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What do liberals like?
I’m only told what they dislike. I even know what conservatives like, that’s an easy answer. Liberals, I haven’t a clue.
They like progress that happened in the past, and they like stories about that progress where an individual, not a movement, fought for what was right and the system, now aware that it was hurting people, changed all on its own without political struggle or mass organizing.
They like voting in parliamentary representative elections, even if every step of that election is rigged to benefit the rich capitalist class, in fact this is the only kind of democracy they like.
They like the feeling that words like freedom, justice, liberty bring. They like ideals, in fact they are total idealists who dont understand that progress should be based on more than ideas. Change does begin with an idea, but so does reaction.
They like to believe that there is no such thing as class.
They like experts and repeating the opinions of experts, and they like to not think about from what institutions and incentives exist to bestow expertise.
Given their recent electoral strategies, they mostly expect to be elected for not being Trump/conservative.
It’s an effective strategy, up to a point. “Vote for me because I’m not the guy you hate” is one of the oldest political strategies around. And Democrats have even openly said that they’ve been funding the most extremist right-wing candidates on the ballot for years to set up easy wins when people think their opponent is a nutjob. There was a lady who even wrote a book about how she won an election doing this. And then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election. Because what they’ve actually done is push the Overton Window further and further into extremism.
Ah, the leftist strategy, very bold.
At a Systemic level hey’re big fans of the only true Power being Money whilst the Vote is nothing more than a bit of loud Theatre & Clown Show that doesn’t actually control the managing of a country - or in other words, of Oligarchy rather than Democracy.
At a personal level they’re big fans of personal upside maximization with no legal, ethical or moral limits, aka Greed Is Good, or in other words, for sociopathy to be totally legal, socially aceptable and even celebrated.
What do liberals like?
Performative actions that give them the illusion of being illuminated leaders.
Liberals like good government.
Both conservatives and leftists believe the government is fundamentally flawed. People keep electing conservatives who sabotage the government to prove it’s flawed (but not in a way that would negatively effect them and their friends). Young people support leftism at protests (which are really just social get togethers) until they grow out of it and vote for conservatives because they continue to believe the government is flawed. Or maybe refuse to participate in a system because it’s not perfect.
If a liberal admits there’s flaws to the system which they want to fix, they are blamed for it because they failed to provide good government. The fact that liberals aren’t in power long enough to make the government better doesn’t matter. They’re considered failures if conservatives prevent them from providing good government.
So people vote for the conservatives to run the government because they succeed in preventing liberals from making the government good.
You know the craziest part about all this is that I’ve been given about three contradictory definitions on what a liberal is, and not one person has claimed to be one.
I’d consider that “Lemmy 101” if the subject was conservatives. They’d never know to come here to begin with, but liberals?
Shouldn’t this thread be full of infighting and opinions?
…where are they? Is this something no one wants to be?
I mean this is a leftist meme community, so I’d expect mostly leftists to be the ones responding. Just like if on a conservative meme platform you asked what leftists are, you’d mostly get conservatives answering.
But I feel like the replies to your question don’t really contradict each other. One was describing them as the Democrats in the US, which is basically accurate. It’s gotten turned into a word meaning leftist by the Republicans, but it’s basically just people who think the current system is pretty much good, and only needs small tweaks.
This amounts to effectively a support of capitalism and the free market, with some regulations being added on top of what we have now. Communism is bad though, and at most we should have some more safety nets. The civil rights movement is good now, but go back to then and liberals were the “white moderates” MLK talked about. Stuff like that disrupts the status quo too much. Since what constitutes the current system changes over time, what liberals support also will, just like any ideology evolves.
Obviously everyone here (me included) will probably be a bit biased against liberals, but also a lot of anarchists or communists or other left wing folk will have probably identified as a liberal at some point in time, and statistically still know and/or be family with a lot of them.
American leftists, perhaps. The vast majority of the developed world wants nothing to do with guns, on either side.
Even then, I don’t think that this is necessarily true. I’d probably swap that part with free healthcare, as it’s something that’s equally true across the world.
Most of the Western World doesn’t have a meaningful Leftist movement
I would heap written abuse upon you, but it’s true
Wait, why do leftists hate leftists?
It is very easy for people without a credible shred of leftist thought to claim to be a leftist.
Challenging those people winds up being an example of ‘leftist infighting’.
So… a leftist and a tankie pretending to be a leftist, in a argument, basically…
Most common pairing for that is moderate centrist and a radical liberal, I find.
Have you never met leftists?
dern leftists… ruinin’ the left
Leftists. What a bunch of bastards.
It’s a joke, but “leftist” is such a wide term that it encompasses groups which don’t really want to do much with each other, such as anarchists, bernie-bros, and ~red fash~ tankies marxist-leninists. Anarchists tend to not hate anarchists for example.
Here we go again, an anarchist calling Marxists leninists “red fash”. What country destroyed Nazism, please remind us.
u mad?
Please remind us!
Aliens!
Seriously though, I don’t know how anarchists can look at the consequences of the Perestroika, Glasnost and eventual dissolution of the Eastern Block, the millions of lives lost to unemployment, alcoholism, drugs and suicide, and still use the word “tankie” (coined to degrade the communists in support of the intervention of the USSR in Hungary when it went down that very path).
