- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
Dumb. The centrists are not the same as the non-voting. But I guess this is a far-left circle-jerk, and it’s none of my business.
![Kermit drinking tea] (https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4886e3a9-8b73-4788-b5ab-ed822c80bee1.webp)
Party A… We want to kill 1.000.000 people
Party B … We want to kill 0 people.
Centrist… Lets just kill 500.000 people.
Sometimes there IS no centrist position
deleted by creator
the dems ARE killing people. It’s just that they aren’t americans so they don’t matter according to the genapos
deleted by creator
Your americans scumbags sent the bombs that killed my friend in lebannon. The fact your retarded country’s “other side” is even worst doesn’t absolve you from the guilt of having voted for a genocider.
Look. I am a regular person, with a heart, flesh and blood.
I hate you and I wish I could repeatedly punch you in the face until your face is powdered.
Bitch
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
You are literally too stupid to know what genocide is
The bar is set too high these days. I thought turning the entire region into dust and not leaving a stone atop another, while sniping random civilians would get you some recognition, but it seems this is nothing to you.
Gee, that’s funny because you talk like a terrorist-supporting piece of trash.
“Terrorist” is just a buzz word used to describe someone who commits the same crimes (or significantly less severe crimes) as your typical western state (or Israel), but isn’t on your side.
Is that what you call your wife right before you beat her? We all know how men in areas like Lebanon treat women after all, and you’ve already told me how much you love assaulting people… 🤔
Even with your retarded assumptions about an entire religious group who are at this point leaving practices of their assigned at birth religion (like your typical christian, jew, and whatever else did and are still doing to this day), Lebanon is the last Arabic country you can apply this to, on account of it’s population being composed of ~40% christians and the Muslim population being split in half between two sects and a million beliefs.
I understand your cunt is hurting after Trump won the election and gave you a little taste of your own foreign policy at home, but we must emphasize the importance of staying civil and not lashing out while the very existence of people you know and love is threatened (or some shit Dem voters would have expected of Palestinians).
deleted by creator
funny how the genapos like yourself just seems to disagree with amnesty and the UN. You suck dude, how do you sleep at night?
I do support terrorism. For exemple, 9/11 was great. All those dead yanks. You’re the perfect exemple that your kind are inherently suppremacist and thus deserve to throw themselves off their corpo building hoping the escape the heat.
I wish i had been there
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
He was a she, asshole. Kill yourself. You are an evil heartless person who deserve to have his bitchy nail removed and then dipped in salt. You’re too stupid to realize you’re with the empire, cunt. Go end your shitty life and it will be a net positive for humanity
deleted by creator
Also funny how your racist idiots seems to care a lot about women when it comes to shitting on arabs. You’re not better than a trumpist dude. Kill yourself
deleted by creator
I really hope we hang your leaders and apply a massive denazification campain.
deleted by creator
lmao you’re such a genociding pos. Average worldist shit innit?
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
The Democrats aren’t Party B here. At best, they’re the “centrists”.
deleted by creator
who’s party b?
But Party B gets less than 1% of the vote.
The underlying split is that the right wants a homogenously united community while the left is united in the acceptence of their differences. This makes me wonder why the right doesn’t want communism. Could this be like homosexuality, that the right secretly wants it and just doesn’t dare to say it?
Because the economic right is capitalism, not communism
I’m not even sure capitalism is the right word, at least not in the US. I’d almost describe their ideology as neo-feudalism.
The republicans have always paid lipservice to the idea of meritocracy, of an even playing field, and fair competition. But that isn’t what we’re seeing from them - they’re merging economic and state power in a way that serves to lock in the existing class structure and remove what little social mobility remains. They may pay lipservice to the idea of a free market liberal democracy, but that isn’t the government they’re creating.
Most right wing voters, right now, practice community level communism, or at least a communal sharing economy.
But you gotta understand that for more than a hundred years now a huge amount of tax payer and corporate money has funded the single largest propaganda campaign in world history, associating the words socialism and communism with every single bad thing that could be described using literary, visual, or audio mediums.
Add this to a society that was already made up of some of the most religious and socially conservative (read shame oriented) people in almost world history, and you have a permanent brainwashing switch that gets flipped on mere mention of specific words.
