which to hate in the form of “lmao look at this snowflake”.
I think it is the juxtaposition with “lukewarm christian” that belied a sense of reverse engineering to me. It indicates a view of liberals as a degree of leftist, which is usually an oppositional perspective.
Look. A lot of people are sick of what looks an awful lot like bullshit. We’ve seen what liberal politics gets us. We see that the victories of the past were won in spite of liberal moderates, rather than with their cooperation. If you find more people taking hard line stances, maybe it is self defense against being dragged into mealy mouthed excuses about why we have to vote for leaders who support genocides.
We’ve seen what liberal politics gets us:
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Fighting to Slow and Reverse the Effects of Climate Change
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Free Libraries
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Free or Cheap Public Transit
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Free Schooling
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Free Daycare
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Free Medical Care
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Paid Sick Leave
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Paid Maternal Leave
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Border Policies That Accept Good People and More Effectively Removes The Bad
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Protections for Human Rights
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Separation of Church and State
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Right to Love Whoever You Want to Love
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Reluctance to Enter Foreign Wars
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Better Economies
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Lower Deficits
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Free Care for Chronic Mental Illnesses
But sure, BoTh sIdES baD, Vi JinPeeng the Pooh can save us! RusSiA iS wInnING thE WAr aGaInST wHiTE SuPReMaCIsT aNtI-cHrIStianS
Are you kidding? Almost none of these points are true. We have almost none of these points besides libraries which are constantly being refunded, and schools that are all but useless.
We are doing nothing more than a token effort to fight the climate collapse, no such thing as free daycare, there is not free medical care, paid maternal leave is laughably short, and so on.
We have every single thing on this list in at least some places in the USA to the point that it would be a much longer list to show every policy and example.
And you’re right, it’s all under attack. By Conservatives.
Are you trying to create an earthquake by making every Union fighter spin on their graves by giving their achievements to the people who opposed them?
Liberal is an Ideology, not a party, so if they opposed these then they were by definition conservatives.
But yes, most if not all examples of these policies was a DNC achievement. The RNC haven’t been known for much except Evangelical Theocracy, Cutting Taxes for the Rich, Creating Deficit, and Gutting Regulatory Bodies since the Reagan Administration.
Let me clear something up that really shouldn’t be this prevalent: The opposite of conservative isn’t liberal, it’s progressive. Both US parties are liberal.
Historically the USA is not a place filled with liberal policy, being conservative contradicts being liberal and being progressive absolutely is liberal. In practical examples, recent and historic, the GOP want to restrict who can marry, what bathrooms you use, what books you’re allowed to read, which gods you’re allowed to worship, and who is allowed freedom to live in which places.
The closest thing to Liberal Policy in the GOP playbook is giving corporations the freedoms to harm others and dodge taxes, by gutting regulation.
This isn’t controversial, you’re just filled with cognitive dissonance, your worldview doesn’t align with reality.
Historically the USA is not a place filled with liberal policy
Tell me you know fuck all without telling me you know fuck all
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And your solution is reverting to authoritarianism?
There are leftist ideas which don’t route through autocracy, but for whatever reason internet leftists seem to hate these just as much as they hate… everything else. That leaves many to conclude that they are more interested in campism and dumb revolutionary fan service than actual leftist ideas.
Wouldn’t these people want to choose their opposition by voting? I assume it would be easier to win victories in a liberal democracy than a Russia-like authoritarian state (which the GOP seems like they’re shooting for).
I think you’re looking at this backwards. Why wouldn’t the democrat party want to attract these voters on the left by fighting for policies they want? I assume it would be easier to win over a potential group of voters by listening to their needs, rather than insulting and blaming them.
The “left” or “progressive” wing is a small part of the people who help them campaign, vote in the primaries, and donate large amounts to them. I assume they think they’d turn off more people/support than they would gain by catering to the left. The DNC establishment (and the money behind them) are the opposition to the left (but they at least share some values, such as bodily autonomy and some domestic human rights, unlike the GOP).
Small enough to ignore when it comes to policy, but big enough to blame for losing elections.
It sounds a lot like the rhetoric of the right, black/brown/immigrants/Jews/etc. They are weak but also a significant threat. It’s just inverted. The left/progressives don’t have enough votes to listen to, but they need to fall in line.
The keyword is “potential group of voters”. The raw truth is that centrists are more reliable voters than leftists. Sanders showed this very well in the 2020 primary. His plan was to get an overwhelming number of supporters and turn out like minded people, and that failed.
Bernie championed progressive causes, but not enough progressives showed up to polls.
The whole point is that you won’t get a set of people to reliably vote for you if you don’t reliably deliver the results they care about. I think the Sanders campaign was actually a success if you consider how much he was able to engage people that generally feel unrepresented by candidates. I know a lot of people, myself included that donated money towards a campaign for the first time ever (we are in our 40s). There’s a lot of energy out there that is ready to work for sincere leadership.
