Also I'm pretty sure most right wing people consider themselves "moderate" or "independent" anyway so it's not like they'll feel attacked if we correctly blame the right for its crimes
Exactly, the issues we are diametrically opposed on cannot afford compromise. You can't compromise on whether or not trans people deserve to exist. You can't compromise on whether all school children deserve to eat. You can't compromise on the opposition of fascism, racism, and bigotry. These people can get on the right side of morality or they can get fucked and I'll tell every one of them to their face now that the other shoe is dropping on it. They have been offered the open hand of reason and discussion since at least 2015. They spat in our face for a decade. Now they get the fist.
Medical standards groups have our interests at heart even if medical companies do not
trans people exist and have a right to live how they like.
Children have a right to some self-determination, including figuring out their sexual preference and gender identity.
All people deserve affordable health care and affordable housing, regardless of their race, religion, or background.
Criminals deserve to be treated as human beings. Jails directly stand in opposition to that.
there's likely more that I can't think of.
These 'dialogues' are not about things the left can morally budge on, and they're insanely exhausting, especially when your opponent isn't arguing in good faith. No one is obligated to go through that social stress, and frankly it's probably easier for most to just physically fight right-wing zealots.
Medical standards groups have our interests at heart even if medical companies do not
Why would they have our interests at heart?
trans people exist
Obviously
and have a right to live how they like
Depends on what they like.
Children have a right to some self-determination
Nah, they don't
All people deserve affordable health care and affordable housing, regardless of their race, religion, or background
Why? What did they do to deserve this? And why do we ignore religion/race/background? IMO there are no "all people". Shinto japanese and Arab Muslim are two ontologically different objects like a rock and a stick. We have no reasons to treat them equally.
Criminals deserve to be treated as human beings. Jails directly stand in opposition to that
How are human beings treated? What is your solution? Abolish jails?
on a similar, related, note, integrating young men into society and not estranging them by telling them that they're the worst, is also important to have a coherent society.
You're right and you're wrong. The 'right' is a made up label for class traitors who have been tricked into supporting billionaires. It's incredibly useful for the billionaires because they get the support and it divides the rest of us and we put our energy into the fake boogeyman instead of focusing our efforts on them.
That was my feeling. It's not a PhD thesis on economic justice or revolution, it's just something I'm hoping might make my Uncle Herb and nephew George say 'Huh'.
No, they use the culture war to divide and confuse people. Not because they want minorities to be respected, but to direct hate to gay and trans people, rather than them.
The left isn't the issue, I'm saying the left has also been used as pawns. We are not beyond manipulation and we have absolutely been pitted against each other. This is a huge reason for all the infighting on the left.
rainbow capitalism is mostly marketing towards polite liberalism. Homophobia/transphobia is their attempt to pit people against each other. Just like racism, it is not that these things didn't exist before capitalism, but the exacerbation and use of it to divide the working class is what capitalists and reactionaries use.
You're absolutely right, my example was not a good one. Although we are still not exempt from being used as pawns, even though we are often a little more educated about the methods that are being used to do so.
But surely there are enough pictures out there of those ghouls together that you don't need to create fake ones. There's enough misinformation on the internet as it is.
"Liberal" means different things in Europe vs America, and that confusion has been specifically exploited by propagandists as well, just making things worse.
I myself am a stupid american. I cannot say that I've read any great works of philosophy that discuss the espoused ideals of political movements.
What I have read are dictionary definitions. I have observed how people behave, what people think these words mean, and how almost everyone who gives themselves a label is either a liar or just wrong. Obviously, this is about the american versions of the words.
Liberals: "everything sucks, but it could suck less if we put in a tiny amount of effort to fix things. You may be mildly inconvenienced by these efforts."
Conservatives: "everything sucks and it's the libs' fault! They changed things and now everything sucks! Fuck {insert racial slur here}!"
Communists: "everything sucks and it's the libs' fault! They're just as fascist as the conservatives because capitalism!"
Democrats: "We're liberals!" (some of them are, but most of them are conservatives. Also spineless failures, but that part isn't important to this conversation.)
nevertheless, "liberalism" used to have an actual definition. it meant somebody would would say "things are allowed unless they are forbidden", which is contrary to the anti-liberal (sometimes identified as conservative) view that "things are forbidden unless they are allowed", which means, liberals don't bother with things that don't matter.
now, if you're a trans girl shitting in a public toilet, that doesn't matter because it doesn't really change anything. that is why liberalism says "ok, it shouldn't be forbidden, so by default it's allowed" while anti-liberalists claim "i don't see why these people are doing this, therefore they are faking it (being trans) and also it should be a crime until proven innocent".
This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean "far left" as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter's policy too liberal. Later on, the American "left", social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.
I'll read that, but not today. For the sake of responding within the current month, I had chatgpt summarize it for me. The gist I get is that "liberalism" is a lie, and it's secretly fascism (I'm paraphrasing the summary pretty hard), benefiting the in-groups and oppressing everyone else. Would you say this is an accurate, if oversimplified, description of what you want me to understand?
Not really, it's more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same "freedom" is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.
It's important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.
I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it's own contradictions become unsustainable, but that's not really in the book.
i guess you're wrong about that. what you're referring to is the fallacy that all liberals are extremely short-sighted and can't make reasonable decisions, which is why they're constantly manipulated and that causes them to be liberal in the first place.
ok i get your point. you were referring to "liberals" as a political party, i.e. the democrats. i was referring to liberal individuals, i.e. people who engage in the rights of liberty.