If you want a good example of how much they hate it and are apparently even affraid of mentioning it in the US, just go to the US holocaust memorial museum website.
They have the Martin Niemöller poem on the wall… more or less.
Less actually since they omitted the first sentence: First they came for the communists.
Not even mentioned in the article on the website.
Imagine that, jews doing revisionism.
Now if you click on the German version of the article you get the right version.
They knew what they were doing.
Americans can not see or hear the C word under any circumstances.That’s…gross. But entirely unsurprising. I never knew that there was a neutered version in the US. I actually had to look it up. Wow. Go us. This country really just continues to depress me day after day.
Or maybe we shouldn’t exterminate anyone, nor let millions of people die in starvation in a failed attempt to “get everyone’s basic needs met”.
You know, the actual centrist position.
Centrists spent the past year arguing that their genocide was the lesser evil.
Who are these centrists you all are talking about? I have realized that what you Americans consider far left is actually center-leftists/social democrats. By that skewed lens I can only assume that centrists to you are pretty extreme right.
You Americans need to calibrate your political compasses to global standards, because out here wanting universal health care is not far left, it is centrist, maybe center-left on a rainy say.
Those weren’t really centrists. They were right-wing, but not as right-wing and authoritarian as Trump.
I see people starving on the streets right now living in America. The fun part is homelessness and hunger isn’t solved because it’s turned into an industry. Money above all else babyyyy.
That was my point, if you go in either extreme, far left or far right, you end up with a lot of homelessness and starvation… And yes, in my European opinion USA is extreme right even on a sunny day. Thus the rampant misery.
Both sides are the same amirite?
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
I’ll just take a pass on the far-anythings.
(Anyone who tries to paint this as pro Trump needs to reread it)
I thought tankies were the far left? Or are they… further left than that?
Tankies don’t even really fit most definitions for leftism that try to use something more concrete than vibes. They just think they’re far left because they like the aesthetics of governments that tried to be or at least called themselves communist.
If we’re using the original definition of left and right, they’d technically be on the right.
The original meaning was whether or not you supported the monarchy. I’d say that a dictatorship is close enough that it applies.
Of course, politics isn’t one dimensional. Even the “political compass” isn’t really enough, here, there’s probably an axis of the political graph for each major axiom of governance.
Honestly the best descriptor for tankies is just “authoritarian communists.” That tells you where they stand better than any attempt at a spectrum or graph.
The original meaning was whether or not you supported the monarchy
So then AnCaps are leftist because by nature of anarchism they don’t support any “-archy?”
In fact, that would make any democrat (as in believer in democracy, not Democrat™) or republican (as in believer in a republic, not Republican™) leftists as well, since they believe in democracies or republics instead of a monarchy.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems everyone has strayed from the French revolution’s definitions in the late 16th century by now, except those intentionally seeking to sow confusion and discord. Language evolves ‘n’ such.
In reality it’s extremely complicated. On certain lemmy instances everyone to the left of kleptocracy is a far left tankie lunatic.
No ‘actual tankie’ disagrees with any left wing view, except the method used to get there. The difference between tankies and the far left pictured is the lessons learned from (usually) us backed ‘freedom fighters’ that fought against popular movements and uprisings that required force to take down as infinite outside arming and funding is usually difficult to peacefully resolve. There’s a lot of valid criticism of the ussr and cpc, anyone that has ever picked up a history book outside the west will tell you that using force to defend progress isn’t one of them.
Or to put it another way and really risk the ban; if you were to do a successful revolution in the us tomorrow and a faction of magats suddenly get unlimited funding and weapons to ‘protest’, kill whatever security force you come up with, and start spreading hateful rhetoric while doing hate crimes… Would you use force knowing how dangerous they are, or would you roll over and let them ‘lead a popular revolt’ against your ‘tyranny’?
Its a fundamental question that separates humans, and one whose answer doesn’t change unless the answerer personally experiences why some support using force.
I dont call people tankies for thinking that communism is cool. Or that the west sucks.
I call people tankies, when they defend the ethnic cleansings and the great purge of Stalin by saying “we just had to defend ourselves” or portraying them as an integral part of the struggle better peoples lives.
