I think there’s a wide range of people on Lemmy too but the extreme right and extreme left have ended up on instances that have been defederated from the main group. So what you’re seeing are the sensible, rational people, and in America such people are considered left wing I guess 😉
I always hear people say that but I can’t figure out why; in some ways, Europe is more right wing (specifically anti-immigrant) than the US. Can you give any examples?
Agreed, although many people claim that Britain is increasingly privatizing their healthcare. I suppose I’m just saying that the American right simply cares about different issues than the European right.
I was using that as an example, because it’s a pretty central point of the different mindsets.
It is literally like the right here is similar to the American left (liberals/democrats). Anything remotely like the Republicans would be not just extreme right, but VERY extreme right here. Here right wing Republicans are mostly viewed as somewhat insane, and there are almost no moderate republicans left, if the image we get from the media can be somewhat trusted.
And yes extreme right does exist, but the equivalent of the 50% rightwing (republicans) in USA, would probably only be 10% of the population in most of Europe.
The differences regard many things for instance the right here still believe in minority rights, healthcare for all, social benefits, environment, abortion rights (except Poland and Hungary), and many other issues. They were simply just too many to mention, so I found your question very strange.
For instance we have basically no climate change deniers here. We also don’t have nearly the same extreme Christian right here, that you do in the USA, libertarians are also rare, in USA it’s seens as sensible even moderate. Here it’s very extreme.
The anti immigrant popularity here has a few reasons. For instance we have many more muslims, and we don’t want muslims to become what the Christian right is in USA, also we have way higher social benefits, and we don’t want that system stressed and reduced in quality for the rest of us. Muslims haver a very poor adaptation rate. In USA emigrants basically have to adapt or die, they are contractually obligated to not receive benefits.
Still it seems to me the American right is at least as xenophobic as the European.
You’re absolutely clowning if you think you have the breadth of data available to confidently make such an assessment. This is, ironically, an incredibly Reddit moment.
I once got dogpiled in r/lsd of all places for saying employers shouldn’t be allowed to drug test for thc. I got swarmed for “being a druggie” in a sub about lsd.
I quit reddit for good not too long after that. What a fucking shithole.
Post 2016, the worldnews/geopolitics subs that I follow on reddit have become nonstop sinophobic and anti-China hate subs. Prior to 2016, there were a lot of complaining about Chinese tourists and kids that shit on the streets, but after Trump got elected the cold war rhetoric went into full effect.
This got worse during and after Covid19, especially in America, Canada, and parts of Europe.
The cold war propagandizing is just so incredibly prevalent on reddit. It’s like people forgot what the cultural/business relationship between the US and China looked like prior to 2016.
I didn’t fully express how I feel about this. Pre 2016, China was viewed as an economic rival. Post 2016, China is viewed as an adversary.
Being anti-China is something both the Left and the Right can agree on, but for different reasons. The left are anti-China based on China’s human-rights violation and “anti-democratic” behavior during the 2018 Hong Kong protests, and in the Xinjiang region. The Left has also traditionally been anti-China based on how China has treated Tibet, popularized by Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, and Hollywood in general.
The Right is anti-China because tHeY tOoK oUR jOBs.
It benefits both the Left and the Right to be anti-China right now.
Speaking of Hollywood and how they viewed China pre-2016… Matt Damon was in a Chinese movie called The Great Wall. Movies like Her and Looper envisioned a far future where China represented wealth and success. We make memes about John Cena and bing chillin, but he was learning Chinese at the peak of his career because even he could see the market value of China’s growing middle class. In my city, Chinese Mandarin was being taught as an elective in high school alongside Spanish and French. Culturally, we were preparing for “The Pacific Century,” but now all of a sudden we’ve switched gears and are in full blown cold war mode… and people are willing to accept that.
Centralized power is authoritarian. Authoritarianism isn’t exclusively right. In fact the right/left dichotomy is a simplification of politics that belongs in the stone age. People have different values across a range of issues, that often don’t fit a specific mold.
