I think Americans need to absorb a bit more global context about the left-right spectrum. I see people saying that policies like universal health care, access to abortion, basic worker rights and affordable education are “far left”. Most of the proposed policies of the left in the US are centrist in the rest of the Western world. Unless you are advocating for a Communist regime along the lines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China, you aren’t really “far left”. Similarly, unless someone is advocating for a fascist dictator state, we should probably not call them “far right”. Of course, that is what Trumpists advocate for, so they really are far right!
We’re “not allowed” to. The concept of comparing our politics to elsewhere around the world is chastised. “It’s not the same here!” “They have a longer history” “they share a common culture!” (far right for “skin color”)
Any excuse under the sun to keep the right as being viewed as closer to “center” and to misrepresent centrist policies as “far left” so we get no progress and all the arguments.
It’s really interesting how the right has embraced moral relativism on a case-by-case basis. Often it is a strategy to quarantine/localize ideas, so as to avoid the need to reconcile them to any broader worldview.
It’s also a strategy for insulating ideas and events from history that they want to shelter from criticism, like criticizing slavery, theocracy, monarchism, etc. I’ve seen real cases in the wild where criticism of slavery was dismissed as “presentism”, as inappropriately imposing present day moral values.
I’ve noticed that too and found it counterintuitive. The other thing is free market economics. I would expect conservatives to embrace moral traditionalism and economic intervention but currently it’s the opposite…
There are quite a few actual leftists on Lemmy. I don’t think they’re confused and as the meme suggests, they’re rather vocal.
Meanwhile Trump and other far right people have tried to brand liberals as “radical left” which is just silly, but a lot of news sources seem content to parrot alt-right rhetoric. One thing the Republican Party has always been good at is poisoning the well.
You’re half right. Americans as a whole don’t need to absorb context, but American conservatives do.
The rest of us are well aware of what’s going on. There are democrats in our government that are pretending to be against “socialism”, but they are old and these clearly dated policies aren’t going to last.
I get the feeling most of that nonsense was just fear mongering to force Biden into office instead of Bernie four years ago.
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Those terms are so vague and have so different meanings to a lot of people that I often avoid using them… I recently read the idea that egalitarian=left // strong hierarchy=right and it kinda makes sense, but it’s still quite debatable
Generally it’s better to separate views by who supports them, and who they benefit. Leftists tend to support the Proletariat, whereas rightists tend to support the bourgeoisie.
I’m not sure its that easy nowadays, when lots of freelancers and self-exploiters struggle while being considered bourgeoisie. Or at least, not “proletariat”. The lines are not as clear as they used to be.
Freelancers and self-exploiters are petite-bourgoisie, not bourgeoisie. Class mechanics definitely hold up.
If you’re working five days a week for a living, you’re not really a part of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the business owners, not the business managers and assistants. At best, a freelancer with no employees under them would be petite-bourgeoisie. You wouldn’t graduate to the bourgeoisie until you have a few employees under yourself, who take care of the day-to-day operations.
A lone freelancer is just a step away from an employee, with none of the legal protections. Hire a manager to run the day-to-day op, and employees to do the grunt work, thus freeing yourself up to sit back and collect profits. Then you would start to be the bourgeoisie, because you only need to check in to ensure everything is running smoothly and occasionally sign some new contracts. The majority of your time isn’t being spent at work for someone else.
To be “on the left” at minimum you need to be totally opposed to the capitalist system.
From there, there are many ideologies to choose from whether authoritarian (like Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism, etc.) or anti-authoritarian: mutualism, communalism, one of the many strains of anarchism, etc.
Also if you’re authoritarian I’d say it’s questionable whether you’re still on the left.
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“I speak alternative facts, making others do the work of figuring out what I meant.”
vs.
“I have researched in-depth and know what I am talking about and why.”
Tbf there are probably far-right people who are more like the latter. Just b/c I do not recall ever hearing those arguments does not mean that they don’t exist!
Tbf there are probably far-right people who are more like the latter. Just b/c I do not recall ever hearing those arguments does not mean that they don’t exist!
Those people are working with the heritage foundation and other far right think tanks. They understand that their brand of mask-off fascism is problematic to a lot of people, so they allow their ideas to percolate through various right wing media outlets and entertainment personalities. By the time their ideologies reaches the mind of your average voter they’ve been neatly repackaged as “hey we’re just asking some questions here, we just want to get the facts straight.”