Because i personally dont think that deporting entire ethnic groups from their homelands is needed to better peoples lives. I dont think the paranoid xenophobia of Stalin helped anyone and at worst crippled the ability of the Red Army to withstand the initial invasion of the Wehrmacht. I think his usage of the word “counterrevolutionary” completely devalued the word because calling Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotzky counterrevolutionaries for calling for collectivization, only to turn around and calling Bukharin counterrevolutionary for opposing collectivization is a sign for devolving into a byzantine power struggle.
It’s not complicated at all? Tankies are autocrats. They’re on the authoritarian right politically, which makes their economic stances irrelevant.
Also everyone knows history is written in blood, the fuck are you pussyfooting around the mention of historical violence for?
You have a deep misunderstanding of tankies. And leftism. And…pretty much everything?
No, quite literally you do. Then again you people tend to call anyone to the left of burning children alive tankies, so that doesn’t matter.
They’re not right wing, politically or otherwise. Just as a reminder the ussr was decades ahead of the us in terms of left wing cultural progress; promoting gender equality, racial equality, and religious equality. Yes, they turned authoritarian, because they didn’t want to be destroyed by the us; and hadn’t advanced enough to understand why mixed markets, i.e. dengism, was essential.
But building a nation from scraps while at war with an enemy with inexaustible resources tends to require authoritarianism, and will require some level of authoritarianism until the west is disarmed, economically and militarily.
Anyone that disagrees with that has no concept of how much destruction and chaos the us sowed among any nation that dared to self determine away from being a us slave state.
Jesus christ I thought my post was firm enough but you’re still trying to argue. I never said shit about the US or the USSR and you’re spewing bullshit like I made an argument.
Reading over what you wrote in full, you’re either trolling or incapable of admitting fault. Either way, good luck to you.
Your tankie overlords are literally doing what you’re describing in Ukraine, South Africa, all over the middle east, right fucking now and you’re talking about some CIA spookops the public had no knowledge of until 30 years after the fact.
Who taught you this bullshit?
You mentioned tankies, tankies are explicitly supporters of the ussr, nothing more or less. If you fail to understand that, no shit you’re confused. You’re one of those people that think if you have a problem with killing children, you’re a crazy leftie tankie. As you’ve demonstrated in this comment.
Also the us is still bombing more than a dozen countries for the crime of not wanting the us. What the fuck are you in about secret shit?
From pinochet to pol pot the us hasn’t been secret about anything but their failures. Who taught you to suck billionaire dick this hard?
You’re confused. Shifting all those goalposts must’ve scrambled your brain, go back to your imbecilic belief that Stalinism somehow isn’t fascism and start over from there.
Our education system has failed, along with many others, you. Best of luck.
Jesus fucking Christ you think our education system is producing tankies? You think our education system produced people who defend Stalin?
News flash! You learned to hate Stalin in our education system and never questioned it.
Sure thing lib. Stalinism, the thing that nearly solely killed fascism, is fascism. You’re welcome on behalf of stalin, by the way, for killing nazis when you people wouldn’t.
Parenti, in Blackshirt in Reds, covers this topic excellently. He does not gloss over the flaws and corruptions in the USSR, but he is realistic in giving a fair assessment of their successes in the midst of their failures. A big point being what you mentioned above: the USSR had to continue focusing production towards just being on even footing with the US in terms of defense, to protect against the very real threat of the US overthrowing the government as they were doing in so many other communist countries. At no time during the USSR’s existence were they ever not under attack by some outside force or another (the NAZIs, CIA, multi-national capitalist interests etc). Here’s a good quote talking about the Stalin era and progressive policies during that time:
During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism didn’t work” is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.
Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti
As brilliant as the previous comment was your reply couldn’t be more confidently wrong.
That’s not even far on the left, that’s just some middle of the ground left. Real far left would be burning government buildings while having a heated discussion about the order of the colors for the flag to be raised over the rubble.
Thank you, I know lemmy is left leaning and so am I but let’s not lose our touch with reality here. People can downvote as much as they want but I’d say you’re objectively right. Or does anyone want to place some counter argument instead of downvoting? Because I can’t think of any
You’re right except that my (EU) view of Lemmy is that it’s not really left leaning.
The large amout of anti-Trump/Musk post doesn’t make it so.
A large part of it is US dems/libs making those posts. They are center-right at best.
