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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How can one tell the difference between someone who truly believes that and a redcap cosplaying as a “leftist” to wedge drive?
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.
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’s 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 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.
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.
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 to 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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Evangelicals come with serial numbers now?
I mean, how long do you expect people to participate in a game where there is no way to change the outcome for the better? People can act stupid, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid - more and more people are starting to see how this spectacle that the political racketeers and their media cronies insist on calling “Democracy!” really works. If you expect people to just bounce back from such realizations and simply “vote strategically” you’re in for disappointment.
I’m not USian… but if I was, would I go vote with you? Sure. But that’s only because I’ve had a long time to digest the fact that my vote means absolutely nothing (so-called “representative democracy” is a racket everywhere - not just the US), and would only do it out of solidarity with all the people who are terrified of what is coming next.
I’ve seen the ways that people have tried to get out the vote for this year’s election in the US… and I’m afraid to report that, so far, it’s not working - and that’s not your fault…
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.
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 consider myself a liberal.
What do you mean? It specifically says leftist, and even you quoted in reference the part that used liberal.
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.
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 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
Tankies, and those they convince of their selfish narcissistic political insanity (and antisemtism) are the bane of the Fediverse. You’re not going insane.
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.
Most revolutions don’t result in a better world for the common person. They result in warlords taking power.
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?
Meaningful change happens through incremental progress, which is what I believe OP is advocating for. Revolutionary change usually involves a charismatic idealogue who is capable of stirring up revolt in the common populace towards their own ends.
See: Lenin refusing to concede power after losing the election following the bolshevik revilution.
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.
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 refused to read more than the first sentence of a comment before replying, I thought I was exaggerating.
What about LGBTQ rights and segregation?
The federal minimum wage in the United States when it was introduced was $0.25. Any increase since then is exactly the kind of incremental change that OP was talking about.
How about any country with universal healthcare? Or do you think that the UK and Canada got our healthcare systems through violent rebellion instead of parliamentary action?
Now, go ahead and name any country that was better off after a revolution. Cuz I can think of China, Russia, and [ waves vaguely in the direction of America ].
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?
Do you think that an unconventional candidate like Bernie Sanders or even Trump winning a democratic election is a revolutionary change? Sweetie, that is change within an existing power structure, which is the antithesis to “revolutionary.”
Revolutionary change is what the MAGAts attempted on January 6th.
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
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.
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?
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.
Stop trying to divide the working class against itself.
We are all working class.
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
I am being called a fascist for voting for Biden and I am the one dividing the working class?
I am being called a fascist for voting for a left of center politician
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.
And here I’m the one who keeps getting banned from .ml for not worshipping Stalin hard enough.
When people criticize centrists, they frame it as the middle ground between universal health care, diversity and taxing the rich vs outright fascism.
What centrism actually is, is the middle ground between fascism and “if you try to lose weight you’re fat-phobic and if you don’t offer up your home to the crack-addicted homeless guy who keeps harassing your 12-year-old daughter you’re a nazi.”
The alt-right doesn’t have a monopoly on idiots. Definitely a plurality, though.
Going to need to see some honest arguments for forcing people to house sexual predators… In fact I’m quite sure there’s an amendment saying you can’t be forced by the government to house anyone on your personal property (which I do think should be lessened, or we should have more Rights to passing by laws). Sounds like you’re believing the progressive side is a very slippery slope.
See: any comment section regarding homeless encampments when the reality people in places like Vancouver are facing is used heroin needles left on their doorstep and in playgrounds and women being harassed on their way home.
I have a friend in Calgary who regularly has to deal with junkies shooting up right in front of his door and trying to get him to let them in.
It’s for people who can’t even imagine that unhoused people struggling with addiction could ever actually get help…
In their vision of the future those people stay on the street instead of getting help so they can stand in their own again. Even if they never can, them having their basic needs met makes it safer for everyone.
It’s not that they intentionally are arguing in bad faith, it’s just a total.lack.of empathy. They don’t see those people as humans that need help. Homeless desperate people are a “thing” to them, not a bunch of individuals.
I understand that addiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum and every addict is a victim of their circumstances. I also understand you should be able to walk down a dark alley while waving a wad of cash without being mugged.
At a certain point you have to acknowledge reality and say “even if we want to work toward a perfect world where people get the help they need and we don’t hurt each other, we don’t exist in that world so we need to protect ourselves and those we care about through common sense.”
Letting addicts set up a tent near a residential neighbourhood or handing over our wallets to the less fortunate guy threatening to stab us doesn’t help anyone.
Imagine, we could have a better world if the capitalists would pay their fair share. If that happened, you wouldn’t need to argue!
I didn’t think I’d have to quote myself today, but in the original comment I made which you’re replying to, I explicitly said:
When people criticize centrists, they frame it as the middle ground between universal health care, diversity and taxing the rich vs outright fascism.