Thanks. I have no time lately but perhaps I should research them directly and actively then, e.g. to find out things like if the COVID response was used to bring population numbers down as a means of control and possibly thought to be beneficial for the sake of mitigation of the effects of climate change. But probably I am giving too much credit for even that much level of strategic thought towards climate change effects for the survival of humanity and perhaps it is solely “we do not need the masses anymore so let’s kill them off, or at least not help at all with saving them”, i.e. think of myself first, only, and always, and nothing else.
Real (enough) to someone, I suppose.
Right up until they aren’t anymore. e.g. when someone chooses not to take the vaccine, somehow MANY of those (I wonder if perhaps nearly all?) end up in hospitals, spreading their diseases to others and putting stress on the already-overworked system.
I legit would not judge someone who for whatever reasons decided to withdraw from society, like Amish, and not take the vaccine, but DO social distance for the sake of others, and then die but like… fully by their own, informed & rational choices according to their own valuation of priorities in their life. I fully respect that.
It is the hypocritical nature of those who are not informed, yet act to block others’ access from knowledge and benefits of society, that I am against. These people will judge themselves later on, once they finally cannot escape into their fantasies quite so comfortably, except by then they have already dragged others along with them. In short: they are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED to find that actions have consequences. But… they should not have been so shocked?! An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes.
TLDR: it is irresponsible, childish behavior, from adults who should know better.
Sometimes they never get it, even when their actions directly lead to someone they love dying.
My buddy won’t talk to his brothers anymore because they took their unvaxxed grandmother out to a concert and she got COVID and died a couple years ago. They (from what he said at the time) accepted no blame for this.
Personally i wonder if the consequences were too horrible for them to accept right away. Maybe with time, but i don’t talk to them either.
I remember those videos by mothers who killed their children by refusing to allow them to receive vaccinations. They were heart-rending stories told by those who KNEW, whereas before they only THOUGHT that they knew. Before it happened, they were obstinate and ignored all medical advice and did the exact opposite. After it happened… then they REALLY knew that they had screwed up. And they begged, pleading with other mothers not to do the same. They were ofc ignored, by those who similarly KNOW better, despite literally all of the evidence to the contrary.
Or you can go to old graveyards, and see grave after grave of infants who died young, from what are today easily-preventable diseases. Something like 4 out of 5 children died prior to 5 years of age iirc (or even if that is wrong, still more than half?), so much so that religious ceremonies still practiced today make that age a cutoff - like before that the child doesn’t even have a name, but after that it suddenly is considered a likely candidate to grow up into a full person, thus is finally worthy of being officially given a name.
I do have empathy for people with mental illnesses who cannot handle processing in the real world, but I also have empathy for all the people who have DIED b/c of those dumb-shit behaviors. Especially when they push further and refuse to allow OTHERS to have the kind of care that they want. Like, choose for yourself sure, but you do not have the right to choose for someone else. That is not only merely unintelligent, but childish on their parts. At least, that is true in the best-case scenario, while the worst is that it is linked to authoritarianism, which sadly is the most likely one in many cases - e.g. these people would turn you in to the government, if that was asking, just exactly like if we were real, actual Nazis. Like, “hey, lookie here, this person took the vaccine!!” (or had an abortion, or even a miscarriage) Even they do not want to have to live in that kind of world - e.g. having to call someone by their preferred pronouns - but they will absolutely heap that burden upon you if they think that they themselves will be exempt, leopards-ate-my-face style.
I’m not far-left, I’m extreme far-left. Radical far-left if you will. I want everyone to have healthcare and adequate housing. (spooky noises)
Luxury gay space communism or bust
FALGSC Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
Whoaa there. That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think? Maybe turn it down a bit. Best we can do is Universal Debt and cardboard boxes.
I just a Mutualist who wants worker consumer cooperatives and housing cooperatives to be the only way to form businesses. Unless someone has a direct stake in the firm, they shouldn’t be able to benefit from it. No rent seeking, no venture capital, no bureaucracy.
Both political extremes are as bad as the other. The only sensible course is to allow our political and corporate systems to destroy our environment unchecked while a tiny elite of billionaires funnel up all the remaining wealth of our societies.
You just described centrists
This meme is not glorifying either side.
It just says that the far left says they are far left but the far right denies it.The poster is a Communist, this is a Communist meme.
Your reading comprehension skills are seriously lacking if you believe either that or the comment you’re replying to.