We aren't talking about massive tax breaks. That's what's insane.
Currently SS is capped at ~$180k dollars @ ~5%. That means if you earn $180k, you pay 9k in SS tax. If you earn $2 billion you pay 9k in taxes.
These greedy leeches are destroying one of the only semi-decent systems all next to no money from them personally.
The actual tax increase from trump's expiring tax cuts is also something like 4%. Meaning these billionaires are doing all this work to save an extra $0.04 on every dollar of income.
They keep talking about the dangers and problems with debt, yet the blindingly obvious solution is a moderate increase in taxes. But instead of even broaching that subject, they are trying to also give themselves a tax cut while destroying social programs.
Social security isn't a tax. It’s an insurance program and structured as such. We have to decide if there should be more national insurance programs. I’d be down.
I just started talking. Sorry you’re probably right.
I don’t understand everything that you said, but as a devils advocate. Social Security is not supposed to be tax. It’s supposed to be an insurance program.
Everyone should have to pay their fair share. Hell, I bet if they just did a flat 15-18℅ tax on everyone, middle class to the uber rich then we would have all the money for the programs like SS and medicare for all.
It is not just saving money on taxes, but having desperate old people as cheap labor and pre-retirement people as customers for annuities. Particularly as desperate, cheap labor, since that helps push wages down for any sector that they could work in.
500k a year is a doctor or something. Someone who actually contributes to society. That's someone who should be rich because of how hard they worked to get there plus how important they are to our society. Elon musk shouldn't get paid a fucking dime.
I'd disagree. Though I understand where you are coming from. I'm not saying behead the petty landlords first. However, often times the easiest way to fuel class consciousness is on these easier fights. Obviously a mom and pop single property landlord isn't making 500k a year I'm not talking about grandmas that have a property as their retirement savings.
But these small petty bourgeoisie (think the dude on tiktok telling people how to make passive income) of 10-100 tenants are often the ripe conditions for the creation of tenants unions which can fuel class consciousness. They lack the power of large capital and the power of state violence in the same way. I think material support to these areas absolutely helps the working class.
But we might just be disagreeing on definitions here.
yes actually, by waiting 200 years until the republicans shoot themselves to mars, at which point presumably the not-so-far-right would stay behind and maybe form a new society.
You can't abstract things to a simple continuum, centrist policies and centrist politicians are wildly unpopular with the US public (a.k.a. the DNC and most democrats) whereas someone like Bernie or AOC frequently gets disengaged or more centrist people to say "huh, well yeah actually they are right about that".
If you look at the polling universal healthcare is very popular, leftist policies often have majority support in US when polled.
The catastrophic danger comes from thinking being more centrist is a winning strategy, the right abandoned that strategy years ago and they have been unstoppable since.
I am telling you, USians of all political stripes are mad and want to burn everything down, trying to reach people with centrism right now is batshit crazy. Reach people with honest, straightforward leftist talking points, emphasize that collective benefits and community focus, emphasize that leftists are actually serious about inclusion and equity unlike centrists.
Most importantly emphasize you are a leftist because if you try to reach someone as a centrist no matter what you say they aren't going to trust you will fight to protect others when the time comes OR the values you claim to believe in, because I mean turn on the news, why would they believe you?
People want the status quo to be smashed, don't sell your ideas as the status quo.
The Democratic Party won't allow any leftward motion. It's always and only, stay in the center and reach out to the right and, whoops, we've gone a little further to the right. ...
tbf, all social progress in the country has come through votes by the democratic party. I really didn't expect them to be quite so terrible about standing up to fascism though-- before these past couple months I would've thought that as more people like Schumer get old and retire/die and more people like AOC replace them there would be a path forward, but now I'm wondering if this is maybe the inflection point for an entirely new party to take over. Bernie's been an independent his whole career-- maybe it can start there
Yes, through labor struggle and organizing. I'm not convinced there are going to be elections for much longer, which means we need to organize outside of the ballot box.
yeah, the left has been systematically eroded in america, and what's typically considered "left" in america today, is actually center-right (i.e. capitalism with small social elements in it).
I 100% disagree with that statement. I might be in a bubble, but I'm in a bubble of amazing, kind and helpful people who go out and help the homeless, volunteer, etc. Community is first.
Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free-market capitalism, minimal government intervention in the economy, and the belief that economic freedom leads to social progress. It advocates for policies like deregulation, privatization, and reduced government spending.
I was referring specifically to your two party system and the errant belief that one of them is somehow "left" when it is a group of turbo capitalist corpo swine lobbyists which are only the better choice because they are not straight up fascist kleptocrats.
What these dumbasses don't realize is that they do rely on these things - every minimum or even low wage worker absolutely needs these services to make ends meet. These people aren't just evil, they're stupid.
How much is "substantially"? And why do you think union wars were the reason for the decrease in deaths? Maybe it's just the technological progress or something.
Because I'm not deluding myself. You wanna continue being a dip shit regarding how improved workplace conditions decreased workplace deaths be my guest. I'm gonna actually use my brain, though.
EDIT: got alittle heated and used some mentally ableist language. I'm trying to break that habit so I've edited that language to reflect that.
Note the US is the outlier here: that's the only country in the world with significant spending and no universal healthcare system (only 10 countries in the world don't have one). And even with that, medical debt is still the first cause of bankrupcy.
If you slash medicaid, you go to the left of that chart, but you also go down. That's a political choice, really.