It’s precisely because we saw the path of the USSR. Because we can see that ML regimes always leads to oppression and capitalism. They’re just another way to convert poor agrarian/feudalist societies to capitalism and have no socialist potential. Terrible system.
No I don’t disagree with you! But you are still somewhat wrong! Hey social traitor, I’m splitting and creating my own leftist memes! These will be actual trotskyist memes, unlike your bourgeoisie-tainted memes!
rinse and repeat
oh fuck, this gif just made me realise now, after decades of knowing this movie, that they mistranslated this line in the Hungarian dub as “spitters” 🤦♂️ “Splitters” makes so much more sense.
It’s almost as if ideology is just some made up bullshit.
SPLITTERS
Most conservatives are able to band together regardless of whether another of them is too racist, or too capitalist. They’re able to look past flaws in that regard.
Meanwhile, we lefties fight among ourselves for not being left enough, or for being too left. It’s why there are very few leftist governments.
Nonsense. conservatives inflight and even kill each other all the fucking time. This is a myth promoted by “left unity” leftists, and “big tent” libs to force everyone to follow them.
Aye, they do, but when it comes to voting they unify.
Take the UK for example. Of our three main parties the Conservatives are, well, conservative, Labour are (ostensibly) leftwing, and Liberal Democrats are centre-left.
In the end, most of my 44 years have been spent under a series of Tory governments because leftists who don’t see Labour as left enough don’t vote out of protest, and leftists who see Labour as too left will vote Lib Dem. Meanwhile, those in the centre or on the right will vote Tory. Sure, there are far right parties here, but they’re mostly cranks and outright racists.
We only have a Labour government right now because the Tories went too lunatic and Starmer’s lot shifted enough to the centre to attract those who would vote LibDem.
Prior to our last election, I saw a whole bunch of fellow lefties going apeshite because Starmer isn’t leftwing enough, and still crying that Corbyn was fucked over (which, to be fair, he was), so much so that I genuinely feared for five more years of Tories reaming us. There was very little room for pragmatism.
As somebody who was an EU immigrant in the UK for over a decade and also lived in other countries of Europe, lets just say that New Labour are plain Rightwing (so, not even Center-Left, although the original Labour definitelly were Leftwing) and the Liberal Democrats are pure rightwing (whislt the Tories have been Far Right since at least the Leave Referendum).
The ideology of “Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement” - a “relaxed about wealth” ideology which loves privatisation and derregulation - which took over Labour is not Left of center and the LibDems have always been even more Neolibs than that.
The Overtoon Window in England (not as much the other UK nations) is way to the Right of the rest of Europe, so its understandable that many there think that when they neither grew up back in the days when Labour was actually a party of the Working Class and never saw politics elsewhere in Europe.
It’s because voting is useless. Many leftists don’t bother with voting and focus on things that actually work.
It might be useless, but ultimately it’s the only tool that the majority have at their disposal.
Leftists have never been the majority though so we can’t rely on voting to adress our issues and interests. Last time I saw numbers more Ameicans wanted a party to the right of the Republicans than Americans who wanted a party to the left of Democrats. We’re the absolute political minority yet many of our policies poll higjer than candidates from either party.
Not at all. Direct action is always an option.
Voting typically has a lower risk than trying to overthrow the government. (assuming elections are still somewhat legitimate, that is)
Direct action isn’t directly “trying to overthrow the government” It’s trying to improve one’s own life directly, instead of begging the elites to do so for you.
Oh I read that comment as you saying “don’t bother voting”, which I hope that isn’t what you meant.
The Republicans have bred a cult that makes up the core of their voting block, though. This is how Trump originally got into the primaries and then elected. He pulled the cultists away from their masters and they couldn’t control the new MAGA cult.
Both my grandfather before he died and my first boss had the same exact reaction if you asked who they were voting for. They’d look at you like you’d grown an extra head and reply, “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.”
As a Leftist there are a few types of leftists I hate
- Fake Leftists: People who think Socialism is when “government does stuff” and they just want the government to do everything
- Ignorant Leftists: People who blindly hate capitalism but make no real attempt to look into leftist theory
- “Anti-imperalists”: People who support “anti-imperialism” by supporting the other empire. These people will blindly support Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, the Taliban, Assad’s Syria, HTS, and occasionally blatant terrorism.
- Aesthetic “Leftists”: People who see leftism as nothing more than an aesthetic which they can use. They make no real attempt to understand leftism but rather then simply being ignorent they actively attempt to subvert the term. These people will say “leftism just means left of center” and use that to justify Capitalism, western imperialism, and other very non leftist ideals under the justification that “leftism has no hard definition” (it does).
supporting the other empire […] Cuba, Venezuela
Tell me you don’t understand imperialism without telling me you don’t understand imperialism (especially funny coming from someone criticising people who don’t read theory). Cuba is possibly the most peaceful nation on Earth, with the core of its international policy usually being sending doctors to countries in need. Please tell me a single imperialist act by Cuba or Venezuela.