I know your joking, but the extreme left is just as batshit crazy as the extreme right. They are called extreme for a reason.
The both sides bullshit comes in when people are comparing far right nutbags like Trump to lefties like Bernie.
Bernie wants a livable wage for everyone, and Trump wants to kill trans people! They are not two sides of the same coin.
Honest question, not trying to start an argument or anything, but what is extreme left when we’re talking about the current political landscape actually? Cause when I look at US politics I don’t see anything close to what I’d consider extreme going on on the left side. Maybe individual people with no significant political power talking about overthrowing the whole capitalist system but yeah, they don’t seem to have any actual political power.
Since we’ve spent the past 60 years talking about how horrific communism and extreme left is, even fighting multiple wars over it, we don’t really have a presence of far leftism.
I feel like it’s cyclical at this point. We hate the far left so much that people become fascist. A fascist dictator rises. Everyone realizes how this was a bad idea, and we equalize. Generations forget, and we progressively move right again til another fascist dictator comes in.
So no, there is no political power in America with true far left views, and our boomer gov would do anything to keep it that way.
This makes a lot of sense to me, the US has a good long history of being anti-communist so anything moving close to that has been villanized to the point that any kind of socialist idea faces push back and true leftist views go under-represented. It does feel like the overall movement in the US has been to the right though, but that could be my own recency bias.
The far left would be people like tankies, where they go so extreme they end up parroting a lot of the same rhetoric you see on the far right, just through a different lens. I’ve literally interacted with people on this site who believe North Korea is secretly a utopia that the West is trying to hide with propaganda.
They don’t really have much in the way of significant political representation in this country. The far right unfortunately does.
I’d consider commies, anarchists, and anti capitalists in general to just be leftists, not far leftists. It’s not really my thing but I can at least respect it.
So communism so hard it swings back around into fascism, yeah, I suppose that would be “far-left”. This may be my own limited experience talking though but I don’t think that’s a popular world view? Especially not in the US from what I can tell. I know there’s a lot of talk of “tankies” on Lemmy (still not 100% sure I understand what a tanky is), but I have yet to actually have a conversation with a legitimate one IRL or online. Far-right extremists on the other hand you can run into multiple times a day, so I know which side I have more concerns about.
The USA skews fairly right overall so you don’t really see a lot of them here. It’s a lot easier to find them in other countries.
I’ve definitely ran into a few people IRL who have gone far enough down the rabbit hole that I’ve heard them trot out the classic stuff about how “Stalin/Mao/Fidel/etc. was good actually”
I don’t consider tankies leftists. I’m an anarchist. I consider myself far left.
Can you name a large scale anarchist project with better rights than Cuba or Vietnam?
I’ll save you the effort: nah. Catalonia had concentration camps and “free” Ukraine was a bandit dictatorship that empowered kulaks to do pogroms. And they both got crushed partially due to a lack of centralization, and a lack of collaboration with and alienation from popular fronts.
“Tankies” as you put it, are the actual leftists advancing liberation, and not just jerking themselves off about how left they are, which is easy to do when their ideology remains only theoretical. When the rubber hits the road, anarchists fall somewhere between the brutality of socialist projects and capitalism.
As Trotsky said “anarchism is a rain coat that leaks only while it is wet”
I don’t believe in rights. at least, there’s no such thing as an inalienable right, since governments can and do take them away. I’m not even sure how to begin to answer your question given that I think that you’re talking about fictions. sort of like asking me which anarchist society had the most thetans, or protection spirits.
I didn’t think that I’d have to explain to somebody that the very existence of a hierarchy implies class structure. but I guess it’s true that some people still side with the wrong people at the second international.
I don’t believe in rights.
Not even positive rights? You’re literally like “authority means it is by definition a class society” and you don’t believe in rights? How do you square that circle?
It honestly feels like this is a cheap rhetorical dismissal because you don’t want to compare what the actual material benefits of socialist revolutions are vs anarchist revolutions.
I didn’t think that I’d have to explain to somebody that the very existence of a hierarchy implies class structure.
And of course, there was no hierarchy in actual anarchist societies. /s.
Have you never heard of the concept of a transitional state? You know, that thing that socialists and anarchists both do, that involves hierarchy in repressing right wing elements? That socialists actually acknowledge the evil of, as opposed to pretending like they’re not doing a transitional state?