Fortunately, enough institutions were torn apart that soon the US will also be the exception for being unable to provide numbers for the years to come.
Generally, people just made more money. Things cost less. Relative to buying power, wages across the USA have fallen since the 70s. We are currently sitting in the culmination of decades of people getting poorer, propped up by credit cards and mortgages.
And free healthcare was the norm rather than the alternative through history. It was rarely as commodified as it is today. If someone was sick, they weren't expected to work and other people took care of them. Generally. Another way the current system in the USA is an outlier, and all the more barbaric for it.
Leftism is just a fat woman with pink hair yelling at me for no reason.
I'm not a Leftist, I'm a Pan-sexual Afro-Future Longtermist Egalitarian Social Radical Centrist With Kropotkin Characteristics. I believe in a single worker owned commune unfettered by the cloistered norms of a 50s era revanchist white colonialist culture. But also I reserve the right to think white women with pink hair are shrill and want nothing to do with them. That's why I voted for Trump.
Class reductionism is a reactionary and deeply flawed analysis. The abolition of the class system alone will not bring with it the abolition of all other injustices if if no attention is given to those.
This sort of post really brings out all the concavebrained centrists and red-brown alliance types who somehow think leftists and fascists aren't axiomatically opposed to each other, as well as the whining brocialists who are happy to oppose the hierarchies that oppress them but will throw a shitfit if anybody points out any societal problems to which they could still be contributing.
Class reductionism is when people act as though literally all of society's problems could be boiled down to the class structure under capitalism. The class structure/class system is the relationship between the owning class (called capitalists) and the working class they exploit.
"Reactionary," put very simply, is a word that describes beliefs or actions that react to efforts to improve society in an oppositional way.
"Concavebrained" is an adjective describing someone whose brain has a dented shape to it. It means stupid.
People or groups being axiomatically opposed means that they operate under values systems and thus motivations so different from each other that they cannot work towards common goals.
"Brocialist" is a colloquial term that describes a leftist who dismisses the struggles against certain social injustices, especially those of feminists. A brocialist is basically the sort of person you'd expect to engage in class reductionism.
Hierarchies are systems that place different amounts of value on different elements. In the context of a social structures, this means treating some people as more valuable than others.
ok so to sum it up, you're saying that not only capitalists, but men in general are also evil.
well, i guess i disagree. you're engaging in a pithole of fallacies there. consider:
class struggles lead to poverty, and poverty leads to angry people. the people lash out against one another, and that creates the social issues. fighting against capitalism means fighting against the problem's root, not just its symptoms.
I'll go easy on you here because your username implies English is not your primary language, but you should perhaps work on your reading comprehension.
Firstly:
I did not say that.
"An annoying subset of leftists has a tendency to dismiss the issues faced by workers who are not able-bodied cishet white men" ≠ "men in general are evil"
Secondly:
What fallacies? You didn't point any out, you just made a weak counterpoint.
Thirdly:
fighting against capitalism means fighting against the problem's root, not just its symptoms.
Like yeah, as a fact of how intersectionality works, capitalism does make other social injustices even worse, but racism and misogyny have existed since long before capitalism, and will not be fixed by any sort of anticapitalism that doesn't specifically work to address them.
As I live alone and pay $500 a month just to be able to see a doctor, I am more and more enraged yet disillusioned the older I get. This is not living—this is fascistic technofeudalism.
No, this is Good vs Evil. Right vs Wrong. Truth vs Deception. But yeah, Billionaires are the dark half of those and develop extreme sociopathic megalomaniacal malignant narcissism apparently. How else can we explain it?
Like honestly, my slightly pedantic and rather uneducated take is that there is no right wing. Calling one party ‘right wing’ and the other ‘left wing’ implies that they are in some way comparable, two sides of one coin. They are not, and I suspect never were. The party to the left is on some level concerned with a good faith attempt at governance, however compromised. The party to the right has no interest in governance at all. On the contrary, they have a direct and specific interest in breaking down and carrying off the bricks and mortar of governance. In the US at the moment, the party to the right is doing quite literally that.
My argument therefore is that calling a right wing group ‘political’, or right wing ideology a ‘political position’ is not only a bad idea, it is also inaccurate. Such an organisation is inherently anti-political and anti-state by extension. It is no more concerned with governing than thieves are concerned with the Highway Code when making their getaway, which appears to be exactly what is happening at present. Booooooo. Disqualified. Not a party, not fun, not political.
my take was always that the "right" wing is called that way because their left brain half is more active, which engages in logical, geometric and algebraic thought.
similarly, the "left" is called that way because their right brain half is more active, leading them to think long-term (in balance with nature), sustainably and also emotional.
it's my personal take and i know many will disagree but:
they distracted the people for decades with this bullshit men-vs-women litigation, to distract them from the systematic erosion of the wages, which is what left politics should have actually concerned itself with.
they attacked the women-men relationship specifically because they knew that love and personal relationships give people enormous strength, and by systematically eroding exactly that (by fearmongering and propaganda), they could weaken the people, making them easier to conquer and subdue.
I don't know. My elderly neighbor might be poor like me but his giant fucking Trump flag kind of makes me hope he dies because of Trump's policies, as well as miserable and alone.
I'll admit that's pure irrational spite politics. But the irrationality doesn't change how completely disinterested I am in joining forces with him against billionaires if he realizes he was wrong.
Right political ideology says the class that owns and controls your workplace, land, and government, billionaires, should own and control your workplace, house, and government.