Critical support to flawed countries is a sad consequence of Realpolitik. Do you support England and the USSR joining forces against Nazism in World War 2? Because they’re otherwise geopolitical enemies that only joined the effort because there was a greater evil.
Cuba is possibly the most peaceful country on Earth
Yup, they’re so incredibly peaceful that they have an entire Wikipedia article deticated to their foreign military interventions
If [socialist country] is so [good characteristic], how come [wikipedia article predominantly edited by people from the west, citing sources from the west].
Also funny that even the article starts claiming that it’s a list of “military and medical support”, and most of the involvements you’re seeing are support of emancipatory movements against imperialist aggression.
the worst by any margin are the leftist gatekeepers ! I hate those guys, they’re not real leftists
Damn leftists, they ruined leftism
Jokes apart, language is an important tool to express thoughs and persuade people what is better or worse. And when so many concepts get conflated in a single word “leftist”/“leftism” /“socialism”/“communism” , it diminishes the focus of conversations around it. It confuses and distracts from the ideas worth discussing.
this is a way to confuse, divide and defeat the healthy expression of ideas, debate, and by consequence, the capability of people to organize around the ideas that resonate with then.
Aesthetic “Leftists”
Absolutely infuriating. These are people who spend a lot of time on discord, closely nurturing a group of diverse people of specific ethnic or gender/sexual identities because it makes them feel very progressive but makes no effort to see their “friends” as humans and won’t hold them accountable when any of them become abusive or hassle other friends in the group. These are the college-kids who will commit all their energy to fighting a school-mascot which bothers nobody, while literal nazis march on another part of the campus. These are the ones who create campaigns to “take down” another popular leftist for saying something like the word “retarded” while actual threats to humanity rise in power. And generally just find it a lot easier to attack people ostensibly on their side than the actual challenge of fighting for actual community organization efforts against a rising tide of fascism and hate.
For these kids being progressive or leftist is entirely about preserving an in-club of specific people who can hate outsiders, but they feel they have a broader societal blessing for the exclusionary and wildly performative attitudes.
for saying something like the word “retarded” while actual threats to humanity rise in power
That one is such a sad phenomenon. I recently saw it in a community I’m in: “Crazy”. If the word was once derogatory towards a group of people, I’d say it has long since lost its teeth, while the stigma it used to express continues to exist independently of individual words. Words have power, but fighting words is useless if the power goes unchecked and self-destructive if other, worse powers grow while you’re distracted.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be mindful with your language, but maybe focus on the bigger issue first. I’m personally not a fan of people casually calling things autistic that aren’t, because I’m autistic and my need for clear, unambiguous language compels me to have certain specific terms keep their specific meaning. If you misuse it, I might bring it up (as a personal opinion type thing, I’m just as prone to error or misunderstandings as anyone else), but I wouldn’t attempt to “take you down” or anything over it while we’re both fighting people that do worse than just misuse language.
Leftists hate themselves?
Leftists ruined leftism
Leftists necessarily fall into different ideological frameworks and camps, like Anarchism and Marxism, because they oppose the existing order. These camps often have fundamental disagreements, such as Marxists supporting full Public Ownership and Central Planning while Anarchists support full Horizontalism and Decentralization.
Right-wingers get by on having irrational, contradictory stances of loose structure because it fundamentally doesn’t matter, right wing ideology is the Global Hegemon and status quo so it supports itself regardless of rationality.
I get it… the People’s Front of Judea vs the fucking Judean People’s Front.
Search your feelings you know it to be true
No just each other
As a leftist… I can’t say I see a flaw here.
As a leftist, I resent that
Hey, fuck you, buddy!
See you at the next meeting.
whats a leftist who doesn’t want guns to be legal for citizens and only for military and police? I don’t like capitalism.
Impotent.
naw it works thanks for checking though!
How do you plan on ending Capitalism without revolution?
no clue, but i am a pacifist. I’d only go to war if my country was being invaded.
In that manner, are you actually a Leftist? Morally you support the ideas of Leftism, but oppose the only actual methods of bringing them about. It’s similar to supporting the idea of everyone becoming a millionaire overnight, if such a solution does not exist it ceases to be something to support and becomes a nice dream.
i guess so. i don’t really have a political affiliation anyways
You might want to get on that!
naw, im 34, seen and read too much crap. nothing makes sense and its all lies or empty promises. like i said, i guess im not a leftist because i don’t believe that citizens should legally be allowed to own firearms.
You can be a Leftist that opposes gun ownership in a post-revolutionary status, while recognizing its necessity in current conditions.
A “pacifist” who goes to war for their country is affiliated with a political ideology called nationalism
would you not defend your country if you were invaded? i’d assume most normal people would
Does the invading country have universal health care?
The country I was born in was born itself from genocide. The first people to arrive had worked to erase a whole people, culture and knowledge because there was land and resources to be stolen.
Women were raped, children were stolen, men were killed. Even to this day, you can’t go a year without multiple stories of disgusting abuse from the federal police against indigenous people.
The same country who stuck as many of the surviving genocided people into reservations. The same country that federally determined that those same people do not deserve clean drinking water in the reservations they were forced into. My tax dollars are funding a genocide today.