Or do you have a new super special plan to do classless society day one? If so I’d love to hear it.
being invaded by imperialists is not an indictment of a society or its structure.
Imprecise definition aside, revolutions have to be able to defend themselves, and it could be argued Catalonia and Ukraine started in much better material positions and ended up falling apart because of problems with their political/economic structure, while the semi-centralized democracy and rationalized economy of the USSR allowed them to succeed in defending itself from the Nazis (but not, ultimately, from the US empire, however Vietnam, Cuba, laos, and China succeeded, and the DPRK partially succeeded)
Just like there are many brands of far right (nazis, religious fanatic), there are many brands of far-left - anarcho-socialists, communists etc.
anarchism and communism are the same thing.
No. There’s a spectrum of both communism and anarchism, their intersection tends to be known as anarcho-communism. An example of non-anarchist communism is vanguardist communism, which is inherently authoritarian (and anti-anarchist).
They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
In the USA, we have an environment where it’s far easier and more beneficial to those in power to co-opt people into right wing extremism than left wing extremism, hence the outsized representation. You can definitely find countries where the opposite is true, it’s a fairly big issue in south american and southeast asian nations. What’s interesting to me is that the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state where there is a powerful insular ingroup that can exploit the masses to their benefit.
the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state
first, a bit of snark: there is a cure for political illiteracy.
then, a rebuttal: communism is a stateless classless moneyless society. there is no such thing as a communist state. for many anarchists, this is indistinguishable from anarchism.
Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.
I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.
The far lefists aren’t commies though, that’s my point. They play like they are, but really they’re just authoritarian fascists. Commies are just regular leftists, and marxist schools of thought are a totally reasonable worldview to carry even if I don’t agree with some points of it.
if you’re not building a classless stateless society, you’re not a leftist. I’d be just as offended about being called a liberal as being called a tankie. statism is bad.
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Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.
I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.
They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
i don’t think there is a reputable source to substantiate this.
I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.
On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.
They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.
Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.
I think the anti-vax movement started from far left. Wanting to be so close to nature and protecting the body.
Also anti intellectualism, where science embodies the establishment that oppresses us.
These are very real things that the far left made impacts.
But the far right loves these too now, they just co opted them.
The original anti-vax movement was always weird to me, the issue screams “muh freedums” so I always found it strange that it came from the left. I guess it goes into the same box as all the hippy dippy wellness stuff, which does have some things like meditation that turn out to have real benefits, but there are just some people who take to all that really strongly without evidence.
Anti-intellectualism I always considered a right leaning thing, like, you always hear republicans saying universities are tools of left-wing indoctrination and not the other way around? But I suppose hippies had that “don’t trust the man” thing going on.
Are hippies how people’s idea of the far left formed? My understanding is the whole hippy movement, while memorable, was quite short lived?
How did it come from the left? The “vaccines cause autism” wasn’t connected to any political side as far as I’m aware. Just because you’re a hippie doesn’t mean you’re left-wing, or politically conscious at all even.
I might be wrong but I always associated hippies with left-leaning, liberal politics. And I’m not sure where the association between the left and the anti-vax movement came from but I know it was a thing that was frequently made fun of. I even remember catching a Simpson’s episode where they went somewhere and commented on how progressive/liberal it was (forget the specific word), then Marge asked a random woman if she vaccinated her kids and she responded “of course” then Marge said “and not TOO liberal”.
Now that I think about it, maybe the political association of the original anti-vax movement was manufactured?
you could look up the rainbow family. hippies are still around.
Oh wow! and they’re still having annual meetings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Family
I think both extremes may have different reasons but the same outcome.
For the anti intellectualism on the left, it stems from real issues like the Henrietta Lacks and relation with race, and generally more that is talked about with critical race theory. Fwiw it is all important to address, but there is a strong contingent that generalizes it too far and will distrust all of medicine, science, education, and academic research.
I also know a lot of far left people who would refuse to vote for Bernie because he was white male
I also know a lot of far left people who would refuse to vote for Bernie because he was white male
Do you actually know a lot of people in real life who think like this? Or is it just particularly loud groups of them on social media?
I am a member of socialist organization and am acquainted with a lot of people on the far left(anarchists, communists, socialists, etc.), and I’ve never heard this sentiment. I’ve heard other complaints about him not being leftist enough, but nothing about his race.
I do know some, maybe it’s because I live in a university town. I think you were interested in today’s far left, and those are the ones I’ve been frustrated with.