Left political ideology says we should control our workplace, land, and government.
Almost as useless as billionaires, don't you think?
You might point out that queens are part of the ruling class, but they are still oppressed by patriarchy hence they have to do all the work while kings just hide away.
Almost as useless as billionaires, don't you think?
At least kings can castle if a rook is there to help, it isn't that cool, but you can say kings know how to get the fuck out of the way of the people who do actual work when they need to, which is something you can't say of any billionaire ever.
I’m of the opinion that the Cold War never ended. Instead, it became like Syphilis and low-key kept its head down for years before coming back with a vengeance.
What we need to do is fight back and force-educate our simpleton brethren that right now are victims of propaganda. This might be a good time now that there are those who are having their faces eaten by leopards.
Sure it’s deserved; it’s kinda funny; and fuck them for backing bone fide traitors; but they are still Americans, and at some level they deserve pity and empathy for their mistakes.
And if we take out of a few billionaires along the way, then all the better everyone is for it.
Left vs right is working people vs billionaires. It is right-wing propaganda trying to deny or obfuscate that. That is why socialism is left-wing and free-market neoliberalism is right wing.
Fascism and neoliberalism is right-wing and market based. Again, terms are purposefully obfuscated and disingenuously misused, but fascism is about privatization and deregulation (Privatisierung, in the original Nazi). While technically some working class are part of reactionary movements like MAGA, it is disproportionately either the Lumpenproletariat or not working class but what Republicans pretend is the working class (reactionary small business owners, who are working class because of some cultural marker like wearing blue jeans and liking country music or hating woke). We live in a liberal, capitalist system. So socialism is almost always, by definition, left wing and pro-capitalist and pro-billionaire politics is almost always, by definition, right-wing.
No, Billionaires are always going to be a byproduct of capitalism. Saying that left vs right is inconsequential and just "fighting amongst themselves" is naturalizing and justifying billionaires. The left fights against billionaires and oligarchy while the right fight for them (even if they rhetorically hate "elites" like woke baristas).
No, even if individuals will continue to have greed or bad traits, if you don't have a social system that allows accumulation of vast wealth or the use of the wealth to immediately control the labor and resources of society, you undermine the social detriment of these traits. This is why systems matter, it is what traits will be rewarded, and what is allowed to be indulged rather than resisted.
Incoherent take. The right is a tool the billionaires use to take shit away from the rest of us.
But bringing people over from the right is important and attacking them is counterproductive.
Not an excuse for mystification.
Also I'm pretty sure most right wing people consider themselves "moderate" or "independent" anyway so it's not like they'll feel attacked if we correctly blame the right for its crimes
Can confirm. Interview a con for my class and he was dead set that he's a centrist. Did have a single left opinion.
Well, when they stop attacking us for believing in human rights, maybe we can have a dialogue.
Exactly, the issues we are diametrically opposed on cannot afford compromise. You can't compromise on whether or not trans people deserve to exist. You can't compromise on whether all school children deserve to eat. You can't compromise on the opposition of fascism, racism, and bigotry. These people can get on the right side of morality or they can get fucked and I'll tell every one of them to their face now that the other shoe is dropping on it. They have been offered the open hand of reason and discussion since at least 2015. They spat in our face for a decade. Now they get the fist.
So to start a dialogue, ppl must agree with your premise that human rights exist? Or should we have a dialogue where you prove human rights exist?
The conversation has to broach:
These 'dialogues' are not about things the left can morally budge on, and they're insanely exhausting, especially when your opponent isn't arguing in good faith. No one is obligated to go through that social stress, and frankly it's probably easier for most to just physically fight right-wing zealots.
Why would they have our interests at heart?
Obviously
Depends on what they like.
Nah, they don't
Why? What did they do to deserve this? And why do we ignore religion/race/background? IMO there are no "all people". Shinto japanese and Arab Muslim are two ontologically different objects like a rock and a stick. We have no reasons to treat them equally.
How are human beings treated? What is your solution? Abolish jails?
And your disagreement on this demonstrates why you're gonna get decked by leftists instead of talked to.
on a similar, related, note, integrating young men into society and not estranging them by telling them that they're the worst, is also important to have a coherent society.
You're right and you're wrong. The 'right' is a made up label for class traitors who have been tricked into supporting billionaires. It's incredibly useful for the billionaires because they get the support and it divides the rest of us and we put our energy into the fake boogeyman instead of focusing our efforts on them.
The right are the lackeys of the owning class and will fight the left regardless of the extent to which the left limits the scope of its engagement.
I think this meme is clearly made for the average American that sees politics as "left vs. right" being "Dems vs. Republicans".
I don't think it's referring to "the left" as anti capitalist here. It's meant to appeal to normies.
That was my feeling. It's not a PhD thesis on economic justice or revolution, it's just something I'm hoping might make my Uncle Herb and nephew George say 'Huh'.
💯%
Left is a tool of billionaires
Do the billionaires not use the left to their benefit?
The left is intrinsically opposed to the existence of billionaires as a matter of principle, so generally speaking, no.
How the fuck did all these dipshit enlightened centrists find their way onto lemmy???
That's very respectful of you
Thank you, I've been training my restraint and decided to put it to use in what I think is a pretty diplomatic tone.
You mean like using whataboutism in an attempt to invalidate a very real issue?
I didn't think you guys were not looking for discussions at all. My bad on that assumption.
No, they use the culture war to divide and confuse people. Not because they want minorities to be respected, but to direct hate to gay and trans people, rather than them.