I disagree 100%. The right is defined by the consolidation of political and economic power. Yes, every one has different values, but each of those values can easily be plotted somewhere on a scale depending on the way they favor decentralization/centralization. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong or accusatory about that.
centralisation of power is not an inherently right or left wing ideal, and some of the largest left wing communities on the fediverse are practically or outright authoritarian
the centralising power thats being opposed being a profit oriented organisation does make it more of a leftist thing, though still not exclusively
I’d say it is the definitive distriction between left and right. These concepts mean things to me on a vacuum. Show me a “left wing community” that is authoritarian and I’ll show you a community that isn’t actually leftist.
Ok but if you want to discuss politics with me in any way, which you seem to want, your need to know what I mean when I say words. Maybe get out of the kitchen?
And yet here you are. Isn’t that convenient for you? Just fuck off of you don’t want to talk, this isn’t an airport. You didn’t even say you didn’t want to have a discussion, you just didn’t want to get into sensitive.
I don’t care if your interested in semantics, they were necessary to the discussion YOU OPTED INTO. If you now don’t want have that conversation, fine, but don’t pretend like I was ignoring your request to not have it, because that’s not what your said. Framing it as a tantrum while you table-flip is rich. Since you don’t want to talk, I look forward to this being the last word. If you want to keep talking, you know what to do.
As someone from Brazil and in the left, I could say the same about not caring, but I am aware that in my country’s case there are a lot of people in mainstream media that replicates what both sides are saying in the USA. The right wing over here went so crazy they have tried to copy the capitol invasion. They are all in jail now.
As a leftist myself (not a communist), I’ve found that the biggest difference for now is that I’m not seeing censorship against anyone politically right of Bernie Sandars, (other than downvotes). I don’t care if Lemmy leans left and/or commie, but I hate it when someone behind the scenes decides whether or not I should be able to debate/talk to my political opposites. The reddit censorship was super frustrating, especially when the goalposts of what’s offensive keeps moving.
but I hate it when someone behind the scenes decides whether or not I should be able to debate/talk to my political opposites.
Then you’re not gonna be a fan of federated alternatives like Lemmy. At least unless you run your own instance. Because instance admins can defederate from other instances, preventing you from reaching those defederated instances. In my mind, this is a Good Thing. I don’t want to federate with nazis and fascists myself, and I want to minimize my association with anyone who does. If “having a dialogue” with people that want us dead is super important, then they can pick a different instance to call home.
The great thing about instanses though is that I can create an account on an instance that isn’t deffederated to get around that. On reddit, there’s no way to do that from one app.
The problem is with what we each consider nazis or fascists. I don’t believe most conservatives are fascists or nazis, but a lot of people do believe that (which is an extremest take in of itself). For example, if you believe people who want more secure borders are nazis or fascists, we 100% disagree on what makes someone so.
I’m still new here and still trying to figure out what the community is like.
I consider myself left of center on most (but not all) topics. I have a deep hatred for the GOP and everything they stand for, but I also am willing to nitpick the endless things that the Democrats do wrong. Ultimately I consider myself a pragmatist - in other words, you will never get your left-of-center policies enacted if the country as a whole is still leaning to the far right. Try to shift the country to your side first and THEN go for more progressive stuff. It absolutely doesn’t work any other way. Trying to push for change too fast and too much will only get you a ton of blowback which will ultimately hurt your cause.
So having very briefly explained my overall stance even I was surprised by some of the comments I’ve seen - like far left stuff. But it’s weird here because there are just simply not that many people, so even one or two comments in a lightly trafficked thread might make you think a site is heavily biased one way or another.
Also, please note that we have already entered US campaign season. Like the FBI has been warning us for literally years now (but few take seriously), there are indeed “bad actors” out there on various social media platforms (Reddit was notorious for this) trying to sway the US election toward Trump. They will do and say anything for it to happen, and that has been proven time and again. Like they fooled some gay groups a few years back and convinced them that Trump would support them, or back on Reddit reading Bernie-focused subs trying to convince progressives that, once again, Trump was the candidate who Sanders would prefer to win. Wild, and crazy stuff, but all it takes is a few percentage of people to buy into this mess to swing an election. Lemmy is not immune to these propaganda campaigns either.