- “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism”
I’ve been hearing substantial amounts of “If you’re not voting for Biden then you’re implicitly endorsing Fascism”. Perhaps this is just reflexive push-back?
- “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic”
If you’ve ever actually dealt with babies before - with one particular anatomical difference that makes changing a diaper more exciting - there’s not much about them that screams “gender” until parents make a big show of color-coding. And there’s definitely a lot of goofy phrenology-tier bullshit that goes into “Blue is For Boys and Pink is for Girls”.
There’s definitely a degree of transphobia that goes into people who are insecure about their boy baby wearing girl colors. And I’ve seen quite a few dime-story psychiatrists insist that infants can be “turned” gay based on insufficiently gendered living spaces or treatments. The most consistently crazy claim I’ve seen is that when male babies are breast fed for too long, they become “sissified”, which can range from becoming cis-homo to trans-hetero depending on who you ask.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian
Well, let’s maybe take a step back and first ask which one of these people are endorsing the bombing of an abortion clinic.
Oh my god. Tumblr’s reading comprehension is better than this.
I’m not saying your political opinions are the same as those of the right. I’m saying you use the same bad faith tactics that they do to spread them.
Namely, you both believe that nothing short of perfection on the first go is worth pursuing, and anyone who dares to pursue it is at best wasting their efforts and at worst a traitor to the cause.
I’m saying you use the same bad faith tactics
Uh-huh
Namely, you both believe that nothing short of perfection on the first go
Biden has been in office since 1973. Crack open the '94 Crime Bill, the '05 Bankruptcy Bill, and the How Does This Keep Getting Worse Every Time They Renewed It Patriot Act.
We are well past his first go and nowhere in the ballpark of perfection.
Their argument: you believe the same stupid-ass shit as fundies
Your rebuttal: YEP, SURE DO
Is the 1994 Crime Bill a religious belief?
Bringing it up 30 years later in a blatant, cynical attack on Biden? Yep.
It’s still the law?
I love calling a genocide “short of perfection”.
It’s brilliant.
If you’ve ever actually dealt with babies before - with one particular anatomical difference that makes changing a diaper more exciting - there’s not much about them that screams “gender” until parents make a big show of color-coding. And there’s definitely a lot of goofy phrenology-tier bullshit that goes into “Blue is For Boys and Pink is for Girls”.
Also, I’ve never heard anyone say that naming a baby is transphobic.
Far less the naming than the fanfare in gendering.
I think it would be less of a big deal if so many fights over gender revolve around what’s written on a birth certificate. But because that’s the battlefield, people are more reticent of what goes into creating it.
It’s of course possible to just be opposed to the meat grinder that is modern society without requiring me to be some kind of revolutionary?
And I would raise the argument that the vast majority of “leftists” are like that and are not actually revolutionary because most people can’t be bothered to be revolutionary. It’s hard work and even if you succeed, then you have to do more work.
I’m quite happy for a government to exist, I just want it to be a good one. I’m not even asking for a Star Trek utopia, just not actively evil. That’ll do for now.
It’s of course possible to just be opposed to the meat grinder that is modern society without requiring me to be some kind of revolutionary?
Sure. But people who support the meat grinder will call you one anyway.
Yeah sure but this comment seems to be from the opinion of other "leftists. Although it is actually probably from the perspective of someone who is actually centralist and have just have convinced themselves that they have a political opinion. That way they can look down on everyone and feel smug.
The right are evil, and the left are apparently religious nut jobs. Yay balance.
Centrists will always have some rationale for dismissing anyone to their left. In this case, they have decided to use the idea that pining after instant and poorly considered revolution is common to all leftists, and have used that stereotype to construct this “authoritarian religious nut” narrative, via which they can dismiss anyone who is less than content with the Democratic Party’s open hostility to the left.
Hell, just read this thread. It’s a veritable bingo card of dismissal excuses.
What I’m after is some consistency. Every time I say “hey I’m a leftist, but I don’t think revolution or temporary autocracy would be an improvement over the current system” all I get is ideological gatekeeping, litmus tests and accusations of left punching.
You have to admit, that internet leftism, and Lemmy in particular is heavily biased towards ML philosophy, and they really do not like 20th century revisionism. I just think the world deserves a better class of communist, but apparently that’s regarded as wrong think.
Not all revolutionaries are MLs. Have you heard of anarchists or any of the branches of Marxism that aren’t Leninists?
All I’m seeing here is a concerted effort to designate .ml as the new “tankie instance” to get world to defederate from.
“I oppose the meat grinder but I still need to crank the handle for a living” is some pretty superficial opposition.
