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What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
~ Paarthurnax
We talk a lot about left and right wing and what it means here. If you’re destroying elite power structures you are to the left of the king. There is zero ambiguity there.
It’s always been 99% vs 1%
The problem is that 49.5% think they are on the side of the 1%
Left wing, and right wing are a construct to divide us. The video below goes into the history of the term and how it’s been used in modern reporting.
If anyone has a peertube or other non YouTube link I’ll edit my comment to that link
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MYoA1R38cuc&pp=ygUccG9saXRpY2FsIHNwZWN0cnVtIGlzIGEgbXl0aA%3D%3D
I saw that video the other day. While I think that it’s true that there are social reasons why people adopt their politics. You’re extending that fact a bit far to say that fact nullifies left/right understandings of politics.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t have class solidarity with right-wingers. But it is a delicate situation because you also must maintain class solidarity with the groups right-wingers have been taught to hate.
That’s pretty simplistic and puts the cart before the horse. Political coalitions are not a new phenomenon, nor are picking up your politics from your social connections. That was exactly how politics worked in Rome. Hell in Constantinople their coalitions straight up sponsored chariot racing teams and ended up burning the city down https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots . Your membership in a coalition was dependent on who you received patronage from.
My point is, from the essence, from it’s meaning to the days of the third estate, breaking down power structures is left wing.
yup. im as left as anyone but you know if a right wing neighbor is picking up garbage strewn around the local park. im not against it.
Are you comparing a healthcare CEO to garbage in the park?
If so, I’m completely OK with that.
Hey! Settle down! Some of that garbage can be useful.
CEOs can be composted
yeah but would you want to eat anything planted in it?
Fair. Incinerated? I could live with watching a CEO powered TV
“Let’s sort this stuff as either dangerous or reusable! Cardboard- reusable. Broken glass- dangerous. Spent shell casing with DDD written on it- reusable.”
He was right wing. Now he’s an anarchist.
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He’s also 26, and was raised in the bubble of wealth and opportunity. For him to even have half of the radical ideas or to have read the Unabomber’s book is growth in of itself.
“What radicalized you?” dear reader, and more pertinently, at what age? Let’s not pretend we all were born as fully actualized and capable philosophical beings that were always right and never had to develop and grow.
Watching a holocaust movie on ABC as a 7 year old, then the next week witnessing a psychopathic cousin torture a starling to death.
Evil quickly moved from an abstract idea to a real and terrifying component of reality.
“What radicalized you?”
unironically it was just having one conversation after class with one of my professors when i was a freshman in college. i don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but i vividly remember the feeling of it afterwards, and walking away much more aware of all the things i didn’t know. radicalization was a slow and steady process after that, but that conversation was definitely an inflection point
Similar vibe-check that metastasized over time for me. Having an outright socialist friend who could argue plainly and calmly with conviction, set that mental brushfire that others can and do think radically differently, and they have a different lived experience that defined them and their path.
In seeking to understand a lot of theory of thought and politics, I found the political language and framework for the discontent and disillusionment I knew but couldn’t comprehend.
It also helped that I lived in an unabashed surveillance state, that the public at large actually wanted and defended from criticism or legal change…
Reading the Unibomber’s manifesto is only evidence of growth if you roll your eyes halfway through and stop.
Which Luigi did. He liked the main thrust of the argument, but found the methods of the unibomber to be distasteful and lazy.
And I tend to agree.
Attacking the people at the bottom does nothing. Attacking the assholes at the top however… They are the real enemy making the world a worse place, so it just makes sense to target them specifically.
Yeah, sure, that was the problem I’m talking about. Not the fascism.
Idk Drag, he still picked it up. That’s enough outside the normie reading list, 2edgy4u teens tend towards the obvious like Mein Kampf
When I realized how politicians fake incompetence to avoid liability. It’s not corruption if you fuck Up and break contracts with penalities in the Billions.
Aww the shooter is rightwing? I guess I’m a healthcare CEO stan now :( :( :(
The media is trying to paint a picture of him as a right winger so they can better control the narrative. Read his actual social media posts and you can see that it’s much more nuanced than that.