And what does Canada do? Point to China, accuse them of genocide against the Uyghur people. Hypocrisy. Absolute hypocrisy.
I refuse to fight for this country. I don’t feel free. I don’t see people feeling free. I think I must fight for the people whose land has been stolen over some imaginary borders that denies me the freedom to connect with people.
The invasion is coming from inside the house.
I don’t agree with that. While it may be true in other countries, i have never felt not safe in my country.
I wasn’t talking about your personal feelings.
well sorry it’s shit for you friend.
Purchase goods from employee owned entities. Support financial transitions away from shareholder owned entities to employee owned entities.
Where has this shown progress towards undermining the Capitalist system, and then not been curtailed by said Capitalist system? It sounds nice on paper but I doubt it’s possible.
The problem is people. Greed is a human trait. You could wave a magic wand tomorrow and delete capitalism and greed would resurrect it before the wand cooled off.
You need a system that subverts greed, harnessing the human potential for selfishness to drive common social selflessness. The best answer humans have found is highly regulated capitalism and graduated taxes. This answer (and others) never last because capitalism either breaks out of jail when capitalists gain control of government, or another capitalist society physically (or politically, or economically) destroys or undermines the non-capitalistic one.
It’s kind of the same reason cancer kills: It’s really good at spreading, and really bad at stopping.
This is idealism, and has no basis in reality. You are projecting the functions and systems of Capitalism as a human problem based on individual moral failings and not on the self-propelling nature of Capitalist accumulation. The best answer is not regulated Capitalism, but Socialism, because that is when humans gain supremacy over Capital, rather than the inverse.
Well, you kind of mean Ideal Socialism. I’m saying none of the solutions humans have implemented have worked, as evidenced by the fact that the planet is not a socialist utopia. The closest we have to that nowadays are the countries that have harnessed capitalism with the yoke of socialism, and even they’re constantly fighting their own right wings that are trying to call more back for fewer.
Capitalism isn’t a thing, it’s a label for a specific human behavior.
I’m talking about Socialism as it actually exists, not some ideal version that only exists in the minds of dreamers. You really need to read some more theory, none of what you say makes any sense, like claiming Capitalism isn’t a “thing.” Economic systems are real, material relations of production.
Starts with “T” and rimes with hankie.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
-Karl Marx
Where are these anti-gun Marxists?
It might not be strictly Marxist, but it’s an internally-consistent and relatively common viewpoint that people within a liberal democracy could be persuaded to vote so that it becomes a social democracy, then democratic socialism, and then keeps going all the way until it’s communism. I saw it on reddit, so there’s room for doubt, but I’ve read that Marx didn’t think this approach was impossible, just that the starting conditions were less common, and in the era he lived in, autocratic monarchies were the default, and no major countries (based on whatever definition Wikipedia uses) had universal suffrage (if you count women as people) until ten years after he was dead.
It isn’t necessarily internally consistent viewpoint. It is common, you’re correct, but such a theory requires at some point wresting political power from the Bourgeoisie, which to this point requires revolution. This is only affirmed by the experiences of comrade Allende in Chile, may he rest in peace. The fact that it is a common viewpoint among liberals and Social Democrats does not mean it is internally consistent, nor does it stand up to scrutiny. Time and time again has proven the fruitlessness of reformism, Rosa Luxemburg has been proven correct time and time again with respect to Reform or Revolution.
As for Marx, the concept of a theoretical transition along peaceful means wasn’t impossible, merely extremely difficult and might as well be, in the context of his time. Now that Capitalism has transformed into Imperialism globally, this is only further affirmed to be true as the State and Imperialist Capitalists are further and further bedfellows.
Historically, plenty of people have gained more rights through actions that were far short of an actual revolution. For example, it would be naive to say that the suffragette bombing campaign didn’t at the minimum accelerate when British women got the vote, but killing four people and wounding twenty-four isn’t a revolution, and women getting the vote moved political power to a group that previously had effectively none. Initially, the only women who had the right to vote were property owners or the wives of property owners, but the same act of parliament gave non-land-owning men the right to vote, so it was specifically transferring power from the Bourgeoisie to workers, too. Clearly, power can be transferred from the Bourgeoisie to workers through reform.
There’s a perfectly legitimate argument that there may or may not be a limit to how far this could go, e.g. whether there’s a threshold minimum amount of power the owning class can tolerate before further reform becomes impossible, or whether if it’s done in palatable increments, reform could continue indefinitely. It’s an unfalsifiable argument, so whether or not it’s true, the only way to know is if it’s done successfully, and until then, there’s a first time for everything might apply (although you could try and fail a whole bunch of times and end up with an upper bound on how easy it might be).
Personally, I think it’s a decent rule of thumb that if you’ve got enough people who agree on the same position to make a revolution successful, you’ve got enough people to get an equivalent government elected if you’re in a vaguely functional democracy. Taking over an existing party or forming a third party that dwarfs all the others should need about the same amount of the population as battling against an incumbent government and any other factions that want to be the last ones standing after a revolution. If you’re not in a democracy at all, then obviously a revolution is necessary, and sometimes a self-described democracy isn’t one or isn’t working properly, so needs some kind of push in the right direction, but if you’re already in a democracy, and not winning elections, a revolution’s likely to backfire, especially as the type of person most keen on using weapons against humans is the same type of person who’ll always put their own needs above the needs of others. Getting loads of people to agree with you is the biggest hurdle both for successful reform and successful revolution.