I believe that’s basically everyone’s position who isn’t multi-millionaire.
Also engaging with society is not the same thing as “turning the handle”. The only people who think like that are absolutists and they are as unreasonable as the most ravid of Trump supporters. Don’t listen to them at all, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
I believe that’s basically everyone’s position who isn’t multi-millionaire.
Its a bit more layered than that.
Also engaging with society is not the same thing as “turning the handle”.
Never suggested it was. But the folks who take the most offense inevitable come back with the “My uncle’s a police officer and he’s not so bad, really” or “Yeah sure I work for Lockhead Martin but we actually help protect a lot of people!”
The internet is rife with folks who simply refuse to see the forest for the trees and cannot imagine being on the receiving end of a system that radiates its worst aspects beyond the borders.
The only people who think like that are absolutists and they are as unreasonable as the most ravid of Trump supporters
You know, I’m old enough to remember the pandemic, when folks who were asked to wear masks and get vaccines would scream “Authoritarian!” and “Absolutist!” and “Religious Zealot!” at everyone from the head of the CDC on down to the guy delivering them french fries. I never got to hear it used against proponents of the Iraq War, back when “You’re either with us or you’re with the Terrorists!” though.
The term has a peculiar usage, in my experience.
But there are still police officers and defense workers under communism. The regimes that MLs so vehemently defend have plenty of these things.
Everyone agrees that we should work towards a world where we don’t need such things, but the popular idea that this kind of thing is bad in the US, but good in China/Russia is blatant hypocrisy.
But there are still police officers and defense workers under communism. The regimes that MLs so vehemently defend have plenty of these things.
I would say anarchists don’t support these things, and there are as many of them as there are MLs on here.
Although it’s MLs building things like Unions that try to improve current society.
But there are still police officers and defense workers under communism.
There is a fundamental difference between an agency that grew out of a local liberation effort and one that inherited the legacy of 19th century run away slave catchers.
the popular idea that this kind of thing is bad in the US, but good in China/Russia is blatant hypocrisy.
Consider the shocking rise in incarceration in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the habit of cops living a city away driving in to police minority neighborhoods devoid of democratic governance, and the huge profit margins police privatization enjoys.
The profit motive amplifies all the worst aspects of the police state
I’m quite happy for a government to exist, I just want it to be a good one. I’m not even asking for a Star Trek utopia, just not actively evil. That’ll do for now.
See, that’s usually where the core political differences start to rear their head. The sort of like, revolutionary leftist, being so swamped in the failures of modern government, begins to see everything through this lens. Ahh, we need to replace the whole system, because any attempt to make it better is inevitably met with failure. It’s relatively easy to feel totally hopeless if you start to grasp, say, the history of civil rights, right. Fight for equal voting, fight to eliminate lynchings, fight for equal economic access. But then we see white flight take place, we see redlining take place, we see the public pools get closed down and we still see huge enclaves and ghettos exist with lack of economic access, a school to prison pipeline, an inability for prisoners to vote, an a specific carve out in the constitution for slavery to basically be legal as long as it’s only done with prisoners. Because you’re so focused on how everything could be improved, it begins to feel as though everything is still a total failure.
I dunno. I do just kind of buy into dual power, so it’s not a problem for me at all and this divide doesn’t really exist, but that’s where that kind of like, hopeless put upon revolutionary perspective comes from.
This rings extra true for me because many of the redfash that I used to follow (before russia invaded Ukraine and they went mask off) were actually ex-Evangelicals. Later it struck me how they’d just exchanged one fascist ideology with another.
The Nolan Chart used to be taught in intro to Poli-Sci. I’m not sure if it is anymore, but it should really be taught in high school.
Here’s the quiz (oversimplified by today’s standards), that will give you an idea of your political ideology position on the Nolan Chart.
This is basically how you get horseshoe theory, but if you come at an authoritarian leftist with horseshoe theory they’ll mention the nonsense fishhook theory.
We’ve seen Horseshoe theory in the development of several dictatorships. However, I don’t really follow how fish hook theory is anything more than a defensive suggestion to mask authoritarian progress.
Finally an explanation for a dumbass like me. The quiz might be oversimplified, but it seems like a decent starting point for what I should do my research on
It’s helpful for learning the difference between economic and social legislation. They’re displayed as two separate axes, demonstrating that political ideology is more of a spectrum that is defined by two independent variables.
Economic: More tax socialization - liberal, Less tax socialization - conservative
Social: More social liberty - libertarian, Less social liberty - authoritarian
Wild to me that people actually think liberal democracy isn’t authoritarian, it is literally the dictatorship of the bourgiosie
.ml domains always have the goofiest takes.
The owning class gets what they want while the working class seldom does.
