Guys, at this rate I don’t think the revolution’s going to happen anytime soon.
Freedom is a humanist value. Curtailing freedom to do wrong is of course acceptable. Something most people here won’t like is that the best gender/sexuality is hetero-CIS. That doesn’t make the freedom not to be forced into the best humanist production of 20+ births per lifetime to not be a valid freedom. A feminist/queer supremacy can define wrongs as hiring practices, or not believing their preferred side in any accusation.
Autocracy, oppression, warmongering is not a left/right exclusivity. Warmongering against those less liberal than “us” is common. All of these are huge wrongs, not the slightestly cured by “leftism”. Freedom has to be more important that good, because there is no non-evil way of imposing “only good”, or especially, letting a ruling autocracy corrupt definition of good.
UBI is especially important as a solution to divisiveness. It is incredibly empowering to workers, and empowers both forming relationships, and empowering those unhappy into leaving relationships.
‘Centrists’ don’t help much either because they too hold the left to a higher standard than the right and always seem to be looking for any excuse to whip out the ol’ “so much for the tolerant left” so that they can feel better about themselves when they vote for who they really wanted to vote for anyway.
People on the right can say in plain English “I want to dismantle women’s rights and put all gay people into camps” and the ‘centrist’ will be like “hmmm yes that seems like a valid political opinion”. But the moment someone on the left drops the high road shit for once and bites back, the ‘centrist’, clutching pearls is like “See? This is why I’m supporting the bigots that hate everyone, because you SWORE and that’s unacceptable!”
That’s not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That’s a solidly right viewpoint.
The Centrist would, however, say “look, if you’re going to make your whole vibe about tolerance, that’s cool. I love it. But my homie, that’s a slippery slope you haven’t fully negotiated yet. So when your less disciplined people start to be big picture tolerant through on-paper intolerance, don’t expect me to do the same mental gymnastics to defend it that you do with your mom at Thanksgiving. How about you solve the problem before you create it by not being sloppy and bumbling your way into an obvious trap every bully has pulled since the dawn of time?”
But hey, as a Centrist, the Left can’t discern me from someone like Bush 43 or a raging MAGA freak because anything right of far left is a legit fascist. Which is why I cant hang with you all, your labels are weird. But the Right usually wants to hang me for being a traitor, so one of y’all is far more worth dealing with occasional cringe.
That’s not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That’s a solidly right viewpoint.
Well then all I can say is that there’s a fair number of right wing people that consider themselves ‘centrists’ either dishonestly or genuinely believing it. It’s actually what I was going for by putting centrist in quotations.
But something that I will never go near the centre on is human rights (whatever that looks like). For example, women should have full rights over their own bodies and not have to die in hospitals when something goes wrong because doctors don’t want to risk harming a foetus (that ends up dying along with her anyway), trans people should be allowed to exist without fear and persecution from other people that can’t mind their own damn business and everyone should be able to choose their religion or lack thereof. For me personally, these are the kinds of things that are more important than the price of eggs. And anyone that ignores those issues because of the price of eggs, does in fact look pretty similar to a MAGA to me.
As far as the slippery slope goes, I believe in no tolerance for the intolerant. Once you’ve shown that you just will not give other people the respect that you personally want, you don’t deserve it.
Look, I can’t help that you have limited real life experience, but the middle is crowded with people of a wide variety of political beliefs. For some, like me, I’m more center-left, supporting things like obvious human rights issues, but I won’t go all in on some of the more outlandish financial policies. And I simply will not give machine politics a moment of my life. I’ve seen it fail miserably too many times to think it can work just because one side does it.
But so when your retort to someone not exactly like you is “you don’t deserve respect until you’re someone exactly like me and think only how I think,” then your genuine intolerance is out there on display, and yet you aren’t self aware enough to realize you’ve just said it.
It’s disappointing that you jumped into that within A single comment. Seriously?
then your genuine intolerance is out there on display
Did you really just “so much for the tolerant left” me? Hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, considering where this conversation started. I’ll put it to you this way seeing as the concept seems so difficult for you to understand. If you go around condemning gay people to burning for eternity and telling women things like “your body, my choice” then I am not going to respect you because you clearly have no respect for anyone else.
And just to clear things up in case this is the reason that you’re taking it so personally, when I say “you”, I am not pointing a finger at you, I am using it in a general sense, talking about the people that do these things.
