we previously had this thread but it was lost in a sitewide crash. kind of fortuitous, given all the new people!
anyways, i’m interested in how you describe yourself politically but also why you do so, and/or how you came to the beliefs that you did. be as brief or lengthy as you want in answering that.
additionally, as a preface: i would like this to be a generally non-judgemental thread and i think this community is more than capable of that, so please respect that idea.[1] in general, you are not obliged to justify to myself or anyone else why you believe what you do.
exceptions, obviously, go for bigotry or intolerant beliefs that would be otherwise incompatible with the community’s ethos. bluntly if you’re a transphobe or something like that this is not the community for you. ↩︎
In terms of the rest of the world? center-left. In terms of USA? radical left apparently
I’m in the same position on the political spectrum. I think we should have universal health care. That’s generally accepted as a basic human right in Western Europe. In the US, it means you’re literally Che Guevara.
Let us start, with the goals and axioms. All arguments must have axioms, all societies should have goals.
Axioms:
- Saving lives is a good thing.
- The importance of a life generally scales with sentience. That is, dolphins are more important than slugs, which outrank trees, and so on.
- Increasing happiness is a good thing.
- The value of happiness again scales with sentience.
- Intent matters, but so do results (you can definitely fiddle with this one to suit your argument)
Goals:
- Increase the total long term happiness in the world
So, what do we do? Well, we start looking for things that make people, animals, and others happy, especially in the long term. We’ve got plenty of data about what is good for doing that, and why. From here on I’ll focus on people, but know that people aren’t actually the only consideration.
Things people usually like:
- Safety
- Community
- Freedom
- Stability
Now, these assertions aren’t all that controversial. The problem arises when these things people like conflict with each other. The problem is when one person’s attempts at happiness and satisfaction interfere with another person’s happiness. At this point, things become very subjective. Whose happiness matters more? Why?
In general, I support the following:
- A high degree of individual freedom.
- A low degree of corporate freedom.
- Simplified laws, wherever possible.
- Strong environmental protections.
- The use of market forces to solve problems, whenever possible. This is not a blind love of free market capitalism, but instead a want to set-up markets to produce desired outcomes. E.G. I’m for a carbon cap and trade market.
- Strong social safety nets which minimize means testing wherever possible, and provide objects instead of cash, wherever possible.
- A strong US military (the reasons why get deep into geopolitics, I don’t love war, don’t misread this)
- Free education at all levels
- Strong labor protections
- Strong self-defense rights
- A high degree of subsidies for basic scientific research
- Mostly free healthcare
- You get the idea, we’re starting to get specific here.
Put whatever labels you want on me, I don’t care, I’m primarily dedicated to those axioms and whatever systems and programs are proven to support those axioms through data.
I’m rather fond of this pair of axioms regarding the rule of law:
For a law to bind anyone, it must protect everyone. For a law to protect anyone, it must bind everyone.
I see many of our modern problems as being rooted in laws and systems which neither protect nor bind everyone equally.
I can understand your desire for markets to handle things, but I don’t think the global climate can be handled that way. Cap and trade means businesses get to shift their fossil emissions around while pretending they’re helping. We already see this with companies which buy land that’s already lush with old growth, then pretend like not clear-cutting it represents a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to having planted all those trees. Giving corporate bad actors any opportunity to scam their way out of responsibility is the wrong approach.
LMAO yeah forest carbon capture offsets are total bullshit. The people who set up that system did not think it through, or at least they knew exactly what they were doing in order to let people game it.
A proper cap and trade system would require that in order to earn excess credits you must actually take carbon from the air and bury it in a non-volatile state at STP. Furthermore, you wouldn’t earn credits at a 1:1 rate, something like 1 ton of credit for every 2 tons you bury would be more appropriate. Things like pumping sewage into an old oil well wouldn’t count because you didn’t pull that carbon out of the air yourself.
Regardless of if it’s a market system or a prescriptive system, you have to make sure it’s actually going to do what you want it to do. The Bush administration mandated E85 corn ethanol become a thing and we still haven’t managed to actually make corn ethanol a fuel source in the aggregate, nevermind a carbon neutral energy source.
Would such a system work for microplastics? Honestly I think I’m more concerned about microplastics than emissions at this point. The shit’s scary.
A cap and trade system? It would be a lot harder to set one up that worked the way you intended. Plastics are incredibly useful, health and environmental concerns aside. So you would have greater incentive to try and write in a bunch of exceptions or tailor things perfectly and it probably wouldn’t work how you intended. My mind is thinking of loads of medical equipment that’s best made with plastics, for just one example.
With carbon dioxide? Well, there’s an easy way to generate credits by buying carbon, so you don’t actually have to ban carbon fuels entirely, meaning planes and helicopters will still have their place. But I would have a tough time coming up with an easy way to filter out and sequester plastic contaminants, so there’s not really a equivalency.