Yup. Rainbow capitalism. Whatever way to pit us against each other.
Rainbow capitalism is still capitalism. What the fuck does that have to do with the left???
The left isn't the issue, I'm saying the left has also been used as pawns. We are not beyond manipulation and we have absolutely been pitted against each other. This is a huge reason for all the infighting on the left.
Yeah that is true, but like you said, poor choice of example.
rainbow capitalism is mostly marketing towards polite liberalism. Homophobia/transphobia is their attempt to pit people against each other. Just like racism, it is not that these things didn't exist before capitalism, but the exacerbation and use of it to divide the working class is what capitalists and reactionaries use.
You're absolutely right, my example was not a good one. Although we are still not exempt from being used as pawns, even though we are often a little more educated about the methods that are being used to do so.
Why did they photoshop the miserable Mitt Romney dinner picture
Oh my, his anguished face. This is a work of art.
But surely there are enough pictures out there of those ghouls together that you don't need to create fake ones. There's enough misinformation on the internet as it is.
lemmy has convinced me that neither conservatives nor communists know what a liberal is.
"Liberal" means different things in Europe vs America, and that confusion has been specifically exploited by propagandists as well, just making things worse.
I myself am a stupid american. I cannot say that I've read any great works of philosophy that discuss the espoused ideals of political movements.
What I have read are dictionary definitions. I have observed how people behave, what people think these words mean, and how almost everyone who gives themselves a label is either a liar or just wrong. Obviously, this is about the american versions of the words.
Liberals: "everything sucks, but it could suck less if we put in a tiny amount of effort to fix things. You may be mildly inconvenienced by these efforts."
Conservatives: "everything sucks and it's the libs' fault! They changed things and now everything sucks! Fuck {insert racial slur here}!"
Communists: "everything sucks and it's the libs' fault! They're just as fascist as the conservatives because capitalism!"
Republicans: "We're conservatives!" (they're actually fascists)
Democrats: "We're liberals!" (some of them are, but most of them are conservatives. Also spineless failures, but that part isn't important to this conversation.)
Am I on to something here, or am I just stupid?
yeah, that seems to me how people use these words
nevertheless, "liberalism" used to have an actual definition. it meant somebody would would say "things are allowed unless they are forbidden", which is contrary to the anti-liberal (sometimes identified as conservative) view that "things are forbidden unless they are allowed", which means, liberals don't bother with things that don't matter.
now, if you're a trans girl shitting in a public toilet, that doesn't matter because it doesn't really change anything. that is why liberalism says "ok, it shouldn't be forbidden, so by default it's allowed" while anti-liberalists claim "i don't see why these people are doing this, therefore they are faking it (being trans) and also it should be a crime until proven innocent".
Yeah in europe liberals are liberals, while in america liberals are liberals but it must not interfere with capitalist interests
Eurocentrism lol
Here's a work going through every major liberal philosopher and what liberalism meant to them, and how they dealt with the contradictions. It's the same definition used in every serious work for the last 200 years or so.
This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean "far left" as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter's policy too liberal. Later on, the American "left", social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.
I'll read that, but not today. For the sake of responding within the current month, I had chatgpt summarize it for me. The gist I get is that "liberalism" is a lie, and it's secretly fascism (I'm paraphrasing the summary pretty hard), benefiting the in-groups and oppressing everyone else. Would you say this is an accurate, if oversimplified, description of what you want me to understand?
Not really, it's more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same "freedom" is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.
It's important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.
I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it's own contradictions become unsustainable, but that's not really in the book.
We're not "confused", we have a different variant of English and a different definition for "liberal".
i guess you're wrong about that. what you're referring to is the fallacy that all liberals are extremely short-sighted and can't make reasonable decisions, which is why they're constantly manipulated and that causes them to be liberal in the first place.
there are liberals who can see reason.
ok i get your point. you were referring to "liberals" as a political party, i.e. the democrats. i was referring to liberal individuals, i.e. people who engage in the rights of liberty.
even if there wasn't any misinformations on the internet, you still wouldn't need to create new ones.
We aren't talking about massive tax breaks. That's what's insane.
Currently SS is capped at ~$180k dollars @ ~5%. That means if you earn $180k, you pay 9k in SS tax. If you earn $2 billion you pay 9k in taxes.
These greedy leeches are destroying one of the only semi-decent systems all next to no money from them personally.
The actual tax increase from trump's expiring tax cuts is also something like 4%. Meaning these billionaires are doing all this work to save an extra $0.04 on every dollar of income.
They keep talking about the dangers and problems with debt, yet the blindingly obvious solution is a moderate increase in taxes. But instead of even broaching that subject, they are trying to also give themselves a tax cut while destroying social programs.
It's robbery, plain and simple.
$0.04 for every dollar of income doesn't sound like much until you're talking about a billion dollars, in which case it's $40 million.
That's a whole extra yacht!
I know, they might have to give up the guest private jet.
Luigi is the only solution
If they don't respect our lifes, how can we respect theirs?
Social security isn't a tax. It’s an insurance program and structured as such. We have to decide if there should be more national insurance programs. I’d be down.
I just started talking. Sorry you’re probably right.
I don’t understand everything that you said, but as a devils advocate. Social Security is not supposed to be tax. It’s supposed to be an insurance program.
at this point i'm actually convinced they're not doing this to enrich themselves.
they're doing it to crush the population, to keep it living paycheck-to-paycheck, so they can't afford an uprise when they need to fight back.