You’re confusing concessions with outright shifting the balance of power to the hands of the Workers. Giving women the right to vote is fantastic, but in the context of allowing the Proletariat to end Private Property, the scale of power transfer is on another scale entirely. That’s why I said at some point said scale must be tipped, and historically that has never happened without revolution.
The question of whether or not it’s even technically possible largely don’t matter at this point, we know revolution works and we know reform has never worked despite being tried far more for far longer.
Personally, I think it’s a decent rule of thumb that if you’ve got enough people who agree on the same position to make a revolution successful, you’ve got enough people to get an equivalent government elected if you’re in a vaguely functional democracy.
Why is this a rule of thumb if it’s never happened? Revolution has been the only way the scales have been tipped, because bourgeois democracy places firm limits on what is acceptable to be voted on. You’re correct that revolutions require mass popular support, but wrong that existing Bourgeois frameworks would allow it to begin with. Read the Luxemburg book.
To my knowledge (which has gaps), there’s never been a leftist revolution over a functioning democracy that left the situation better than it started, so I’m under the impression that we’re in never happened territory whether advocating for reform or revolution. Plenty of right-wing groups have overthrown democracies, though, and plenty of right-wing groups have taken over in the aftermath of non-right-wing revolutions, so there’s a need to make sure there are still enough leftists left alive to still be the majority.
Even if reform is a doomed goal, it’s a more achievable to get the population of a democracy to a point where they could try voting in a leftist government than to throw out everything (and potentially die in the process) and start again. If they lose the vote, then it’s a strong indication that a majority of people participating would be fighting against them in a revolution, and more people need bringing on board. If they win the vote, and still don’t gain power, then it’s a great time to start a revolution, as this is exactly the kind of thing that whips up revolutionary fervour in people who normally would advocate solely for reform. The situation where reform could theoretically happen is a great environment for a revolution if it turns out that reform can’t happen, so it’s easy to pivot if it doesn’t work. It might turn out not to be a doomed goal, though, and they might just end up in power immediately, with state institutions composed of voters who want to believe their votes counted potentially taking the new government’s side if the outgoing government or their supporters didn’t concede.
Either way, the main tool used to keep power in a democracy is to sway public opinion so voters vote against their own interests, and swaying public opinion also works to make people revolt against their own interests or fight against a revolt that’s in their own interests. The debate is moot if half of people read The Daily Mail or watch Fox News, and if there’s a tool that can stop that happening and take away bourgeois power that way, it can probably take it away in other ways.
yeah i don’t think im a tankie
Someone who only likes to lick left boots?
doesn’t like capitalism
only wants state enforcers of capitalism to be armed
I think that makes you inconsistent
I don’t see how law enforcement and profit driven market are inseparable concepts.
It’s entirely possible for a state to enforce laws without it being capitalist, however what I thought was a weird inconsistency was to posture as ‘opposed to capitalism’ but pro cops/military having guns without anybody else having them.
I don’t relish the idea of people having to take up arms against the government, but I certainly don’t want militarized police to be the only ones with them either.
If all the citizens are trained in the defense of the nation, then both things can be true. There’s only so many fighters jets, tanks, and nuclear bombs to go around, so the stewardship of those assets is going to fall to a trusted committee anyway (an organized military), but that’s logistics, not politics.
What does such a society do with conscientious objectors and Pacificsts? Hopefully value their option as a source of diversity and honor their choices.
well you need the police to enforce the law. how can you have a country without laws?
In some developed nations, even the beat cops are disarmed and only their equivalent of SWAT response teams are.
Law enforcement are seen as community emmisaries, you can walk up to a British cop in a corner with no fear of them shooting you over a misunderstanding.
This actually helps those police to be seen in a positive light by society.
I see this as an appropriate compromise. Mitigates the potential for casual police shootings with only 1-2 law enforcement witnesses.
But American police, while paid a lot for very little education, don’t want to take ANY risks despite explicitly being paid to. They aren’t even in the top 20 most dangerous professions in the US.
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-united-states
They shoot until everyone’s dead, then ask the corpses questions, instead of doing their jobs and protecting citizens with their lives if necessary. That’s why you get paid booku bucks with a high school diploma, at least in theory.
oh cool. cops need guns here.
Clearly they believe so, since they see their job as shooting minorities for existing, even in their own homes.
And if they didn’t want to be seen as such, they’d police each other.
they don’t shoot minorities in my country, just criminals. Sounds like your country has a problem.
Yes, the US does have a lot of problems like this.
Be glad you’re not from here.
Sometimes laws are bad and should be broken, if you’re going to advocate taking guns away from normal people at least take them away from the pigs too.
Having armed police showing up to evict people (possibly leaving them homeless) because the banks not getting its payments is a pretty severe power assymetry.
sorry i dont agree
With which part?