The media is also trying to paint a picture of him as a left winger. But his overall “wing” does not matter when we support him for his message
He didn’t kill the CEO of Planned Parenthood or the dean of a liberal college. He killed the CEO of one of the most evil companies in an evil industry - something we can all get behind
Right. It’s just yet another example of progressive ideas being popular with everybody, so long as it’s pitched in a vacuum without any labels attached. Everybody wants better healthcare. Everybody wants cheaper groceries. Everybody wants privacy in their bedrooms. Everybody wants money out of politics. But most people aren’t paying enough attention to realize that they’re actually voting against these things when they vote for conservatives, no matter what those conservatives pretend to stand for.
Eh, same thing with the democratic party, they at least drop some crumbs but at the end of the day they still answer to the oligarchs
I agree, but so many leftists on lemmy have told me they don’t want democrats working with Liz Cheney regardless of her message that we must stop Trump from getting re-elected.
I wish people would focus less on ideologies and more on solidarity for a cause.
That’s COMPLETELY different.
It’s easy to point out the obvious fact that Trump is a fascist who should never have been trusted to run the family real estate company, much less the government of the richest and most powerful country in the history of humanity.
It’s especially easy when you’ve already been kicked out of the fascist party for insufficient but not nonexistent loyalty to Dear Leader.
When there’s political relevance and profits in pointing out the obvious, Liz is there in a flash.
When it comes down to meaningful action, though, Luigi killed the killer and Liz voted exactly like her dad would have, which is “whatever whomever’s in charge of the GOP wants” 95%+ of the time.
Tl;Dr: Liz Cheney never did anything for the working class and the only time she pretended to, it only served to illustrate how out of touch with the reality of regular people the Lesser Evil Party is.
So much for solidarity for the cause
That’s what I’m trying to explain to you: to the DNC leadership and the Cheneys, there is no cause. Only a competition and a paycheck.
Do you seriously believe that Liz Cheney, Joe Manchin, and Nancy Pelosi care any more about the working poor than the likes of Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and John Roberts?
Because if so, I have oceanfront property in Nebraska to sell you…
Their cause was to prevent Trump from getting re-elected
If it was, they would have listened to the people they had to represent to win rather than the rich ones they represent to get paid.
Biden said it himself: as long as he gave it a good shot, he wouldn’t feel bad about losing to Trump.
The minute they didn’t have any money and power to gain, THIS was how much disdain the Bidens had for the fascist dictator–elect:
They interviewed one of his friends from college who said that “Luigi tends to be on the left economically but not agree with the leftist identity politics”
That’s kind of how humans work. Everyone has all sorts of disparate opinions not aligning directly to party lines. I mostly follow left wing politics except where it comes to guns because for some reason that’s right wing. So many beliefs and opinions cannot be properly expressed by a political spectrum but by god we’ll do it anyway.
It makes me remember that video of the guy putting every different shaped piece into the square. https://youtu.be/Nz8ssH7LiB0
Yeah exactly. I consider myself far left but if I were to speak about certain topics here, I would face lots of criticisms and downvotes… and that’s okay.
It’s why we should focus on topics and not teams.
if I were to speak about certain topics here, I would face lots of criticisms and downvotes
To be fair, your idea to sterilize every New York Yankees fan IS a bit on the extreme side…
No, we’re supposed to be focusing on a made up migrant crime epidemic and pets being eaten. We can’t look at wealth inequality until those issues are solved. /s
I think Luigi might have immigrant ancestors.
It’s-a possible. 🤌🤌
If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Left leaning people do too good a job of shooting ourselves in the foot by alienating people who don’t 100% prescribe to the same beliefs we have. The reality is people are all over the political spectrum and that’s not always a bad thing. Finding common ground and working together is what governance is all about.
We need to end the bullshit culture war divisions and make the rich afraid.
Left wing, and right wing are a construct to divide us
If anyone has a peertube or other non YouTube link I’ll edit my comment to that link
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MYoA1R38cuc&pp=ygUccG9saXRpY2FsIHNwZWN0cnVtIGlzIGEgbXl0aA%3D%3D
The further you get from center, the more caustic the purity tests get
Nah right wingers don’t give a shit about purity testing. Evangelicals don’t give a shit that Trump isn’t a Christian nor do Nazis care that Cruz is a mexican-Canadian. If you’re pushing in their direction thats all they care about.