I am completely in favour of taxing the rich. Billionaires should not exist, and in fact it is unethical to be a billionaire because to hold that much wealth which you will never be able to use while others are suffering is outright evil.
But this is exactly what I was saying. You aren’t centrist if you look at the Republicans and Democrats and say “they both make good points.” You’re a centrist if you look at the Republicans and Democrats and say “the Democrats are the only sane option, and even though they aren’t ideal they’re way better than the alternative and voting for them is the only thing preventing the United States from becoming a fascist dictatorship under an absolute idiot.”
Great example of neoliberalism…
Try to act like the only thing that matters is extreme social views on either side to distract from what happens when the only two major parties are “fiscally conservative”.
That’s the whole point, the rich buying both parties and starting culture wars so no one pays attention to what the rich want.
Sorry, but isn’t that exactly what centrism as I described is against? The extreme viewpoints of either side. And what’s in the middle? Typically moderate politicians like Biden who are ostensibly on “the left” but only insofar as the politicians on “the right” are batshit fascists.
But the “enlightened centrists” crowd act like centrism is the point between Biden and Trumo. Biden is the goddamn centre point.
Biden is the goddamn centre point.
Biden is only “the centre point” if one end is trump and the other is the bare minimum you want from a president.
He’s not even the middle between what people actually want and trump.
The only people who say online that Biden has been a bad president are right-wing trolls and Russian propagandists, or those who have believed the crap they spew.
Remember when the left was screaming at Biden to forgive student debt and then he… started doing exactly that? How far back have you had to move those goal posts in the last four years?
Why would Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists be “happy” with Biden and believe him to be a good president when Biden is a firm Liberal Capitalist, which stands against what Leftists stand for?
And here, children, is one of those Russian propagandists, or “tankies.” Easily identifiable by their .ml instance.
In what way? If we had a socialist president, I wouldn’t expect right wingers to be happy either.
I genuinely don’t get where you think I am doing Russian propaganda, considering Russia is a bourgeois dictatorship and not a beacon of leftism. I don’t know where you get the idea that I am a tankie either for saying it makes sense that leftists don’t agree with right wingers, just like right-wingers don’t agree with leftists.
This is just slander.
- “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.
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.
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.
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 met him 95% of the way… and failed.
That’s because the people you’re picking fights with only care about being right. It’s why the American government undergoes a political ratchet toward the right: the people pushing for radical change at all costs and the people seeking compromise are not evenly distributed.
There’s this half baked idea that keeps bouncing around in my mind, let’s give it a engagement friendly name: Scam Theory.
Scam Theory, stated simply, is the idea that most of society is composed of scams. Scams, in this case, are any relationship where a large group of people come to believe lies that harm them and others, told by a small group of people who peddle those lies because they benefit from that harm.
It’s like Category Theory, where you start to see the commonality across many disparate domains of math; except in this case it’s commonality across many different social groups, and the commonality is the cycle of abuse.
Under Scam Theory, there are only minor implementation details that differentiate political zealots and religious zealots. Given some time, I could probably think of dozen more commonalities between leftist revolutionaries and christian doomsdayers. Or any other religion’s extremists for that matter. Or people that buy into get rich quick schemes. Or capitalism. Or any other type of scam.
One of the main aspects of commonality amongst all scams is that there are the in-group, who participate and get to go to heaven/live in utopia/become fabulously wealthy/find happiness/stay young forever/etc, and the out-group, who didn’t participate get to burn in hell/get walled for being counterrevolutionary/stay poor/be miserable/grow old and die alone/etc.
All you have to do to support Scam Theory is be vigilant of scams, spread this info, and don’t be like one of the easy targets who will suffer (scams) for not buying into Scam Theory
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 right wing has spent generations embedding themselves into corridors of power, from the local school board up to and including the supreme court.
A huge number of the left wing typically don’t even vote. So then when the left do get energized but it’s not enough to stem the tide or accomplish too much, because they didn’t invest in the long game… then they start this hyper-ideological, cultural revolution style thinking. It’s exhausting.
Folks, your opponents put in the effort while you just showed up for the test.
A huge number of the left wing typically don’t even vote.
I’ve voted in every election since 2004. I’ve campaigned for folks running from City Council to Senate and donated well into the tens of thousands of dollars.
I know quite a few people more left wing than me who go farther. Salting workplaces to help organize unions. Spending 100s of hours on pro bono legal fights for the wrongfully convicted. Weekends at food banks. Months overseas providing medical aid. Lifetimes caring for adults with Downs Syndrome and children with Leukemia.
None of them get the kind of media exposure or political representation or government assistance as your LibsOfTikTok smear campaign or JD Vance book club.
“Why won’t leftists just vote harder?” is the most divorced from reality sentiment. Just painfully disconnected from the real world.
Dude, everything on the internet is fake.