Except that it has worked and continues to work for conservatives. They know incremental change is how you get your way. They’ve successfully been shifting this country to the right for a few decades now. Certain coast areas are very left, but they have established a core group of people who continually try to push left.
Little by little. A court victory here, a new law there. Trying to overthrow Row v Wade would never have gotten anywhere 10, 20 or even 30 years ago, but with an endless stream of lawsuits and attacks on the right to an abortion, they’ve essentially won. Similar deal with gun control. It’s worse now than it was after that piece of shit Reagan got shot.
The left is so utterly disorganized and always jumping to the next big thing that will trigger them they can never accomplish anything. If the Left has the semblance of being able to focus on a goal, we would have universal healthcare by now. Or nationwide parental leave. Or a host of other things that are a common thing in Europe and elsewhere.
But we don’t because liberals act like a new born puppy with ADHD that can’t focus on a few key initiatives and continue to focus and hit on those topics for years - no, actually, decades - at a time to get them passed. Every few months it’s the latest and greatest thing to get triggered over. Celebrities join in on the outrage. It makes its way through the media cycle and then we’ve moved onto some other great big travesty that liberals will solve. It’s infuriating and exhausting because nothing gets done.
While on the other side of the aisle, conservatives all fall in-line and know they have to unite to slowly chip away at our freedoms, chip away at our voting rights, chip away at our way of life.
Well, there’s a self-proclaimed Left which, though probably having started out with good intentions, is all about “lets classify people on visible things they were born with and then presume things about them purelly on their “classification” and treat them differently”.
If this sounds strangelly like the far-right thinking that’s because it is kinda derivative: the same architecture of deeming individuals as worthy/unworthy likely-good/likely-bad because they were born with certain characteristics as the far-right is used, and then the categories are swapped and the whole thing is called “being progressive” as if it was only unfair to judge and treat people because of their genetic makeup if done in one direction but not in a different one.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made. Because these people follow the recipes without examining the against the principles and ideals and in contexts which are very different of the ones for which those rules were created, you went up with ridiculous ideas directly opposed to “the greatest good for the greatest number” principle like supporting Putin’s invasion.
The followers of such “Lefts” hate it when their faith-like beliefs are examined against the actual Principles of Equality and “the greatest good for the greatest numbers” and found often to be directly opposing them, just like when you grab some religious book or other and point out the inconsistencies in it: there is no greater hate than that of the faithfull who sees the basis of their Identity be examined under the cruel light of logic and found to be mainly bollocks.
Or in other words, I think the Left here is a lot more the product of thinking things through and concluding that it would be a lot better to live in a World with less poverty, more equality and were a few did not amass more power than whole countries thanks to their wealth, and continuing to actually continue to think things through when face with slogans from the tribalist flag waving slogan parroting and social-circle-jerk groups which call themselves “Left” and which are the leftovers from Marxism in the XXI Century and the Neoliberal-inspired “in the greed is good context, lets pursue personal-upside maximization as an ‘Identity’ group instead of individually so that we can claim we’re lefties”.
PS: If it sounds I’m raging against the Left here, that just because I find the pettyness and self-serving sociopathy of the modern Right to be self-evident. I actually don’t think you can be a true leftwinger genuinelly fighting for the greater good if you just blindly follow slogans and tribes. Funilly enough it also means I can actually respect a genuine old-style conservative, even whilst wholly disagreeing with him or her.
You need to be a leftie-in-name-only tribalist to confuse equal-opportunity skepticism with being on “the other side” - the conservatives, those people well known for questioning the way things are…
Then again, anybody who has reduced the entirety of political choices in society to a mere two sides as you hinted you have in your post, really hasn’t though it through (there being billions of humans there is an almost infinite number of choices) and instead has firmly engaged with the whole thing in an us-vs-them tribalism devoid of logic.