To a lesser amount, I also know one or two people who identify as communist. The best quote from them was, maybe if trump were to be president, then we would finally collapse the global economy so then every one would start over.
It does stem from a feeling that the current system is too broken to fix. They are valid feelings and I can only presume our lack of progress is because the Republicans have always had so much power paired with general concept that change is a slow process. But these people are tired of waiting and hoping for drastic change.
I feel like we’re all already moved on from this discussion, but I JUST came across mention of the original anti-vax movement and hippies on “Some More News” (aka Cody’s Showdy), felt it was interesting to run into a day after this discussion: https://youtu.be/nrsysN_LBoo?si=rqEEZCGLQ8wH2GNV&t=2781 (comes up at 46:21 in case the time stamp doesn’t work).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/nrsysN_LBoo?si=rqEEZCGLQ8wH2GNV&t=2781
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m an extreme centrist. Between absolute anarchist worker self-management and overreaching socialist government regulation, I think we should reach a healthy middle.
Based
ITT: not one person who knows what far left is.
Left is to redistribute the land. Far left is to redistribute the landlords too.
Far left is no landlords really. Like maybe small scale for like older people who prefer not to own condos and do any maintenance in elderly years, or students or people temporarily in another country or something, but no massive bloated greedy parasites like now.
I think they meant eat the rich
I think the distinction comes in how you get there.
How would apartments work, ideally? I guess have a contract where everyone living in the apartments owns a percentage of the building, and therefore the community of people that live there are responsible for building maintenance and other stuff like that, right?
I feel like this is easy to answer and I’m not sure why the question comes up so often.
People have jobs and get payed salaries to both build and maintain houses/apartments. Rent payments would go to pay the actual people that did the building / do the maintenance. Nobody makes profit off this. No landlord, no investor, no profit. The money goes to cover building costs, then maintenance. Easy peasy.
We have things like this. People build and maintain our public roads, schools, water/sewer systems, fire departments, military, etc.
No profits. No landlord gets free money for renting. No wallstreet investor gets free money for selling at high market values, etc.
Obviously, decisions have to be made about supply/demand, areas where lots of people want to live and all that. So what? Let’s make those decisions intelligently instead of greed and profit driven.
My friend lives in a co-op apartment that works exactly like that and it works very well.
You just described a housing cooperative. This form of collective ownership aligns owner and renter/home owner stakeholders as the same person and is a special form of consumer cooperative. Housing cooperatives are especially prevalent in the nordic countries. They keep prices down as they aren’t owned by shareholders who want continuous profit. The problem with this style of firm is that they tend to dissolve after the tenets collectively pay off the property and seek to sell rather than maintain or expand the cöop. This occured after world war 2 in France as a bunch of post war building were quickly built and the coops that built them were dissolved.
Isn’t that how most apartments work? The apartment I live in, and every apartment I know of has an “owners corporation”, of which each owner of each apartment is a member. The members have meetings and elect a committee to make financial decisions. All members pay fees to the owners corporation. Most of the money goes to a building manager, which is an external company hired by the owners corporation to maintain the building. The building manager handles repairs and cleaning of the common areas and facilities. Any non-routine spending must be approved by the committee (and large expenditures, such as elevator replacement, would go to a vote of all members).
…
Anyway, the gist is what you said. Individuals and families own the apartments, and collectively they own the whole building and make decisions about how it should be maintained and run.
Yeah, but there is the authoritarian state owned housing way and the anarchist housing cooperative way. Political science isn’t linear.
I don’t think you can simply call state housing authoritarian or housing coops Anarchist, political science isn’t really binary, nor even grid-based like the political compass wants it to be.
Let’s redistribute the farlands!
not true, the current wave of fascism across the world force leftists to not tell their ideology openly, hope things change for good
I have the impression it’s the opposite. The left is becoming more militant to contain the right leaning extremists.
Ah no buddy, I’m as far left as you can go, you got this backwards
We could do that, or we could kill fascists.
The left doesn’t really have any political power under capitalist hegemony where there’s economic consensus in the political and ruling class. There are many leftists but essentially no political left, and at the same time politics can no longer impact our economic arrangements, irs basically a spectacle we react to from different angles. What we have are centrist liberals both portrayed as “far left” by the right, some who ignorantly react to that with “yes, I am far left!” And those who actually have a visceral hate for capitalism have almost always been dealt with on common ground between centrist liberals and the right.