You’re talking to a Zionist and genocide denier, they support the police.
Many such cases, also lol that they already got removed
no laws should be broken
I presume in his ideal country there is no capitalism, and as such state enforcers don’t enforce capitalism, but enforce whatever he is thinking of
Leftist here: I swear to fuck if I hear one more Tankie put a “Trump winning is actually a good thing because Kamela’s literally the same person as Trump” card on the table with a “Actually North Korea is this amazing paradise and EVERYONE ON THE FUCKING PLANET is just pretending it’s awful. Source: Trust me bro!” stat booster
So help me God I will… Roll my eyes and drown my sorrows in another round of Dead By Daylight where I hope to find a Jonah in the lobby because I’m a Killer Main…
Seriously, why can’t we have unity like the Rightists do? I mean they just point and say “Look! It’s a gay!”, they all form in a line.
If I point and say “Look! It’s a fascist!”, the whole squad starts pointing at each other and somehow I’m “cancelled for being a rape apologist” because the way I pointed was actually a dog whistle because it vaguely resembled the ancient Anti-Black symbol called “Ligma” popularized in the year 19Dickety2 in response to white men being annoyed that black people could afford chewing gum or something… Which obviously everyone totally knows is a real thing!
I just want us to ya know, save the fucking world from Neolibs and Literal Nazis before we start doing purity tastes on each other. Like, can we wait to do the “Everyone in the group gets chronic backstab syndrome.” shit AFTER we win?
I mean fuck the Deadly Alliance had the fucking patience to wait till they killed the main cast, Raiden included, before that shit… and they’re literally Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, the exact two people I expect to constantly lose Among Us by reporting each other when they’re both the Imposter! In a SELF-REPORT! Because I’m reliving all of my negative experiences with other socialists, and when I’m angry I try to make the nerdiest references I can make while still ensuring there’s a chance for others to get them.
starts frothing, dies of self-inflicted rabies
I haven’t seen anyone say Trump winning is a good thing, nor have I seen anyone say the DPRK is a paradise (closest to that is people saying the DPRK has living standards around the level of Cuba these days). Where are you finding these people at significant enough numbers to cause you anguish? Legitimate question here, you’re calling for Left Unity but it seems like you’re misframing others at best, which goes against that ideal.
Don’t be obtuse, he was obviously being hyperbolic.
But doesn’t that hyperbole get in the way of a desire for Left Unity? If someone says “Harris and Trump serve similar interests” and someone interprets that as “Trump is better than Harris, actually,” that fundamentally changes the point the person was making. Hyperbole is only useful as long as the quantitative change in a claim doesn’t change the fundamental equation, if it does, it becomes strawmanning.
No.
Gotcha, so me saying you hate all Leftists is rhetorically fine and just “hyperbole?”
I think that would be a great use of hyperbole, actually. The venn diagram is hilariously accurate, and I think you’re being obnoxious.
Then I disagree with your understanding of rhetoric, that doesn’t make any sense.
I will admit that I’m exaggerating out of frustration, but the idea that North Korea is “Actually a real nice place to live, preferable to America in some respects” is one I hear a lot (I do hear about China being a paradise)
And for the record I was kicked out of my local Socialist Chapter for refusing to endorse a Green Party Candidate who was openly transphobic and talking about nixing expanding healthcare access in favor of just “curing autism with crystals”, the head of which responded to by calling me a rape apologist, which doesn’t make any sense. (Also a white cisguy calling a transgirl a “Rape Apologist” for not going along with transphobia and ableism is sus)
I was hardly the only nay-sayer, he got a lot of backlash for supporting this person, but the fact that I wouldn’t play ball with one of my oppressors seemed to really piss in this guy’s cornflakes.
Wasn’t the only odd thing about the guy, he actually condemened Bernie during the 2020 primaries, citing a “Refusal to advocate for violence against the police” as “Proof that he just doesn’t care!”, when that was never a realistic thing to expect a candidate to do.
So I have dealt with a lot of crazy unreasonable types “on the front lines” so to speak.
Also I sadly have dealt with a lot of “Even though it means letting Trump win, we can’t lift a finger to help Biden/Hillary/Kamela because they’re literally not as bad as Trump on this one issue.”
My point still remains, can we please just focus on actually being productive before we turn on each other?
I can’t speak for the chapter you were a part of, but I think the idea that the DPRK isn’t a hellhole, actually, is a valid point to take against common allegations as such. The PRC is certainly no paradise either, but it has rapidly improved, and I think acknowledging that as well is also valid. I questioned what you alleged because I haven’t seen anyone say the DPRK is paradise, period, nor the idea of Trump being better than Harris.
It happens all over Lemmy, at least it does for me. Anecdotes aren’t typically considered reliable.
i dunno friend, purity tastes sound pretty fun to me
Seriously, why can’t we have unity like the Rightists do?
You’re american and you spent months telling everybody that genocide wasn’t a deal-breaker. My wife and I had friends in lebannon.
It’s not that genocide wasn’t a dealbreaker, it’s that there was no “Don’t Do Genocide” option, it’s called “Harm Reduction”
Obviously I’m sorry about your friends, but if there was a no genocide option, I’d obviously have picked it.