Everyone should have to pay their fair share. Hell, I bet if they just did a flat 15-18℅ tax on everyone, middle class to the uber rich then we would have all the money for the programs like SS and medicare for all.
It is not just saving money on taxes, but having desperate old people as cheap labor and pre-retirement people as customers for annuities. Particularly as desperate, cheap labor, since that helps push wages down for any sector that they could work in.
That is exactly why its Right vs Left
No war but class war!
Class war is literally the least important war
So where should I focus my efforts? Because I think the current political situation in the US is not untenable but is not working well.
Fight a class war, not a culture war.
And you, who thinks you are in the “upper class” by making 500k a year. You’re not, you are among the poor.
We fight the people who own billions, not you.
500k a year is a doctor or something. Someone who actually contributes to society. That's someone who should be rich because of how hard they worked to get there plus how important they are to our society. Elon musk shouldn't get paid a fucking dime.
Elon isn't getting paid. He's not a wage worker.
Semantics
I mean technically how they make that 500k matters. If it's all just being a landlord we are definitely fighting them too.
We'll burn that bridge when we get to it. Let's handle the people owning a thousand homes first. Then move on the ones who own a dozen or less.
I'd disagree. Though I understand where you are coming from. I'm not saying behead the petty landlords first. However, often times the easiest way to fuel class consciousness is on these easier fights. Obviously a mom and pop single property landlord isn't making 500k a year I'm not talking about grandmas that have a property as their retirement savings.
But these small petty bourgeoisie (think the dude on tiktok telling people how to make passive income) of 10-100 tenants are often the ripe conditions for the creation of tenants unions which can fuel class consciousness. They lack the power of large capital and the power of state violence in the same way. I think material support to these areas absolutely helps the working class.
But we might just be disagreeing on definitions here.
Don't fight class war.
This is photoshopped… the picture was with mitt Romney and trump with his shiteating grin.. why the edit?
Right? There are now 1,000 images of these idiots together. Why doctor an old Mitt Romney photo?
Messaging aside, be aware that this photo is edited, Musk wasn't originally in it.
Wasn't it Ted Cruz originally?
EDIT: ah it was Mitt Romney.
You do not have any "left" to speak of. You only have fascists and neoliberals.
Hey, we got some soc dems. Like at least 3!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism
Do you see a path to move the US to the left that doesn't involve first shifting the overton window leftwards through the democrats?
yes actually, by waiting 200 years until the republicans shoot themselves to mars, at which point presumably the not-so-far-right would stay behind and maybe form a new society.
but not in your lifetime, no.
You can't abstract things to a simple continuum, centrist policies and centrist politicians are wildly unpopular with the US public (a.k.a. the DNC and most democrats) whereas someone like Bernie or AOC frequently gets disengaged or more centrist people to say "huh, well yeah actually they are right about that".
If you look at the polling universal healthcare is very popular, leftist policies often have majority support in US when polled.
The catastrophic danger comes from thinking being more centrist is a winning strategy, the right abandoned that strategy years ago and they have been unstoppable since.
I am telling you, USians of all political stripes are mad and want to burn everything down, trying to reach people with centrism right now is batshit crazy. Reach people with honest, straightforward leftist talking points, emphasize that collective benefits and community focus, emphasize that leftists are actually serious about inclusion and equity unlike centrists.
Most importantly emphasize you are a leftist because if you try to reach someone as a centrist no matter what you say they aren't going to trust you will fight to protect others when the time comes OR the values you claim to believe in, because I mean turn on the news, why would they believe you?
People want the status quo to be smashed, don't sell your ideas as the status quo.
The Democratic Party won't allow any leftward motion. It's always and only, stay in the center and reach out to the right and, whoops, we've gone a little further to the right. ...
tbf, all social progress in the country has come through votes by the democratic party. I really didn't expect them to be quite so terrible about standing up to fascism though-- before these past couple months I would've thought that as more people like Schumer get old and retire/die and more people like AOC replace them there would be a path forward, but now I'm wondering if this is maybe the inflection point for an entirely new party to take over. Bernie's been an independent his whole career-- maybe it can start there
Yes, through labor struggle and organizing. I'm not convinced there are going to be elections for much longer, which means we need to organize outside of the ballot box.
yeah, the left has been systematically eroded in america, and what's typically considered "left" in america today, is actually center-right (i.e. capitalism with small social elements in it).
I 100% disagree with that statement. I might be in a bubble, but I'm in a bubble of amazing, kind and helpful people who go out and help the homeless, volunteer, etc. Community is first.
I was referring specifically to your two party system and the errant belief that one of them is somehow "left" when it is a group of turbo capitalist corpo swine lobbyists which are only the better choice because they are not straight up fascist kleptocrats.
What these dumbasses don't realize is that they do rely on these things - every minimum or even low wage worker absolutely needs these services to make ends meet. These people aren't just evil, they're stupid.
They're in a cult.
ヤクルト
How did low wage workers survive throughout history without Medicare and Medicaid?
They died substantially more often and sooner. Look up the working conditions prior to the union wars in the US.
How much is "substantially"? And why do you think union wars were the reason for the decrease in deaths? Maybe it's just the technological progress or something.
Because I'm not deluding myself. You wanna continue being a dip shit regarding how improved workplace conditions decreased workplace deaths be my guest. I'm gonna actually use my brain, though.
EDIT: got alittle heated and used some mentally ableist language. I'm trying to break that habit so I've edited that language to reflect that.