There’s also the problem of trying to properly define just what the fuck a plastic even is. Is natural rubber a plastic? What about epoxy? Wax? The second you come up with a hard definition for plastic every manufacturer is going to look for alternatives that don’t technically meet that definition.
Now, in my version of a carbon cap and trade market, it would focus entirely on what’s underground. You have to buy credits to extract carbon from under ground, and you’re awarded credits for returning it to under ground (at a less than 1:1 rate). The reason you do it that way is because it’s just the easiest point of control. Fewer players involved, obvious locations for auditing
Anyway, this system would have the side-effect of also making plastic products more expensive so manufacturers would look for alternative materials and/or alternative sources of carbon. Probably a bit of both would be going on.
Probably the only thing you could really do is set up a broad definition for what a plastic is, then put in an excise tax on plastic and write in exceptions for things where we really need the material.
It’s just a harder situation because we don’t have good substitutes for most of the applications for plastic, which isn’t true for carbon fuels.
Perhaps more than just the US military. A strong international coalition is needed that seeks to preserve the rules-based international order that was established in the aftermath of World War II. That being that countries can’t just invade other countries without expecting severe consequences. Ideally the UN would fill this role but I think it might be up to NATO and its non-NATO allied states. We are in a time where democracies are at odds with authoritarian regimes, and I feel like the only way we can prevent dictator-driven wars is to have an international military coalition that is strong enough to make them think that attacking other nations is a bad idea.
Walk softly and carry a big stick. Fleet in Being doctrine. A big paddle that has the word “No” on it. You get the picture.
I could get behind MEGA-NATO for exactly the reasons you described. I don’t know the authority structures of NATO well enough to say whether we really could turn it into a world police like we need, but assuming it’s given the flexibility to respond to belligerence while being on a short enough committee-leash to prevent it from becoming the defacto military of the US or some other powerhouse, then yeah, I’m all for it.
Is that achievable? Ehhhh… I don’t think it is right now. I think in order to prevent MEGA-NATO from just being the left arm of the current economic powerhouse, we essentially just need to not have one obvious powerhouse. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen though, which leads me back to just acceptingly defaulting to Team America World Police.
I prefer the name coined in /r/NonCredibleDefense for this mega NATO:
Pacific-Oceanic Trans-Atlantic Treaty Organization
Or POTATO for short 🥔
I like your reply.
I like the way you chose to frame this, especially as someone who on some level hates labels. This is fantastically precise, well thought out, and resonates on many levels. Cheers for presenting your info in this way, I think I’d love to present myself similarly in the future when people ask this question 😊
Agreed. This is the first post I’m saving on Lemmy.
I pretty much completely agree with you, but I’d like to add “the use of technology to solve problems”. A fair amount of leftists seem to think we should stop driving cars and eating meat, and of course their environmental, ethical, and safety concerns are valid. But we are humanity, the highest-tech species ever to walk this Earth. Surely we can find a better solution to these problems than just giving up and going back to the bad old days.
ooo, first to answer!
Ok, I’m a Democratic Socialist. While I strongly support the power and rights of the worker, a system of equality and equity for all people, and everything else that comes with socialism after growing simply disgusted with capitalism and how it exploits people, societies, and everything it can, I strongly support Democracy and a balanced and responsible freedom of the individual.
American here. If someone asks, I tend to say “independent”. I think folks usually assume that means “somewhere in the current political center”. What it really means is that I’m more left than the current Democratic Party. I would happily embrace a more left political party, but in the last decade I’ve had no other choice but the Democratic Party (with the exception of some local elections). Regardless, it tends to disarm people a bit. It may lead to a better conversation. I’m entirely convinced our two primary political parties completely fail to accurately represent the nuance in Americans’ political beliefs - and I think that’s true for those on the left and the right.
Anyway, I’m probably a Socialist. Sometimes I wonder if I might be a Communist, but I think I need to read more first. I’m willing to accept that maybe the market has its place, but it should be heavily restricted and completely removed from vast swaths of our society. That might make me a SocDem, but I see that as a milestone, not the end. It’s like a temporary compromise so we can take the time to find better ways to handle the industries the market continues to operate in. I’m convinced that capitalism (especially the unfettered, free market variety) is not efficient and its motives are ethically questionable. Here in the U.S. we have decided it’s ok to allow kids to go hungry because it may interfere with profits. We bail out billionaires because they’re too critical for our economy, but it would seem the more efficient solution would be to nationalize their industries.
On social issues, I’m still generally on the left. But sometimes I think virtue-signaling liberals take it a bit too far. I’m also really tired of this obsession over culture wars. Don’t get me wrong, I think LGBTQ+ rights are currently threatened and we should rightfully focus on preserving them. But at the same time, some liberals react much like emotional conservatives do over really petty shit. Sometimes they become the caricatures conservatives claim all liberals/leftists to be.
If you ask me, the most important part of modern politics is economics and the environment. I realize we can “walk and chew bubblegum” at the same time. But I don’t want to keep feeding this culture war bs. At least that’s how I feel, at the moment.