And I should know since I point that out to them and see the reaction.
Massive downvotes and an avalanche of vicious comments.
To some degree, I agree, including the tendency for infighting among leftists. It’s why I’ve never liked this meme or its variations much. On the other hand, I’ve recently seen only one side actually mobilize to attack government buildings and harm people inside, and it wasn’t the left.
Anecdotally, this week at work, I heard a self-identified rightist argue for banning gay marriage. Others sitting around their table agreed. I’ve also had the privilege of hearing we should get rid of social programs, and too many jokes about killing people they don’t like. Last time I talked to a tankie and they defended oppressive policies saying the ends justify the means, folks around us made fun of them and moved on.
I think one of these groups might not be a real issue. At the very minimum, they’re definitely not as dangerous as the other one, right now. So, is the meme a bit silly? Sure. Does that matter? I don’t feel like it does.
Please don’t reply re: proper tankie political classification. It’s beside the point, I’m using them because it seems to be what most imagine when they think “far left.”
My point, simple and plainly put is that wishing for an egalitarian society (or whatever it is called) isn’t an extremist believe (as in far-x) and most people would usually agree with it.
I just think it is just how much mass media controls most people’s perception, and how is that the key factor antagonizing with finding common ground.
Centrism doesn’t mean that you can’t choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can’t do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It’s a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn’t matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can’t decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn’t automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
I consider myself Centrist because I would rather eat 10 pounds of fried bugs than align myself with either absolute clown show of a party.
I’m a free agent, and the haters can’t stand that they can’t have me.
This only makes sense if you insist on reducing complex multidimensional concepts to a single scalar value. Even intuitively it doesn’t make sense. You place yourself in the centre between two philosophies you disagree with? What?
It actually makes more sense when you don’t reduce it. Look up a Nolan Chart, or quadrant-based political stance diagram. I fall squarely into the center of the Nolan Chart.
You think that reducing to two dimensions is significantly different than reducing to one. I disagree.
Why do you think voting for a party aligns yourself with that party?
If two people want to attempt to unalive your mother with a 50% probability that they will succeed, and you have the chance to stop only one of them, reducing the chance to 25%. Does it mean that you align with whoever you do not choose?
Voting WITH a party is not the same thing as voting for a candidate that has openly identified as a member one party or the other because that is a barrier to entry or funding avenue for them.
I know it’s hard to accept, but the entire history of both parties hasn’t been “socialist utopia vs. Nazis.” For a century the Democrats didn’t eject all the Southern racists that declared they were Dems simply to be a counterpoint to Lincoln-to-MLK-era Republicans.
Even a cursory understanding of history should make anyone distrust all political parties forever.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Why not vote for Bernie then? Better than nothing. At least it may give a lot of people or the democrats faith that he could potentially win in the future.
I’m not saying that you need to give them your time, I’m just saying that voting for them doesn’t mean that you stand for what they believe. You can vote them and at the same time advocate for a different voting system.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Like Bernie has said, it is the only realistic vehicle to carry someone like him into the White House. The way the US political system is structured your movement needs to take over an existing party instead of trying to establish its own new party from the ground up if it wants any hope of success.
That doesn’t make you a centrist. Ya’ll seriously have lost your ability to see anything objectively it’s wild. The Democrats aren’t left wing except for a few people I could probably count on one hand but nearly the entire country, and its inability to pay attention even across its northern border, believes that the Democrats must be left wing since the Republicans are right wing.
You may very well not be a centrist, or maybe you are, but basing that on anything that suggests that the Democrats are left, and left to a point where they balance the extremism of the GOP, renders he whole thing worthless.
We’ve been screaming at the US for years to get a fuckin’ clue PLEASE just become moderately politically literate we are begging you.
I spent 4 years going into debt for a degree in political literacy. And then more for a related Master’s. I appreciate the frustration, but I can assure you I know exactly what I’m taking about.
Relative to the 1D spectrum of D to R in the US, I’m certainly in the middle ground, beyond the border of what falls enough into the D realm. From a global perspective, sure, the Dems are already a mess that overlaps the center some, but thats a fuzzy edge and not as fully held by the Dems as most moderately informed Europeans like to imply.