In such a simplistic take on politics those questioning the beliefs you hold (in very much the same way as religious people hold theirs) couldn’t possibly be questioning all ideas with Logic and Analytics to try and find the best way to increase the greatest good for the greatest number, but instead “must be from the other side”.
This sounds like a straw man argument. The lefties I know are analytical and critical to a fault; unlike the righties they don’t blindly wave the party flag, and that criticism reduces their support of party policies and presents itself as a lack of unity.
Being a member of a leftwing party in my own country, I can tell you that most members aren’t analytical and critical when it comes to words uttered by celebrities “from their side”.
In fact that was exactly my great dissapointment with that party as I became more and more familiar with it and the way it works: having come in thinking as you seem to do and expecting to find a Thinking Left, I ended up finding yet another bunch of mindless parrots who even lack self-awareness (I was pretty shocked in a National Party Conference when maybe 9 in 10 of party member interventions were of the “we the <insert groups that person belongs to> need/want/should-have …”, or in other words Personal Greed disguised as “for the group”, the kind of shit that is rotting from the inside the genuine fight for Equality).
There are many “lefts” in the Left and a lot of them either interiorized greed as ok and practice an “as long as it helps me and doesn’t affect my priviledges” type of being “left” (lots of high middle class Feminist around who strangelly focus entirelly or almost so on the “oppression” of high middle class women whose income is above 90% of people, rather than on that of, say, working class cleaning ladies who get up at 5 AM every day to go clean toilets for minimum wage), people so beholden to an old script that they lost sight of the principles why and from were that script was born, and people whose relation to the leftwing is akin to their relation with a sports club: of the heart, unthinking, unchallenging and always applauding whatever the club’s stars say - perfect useful idiots being fed pap by people in leadership positions who either are manipulators rather than leftwing or are profoundly incompetent, with no vision and no strategy, hence are totally unable to advance leftwing principles (quite the contrary, judging by the way politics is going towards the far-right nowadays).
We do need more Genuinelly Thinking Left, not people consciously or unconsciously accepting accepting the “greed is good” of neolibs, or flag waving parrots with not even the awareness of how lost their party is without an actual vision or strategy and always reacting moment by moment to political events (making them oh-so-easy to manipulate by the mainstream political parties).
I am pretty fortunate to live in a quite progressive city in a fairly progressive state. I’m sure some of that goes on here as well, but the people I surround myself with seem to be genuinely interested in the greater good.
Well, I was born in Portugal and lived there until my 20s, at a time when the country was profoundly backwards in social issues, and then became an immigrant in The Netherlands, which I was for almost a decade during my young adult years, so I ended up wholehearthedly adopting the dutch version of Tolerance.
Now, remember that The Netherlands was maybe the first country to, for example, legalized gay marriage (in fact some of my colleagues there were British “refugees” who had move there so that they could get married with their partners) and even for a while had as leader of their far-right party (I kid you not!) an openly gay guy, and this kind of thing applies to a lot of other areas: for example, 20 years ago they already had 18% of “housemen” - stay at home fathers - and their tolerance on drug consumption is well known.
And their whole Tolerance practice is based on “it’s all normal”, “we’re really all the same in what matters” and “it’s not up to me to pass judgment on others”, a view were for example discrimination on sexual orientation or religion is as ridiculous as descrimination on eye color or hair color: only a nutter would treat people differently because of any such things.
So for me the present day Anglo-Saxon format of Identity Politics were people are still classified on who they love or the genes they were born with and then measures are proposed and judgments made based on those group-membership classifications, is actually not progressive at all but rather regressive, and not just by years but by decades - it’s like going back into some half-way between that Portugal of 3 decades ago (fortunatelly a lot better now) and The Netherlands.