“Truth” and “Right-wing” don’t associate.
I don’t really get the far left image, is it saying people on the far left are sponsored by tyre and racing companies?
Dale Earnhardt has been co-opted into a leftwing figurehead, mostly just to piss off people on the right
It’s absurdist comedy, a deconstruction of the soyjak meme format.
Yes
Raise hell, praise Comrade Dale.
I don’t know. People will proudy tell you they are staunch conservative anti socialist, all while collecting a check from the government
To be fair, social programs aren’t Socialism.
I know people that work at an electric consumer cooperatives that are the same way. Nothing says capitalism more than communal ownership I guess. :/
Then, what are them? (Legit question)
Social Programs are just functions of government, they don’t necessarily have any direct ties to Mode of Production. There are examples of Socialist social programs, such as Single Payer Healthcare where everyone along the Healthcare chain is a government employee and the Healthcare industry as a whole is owned and run by the Workers via the state, but most single Payer Healthcare programs heavily involve privatized companies that are paid by the state.
I’m far-ting.
Between Dale and Amelia, the Earnhart family has been through a lot.
*In the US
Go to most other Western societies and your version of “far-left” is new, naive, and conservative. In my country, most right-wingers back all the “socialism”—by American definition—that we have.
Y’all got decades of catching up to do. I admire the surge, but you’ve got a lot of examples around the world of how to actually do it. All the while also understanding what you apparently claim to stand for.
Keep enjoying that Us versus Them game though, since that’s more what Americanism is into. Love that division. Good job 👍 /s
This meme references the “far-left,” ie Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, etc, not the Social Democrats. If it was referring to the American “left,” it would say “liberals.”
How’s your political propaganda out there?
ALL of our major media outlets are for profit corporations and serve as propaganda outlets.
NONE of our major media outlets speak honestly about progressive policies.
ALL of our right wing propaganda equates socialism with “the left” and “the left” is portrayed in the absolute worst ways possible. They constantly talk about Venezuela and eating rats (they say we want that). The argument about abortion is almost entirely to be at opposition with “the left” and to paint us as “baby murderers.” Any conversation about taxation is equated to theft from “hard workers” to be given to “lazy slobs who pop out babies to collect free money.” They specifically take opposition to anything “the left” wants so they don’t have to have policies other than “hate the other.”
“Yeah, but if you go to those countries in Europe, you’ll find that almost no one likes the socialized health care they have in their country.” - Every American conservative and libertarian ever trying to defend the freedumb of paying thousands of dollars out of pocket each year for basic medical treatment.
I love the NHS in my country. I’m currently in hospital right now and the staff are fucking amazing but it’s underfunded so I got stuck in an isolation room all of Saturday after being transferred to another hospital. Anyway the staff isn’t the problem, it’s the lack of support and funding that’s killing the quality of the service which everyone i.e patients, staff, even politicians all agree on.
I’m not left or right. I hate you all mutually. 👍
Pure ideology (liberalism).
Ew. I want the government to keep their grubby little hands out of my freedoms, not pretend like they care while ass fucking us e.g. liberalism.
Libertarianism then
Liberalism for racists?
AND conservatives who like weed and birth control and whatnot.
The name for that is liberal.
Racists? Omg. 😱 that’s literally most parties in the US. Democrats have a racist history just the same. Welcome to America, all parties are racist in one way or other, because this country breeds extremism and corruption. Even liberalism has perpetuated systemic racism on several occasions despite trying to dismantle it. All the parties in the US are guilty. Corruption runs deep, and corruption is corpo profit margins.
Much closer, yes. Have you heard of hackliberty & dividebyzero?
Sorry to say if your views are closer to true libertarianism and the principles favored by those links you would likely be considered distinctly leftist. Dbzer0 is a primarily anarchist community, on the far-left.
Not really. I have views distinctly on both left and right. And hacklibery is actually a lot more right leaning…
You have views that are independently more left or right, but say if your views were a political party, it would be placed on a spectrum from left to right based on how many of these positions fall on either side of the spectrum. Typically the views that are seen as far left and far right are mutually exclusive, like authoritarian centralized governance versus decentralization, increased immigration vs decreased, but it’s true there is a lot of nuance lost when things are viewed that way.
This is not agreement:
You are right.
“Both sides,” says one side.
Hfc
ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM is the best I agree