And yes, the lack of appropriate labels makes me more of a “Centrist” than anything else, but its barely an accurate term, as is using a 1D left/right binary to define anything can be. I’m against many types of government spending, which only a decade or two ago used to be such a quaint way to identify oneself politically, then everyone dropped the mask and it’s just a full-on Kleptocracy out there now. On a Nolan Chart, I’m squarely in the Centrist square. On a quadrant evaluation, I fall into the same zone as Thomas Jefferson and…Marianne Williamson, oddly enough.
Plus, Lemmy needs to hear opinions from outside the tankie echo chamber.
Reducing an individual to a single point on these charts is kinda a fool’s errand.
Far better to give yourself a series of points on stances you agree with and carve out a spread of your beliefs with an averaged point that represents you.
To say you are a centrist because your beliefs are purely in line with what society considers anodyne and ‘normal’ is far removed from a person that agrees with extreme positions on all sides of the compass.
I’d love to hear about that “many types of government spending” because that’s kinda important here.
Any dipshit can barely pass classes and get a degree. I’ve worked with engineers who can’t even fucking count pillars in a picture and argue when you politely ask for a recount so you’re gunna need to do a lot more than leave incredibly important context up in the air while flapping around your basically worthless-until-proven-otherwise degree.
Trump went to a good school. He’s bad at everything he supposedly learned there. Many republicans have law degrees and some days you wonder if they’re even able to read a children’s book with any level of competency.
Yes, well I also hate typing out my political beliefs on mobile, but you raise a fair point. Even though in sure you’ll hate everything I say out of principle. Apologies in advance for typos.
In general, the GAO does a good job of enumerating wasteful spending. For example, there’s 133 individual programs over 15 Federal agencies intending to expand broadband coverage. FFS, consolidate that. So there’s statutory reforms and some streamlining to be done strategically across government. Not to balance spoons on a fork better than one can look at a spreadsheet, like some people.
My family has spent their carers in education, and for me there’s no love lost with the Dept of Education being eliminated. Even if you reduce it to a small grantmaking entity that funds state level systems, that’s a function that can be easily done from within DOI.
There’s a large number of farm and oil subsidies that are so old as to be the goal of the industry to exploit. But oh no, don’t touch farmers because you might undermine Monsanto’s bottom line. These poor people are human shields.
Earmarks, while a pittance on paper at only $15B in 2024, are a cultural artifact of the endemic problem in budget making. While not all spending is Earmarked, there’s plenty beyond that scope which is a personal or lobbyist-initiated favor. Innumerable examples exist for this, and neither side is willing to get rid of theirs in order to get rid of the other side’s favorites. Everyone is the problem here. Sure, at some level this is a balancimg act with the cost of politics and playing to constituents. But the fact that most Reps see it as their right is the problem.
Military spending is crazy bananas and no one will touch it. Regardless of what idiots Musk and Hegseth say. The whole infrastructure is based on the Cold War+Post9/11 add on.
My career is in international development, and as an industry, it very often achieved remarkably little other than things like gainfully employing 10% of the PhDs in a small country in Sub-Saharan Africa to do office work. Some programs were awesome and saved lives and made a difference. They were the rare exceptions to the rule. However, simply strangling USAID like has happened is the stupidest, most expensive way to accomplish chaos with nothing to show for it. Many programs that engaged in short-term behavior change frequently showed how ineffectual they were in their own final reports, yet the same companies still thought they did a great job because they had simply not failed to complete the contract.
And don’t get me started on how many contractors there are that charge 50% above market rate just because they can. Doesn’t matter the industry, it’s literal collusion across every contractor. I’ve written the budgets, and learned how to be only a “tiny” part of the problem. The reliance on contractors is a strategic disadvantage. Because money can solve that problem, it goes away temporarily over and over. That was a low-information environment in the past, ordering copier toner from a paper catalog. We need a new round of procurement reforms.
I can go on and on. In large part, there’s no one simple solution here. It’s a lot of statutory reforms, hard work, strategic planning, and doing less with less that had to be adopted over years, as was done in the 90s. But at a much higher rate, and with more urgency. The US is in a genuine debt crisis, and the people who ran on crashing the system won in part because the Dems ran on ignoring this among other problems.