You see how flat that line is? The percentage of the public that wants something has very very little effect on policy
The owning class (bourgiosie) has the authority to hand down dictates that the working class (proletariat) must abide by despite have essentially no influence on the nature of those dictates.
This has got to be a troll, right? A liberal democracy is by definition not authoritarian, what do you even think it means?
Nah, I agree with the original point. Liberal Democracy is only one form of Democracy, and is particularly good at resisting popular change and supporting whoever has the money to lobby. You can see in the US, for example, even presidents who win the popular vote, lose!
More direct democratic forms, whether that be direct democracy, participatory economics, parlimentary democracy, industrial democracy, and so forth are all more accountable to the people and capable of positive change that the public desires.
Despite being overwhelmingly popular, the US does not have: Legalized Marijuana, Medicare for All, Student Loan Forgiveness (outside loophole forgiveness), Enshrined Abortion Protection, and more.
Read up on the types of democracy here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy
A liberal democracy is a representative democracy with rule of law, protection for individual liberties and rights, and limitations on the power of the elected representatives.
From your link, sounds like the exact opposite of authoritarian to me. Just because authoritarian “neo-liberal” places like the USA choose to call themselves liberal democracies doesn’t make them correct.
What is “authoritarian” if not a method to suppress popular opinion and exert the will of the minority? Those are the stated goals of liberal democracy, but not the function.
Where are you getting these “stated goals”? Who is the minority, elected officials? What am I missing here?
The stated goal of liberal democracy is to “enshrine personal liberties, the rule of law, Private Property, and political freedom” via a representative government in a Capitalist state. In another phrase, it is a Capitalist state with representatives.
In practice, the purpose of a representative, rather than more direct forms of democracy, is to provide the wider public with a set of predetermined choices, not to represent the views of the public. This results in political parties that are good at fundraising being the only viable parties.
Furthering this logical chain, those who appeal to those with the most ability and interest in shaping the state will be the representatives the public can vote on. Ie, those who can convince large corporations and the ultra-wealthy to make significant donations, are the ones who retain power.
The reality is that in Capitalism, a minority controls the majority of the wealth, and this minority is the Capitalist, owner class. Capitalists lobby and advertise for candidates that do not fundamentally challenge their profits or positions, which leads us to presidential elections that appear to be a constant “lesser evil” voting process. The evil is the point! We just choose which flavor is easier to suck down, which is normally the side willing to make more concessions.
More direct forms of democracy remove this barrier.
I think I get your point, but it seems to ignore that plenty of places have successful labour parties that have the backing of unions rather than wealthy capitalists.
presidential elections that appear to be a constant “lesser evil” voting process
Sounds like you’re basing all your arguments on one particular county!
They have a point for the USAs flavor of democracy specifically. I don’t have a choice on the ballot to vote for a working class person who shares my struggles. My options are those who came from very wealthy families and have tremendous influence.
You need a lot of money and power to get on ballots and to actually win anything. So yeah we have a democracy, but we only get to vote for the wealthy who are largely influenced (or bought and paid for entirely) by corporations and other ultra-wealthy people who want policy written for themselves.
Yeah, but I wouldn’t call the USA a very liberal place at all
You know, that’s fair too. We are pretty right-wing compared to most of Europe.
I explain my comment to ilovethebomb
That comment has nothing to do with my actual question, you can’t just vaguely gesture to some graphs
The graphs and studies and comment elaborate on why liberal democracy is authoritarian.
Specifically the point I was making was that liberal democracy under capitalism is only democratic for the ruling class. It is an authoritarian dictatorship because it gives one class full authority to dictate the actions of another.
I understand how this can be difficult to grasp immediately if you don’t have an understanding of class dynamics and the history of labor. I don’t expect you to get it because of some comment on lemmy but do think about who really has power in capitalist neoliberal society.
This video is a decent entry point to my line of thinking here
neoliberal
I think this is the problem, you’re using “liberal” and “neoliberal” pretty interchangeably, right? Most people do not think ‘protect the rights of individuals and don’t tell them what to do’ and ‘let business and the ultra-rich do whatever they want’ are the same philosophy!
Most people do not think ‘protect the rights of individuals and don’t tell them what to do’ and ‘let business and the ultra-rich do whatever they want’ are the same philosophy!
They work out to be pretty similar in practice, though. Like, you can see how private property (not personal property important distinction) as a right encourages the buying up and scalping of pretty much anything that can be qualified as private property by, basically, random chance as according to the free market, right? So, the first one creates the second one. I.E. 9 times outta 10 they boil down to effectively being the same philosophy in practice.
ask informed middle easterners or south americans if they think you aint authoritarian.
or the informed people in your own homeless camps. or your own black and queer people. or your own immigrants. or maybe Assange, Snowden and many others.
What do you mean “you”? Do you think I’m an American? And do you think that I think the USA isn’t authoritarian?