The last thing I’ll say is, I think our arguments around government budgets often miss the point. I spent time in the U.S. military. I know for some leftist circles this will make my opinions less valid. But I can’t change how a younger me saw the world. So, while in, I saw the ways in which we waste tax payer money. I think we could have a strong military while still reducing the budget. We heavily rely way too much on contractors (as in, privatization). That massive budget rarely made its way to my soldiers’ pockets or to the equipment they used on a daily basis, and that continues to piss me off to this day. The training and the facilities occasionally got better.
But man, we always seemed to get more contractors. We always seemed to get screwed by the fact that the military was limited in how it could negotiate prices for things they needed. I’ll never forget about the artificially inflated cost of printer paper. What a waste. Privatization in our government is helping inflate the costs of governing, and I feel it’s not talked about enough when our “representatives” are pretending to bicker about the military budget.
I think I’m a socialist, though I’m open to change my mind; however, due to the political climate in the US, I kinda feel stuck just voting for anyone who is even vaguely for LGBT rights, as I feel like trans people are in serious danger right now
Seriously, even the Democrats have shifted too far right for me, but they’re the only party, along with some independents, with politicians that care about LGBTQ+ rights.
Ideally, I’d like to support a human-centric approach to policy. Particularly around defining what opportunity looks like in a realistic and compassionate way. But I live in a vote left or nazi country, so it doesn’t much matter.
I’m a leftist christian anarchist in love with the solarpunk movement. That’s the quickest I can summarize my stances.
Agree on the solarpunk. I’m not good at the concept of big-picture politics, but I can be very specific on small-picture and solarpunk is the closest “label” that fits.
I guess christian socialist (or social democrat, but not super invested in that label). I generally think that we should be helping as many people as much as possible, and it seems to me like the state is a convenient way to organize that. I’m also not as opposed to incremental change as a lot of progressives seem to be, in that I understand that circumstances are dire for a lot of people so I think we should be moving in the direction of making things better in whatever ways we can, either large or small. I also think that collective, communal action outside of the state is good, but that it’s often hard to motivate people to help anyone outside their immediate social circle, and most people’s social circles are unfortunately very small and getting smaller all the time. I guess I really don’t spend a lot of time trying to put myself in a box or align with a particular movement, I just think we can and should do better for folks in whatever way we can manage.
@Alyaza has yet to answer their own question. Clearly they’re just digging up dirt on all the newbies.
alas, i got swept up in all the user-facing stuff yesterday! it’s been quite hectic, and my answer is comparatively uninteresting. i mostly just consider myself a leftist and don’t care so much for specific labels. i find principles from all flavors of leftism desirable and i’m not picky on the reformism/revolution distinction as long as it gets us to a socialist world in the end
Unique answer here but I don’t think it’s important in the current US political climate to define myself specifically.
All I know or need to know is that the answer to me seems to be left of where we are currently at. Makes my voting easy.
now that the website isn’t in five alarm fire mode i can inquire a little further of people, so!
All I know or need to know is that the answer to me seems to be left of where we are currently at. Makes my voting easy.
what would you say are the most significant policies right now where you think the consensus should be more to the left (especially that you think can eventually be accomplished with voting in the right people)? i’m sure i can guess most of these but sometimes people surprise me
I think that the obvious ones are obvious. I think that rights for lgbtq people are possible to settle in the immediate future. Abortion too. Those big issues are major reasons that the right has become largely unpalatable for people in general.
The most major reason for me is that the difference in wealth is growing. And I think many voters on the right would agree with that but haven’t identified that the right is for the rich getting richer. So while I don’t believe the democrats will fix much, it needs to be a race between them and a more left leaning party.
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Whatever is the antithesis of the American “religious right”
Generally, I tend not to dwell on the intricacies of politics, as no one fully embodies any particular political stance, be it left, right, progressive, or otherwise. My belief in reincarnation leads me to strive for leaving Earth better than how I found it. While decisions that favor the future over the present may not directly benefit me in this lifetime, if reincarnation holds true, they may be advantageous for my future self.
This concept forms the foundation of my political leanings. Any political perspective promoting discrimination against others could, in turn, affect me in a future life. Poor policies could trigger a cascade of suffering across generations, potentially impacting my future existence. At present, I find myself more naturally aligning with progressive political views, particularly those emphasizing the rule of law and accountability.
So I am a bit of a weirdo. Keep in mind I am nearly 40 and have had a LOT of life experiences and come from a very conservative and traditional area of the world which have colored my beliefs.
I have always been a strong fan of Kropotkin-style left-libertarianism (or anarchism if you want to use that label) though sometimes I vacillate between that and democratic socialism. Trying to stick to the “rules” of a label is dumb though.
However, I am also a pagan and animist due to my strong beliefs in tradition, family, military service, and the environment.
Whenever I vote it is usually for whatever party is most left without being ML.