To be honest, I agree with most of that. I’d love to hear more about the department of education but I also don’t wanna waste too much of your time and am aware that in the States it’s not entirely what it may seem to be. Personally I think it should be expanded to be more of what people believe it to be; leaving education so fully up to states doesn’t seem to do much besides make it easier for republicans to turn their base into even bigger drooling morons.
But anyway thanks for clarifying, and in such depth, too. I’m glad to hear that “streamlining” doesn’t seem to mean the classic right-wing nonsense around making government small enough that it can be easily controlled by awful people. I’m also not sure how centrist these points are, especially if you’re aiming to, for example, not rely on private contractors. Left-wing policies aren’t “spend blindly”, that’s just a right-wing attack angle so they can defund things, so if you have ways for the government to be able to do things well then I mean of course I’m all for it.
If americans could read, they would be very upset.
Lately I’ve caught myself thinking differently. The left is progressive because they want to progress civil rights. The centerists are conservative because they just don’t want things to change. The right is regressive because they want to turn back the clock. Honestly I think we need to stop calling people on the right conservative and give them the new label regressives.
You have to see conservativism and “the conservatives” as separate things. One is a group that can hold many different views and another is a view point itself.
Conservatives want to go back to the days when mediocre white men were greatly rewarded just for being white.
As a mediocre white guy, I can confidently say that is today. Any white guy who is like “I never got any special treatment for being white” has gone though life and society with their eyes closed.
There’s still systematic racism with America. That being said, everyone’s quality of life other than the uber rich has gone down noticeably. That’s part of the reason populist lies from Trump work so well.
It’s funny because from my European perspective there’s no (visible) left in the USA. Democrats are centrist. Sanders could be social democrat. Otherwise I fully agree with you.
I think this has only happened because of manipulation of the masses.
The US political spectrum has shifted so far. What is right in the US is far right in the EU, and what is left in the EU is far left in the US.
Ugh, market socialism exists.
Not all socialism has planned economies. That’s communism. A specific subset of socialism.
Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on market economies. badumtssh
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it’s more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff it’s communism.
Right, but I see market socialism as an ideological compromise rather than inherent socialism. Im from scandinavia, and my country is a capitalist country with a strong welfare state.
You have “welfare capitalism” as they define it so that they get to still try to keep people tethered to capitalism. Capitalism is not just having money, it’s a system that prioritizes said money. Capitalism seeks to reduce regulation and separate the worker and owner class and basically by definition you don’t get to have a say if you don’t have money. Scandinavian countries are not finding a balance but are resisting capitalism while keeping its name and to make people not be afraid of not having it(for some fuckin’ reason people really want it I don’t get it).
If you have strong regulations, a government focused on taking care of people instead of relying on businesses to do it, and the people have fair power then you don’t have capitalism, just a system where private ownership exists but is not jerked-off at every turn like in the states. It was literally made up so the merchant class could keep all their money as monarchies were falling. It’s a not something you want to even associate with. Even the states hasn’t gone full capitalism because they know(knew) that it’s not a truly viable system.
I also want system with some level of private ownership, but I also don’t think private, for-profit power generation should be a thing and if a company under “capitalism” is too big to fail then at least a large part of it should be sold to the government, and at least have it’s executive board purged, not handed a bunch of money as they hold their employees’ jobs hostage.
agnostic are agnostic because there is no foolproof evidence basis.
with politics you can clearly see how some stances have been done and their effects. and other instances you also have a basis even in the most unclear case
just had an issue with the negative connotation implied here talking about agnosistics :D
Yeah since people cannot be expected to have full knowledge of the evidence, you have to recognize you can be agnostic about some issues. It’s virtuous to seek evidence and knowledge, and you should make choices based on the best information you have.
I’m not advocating for independents btw. I think you should clearly pick a party to vote for, but the two party system is a horrible system for people who are pluralistic in their views.
I think we can all agree that adding religious parallels to anything is a waste of everyones time.
The boss: steal most of the profit
The worker: hey stop stealing, i’m the one working
Idiotic centrists: hEy MayBe You CaN JusT LeT Him SteaL A LittLe BiT
You can advocate for wealth taxes, unions, and other welfare measures within a capitalist system. I’m from one of the most egalitarian countries in the world and we are capitalist too.
What you’re from norway or canadian or something?
