this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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First weekend on Lemmy and Iβm loving it.
Iβm noticing a very strong hard-left bent though, which suits me just fine, but itβs interesting to see how progressive this space is
I think the center ain't working for folks anymore
I disagree. Too many people take one side or the other, take for granted that their side is 100% correct, and refuse to believe anyone could possibly be center.
If one side says that I should be imprisoned or dead for existing, and the other says I should live not in prison or not dead, I choose life
Yes, but also not every issue is that.
Granted, I think center vs left is where meaningful policy conversation is happening... left vs right or center vs right is normally just painful
Center will gladly consolidate power with right if it conforms with their interests, they more frequently will make coalition with the right before they ever even communicate with the left Center has and will gladly overlook slavery if it conforms with their interests Center has always been complicit with overlooking genocide if they 'don't have skin in the game' Center is LITERALLY THE REASON why Hitler was elected, the Weimar Republic was vaguely modern center and STILL VOTED HIM IN
Super important insight. Compromising on something that's insane with 1/2 insane is not a choice at all, really, and is just plain unacceptable still.
When I wrote that I was internally mapping center to mainstream Democrats.
I think you're putting that more at like Joe Manchin.
Still... in either case I think you're out of your mind if you think anyone, except for the very furthest right white nationals, is willing to overlook slavery itself in 2023.
The comparison of "Center" as an abstract thing you're tying to Hitler honestly comes off as unhinged.
Democrats are socially center-left and economically center-right If there is a conflict with a social topic and an economic one, they will USUALLY FAVOR the economic one
Assuming everybody who votes differently from you or is in the opposing party is exactly the same is just as harmful as taking for granted that everything everybody on your side does or says is 100% correct. This binary view of politics has been exacerbated by social media, and it is doing a lot of harm. Both sides are basically at the point where they're convinced that the other side wants them dead. It's fucking crazy.
Tom MacDonald - "The System" gets it just about correct IMO.
That song is spot on. They've successfully turned the people against each other to the point where anyone who criticizes the side they picked gets written off as a nazi.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Tom MacDonald - "The System"
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I dunno if you have payed attention to politics recently but "we need to exterminate the trans agenda and the people who spread it" ain't exactly anyone misconstruing what those people have been saying
And on the other side, 'we need to murder all landlords' also leaves a bad taste.
I'm not sure you know this, but housing is a NEED, and making it a tradable commodity that is affected by market trends tends to harm more people than it serves
You're right, I guess we should also murder shop owners, pharmacy owners, clothing production owners, prostitutes, even councils who charge for toilet usage, self-help gurus, artists.. All people who provide needs that are affected by market trends.
You will not die without most those things, and the things you would are either currently being hoarded and killing people (shop owners destroying edible food to increase margins, pharmaceutical companies gouging for AIDS medication, insulin, etc), or cannot effectively hoarded (bathrooms, scam artistry, regular art).
First of all, not every conservative is a Trump supporter. Second, there are a number of loud liberals on TikTok who have said things like "cis people need to delete themselves." It goes both ways.
Loud liberals on TikTok are not elected officials
There are 496 bills that are introduced to state legislatures all the way to passed in the united states, spanning every state
Loud liberals are saying illogical, irrational things loudly on a social media app
13 states have laws that specify trans people being murdered is not a crime if the murderer thought they were cis
People not in power in any part of the 3 branches of government said something mean
In a majority of states, trans individuals can be removed from/denied employment, housing, state assistance, medical care, or virtually anything involving a contract
Just because some people were mean in your direction does not mean that they have any meaningful power, and the people being handwaved off that actually have political power are actually doing the things that people are saying they're doing
Ooh, big text!
Elected Democrat officials in many states shut down small businesses, while declaring big corporations like Walmart and Amazon "essential"
Elected Democrat officials caused people to die of non-covid causes by denying them access to things like Alcoholics Anonymous and other programs to sober up.
Elected Democrat officials hurt development of children with lockdowns lasting more than a year.