I absolutelly can understand how in an environment where there is massive descrimination people of those groups discriminated against have to get together in order to fight against it (after all, “there is strength in numbers”), correct the injustices that have been done and change the system were such injustices are repeatedly done impunity (sometimes by the very State which should protect all citizens).
However the objective should be to, as such systemic injustices are eliminated, eventually end up with the dutch mindset (we’re all the same, this is all normal, who am I to judge others) in the minds of everybody, and that’s not at all possible if you keep on classifying people and effectivelly saying “these people are different”, “this characteristic people have been discriminated by is extra important” (rather than normal), and practice “we should judge others”, because you really can’t have a natural fair and equal treatment on something if keep on dividing people on those things and keep emphasising those human characteristics as huge differences, and without fair and equal treatment becoming natural in the minds of most people, the fight will never be over and you’ll constanty have pushback.
As I said, the intentions are good, but the methods are not and they are way too easy to subvert by those who care only about their personal upsides, even those on completelly opposite sides of the political spectrum who want to manipulate the masses via induced rage.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made.
The “tankies” are absolutely not utopian. There was a great big schism about this very question more than a century ago, with Marxists roundly rejecting the utopianism of the libertarian socialists (Anarchists). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels is a good starting point.
Look, as I said in another post I am a member of a leftwing party in my homecountry, and that party has two big strains inside, which are pretty much the older generation (people in their late 60s+) most of which tend to be old style socialist/communist (though not fans of the local Communist Party, who they see as self-serving and with a deep authoritarian strain) and a newer generation in their 30s, sons and daughters of the high middle class, who don’t really have a concrete ideology and make the politics up as they go, with not exactly great competence.
About a decade ago the old generation very purposefully made way for the new one, hence why that 2nd strain is so “narrow in their age range and social origins” (and quite blind to their own ignorance about how the other 95% or so of the population trully live and think).
Anyways, all of this to say that when the Russian Invasion of Ukraine started, I actually argued with one of those old guys, whose kneejerk reaction was to defend Russia (because in his worldview “Russia good, US bad”), and I convinced him to change his mind by pointing out that there was but one aggressor and one victim in this War and how it was entirelly consistent to be against the actions of Russia here as it was to be against the actions of the US in the second Iraq War as both were agressors killing people who did no harm to them, and further it was entirelly consistent with in life in general side with the victims against the aggressors.
If I understand the definition correctly, a “tankie” is what this guy was in his kneejerk pro-Russia reaction, yet I did manage to convince him to change his mind and did so with an entirelly humanist argument of siding with the victims, so I would say that his heart was in the right place.
More in general, my judgement of the old-school lefties I’ve been in contact with mainly through being in this party is that their intentions are good but they’re often stuck in a slogan-heavy view of things which is severely outdated and rigid and which they learned in their early adulthood, often resulting in things like this kind of kneejerk defense of present day Russia because of what a very different Russia meant to them half a century ago, but as I described, it’s still possible for their view to change when somebody gently and with some good examples points out that they’re “sidding with the guys harming others” in their unthinking “taking a side” reaction.
Left wingers: “The right is full of neo-fascists who want to exploit natural resources, subjugate minorities, project their own pedophilia habits onto us, roll back the clock on women’s rights, and are willing to lie, cheat, beg, borrow, and steal to get it all done!”
Also the left projects and makes shit up constantly. Hell, one of their favorite phrases “dog whistle” means “My opponent did not say X, but I want him to say X, so I’m going to pretend he said X”
The problem with using the term “the left” (much like any board term) is that is definition is nebulous. Political leaning is relative to the reference ideals.
The point I’m getting at is that it’s imaterial to your issue, with this one person and while you have your right to be upset with them it’s a bad basis for an argument against a group especially one so ill defined.
I would argue that, in an informal and somewhat overvgeneralised sense, people do trend to the left and right sides. A person who hates abortion is more likely to be for gun rights, for example.
And in my experience, the people who use the term dog whistle tends to trend towards the left socially.