Statistics tell me there is a relation between healthcare and life expectation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
Note the US is the outlier here: that's the only country in the world with significant spending and no universal healthcare system (only 10 countries in the world don't have one). And even with that, medical debt is still the first cause of bankrupcy.
If you slash medicaid, you go to the left of that chart, but you also go down. That's a political choice, really.
Fortunately, enough institutions were torn apart that soon the US will also be the exception for being unable to provide numbers for the years to come.
Generally, people just made more money. Things cost less. Relative to buying power, wages across the USA have fallen since the 70s. We are currently sitting in the culmination of decades of people getting poorer, propped up by credit cards and mortgages.
And free healthcare was the norm rather than the alternative through history. It was rarely as commodified as it is today. If someone was sick, they weren't expected to work and other people took care of them. Generally. Another way the current system in the USA is an outlier, and all the more barbaric for it.
What do you think "the left" is??
I'd love to see a poll of how people in the USA would answer that question.
Leftism is just a fat woman with pink hair yelling at me for no reason.
I'm not a Leftist, I'm a Pan-sexual Afro-Future Longtermist Egalitarian Social Radical Centrist With Kropotkin Characteristics. I believe in a single worker owned commune unfettered by the cloistered norms of a 50s era revanchist white colonialist culture. But also I reserve the right to think white women with pink hair are shrill and want nothing to do with them. That's why I voted for Trump.
OP should have phrased it as "It's not Democrats vs Republicans; it's the 1% vs the 99%"
Culture war manufactured, class war real.
Class reductionism is a reactionary and deeply flawed analysis. The abolition of the class system alone will not bring with it the abolition of all other injustices if if no attention is given to those.
This sort of post really brings out all the concavebrained centrists and red-brown alliance types who somehow think leftists and fascists aren't axiomatically opposed to each other, as well as the whining brocialists who are happy to oppose the hierarchies that oppress them but will throw a shitfit if anybody points out any societal problems to which they could still be contributing.
Yo man, please use terms that we can understand or explain your terms
Okay girliepop, here's your glossary:
Class reductionism is when people act as though literally all of society's problems could be boiled down to the class structure under capitalism. The class structure/class system is the relationship between the owning class (called capitalists) and the working class they exploit.
"Reactionary," put very simply, is a word that describes beliefs or actions that react to efforts to improve society in an oppositional way.
"Concavebrained" is an adjective describing someone whose brain has a dented shape to it. It means stupid.
People or groups being axiomatically opposed means that they operate under values systems and thus motivations so different from each other that they cannot work towards common goals.
"Brocialist" is a colloquial term that describes a leftist who dismisses the struggles against certain social injustices, especially those of feminists. A brocialist is basically the sort of person you'd expect to engage in class reductionism.
Hierarchies are systems that place different amounts of value on different elements. In the context of a social structures, this means treating some people as more valuable than others.
A shitfit is when someone gets really mad.
ok so to sum it up, you're saying that not only capitalists, but men in general are also evil.
well, i guess i disagree. you're engaging in a pithole of fallacies there. consider:
class struggles lead to poverty, and poverty leads to angry people. the people lash out against one another, and that creates the social issues. fighting against capitalism means fighting against the problem's root, not just its symptoms.
I'll go easy on you here because your username implies English is not your primary language, but you should perhaps work on your reading comprehension.
Firstly:
I did not say that.
"An annoying subset of leftists has a tendency to dismiss the issues faced by workers who are not able-bodied cishet white men" ≠ "men in general are evil"
Secondly:
What fallacies? You didn't point any out, you just made a weak counterpoint.
Thirdly:
Like yeah, as a fact of how intersectionality works, capitalism does make other social injustices even worse, but racism and misogyny have existed since long before capitalism, and will not be fixed by any sort of anticapitalism that doesn't specifically work to address them.
As I live alone and pay $500 a month just to be able to see a doctor, I am more and more enraged yet disillusioned the older I get. This is not living—this is fascistic technofeudalism.
The only war is a class war.
and what tool do we fight wars with?
guns.
The only tragedy is our lives.
Speak for yourself.
Eh, thanks, I will. Who else would I speak for?
No, this is Good vs Evil. Right vs Wrong. Truth vs Deception. But yeah, Billionaires are the dark half of those and develop extreme sociopathic megalomaniacal malignant narcissism apparently. How else can we explain it?
Eat the rich
tax the rich
3% of their net worth annually, give it all to the people. universal basic income.
I could get down with that.
that seems like a pretty small number, even if its based on networth. we can do much better than that.
don't forget that 3% annually over 20 years is still something like almost 60%.
actually a little bit less if you consider how exponential functions work, it's actually
exp(-0.6) ≈ 0.5, so it's closer to 50% but still good.im firmly in the camp that billionaires simply shouldnt exist, hence my position, but i get what you're getting at lol. gotta start somewhere.
Like honestly, my slightly pedantic and rather uneducated take is that there is no right wing. Calling one party ‘right wing’ and the other ‘left wing’ implies that they are in some way comparable, two sides of one coin. They are not, and I suspect never were. The party to the left is on some level concerned with a good faith attempt at governance, however compromised. The party to the right has no interest in governance at all. On the contrary, they have a direct and specific interest in breaking down and carrying off the bricks and mortar of governance. In the US at the moment, the party to the right is doing quite literally that.