It’s easier to be egalitarian when your loaded with oil money, isn’t it?
Nope, but I’m from scandinavia, no oil money.
Edit: also, I dont like categorical descriptions, because reality is more complicated. But what is happening in the US is more specifically referred to as “rentier capitalism”. In Scandinavia, we have something like “welfare capitalism”.
You live in a wood, you genocided the samyz and forced sterilisation was still a thing a couple of decades ago
I’m not saying we don’t have things to work on, but it’s not black or white. Social injustice gets reduced over time in a democracy. Name a country that is not capitalist that has never done bad things.
Independent here. Both parties are bat shit crazy in their own ways. Will I choose psycho #1 or psycho #2 to decide my fate? It is actually a very tough choice.
What has been psycho about the democratic party?
Ohhh idk “hey sit down Bernie, we’re going to suppress your campaign that actually has traction so we can run the lady who stole aid money from Haiti with her Iran-Contra involved husband, y’know, that lady literally everyone hates? Don’t worry, she’ll tell people to ‘Pokemon GO to the polls!’ so we got this.”
Not good enough? How about *gestures vaguely at their recent support of Israel*?
Getting everyone’s basic needs met is more of a centre-left ideology.
Many centre-right parties believe in things like public healthcare, because it has a net-benefit to the economy.Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything. That’s a really poor strawman argument from someone who clearly doesn’t understand global politics.
I guess you’re confused with people in the U.S who think having views somewhere in-between those of democrats and republicans makes you a centrist.
That U.S-specific ‘centrism’ is really just right wing politics.Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything.
I seriously don’t understand how fucking difficult this is to understand. It’s why I largely ignore political discussions on Reddit/Lemmy/all social media.
I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.
I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.
This is literally what centrists all over the world (well, the parts that show up in English-language news anyway) think about Palestine, though.
And you missed the entire point. Centrism isn’t about trying to find a perfect middle ground to every individual subject.
Of course there will be centrists that support Israel carpet bombing everything. There are other centrists that don’t support them. There are some that will support them with conditions. I know someone who is broadly centrist who thinks Israel should be dissolved entirely.
It’s not a fucking hivemind.
It’s not a hive mind, but centrist parties almost invariably have pro-Israel/“it’s complicated” positions. There will always be individual variation, but the pattern is clear.
Now do it with gazans
far left and center left are relative to your own position anyway
They are relative to global politics which most Americans know nothing about, it seems.
Republicans have always been pretty hard right and as of the Trump administrations they are pretty much extreme right. Democrats seem to randomly oscillate between centre right and right.
Pro-Oligarchy vs Fascists, IMHO.
Centrists don’t sit in the middle of every issue or make an exact 50/50 compromise on everything.
In practice, they just capitulate every time.
You are right, that centrists don’t actually sit as a 50/50 middle. But that means that “centrists” always actually side with fascists and the far right when forced to take a position. If you aren’t fully willing to confront capitalism, it means that you will side with fascism before even mild socialism.
That’s your opinion, not a fact.
And the issue with that is you’re only seeing it as two sides and a fence-sitter.
Centrists form their own views and positions, independent of the parties on either side.There’s no forcing them to take a position, they already have one.
And when they have to vote for/against legislation changes, they’ll side with whichever option aligns most closely with their views.US pseudo-centrism is right wing though, which might be what you’re confusing real centrism with.
Am I understanding you right that you are saying that all centrists will side with fascism over socialism? Because I have some news for you in that case.
Actually, it sounds like I have news for you if you don’t think that’s the case.
Fascism is not the same as capitalism. For capitalism to work properly, it is required that market power is minimized and that companies cannot influence politics. The fact that they have been able to do so is not capitalism.
Milton Friedman – In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he argues that government intervention should be minimal and that businesses should focus on profit rather than lobbying for special advantages. While he doesn’t explicitly state that capitalism requires private companies to stay out of politics, he warns against corporate influence leading to cronyism.
Adam Smith – In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he warns against “the merchants and manufacturers” using their influence to gain monopolies and special privileges, which distort free competition. He emphasizes that capitalism works best when businesses do not manipulate laws in their favor.