See that technique you just used is call “gaslighting.” A dogwhistle is when you say something that’s not exactly advocating for unspeakable ideas, but indicates that you hold those ideas and is intended to garner support. So when you said “Mohamed raped a 9 year old, and reddit doesn’t like that particular fact about that particular religion” you were dogwhistling to other islamophobes and hateful people the idea that all Muslims are child rapists.
Oh, nice, dog whistle inception! I never said the “all Muslims are child rapists”, but you wanted me to have said “all Muslims are child rapists”, so you’re pretending I said “all Muslims are child rapists” anyway. And you claimed I was gas lighting, when it was you who was. Truly the shitty cherry on top.
No, what I really mean is Muslims worship a child rapist, which I thought was pretty clear.
Yeah but now you can just say that instead of actually talking about the subject. If it were any other time, you would say something like “there is no credible source that Aisha was 9 when they married” or “are you saying that christians didn’t historically marry 14 year-olds?” Or whatever other rebuttal you can have. And someone who doesn’t know anything about the subject who is reading this might be swayed to your position. If you just say “fuck off with this dogwhistle” people might not be convinced.
Whenever I see a political thread here, it seems like the comment section is dominated by the most extreme of the left, with takes like “All right wingers are part of the MAGA crowd and advocating genocide” and “The right wing is weak, stupid, evil, and dangerous so we need to shut it down.”
As a centrist (not a rightist,) I don’t like this. We need rational discourse, not extremism and hate. Actually talk with reasonable people from outside your political circle please. (Reasonable people, not the right wing extremists that seem to be the only right-wingers y’all hear about.) Remember when we actually had a class struggle that made the people in power nervous instead of identity politics that get the working class fighting each other?
But then, most of the places I talk in are pretty politically left-leaning, so I guess being a centrist does make me look right-wing to a lot of people. I’m rarely seen pushing back against right-wing ideas, but that’s because I rarely see right-wing ideas being presented (outside of leftists pointing at rightist ridiculousness) to push back against. That probably has to do with the internet as a whole leaning more left than right.
Centrists are people who support harmful republican policies but do not want to admit to supporting those policies.
But you are correct. The far “left” is insanely hyperbolic and pathetically ignorant. They emulate the same qualities that they accuse the other side of having: mostly racism and the disregard for facts / stats / science / doctors.
I don’t think I support any harmful republican policies. Some non-harmful ones, sure, but nothing that I can see needlessly harming people. And I don’t vote for them anyways. If you don’t believe me, feel free to make your accusations a bit more specific.
I mean I’m probably pretty close to your point of view, but Lemmy is probably filled with more of the folks that the rights hateful policy effects. It’s understandable that they see an enemy when the current right especially in the media are in no way shape or form good faith actors.
Centrism is the politics of thinking you’re the rational party, but then you just side with status quo neoliberalism. Like seriously? Rational discourse and debate? Homie, that ship sailed with Reagan.
I don’t know this neoliberalism fella, I just don’t like to see people suffer needlessly. Radicalization can lead to isolation, which can contribute to depression. I can’t stand for that.
It depends on what you mean by being “centrist”. In America the Democratic party IS the centrist party. If it wasn’t for the small contingent of progressives in the Democratic party, they would actually just be a normal conservative party, but the party as a whole is still right of center, if not smack dab in the middle of it.
On the other hand, the Republican party has fully embraced the extreme far right tenants of fascism and are merely arguing over who gets to be it’s leader. There is nothing “centrist” about them or their policies
Typically in my experience, most people who say they are centrists aren’t moderates trying to find a balance, they are just conservatives who don’t want to feel guilty about voting for the fascist party.
It’s not a guilt thing for me. I’ve never voted for them, and I don’t think they’re fascist anyways. Not most of them, at least. The term’s been pretty overapplied, which helps to radicalize.
I don’t support either American political party. They’re playing this radicalization game with each other, making it an effectively two-party system, gerrymandering, and doing whatever else to keep themselves in power. I’m planning to vote third party in the next election to at least take a step towards disrupting that.
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