You arrived here telling me that my first comment was actually about right wingers while calling yourself a centrist, but you’ve already started clutching your pearls just because I don’t want to ever meet in the middle with hateful bigots and tried to shame me into changing my position by pulling “iNTolERant LEft” schtick. So I dunno.
I think you underestimate my ability to fuck things up. Especially my plans to do nothing.
It’s how we’re conditioned to behave by society from birth. Break the rules and you get punished.
From my casual observation, leftists tend to be a lot more individualistic and tribalistic than people on the right, to the point where they would much rather join the right just to spite another left group.
I’m not sure about the right, but the amount of arguing over labels and shit is ridiculous on here. Half the time people never get past whether something is left/liberal/tankie/right/whatever and completely ignore whether an idea or policy is good on its merits.
And if they do, most of the time it devolves into whether or not it’s the most ideal in every way possible. People are content to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Except in crisis, a society benefits when everyone does nothing renegade.
The problem is we’re in crisis, largely due to a lack of information about the scope and breadth of that crisis.
The scope(of ice ream) and the bread of that crisis.
I just hope we can switch to renewables and stop facho putin, everything on top will be the cherry on the cake IMO.
Right… Except this is true for all online communities. People talk a lot of shit and complain a lot. Cope with it or log off.
Or blame it on the left, lol, whatever makes you happy.
I am left and this is so fucking true though. So many pussy-ass towel wringing gutless cowards just want to pick bones out of tofu than actually act to make a meaningful difference because they are frozen with indecision over acadmic moral quandries
I wish we could all just agree on a few basics and do it. Like, can we support unions and do mutual aid? Yeah, it’s not nearly enough to fix all our problems, but it’s a start. Maybe it will help bring about anarcho syndicalist trotskyist solarpunk feminism, and maybe it won’t, but it’s a start.
It’s interesting how your comment undercuts the message that it’s trying to express. You got the vocabulary wrong. It was a good try though.
Bones out of tofu is a great expression.
To be honest, if the leftist revolution promises Stalins USSR style economics and governance, then Western people are better off without it because most people in Western nations are relatively well off, so moving to that type of economic/political model will make the majority in a western nation poorer.
For example, 66% of US population are homeowners, that is they own both the land and property (if any). In this case, the humanitarian pov is that the minority should be lifted from poverty, and provided equal rights to achieve self-actualization. So housing assistance, education, health care and food assistance.
The democratic and humane way to achieve this is via high tax rates on the uber wealthy. People also deserve protections from discrimination to enable their self-actualization in a psychologically and physically safe manner. My own philosophy is that a person is born without any will to be born, so that person doesn’t necessarily owe anything to anyone else other than reasonable and mutual social contracts. People don’t have the right to be sociopaths or psychopaths, but they don’t have to be self sacrificing or altruistic.
My own pov aside, the U.S. could implement China-style market socialism and state-controlled socialism for itself and its citizens, but then it’s not going to be a haven for immigrants because such policies require cultural homogeneity. Cultural homogeneity requires strict immigration control, as seen in China, https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/why-isnt-china-considering-immigration-against-demographic-decline-163101.
But I think maintaining immigration to democratic and economically well off nations is important for lifting the world out of poverty and illiteracy. However, all of this necessitates that nations preserve democracy. Capitalism has ruined democracy, which is why we get neoconservatism/neoliberalism, two sides of the same fail coin.
Governance models have forgotten that people formed groups, communities and nations to ensure the betterment and self-actualization of the individual, not to create productivity or workers. Currently the world acts to enable self actualization for companies or nations, which is why we end up with genocides and corporate imperialism as a default state. People deserve better than the Stalin-style leftism or the Clinton-style liberalism. I think we need some type of humanitarian libertarianism, where we can ensure free markets, individual freedoms, but also governance models which ensure social fairness and justice.
Aka national socialism.
It’s easy to convince people to do wrong if you convince them there is no right to be done.
That’s why Tankies are so hard to tell us both sides bad.
A lot of online leftists aren’t doing anything because they don’t know how to do something (or are scared, e.g. of losing their job or of getting brutalized by the police). If you aren’t doing anything in The Real World™ there are only so many things left to do, and the internet is genuinely terrible about people who make mistakes or change their opinion.
Ah yes, the old enemy of the left: the left.
You leftists sure are a contentious people.
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
You’ve just made an enemy for
lifeleft!ftfy
I swear you could introduce UBI and someone somewhere would complain about it not being left enough.
