this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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CHOOSE:
freedom of thought, but you have to learn to work with people you disagree with slightly or find annoying: left
uniformity of thought, but you are surrounded by bleating sheep and must bleat along: right
It cracks me up how antivaxxers on the right try using the slogan "Lions not sheep". It reminds me of how Fox News used to call themselves "Fair and Balanced".
It's always funny when the right start having a lot of infighting because it turns out that "what everyone thinks" turns out to be a personal choice.
They never have infighting about how to make things better though... Like they don't fight weather we should help single mothers with X or just Y... No they argue if billionaires should get pay no taxes or negative taxes...
A lot of younger (louder) leftists are not liberal so they enforce uniform thought in their communities and mock liberals.
Leftism is intersectional. So having communities that agree with one another but disagree with others is often the state of things. One community can get more accomplished if they agree internally. Liberals are not leftists.
Majority of people who vote left wing are liberals and most leftwing policy in the west is based in liberal values. It seems to be only a small set of people on the left that are not liberal.
There's nothing left wing about liberalism.
Being left of center is not being a "leftist."
Leftists are commies. That's why this guy is arguing that liberalism is right-wing. Anything that isn't communism is right-wing to him.
The real reason there are no leftists in US politics is that outside of a few small internet circles, there are vanishingly few leftists in America.
Wait I didnt say right wing 😡
Maybe I need to read more on where the term leftisn comes from. I was under the impression it referred to any left wing voter.
"Leftism" is a philosophy, namely that collectivist solutions are the correct answer to all societal problems. It is the purview of a "leftist" or someone who adheres to communist (or otherwise generally some type of Marxist or post-Marxist) thought.
I definitely understand the confusion if you didn't know that.
This is confusing. Liberalism isn't leftwing, it's right-of-center at best. Most often it's right-wing economic policies with socially left-wing ineffectual lip service. Especially with how far right the Democrats have trended since the 80s and their adoption of a corporate focused form of third-wayism. There are only a handful of representatives who could even be considered slightly left-of-center progressives.
Liberalism could mean a wide variety of political positions, from left to right.
You might wanna give "third way' a Google, because you do not know what it means.
There are very few actual leftists at any point in US politics because leftists don't exist as a substantive bloc of US voters. Bemoaning that people who aren't leftists don't do leftist things doesn't really make a lot of sense
Tangent, but there's a lesson with the third way that's often forgotten.
It worked.
Conservatism was way too popular. The country was just not at a point to go further left, as unfortunate as it was. Reagan ushered in an era of conservative dominance that we're only just now emerging from.
Young people of all generations do not have full brains developed yet, they are basic and self righteous until 27ish
I mean if someone doesn't want to put in the energy to performatively come to their own opinion, I still think it's alright if that opinion isn't "you know, we SHOULD support the boot that wants to stamp on our faces forever!"
CHOOSE:
grouping everyone on a binary political scale with no nuances
not thinking that you're either left OR right, but realise that you can have different opinions and preferences in different areas and those can't always be forced into a left/right box, and that you can agredisagree with anyone, regardless if you vote for the same party or not
We on the right don’t view uniformity of thought as a positive.
lol
Really? The right around here is burning books, claiming their religious beliefs should be enshrined in laws forced on others, and openly supporting a wannabe dictator while calling anyone in their party who doesn't agree a 'Rino' (Republica in name only). To say nothing of the connection to churches and their 'flocks'
That is a lot of trying to force viewpoints on others and create a uniform viewpoint
Interesting. Why are people getting cancelled for opposing leftist views? Why are you automatically considered a nazi if you don't agree with every facet of the left? I may be wrong here, but none of that sounds like freedom of thought. The right is full of dumb ideas, but at least they let them all be heard.
From the people who tried to cancel D&D, Rock music, The Dixie Chicks, Drag shows, LGBTQ....
From the people who started asking if the ultra-religious speaker of the house was "secretly a Democrat" because he simply acknowledged the difficulties his adopted black son has that his white son doesn't.
From the people who shouted down a reporter for simply asking the question "do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?"
They aren't
You aren't
You are wrong here
Why is this even a positive lol
Dude, people on the left don't agree with everything on the left. That's the entire point of this post. Grow up and have some nuence in thought. Learn to analyze what you're told and think critically, not just repeat things you hear other people say.
Exactly. I’m a leftist and I’ve been banned by leftists for disagreeing with them.