Well let’s put it this way. If I ever have to chose between fascism here and genocide in america, I hope you have a place to hide :)
what genocide? you mean the apartheid?
Shut your poutine hole, you moose.
that was rude
Yeah sorry it’s a bit of a sensitive subject given my wife is crying everyday over this. Quit denying genocide.
but what genocide is happening in Lebanon?
Hezbollah and the Israeli invasion that has (seemingly) stopped
So what’s Dead by Daylight about? Also any decentl places I could watch it without spending much?
Sorry if I didn’t make it clear. Dead By Daylight is a multiplayer horror game famous for its surprisingly deep story and for including crossover elements.
5 Players enter a match. 1 Killer (Which can be an original character made for DBD like Deathslinger or The Nurse, or a character from a famous game or movie such as Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street or Nemesis from Resident Evil) who hunts down the other four, and the other four are various survivors who must find a way to escape the map before being murdered to death by the killer.
As a Killer Main, I typically opt for the Killer Role and only play as a Survivor every now and then.
The game typically goes for 20 dollars on Steam, but is typically sold for 7 during sales.
Though it’s one of those dealies where if you’re there for the crossover content, you’ll need to pay real money.
Truth
I like guns and some parts of capitalism, I like some ideas from the ML people and anarchists. The complete evolution of human thought and philosophy is worthy of consideration without bias or prejudice.
Addendum not racial supremacy, though
I’d argue that’s worth consideration in the context of a history class.
I like any political map that triangulates liberals from the left and right.
And I love any one that properly omits libertarians.
I am getting more and more confused.
Liberty ≈ Freedom.
Liberal is someone beliveing in something adjacent to freedom. Libertarian is someone believing in something adjecent to freedom.
But I only hear bad things about liberals, alright I already knew 'Merricans are stupid, they get angry about a word while not even being autistic. But I also somethymes hear about libertarians. what the fuck is that supposed to be, especially compared to its namely cousin?
Well I know I’m not being entirely fair to the poor, old 'Murricans, there surely is something they all know about their system, that has not yet reached me. Still calling someone by one of your core tenets ('Murrica, land of the free, home to lady liberty…) and believing that to be an unterstandible slur sure is weird.
Libertarian has two different meanings, depending on who you talk two.
In the modern day, and unless they qualify it, “libertarianism = anarcho-capitalism”.
Classical libertarianism (sometimes left libertarianism, or libertarian socialism) is more akin to anarcho-syndicalism. Advocacy for ownership of the means of production via trade unions and the like, with the goal of obsoleting the state and capitalism, that kinda thing.
EDIT: Also, capital-L “Liberalism” in the US is more than a little bit of a departure from liberalism. It’s mostly evolved into a meaningless pejorative the far right uses against the center-left (and when I say that, I’m talking about center-left from an American perspective, so really more center-right)
not to mention “liberal” in the us usually refers to “neoliberal” as in neoliberal capitalism, which is wack.
Jesse…
what the fuck am I talking about?
well im confused. so what do you wanna do about it?
Idk you calling people stupid while also coming off as extremely ignorant on the topic just makes you seem like both an asshole and an idiot.
You can either be an asshole or ignorant but if you’re both then all I can ask is Jesse what the fuck are you talking about.
Well people are stupid. I am a hypocrite, I am somethymes an asshole. And I’ll call americans stupid for however long I wish to.
As for me being ignorant… The search-engines are never useful. I asked for information and gave some sort of premediated Information about my previous understanding. Now I know more than beforehand. Because some people were helpful.
You catch more flies with honey
One catches more idiots with platitudes /s
Sorry, Bud. The names are mostly just advertisements and not necessarily useful for understanding the underlying philosophy.
American Liberalism (capital ‘L’) is fluid over time at best in its philosophy, and is actively shifting to further elitist interests from a less charitable perspective. It often prioritises corporations over people and cherry picks which cases of violence are or aren’t acceptable by the state.
American Libertarianism (again, capital ‘L’) is Anarcho-capitalism, which believes the world would be a better place if the state was bordering on non-existent, and companies were allowed to operate completely unregulated.
thank you
Libertarianism isn’t nearly as extreme as anarcho capitalism. It argues for minimal government where possible, but still supports governments providing military and law enforcement, emergency services, etc. The libertarian party, for example, is basically what Republicans were pre-trump on fiscal and economic issues, but without any desire to restrict stuff like gay marriage or marijuana. A libertarian is as much an anarcho capitalist as a socialist is a communist (they’re not).
That is not significant a distinction for me to care to differentiate one from the other. They both are right-libertarian, are wanting laissez-faire capitalism with as close to zero oversight as possible, and are cutting taxes as low as possible by gutting public services. Whether one still wants to keep state-funded cops and fire departments is no longer relevant when the end results of both are corporate-nation hellscapes in my view.
I just want to live on mountain, make LSD and moonshine, and tweek out playing video games where you build shit.
But someone says they “own” the mountain. How do you own a mountain? They didn’t build it. They were forced to be born on this planet just like me. Just another human full of blood and made of meat.