I mean it depends on the context of how UBI is going to get paid for. If it is funded by a wealth tax then I am on board. But that’s not how the powerful proponents of UBI say it should be funded. Andrew Yang would have us take it out of Social Security to pay for it but you don’t hear him say we should uncap Social Security contributions.
Also, I think rent caps or something need to be introduced as well. I worry about landlords just assuming you have an extra 2,000 on you and then taking it.
But implemented with the right protections, I would love UBI.
Someone somewhere would because UBI is the capitalist techbro idea of a social safety net; it’s a band-aid that doesn’t address the underlying problems in a similar way to how the ACA helps but in reality is a very center-right idea that doesn’t address the underlying hypercapitalist healthcare system.
Well there yah go, we didn’t even need to introduce it and it’s already not left enough.
It was cooked up by Milton Friedman, one of the grandfathers of American free market libertarianism.
The whole impetus of UBI was to eliminate traditional social services because, it is argued, there’s no way that a government institution could be as efficient or effective as a free market.
And make no mistake, even modern proponents of UBI such as Andrew Yang propose funding it by hollowing out existing social services.
Like, yeah, UBI is better than having literally no social support at all, but the fact that its seen as this ultra-leftist idea, to the point that we apparently can’t even conceive of how it could possibly “not be left enough”, is an indication of how far right mainstream politics has shifted.
It never was.
UBI is only surface-level leftist, it’s distributing some of the wealth while leaving the important parts - property - untouched.
So yes, I and many others would complain about UBI. I’ve long held it’s an untenable bandage slapped on the gaping hemorrhage that is capitalism.
The irony writing itself.
It’s certainly not enough, but I’d still prefer it over nothing. I’ll gladly take a miniscule win.
If you know anything about first aid you know that slapping a bandage on is the first step to actually helping the patient.
“The real problem with this stab wound is it damaged their liver. Putting a bandage over the wound isn’t going to solve that, what they really need is surgery!”
“We’re twenty miles away from a hospital, we need to stop the bleeding or they’ll die before we get them to a doctor.”
“A bandage isn’t going to save them. Only a surgeon will.”
That’s under the assumption that you’re actually getting them to a doctor and not just slapping the bandaid on and calling it a day.
And I would argue that in either case, stopping the bleeding is still the immediate goal.
And would be correct. But if we’re planning a health system, and I keep insisting on bandaids but refuse to even talk about anything else, my proposal is a bait-and-switch. That’s the problem, not UBI/NIT, as a concept.
You literally just engaged in what the OP was talking about, and here am I joining in as well.
And that is the issue. Ada is bleeding to death, and Bob is giving them a rudimentary bandage to staunch the bleeding. You could:
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Let Bob do their thing, and go get an ambulance.
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Complain to Bob that this will only slow down the bleeding. What Ada needs is to be in a hospital. Keep yelling at Bob for his shitty bandage.
We are all afraid that Jake will convince the doctor to refuse surgery claimimg the problem is fixed now. He goes on to convince Ada and the world that she is healed and asking for surgery makes no sense.
I dont know if Jake will be effective at creating regressions nor if we can fight him off effectively.
Okay, but yell at Jake then.
What you’re saying is that the bleeding is good. The more people bleed, the more they’ll need “a real solution.” This is just accelerationism.
You know what the most important thing for proper triage is : my personal feelings /s
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I mean, if it introduces people to surface-level leftist ideas and gets them onboard, they then can be drawn further to the normal - the left wing ideas. Which would be good.
I agree with you though that it’s only a bandage.
The differences of opinion are still there in irl leftist spaces but it alters how it feels when you’re actively doing something. Online you only see the differences in opinion but the real leftists aren’t just arguing details online (though they do that too) they’re running food banks and organizing housing cooperatives and coming out en masse when someone is being evicted. They’re putting together food packages and sending books to inmates. They’re hiking out into the desert to leave water for migrants and waiting by the train tracks to toss food up to travelers.
Bickering about details online might seem ridiculous to someone who isn’t involved but for the actually active leftists that part is only a sliver of their leftism and it’s not necessarily a bad thing— it’s very hard to imagine the world organized other than it is and one way we can be prepared to make the right decisions together when gaps appear is to discuss everything from every angle. I’m not going to pretend all the stuff online is in good faith and I suspect a good percentage of keyboard warriors who are not actually involved in leftward movement, but I do think in the context of real activism the bickering makes more sense.
The Left: Fractured Butt Hole. 😞
Lmao i love this planet.