You don’t have to be right wing to get called a nazi by a leftist
This is true. People can be quick af to jump to conclusions and even won't believe you when you say you're not disagreeing with them as a whole, just on some nuance.
Everything you said is bullshit and d r I p p I n g in so much propaganda filth I don't think you are an actual real person! Literally Nobody talks like this.
In my opinion it sounds a lot like what would be concluded by somebody too distant from the subject to notice details if being fed entirelly by the "opinion forming" newsmedia that has does propaganda for a specific side.
I've seen the exact same thing when I lived in the UK and certain newspapers kept publishing stories about very specific poor people who had morally repreensible behaviours and painting it as "all poor people are like this" (for example, they showed entire families who had lived of social security for 3 generations as portray it as a "something the poor do" even though in a country of 50 million there was a grand total of 4 families which had had 3 generations living of social security) - plenty of people who were capable of reasoning (but lacked skepticism or any analytical thinking) would, as they were meant to, conclude that "the poor are lazy and lack morals".
People will most definitely and very genuinelly have their opinion formed against a group or ideologic domain they don't really know well, by being fed stories of extreme cases labelled as "from that side" and their simpleminded reasoning pushed to conclude those extreme cases are actually representative.
(The same thing is done to a lot of people who genuinelly believe themselves "leftwing" - the dominant "left" thinking in places like the US and UK is shaped by "opinion makers" that claimed the "left" label, rather than being something people build by themselves "from basic principles" - it's not by chance that the thinking of Chomsky is a lot more all-around consistent and generic than what comes out the self-proclaimed lefties in the Democrat party).
Genuine Free-thinkers are incredibly rare nowadays.
Yet you haven't said anything. Which part is incorrect?
The part where the left cancels everything but the poor pitiful free speech respecting conservatives are totally innocent. Lol. Right wingers are the all time world champions of cancel culture.
You really gonna gaslight about the left not canceling anything? Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Land o Lakes... You all couldn't wait to get rid of minorities in advertising. How about people's careers ended and lives ruined because of allegations of them saying something that goes against whatever is currently trendy, even if the comment was twenty years ago. JK Rowling was beloved by everybody and then said something someone didn't like and now she's hated by those very same people. Roseanne had a hit show with 18 million viewers to be kicked off for a comment. Even Dr. Suess couldn't escape it. But according to you, none of that happened. Maybe I just have a wild imagination.
You're both profoundly ignorant of the subject matter and very confident you know a lot about it, a.k.a. an excellent example of the Dunning-Krugger effect.
Consider the possibility that what you hear about "The Left" (just the idea that it's an unified thing is ridiculous) from the media you consume (American, right?!) are the shocking things that will make you form the opinion others want you to have - in other words, you're being treated as an useful idiot.
Even in the US, were whatever passes for "Left" is very much captured by the local Duopoly Of Power politics and doesn't really tries to effectivelly achieve the "Greatest good for the greatest number" (otherwise they would be way, WAY, WAY more worried about wealth inequality and not obcessed with fragmented identitarian infighting), leftwing thinking is a range - though narrower than elsewhere - not a unified anything.
Income inequality doesn't really do anything at all, so no I pretty strongly disagree with this.
The difference of life expectation between rich and poor is more than a decade: income inequality quite literally dictates how long somebody lives.
You must live an unbelievably sheltered life in an extremelly isolated and limited ideas bubble and having lived a life with an extraordinarilly narrow range of life experiences if you think wealth inequality doesn't make a difference.
Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners. This is meaningless statistic
What matters is where the floor is, and how surmountable that difference is. Actual policy positions matter a lot more than "but this one has more"
You've changed the definition of "income inequality" to match a very specific non-standard metric, which of course is a "meaningless statistic" since that's exactly what you redefined it to be - that's what's commonly known as a "straw man".
The problem is not how many "wealth tokens" people have, it's that in the system we live under at the moment there is a gatekeeping by amount of "wealth token" of access to important things such as food, the place somebody can live in, the opportunities their children have, their access to healthcare, how much free time they have, and even their freedom (having to work doing something you don't want to do to barelly survive isn't Freedom).
Nobody would give a shit about "wealth" if how many "wealth tokens" somebody has only affected luxuries, and in such an environment there wouldn't even be a life expectation difference between people with lots of "wealth tokens" and people with few "wealth tokens".
The problem is the combination of wealth inequality and a system were wealth dictates access to life essentials rather than merelly to luxuries. If all "wealth tokens" bought were bragging rights and a few luxuries, few would care.