Purity testing is a uniquely leftist problem and it’s part of why it’s so damn hard for the left to organise and accomplish anything ourselves much less appeal to the broader public.
The FBI has literally exploited this to destabilize activist orgs since the 50s with COINTELPRO and likely long before that.
If you go far enough right, you will find it. Trump once gave one little nod to encourage his supporters to get the covid vaccine, and they turned against him. He quickly let the news cycle pass and everyone forgot about it, but apparently that is the line they won’t cross with him.
I remember. A few voices amongst the cacophony whined but we both know they all fell in line and voted for him in 2020 and then again in 2024.
I should have clarified, but yeah I’m not discussing US right wingers, they are in wacko mode and follow no logic. The comment I replied to was about the left and I was discussing the center to left spectrum
Ah ok yeah I can see that now!
I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. The “center”? Of what? Between what?
You can’t have a “center” without first defining what those boundaries are. A major part of “leftist” belief is that those boundaries are in fact false and that rather than the political world being divided by left and right, it is divided up and down, that the rich govern everyone else.
Most centrists lack clear definitions of what it is, as you highlighted. That is my point. Western centrists are just like, a train station lobby of people milling about without clear platform or opinion. As you get further away, people have increasingly clear definitions. Your idealized leftist is hardly common. Most vigorously review their neighbor’s qualifications and are quick to purity test and reject those remotely to the right of them. At the furthest extremes, all pretense of the current world are effectively evil and should all be scoured away
Now, we are discussing political opinion and discourse. To your other point, I agree completely that the true divides are those of class/wealth.
I think i see what you’re sayin. Certainly there’s a hard divide between peeps that think “capitalism can or even should exist” for a prime example.
A more modern take in Political Science is to consider which groups will work with what other groups. Democrats generally don’t work with anarchists, but they will work with democratic socialists (to some extent, anyway), and DemSocs might work with anarchists. Republicans won’t work with democratic socialists, but will work with free market libertarians.
Notably, Horseshoe Theory doesn’t fit into this model. Free market libertarians won’t work with democratic socialists, either. So one way to define the center is to find the centerpoint between all these group connections.
However, another way to look at it is a graph rather than a line. Free market libertarians may not work with Christian nationalists, but both will work with the Republican party (not a perfect example, I admit, but that’s the gist). That graph might not have anything that can be properly called the center.
Nice discussion. I agree.
I’d clarify the distinction between work, and association/discussion. Especially here in online platforms
Seriously, though. I mean, if you see someone helping an elderly person cross the street, do you go up and ask them what their political alignments are before you decide it was a good deed?
Lol at the comparison. Our boy Luigi out there shooting CEOs and walking grandma’s across the streets
I mean … in a way he helped grandmas cross streets. After they now finally got that hip replacement or the walking aid or the physiotherapy or…
It’s absurd that y’all think this changed anything. We’re going to need a lot more blood to water that tree.
Except it did result in immediate change? Cou,d they reverse it down the line? Sure. But they backed off from it now because of this.
I’m with you what the tree needs more watering. But let’s not act if it didn’t have an immediate effect. They took back the “no more anaesthesia” for example. Yes they will try again, if the pressure isn’t kept on them.
Was he right wing?
Or, was he just right?
I don’t have to agree with right wingers on everything in order to agree that these rich parasites need to go.
US 3 letter agencies will start telling people left of center that he’s a “right wing Qanon nutjob”, and simultaneously tell people right of center that he’s a “radical marxist”.
Like IDGAF, even if he was right wing or even far right (which we don’t even know if he is or not), that’s still the fault of mainstream media propaganda that caused him to have those views, so he’s still the victim of propaganda.
That the USA state and its willing mouthpieces has completely lost control of the narrative on this one is just icing on the cake.
“Shit, maybe [political alignment I’m supposed to hate] ain’t that bad.”
I know it won’t happen, but that’d be great if this resulted in more widespread recognition that the rich are setting us against each other.
He has some right wing views on his Twitter, but I don’t think there’s any like explicitly pro Trump/ anti LGBT stuff that I’ve heard of. But yeah I completely agree.
If that’s the case, then he’s my kind of right winger.
The divide and conquer strategy of the ruling class will work as long as the oppressed are kept busy focussing on their differences.