Elected Democrats granted exceptions to the covid restrictions of 2020 and 2021 to protests they agreed with while demanding that small businesses and parks stay closed for "social distancing."
Elected officials printed a shit ton of money to bail corporations out for covid and then act like they have no clue why inflation is so bad.
Elected officials put thousands of my unionized brothers and sisters out of work with executive orders.
Elected officials caused domestic violence to skyrocket, mental health to decline, and now they're talking about more lockdowns after promising that anyone getting the vaccines would not spread the virus.
Elected Democrats can't even be bothered to codify things like abortion and gay marriage, but it's always someone else's fault, fodder for the next election cycle.
My point is, neither side actually gives a shit. I agree with most of what you're saying about Republicans, but Democrats just do not give a shit either. They just play the blame game. Nothing will get done because all of these politicians are laughing their way to the bank while everybody else bickers.
Democrats suck, and they have always sucked, its a given. Not new, not controversial. Conservatives, especially the non-Trumpers, have absolutely no qualms with allying themselves WITH Trump because it's an ideology founded on greediness and spite. Conservatives will ALWAYS fall in line with even their political disagreements if it means they get to commit violence on those they dislike, strengthen hierarchies, or try to enact their weird palingenesis
That is an unbelieveably black and white way to look at things, and doesn't represent the real world at all.
The right wing equivalent would be; "One side wants me to have freedom to choose for myself, while the other wants to abort me before I'm even born."
It always amazes me the extent to which people with such absurd reductionist hyperbole seem intentionally unaware of the extent to which there's an exact mirror of oversimplification on the other side.
Absolutely. And if you agree with things from bothβ¦ βsidesβ? then youβre a filthy CENTRIST who believes the worst things from both sides and deserve the gallows.
Why canβt my queer ass think guns are awesome like cβmon
This exact combination has begun to break brains over here in such a manner as to be exactly like the old r/Politics that made r/liberalgunowners so lovely.
I just want every gun ever because holy shit theyβre cool
but also thereβs soooooo many people who should be B& from GUN forever
And the results show that the abortion was the better option
I am sorry. You'll have to choose from the options provided. Please choose either nazi or super nazi.
A lot of these problems are resolved directly and via the impossibly-quick feedback of pure discourse in the absence of any overarching commercial agenda.
Like if you argue in bad-faith with dogshit points at least 4-5 people will rip your "arguments" apart and cross-examine and ridicule you into oblivion. And those are just the nice folks like myself lol. God help you with the actual psychos who's ideological bent overlaps with said nice folks.
Its a very self-policing and self-regulated environment where we can all LARP as arbiters of reality and what is true and still be of use in grand scheme of general providence.
People behave in normal distributions. By definition vast majority of people are in the centre. The extremists (outliers) scream the loudest and warp an observer's perception but the actual population is still a normal distribution.
When has it ever, really?
This was before my political consciousness, but I feel like 1992 has an argument, but maybe that was just because of Perot...
Where is the center?
Progressives came here to build. The conservatives will be along to bitch about the place eventually.
Thare was exploding-heads.com instance, but they exploded.
Communists built the platform, and far left spaces fled here years before the rest of us, after Reddit banned some leftist subs.
I think some of them got established before the recent reddit exodus, so it kind of guided the political leaning.
The Politics@ communities seem to be doing their best to bring that back to the right, but yes, outside of that it's leftist to a lovely degree.
Just tilt your phone a bit to the right maybe that helps? π
One of my favourite things about reddit was that I could sort by controversial, and would often find a reasonable take explaining the view of the opposing side. Even when I don't agree with it, I still want to hear it, and what I often found the case to be is that I didn't quite agree with either sides and (unsurprisingly) the thruth is somewhere on the middle.
On Lemmy this often is not the case and I pretty much only hear one side of the argument and not many bothers to write a reasonable take arguing against the apparent view of the masses because it'll just receive downvotes and bad faith counter-arguments. The extreme left is just as unreasonable as the extreme right and it's often the majority in the middle who simply stays silent. There seems to be almost no space for nuance and complexity.