James Buchanan (Public Choice Theory) – Buchanan and other public choice theorists (like Gordon Tullock) argue that when businesses influence politics, they engage in rent-seeking, which distorts market efficiency. They emphasize that government should limit corporate lobbying to prevent economic inefficiencies.
Luigi Zingales – A more recent economist, Zingales argues in A Capitalism for the People (2012) that corporate political influence undermines free markets and leads to a system of “crony capitalism,” where economic power translates into political power.
Maybe we should stop with left, right and centrist all together.
It’s a stupid way of defining politics. If you ask a random person what being left means it can vary from anything between hugging a tree or wanting good health care.
By calling yourself “green” or “social” you are immediately putting a label on yourself and a lot of people won’t vote for you because they’re too dumb or lazy to actually read into what a party is about. I saw an article here on lemmy that pointed out some moron that voted for Trump in hopes he would save his farm, if he would have read into politics he would have known that Trump was the worst possible choice but here we are…
I’m from Europe and I see the same shit happening here. Call yourself green or left and people will scoff at you.
If there is anything the current “left” parties absolutely suck at its marketing. Call yourself the freedom party or whatever but stop using idiotic terminology that people can’t relate to. Almosr no one will vote for the “environment party”.
I hate the extremist conservative parties here but i have to give them credit for being able to market their party in such a way that people are literally voting on them AGAINST their own best interests.
The word you’re looking for is pluralism.
If there is anything the current “left” parties absolutely suck at its marketing.
You mean to tell me endless purity tests and screaming “you’re a literal nazi” at everyone who disagrees slightly with your position aren’t effective tactics to change someone’s mind? No waaaaaaay.
The biggest party in the Netherlands is called the freedom party, their mainly anti-immigrant and against the freedom of religion and the freedom of education. Totally agree they’re great at marketing (though it’s more about being loud and talking about social problems than it is about having ideas of how to solve them). They’re considered to be far-right populist, their leader (Geert Wilders) is aligned with Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni. The left has lost their working class-base traditional base to them because of them being more relatable (and less high-brow) than the labour party, the socialists and the greens.
Love to see the compromise for that one.
“What if we let them kill some of that social group so everyone gets what they want?”
Some kind of national socialism
Sure, the 1% it is.
We’re going french style.
😎
Americans with their white or black bullshit
Centralists… they are Libertarian, which means they don’t care what anyone else does, even if they are dictatorial or authoritarian, as long as the libertarian is left alone and are not affected. They wouldn’t mind watching the world burn or even care so long as their part of the world was not on fire.They are individualists, they care about others, all they care about is themselves. They don’t want to see the world as a community of fellow equal humans, they see others are either servants to serve them, people they can exploit or individuals they can take advantage of.
Oh c’mon, I consider myself to be on the left but this is a strawman and you know it
Edit: if you want this to be more accurate then add this at the end of far left section: “at all cost. And I mean ALL cost.”. And reminder, we’re talking about FAR left here
Yeah someone needs to study the death toll of far left policies.
Indeed, studying it is the best way to learn that the huge numbers that get thrown around in pop-history are completely made up cold war propaganda.
More people die every year due to the lack of food, medicine and clean water than whatever made up number you can come up with for “far left” policies.
I’m not sure that’s fair. The “death toll of communism” has more to do with authoritarianism and political maneuvering than economic policy. Also, the people quickest to point out this fact don’t seem to be using the same measuring stick to tally up the equivalent “death toll of capitalism.”
It’s just propaganda that doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny. All governments - including ‘centrist’ ones - have an awful lot of blood on their hands. Enough blood that I wouldn’t say there’s a significant difference due to economic policy alone.
Authorianism is pretty much how I see the far-left.
Communism, I’m still unsure about.
I’m fine with criticizing the failings of capitalism.
Uh… The farthest left ideology out there is anarchism, which is long story short the abolishment of the top-down state. That is literally the opposite of authoritarian.
Political theory is not a two dimensional line.
Those of us who recognize that organization is the most powerful force in human history recognize anarchism for the controlled opposition it is.
Capitalists love anarchists. What isn’t to love about an ideology that wants to overthrow the established structure but ideologically refuses to use any strategies that have historically actually, you know, have worked?
P.S. for the intellectually honest anarchist, what was the outcome of the Paris commune, or Spain?
What no theory does to an mf