If that's what you mean with "were the floor is" then we're probably more in agreement than it seemed at first sight.
I'm using the standard definition of income inequality.
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/Inequality/introduction-to-inequality
I not sure what your overall point is here, but the total distribution of wealth is a meaningless statistic. If you had all your needs taken care of, UBI, didn't work etc and one person had a quadrillion dollars under that same system, you would not give a shit.
You definition: "Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners." The IMF definition as per your source: "Income Inequality, which refers to the extent to which income is evenly distributed within a population"
They're not the same thing: you picked a very specific metric, not the general definition which is what I was using.
But yeah, if there was UBI that took care of life's essentials, "one person with a quadrillion dollars" would not matter.
Then again that wouldn't be possible in the Mercantilistic Economic System we have because in this system monetary tokens (such as dollars) are claims on a fraction of the goods, services and assets of a country, and I really can't see how it would be possible to both provide for the life's essentials for everybody AND have somebody with enough monetary tokens to lay claim to most of the wealth produced in the country (unless we're talking about worthless dollars, such as the ones in Zimbabwe at some point, in which case most people would be quadrillionaires anyway).
Now, if "dollars" were only claims to very specific kinds of things that excluded essentials and things necessary to provide them (which would also mean Land, since that's necessary for building places for people to live in), then how many such tokens somebody had would be irrelevant, but the closest to such a "money is not needed for essentials" environment we ever had was basically the USSR and we all know just how well that specific experiment worked.
In a centralized state control system "Income inequality" is is indeed not the problem: there the problems are in the production and distribution of goods and services, not affordability (i.e. the scenario where everybody can afford bread but there is no bread), plus centralized state control is by necessity authoritarian, so forget about Democracy in that one, which brings yet another big-box-of-problems.
It's only in trying to find an ideology to deal with the social side of policy whilst Capitalism deals with trading and resource provision, that you end up with the wealth concentration problem: if dollars are claims to goods, services and assets, then the fewer the hands holding those claims the more the State has to tax them to provide the essentials to everybody and as you might have noticed, those with lots of money use it to buy legislators and agents of the State to make sure they're taxed as little as possible.
This is the same thing written conversationally and professionally.
More to the point, it's clear we're discussing the same thing through context, so why choose this hill to repeatedly die on?
You're not serious here right? I don't need to address this? You're not being literal?
It's important to understand that "lots of paper dollars" does not mean wealth. For instance, here, you conflate having lots of paper dollars with being wealthy while also suggesting that the money is worthless (which is correct), but you're missing that people can still own a significant portion of wealth in a country even if that country is destitute.
Having lots of money doesn't mean you pay claim to lots of wealth. That's backwards. Having lots of wealth is represented by you having easy access to money. Billionaires aren't sitting on vaults full of cash. That would be insanely stupid. Their money is invested.
I'd highly recommend doing some reading on the various aspects you're not understanding here.
Clearly you so desperatelly need to feel you won an argument that you're critizing the very thing you brought to the discussion (I used "token" up to then because - No Shit Sherlock! - "wealth is not just money", and then you started talking about "dollars" so I went along with it only to be criticised for going along with it) and are figurativelly lying dead on the very hill you hinted I should not die on (way to display a huge lack self-awareness there!) after being disproven by the very link you provided which was meant to prove your statement.
You and your never-ending line of strawmen should probably get a room.
Anyways: I'll leave you with the statisfaction of knowing you won.
I really can't beat you in that shit, that's for sure.
Disagreeing with a gay person's lifestyle doesn't make you a nazi. Wanting to punish a gay person in any way because of their lifestyle does.
Calling it a "lifestyle" is phobic propaganda btw.
I wasn't aware of that, nor was it my intention, but I can see how it can be interpreted that way as a "lifestyle" is a way people choose to live. Gay people aren't choosing a gay lifestyle any more than white people are choosing a white lifestyle.
It's also about implying promiscuity, but yeah the terminology was definitely an effective bit of rhetorical warfare, most people use it out of habit without considering the implications.
fair, I never used that word not because of any knowledge of negative connotation, but because it just seemed off, like it was never really the right word. Seeing you describe the potential negative connotations certainly will make me more careful.
I understand the opinion, but I don't know if I agree. If you say someone has a "poor" lifestyle, that's not a choice necessarily. I always assumed the word includes intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
Still, it might be the wrong word if some people do think in a way that causes harm.