My argument therefore is that calling a right wing group ‘political’, or right wing ideology a ‘political position’ is not only a bad idea, it is also inaccurate. Such an organisation is inherently anti-political and anti-state by extension. It is no more concerned with governing than thieves are concerned with the Highway Code when making their getaway, which appears to be exactly what is happening at present. Booooooo. Disqualified. Not a party, not fun, not political.
my take was always that the "right" wing is called that way because their left brain half is more active, which engages in logical, geometric and algebraic thought.
similarly, the "left" is called that way because their right brain half is more active, leading them to think long-term (in balance with nature), sustainably and also emotional.
Hey. Right wing here. People drive right, legally, and don’t hurt anyone.
I’m not right. But that’s the level of discourse. Got them civil rights?
I refuse to believe that Elon Musk is human
Ffs, i appreciate the sentiment but that's a fucking shit Photoshop. This was when Romney dined with trump in 2016 at the Florida tat palace
Lol, I wondered what was wrong with elon. I like how when you zoom in you can see the scallops from the eraser circle.
It kind of is Right vs Left, tho, because Billionaires Welfare and Anti-Tax-the-Rich is a core policy stance on the Right.
They played us against ourselves and won.
I meant "Us" generally.
Non-Generally: A lot of us also saw it coming and are watching it happen.
Now we, meaning all of us, need to either accept it and do something about it or continue to deny it and submit.
This -is- the end game.
I can't tell you what to do, because it's going to take a lot. But find whatever makes sense to you, and find people who agree.
I know it's going to get worse before it gets better, but i'd rather "better" come sooner.
it's my personal take and i know many will disagree but:
they distracted the people for decades with this bullshit men-vs-women litigation, to distract them from the systematic erosion of the wages, which is what left politics should have actually concerned itself with.
they attacked the women-men relationship specifically because they knew that love and personal relationships give people enormous strength, and by systematically eroding exactly that (by fearmongering and propaganda), they could weaken the people, making them easier to conquer and subdue.
I don't know. My elderly neighbor might be poor like me but his giant fucking Trump flag kind of makes me hope he dies because of Trump's policies, as well as miserable and alone.
I'll admit that's pure irrational spite politics. But the irrationality doesn't change how completely disinterested I am in joining forces with him against billionaires if he realizes he was wrong.
that is why, crash tesla stock so that Elon loan collateral will be cashed out by bank forcing Elon to pay tax.
What exactly do you think right vs left refers to?
Will you explain it to me like I'm five?
Right political ideology says the class that owns and controls your workplace, land, and government, billionaires, should own and control your workplace, house, and government.
Left political ideology says we should control our workplace, land, and government.
Can we cut them out of society when we cut their taxes to 0? Seems fair. Just revoke their citizenship
The people vs the rich/the corporations
Durrrr both sides.
Compare Project 2025 to HR1 and stfu.
And chess isn't good vs evil. It's kings vs the rest of us
well, queens really, the kings are useless
Almost as useless as billionaires, don't you think?
You might point out that queens are part of the ruling class, but they are still oppressed by patriarchy hence they have to do all the work while kings just hide away.
No one is free until everyone is free.
At least kings can castle if a rook is there to help, it isn't that cool, but you can say kings know how to get the fuck out of the way of the people who do actual work when they need to, which is something you can't say of any billionaire ever.
I’m of the opinion that the Cold War never ended. Instead, it became like Syphilis and low-key kept its head down for years before coming back with a vengeance.
What we need to do is fight back and force-educate our simpleton brethren that right now are victims of propaganda. This might be a good time now that there are those who are having their faces eaten by leopards.
Sure it’s deserved; it’s kinda funny; and fuck them for backing bone fide traitors; but they are still Americans, and at some level they deserve pity and empathy for their mistakes.
And if we take out of a few billionaires along the way, then all the better everyone is for it.
Give ‘em Hell!
Left vs right is working people vs billionaires. It is right-wing propaganda trying to deny or obfuscate that. That is why socialism is left-wing and free-market neoliberalism is right wing.
Fascism and neoliberalism is right-wing and market based. Again, terms are purposefully obfuscated and disingenuously misused, but fascism is about privatization and deregulation (Privatisierung, in the original Nazi). While technically some working class are part of reactionary movements like MAGA, it is disproportionately either the Lumpenproletariat or not working class but what Republicans pretend is the working class (reactionary small business owners, who are working class because of some cultural marker like wearing blue jeans and liking country music or hating woke). We live in a liberal, capitalist system. So socialism is almost always, by definition, left wing and pro-capitalist and pro-billionaire politics is almost always, by definition, right-wing.
No, Billionaires are always going to be a byproduct of capitalism. Saying that left vs right is inconsequential and just "fighting amongst themselves" is naturalizing and justifying billionaires. The left fights against billionaires and oligarchy while the right fight for them (even if they rhetorically hate "elites" like woke baristas).
No, even if individuals will continue to have greed or bad traits, if you don't have a social system that allows accumulation of vast wealth or the use of the wealth to immediately control the labor and resources of society, you undermine the social detriment of these traits. This is why systems matter, it is what traits will be rewarded, and what is allowed to be indulged rather than resisted.
Good luck getting partisans to buy into this meme, but it is correct.
Left doesn't mean the democrats.
guns
Idk, same shit honestly.
It's kinda right and left vs everyone else
this is egg vs noegg
Reads as: I hate it when people have more money than me
The wealth gap can't simply be captured by "more money". Here's my favorite visualization of the wealth gap for the ultra-rich. Enjoy!