So I guess I’m stuck in this basement instead, forced to live in this “civilization”. Doesn’t seem very civilized to me that’s for sure.
Maybe next life.
Both liberals and conservatives are right wing (capitalists).
Leftists are capitalists too, they just know that strong social safety nets are required to keep the ball in play instead of letting the billionaires take it home with them.
Leftists are capitalists too,
Not all leftists are capitalists. That’s absurd. Socialism is a left-wing ideology.
Those are Social Democrats, a subcategory of liberal.
Gross, wrong
In what manner?
In the same manner that everything in humanity is labeled. If the group you’re labeling doesn’t agree with you then you’re creating a false stereotype
Social Democrats support Capitalism with Social Safety Nets. They oppose Socialism and support Capitalism, ergo they fall under the umbrella of Liberalism.
Every worst group ever has come up with a bullshit label about how democratic and socialist they were.
It isn’t stereotyping though. The political spectrum is built with a non existent center, or rather at the center one would not care who owns the means of production. Right of center is that the means of production shall be owned by private people/companies. Left of center is that the means of production are owned by the people as a conglomerate. Now anywhere you lay on that (because ideologies and beliefs don’t stick to a 2 dimensional spectrum) you can view people to the right of you and people to the left. But by definition, the democrat party in the U.S. firmly believes the means of production is owned by private citizens/companies. Thus a farmer can buy 1600 acres and farm it as they will. Leftists by definition believe the means of production shouldn’t be owned by individuals or companies as they do not have the good of the people at heart, and will often choose their own self gain over the gain of others.
So people can yell “The Democrats are Marxists” and it immediately sells them out as not knowing what they are taking about, because the very root of what makes Marxism, isnt accepted by Democrats.
Where parties land varies all around the world, but the means of production is the stagnant center point. (Assuming you can get people to agree what makes up those means of production haha)
I put the center between the believable extremes. Utopian communism and anarchy just don’t work, so putting them on the political spectrum is disingenuous at best until it does work. Until we have Star Trek replicators or something to fight against scarcity and/or artificial scarcity.
So with that in mind, avoiding pure idealism, left of center would still include a hobbled capitalism.
He doesn’t know how to spell Anarchy.
No, you are clearly not a leftist. Everyone should get a ball, or at least be communally shared. If we seize the means of ball production we can **** CEOs without worrying about going ball-less.
Leftists exist between liberal and communist.
And since communism can’t work with our current understanding of humanity leftist is about as left as you can get
In my analogy everybody does get a ball because that’s the social safety net necessary for gameplay. Not everybody gets a fancy hat with a neat feather though
And here you see a microcosm of the problem. “Leftists” range from “we have to destroy the system and everyone in it damn the consequences” to “I just want the government to provide reasonable services”. (but no, only I am the true left)
fiscally that might be true kind of but socially in Canada that is far from true.
Trump is not a conservative. Fascists and reactionaries are not conservatives. Far right is not the right, eventhough the right did sliped into far right because of the liberals.
The right slipped into the far right because of the far right. Don’t blame anyone but them for their actions
The Democrats did spend years funding the most extremist opponents in their elections to set up easy wins for themselves. A lady even wrote a book about how she won her election this way.
And then she lost to that extremist the very next election.
Maybe, but the far right are responsible for the actions of the far right. Stop deflecting
Don’t misunderstand me, I agree the extremists are responsible for their actions and the extremism. But there are other factors that led to those views being pushed into mainstream politics. The Democrats didn’t help things by funding extremist candidates for the easy win in the same way that the Republicans breeding their core voting block of “I’m a Republican, I vote for the nominee” cultists didn’t help when Trump stole them from less extremist candidates in the primary. Like how TV channels choosing to air 30 minutes of Trump’s empty podium instead of Bernie’s speech during the Democratic primaries didn’t help run a fair primary that year.
Extremists are responsible for their actions, but those who help to push their views aren’t spotless.
Stop
Deflecting
Every accusation is an admission.
Stop deflecting by pretending that there’s no greater issue than just the extremists. The rot’s just gonna come back if we don’t stop it at the source after we deal with the cancer in front of us.
Or are you incapable of thinking about what happens after the extremists are dealt with.
AFTER is the key word here. Stop trying to find someone else to blame and look directly at the people who are to blame
I blame the liberals because they had the power for decades and they are actively supporting the fascists in order to fight the left. They are responsible.
But as always liberals will always, always pretend nothing is their fault. They took all the decisions for a century, but somehow they shouldn’t be accountable for the problems they brought on the world. They’re spoiled children if you ask me.
Fascists are responsible for fascism. Could others have stood up top them? Yeah that would be nice. Did they cause it? No of course not!
Liberals are causing fascism. They are directly responsible.
That is the most stupid thing I’ve read today. Granted it’t not even half one in the morning but it’s gonna be a high bar to bear
What do you think “it’s us or chaos” is doing?
Trump campaigning on conservative values is like Harris campaigning on wealth inequality.
Instead we got “fuck immigrants” and “gay rights”.
Don’t you mean “fuck immigrants and gay rights” from both candidates?
