- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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But the far left are commie bastards idk what else to tell you
/s for whoever the fuck needs it
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Why would they do better when you vote for them no matter what they do?
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Let’s not suck off the left too hard, they have some splaining to do for this mess as well.
For not supporting Jill Stein? Agreed.
I think people who call Republicans and Democrats the same are just in love with their own need to rant. When they’re elderly they’ll walk around shouting at trees.
The far left and far right are both bad. If in doubt, look at any country which has gone down either path.
Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone’s basic needs met.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.
Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology. Both sides did horrible things, like purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.
Still waiting on that basic need.
Biden built entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid, while ironically being against universal healthcare. Almost like his donors didn’t want it or something.
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)
"Far Left: we’re going to force everyone into our micromanaged society and beliefs, because somehow that will fix everyone’s problems.
“Far Right: we’re going to keep things the way they were, and give people the freedom to do what they want.”
Alas, the way people see it depends a lot on what aspects you emphasise and caricature, and which you pass over. And how “far” you consider.
Far Right: You’re free to be poor, because who cares
Yes, which can be seen as “you’re free to be who you want” (and the rich are free to oppress you); Vs “you’re not free; the government will organise your life” (and I’m sure that goes well…)
The far right is the one not allowing people to be free to be who they want/are, inserting themselves into everyone’s bedrooms, and justifying it all with fear based propaganda.
What are you even talking about?
How about the freedom to own a place to live without being taxed for existing? The freedom to employ people based on what you think best for the company rather than to fulfil a race/gender quota? The freedom to educate your children the way you think best? The freedom to protect your children from disease the way you think best? The freedom to protect your family from illicit CIA experimentation by being borderline-paranoid? The freedom to make and sell the food you want, and drive the car you want?
Every one of these is restricted by government, and - if I’m not mistaken - traditionally more by Dems. Every one of these also has an upside to restricting! Mandatory vaccines. Standardised curriculums. Undoing oppression of blacks. Regulated food safety. But doing those upsides means restricting freedoms, and - as you might imagine - people disagree on the balance.
If you don’t understand the positive reasons why Republicans and others want their policies, then you lose the ability to help them see reason. You just sound smug and stuck in your political bigotry.
You are mistaken, both on what is actually restricted and who is doing the restricting.
This might sound controversial to you, but I don’t want the rich being able to oppress people.
(Historically, that went horribly. It’s still going horribly, in fact.)
I think you’re being disingenuously generous with your interpretation of far right policies.
It is controversial, I suppose. I also don’t want the rich being able to oppress people, and generally stand with you on most left-style policies talked about here on Lemmy. But restricting the power of the rich comes with downsides, and the extreme versions of it haven’t worked out well historically either.
restricting the power of the rich comes with downsides
Say, if I don’t believe there’s a good reason for a person’s wealth to reach Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk levels, if I say that’s not healthy for society, that we ought to implement heavier progressive tax and that people like him must pay it properly, can you explain what the downside would be?
How would you implement it? Given time and breadth, I expect one could find downsides.
But if it were really just that? Heavier progressive tax affecting the super-rich more, with enforcement on the rich to actually pay it? Sounds good to me.
I was going to say it’s not worth my time to think of downsides to that - but actually I can see two already. One is on principle, that wealth earned shouldn’t be penalised. Especially when there is real communal wealth generated by e.g. Amazon. I’ve even wondered, at times, if this sort of taxation provides a band-aid for avoiding the real work of stopping the injustice that leads to the wealth imbalance in the first place (like wage theft etc.).
The second is again how you implement it. I’ve seen a few fallacies in discussions of taxing the super-rich, around that complicated topic of what wealth really is when it includes company shares. You can shortcut that and say, well it’s definitely worth taxing Musk et al and anyhow they’ll have plenty of money left over - but if you do it slapdash like that, even if the effects don’t spill over to the poor, it’s still an injustice. And an injustice, even if hidden and apparently benign, is still a downside.
But yeah, tax the rich :-D. Please do!
I agree with your take of the far left to a decent extent, but your take of the far right is dumb. They are actively “micromanaging” society by disallowing anything that doesn’t align with there “the way things were” ideals, and even then the way things were sucked for anyone who wasn’t a white Christian.
Is that so. It hasn’t looked that way to me, from the news. More, it’s looked like people getting paranoid that it’s that way. But I typically only see big news from America, and not from many news sources. What I see more is Trump being a ridiculous bully, making a mess of relations both at home and abroad, and Musk doing the nerd equivalent, trying to solve government bureaucracy as if he knows everything and damaging everything in the process, not heeding anyone’s caution. But not micromanaging society.
But if it is, I don’t think that’s what the Repb supporters see, and this sort of comparison is about how one picks and chooses certain aspects of the two sides to compare.
How is restricting access to abortions, birth control and healthcare not micromanaging? How is abolishing gay marriage and trans rights compatible with “imma leave you alone to do your own things”?
I don’t think that is micromanaging at all. Abortion: federal level has fought for it to be ruled at state level. That’s lifting restriction. State level: those states which have restricted it, are doing it on the idea of protecting the life of the foetus: that’s restricting specifically what appears to them as killing another person. Birth control: not restricted, is it. Healthcare: removing or changing federal subsidised healthcare: that’s not restricting or micromanaging! It’s just removing a good thing! (Yes, I think national healthcare is good.) Abolishing gay marriage: hasn’t happened. Trans rights: “you should use your identified gender bathroom” Vs “you should use your birth sex bathroom” is not one more micromanaging than the other.
And, believe it or not, these are not the only things going on in America. Again, if you pick and choose, yes you can make an argument one particular way. Doesn’t help you help anybody else though.
Its only restrictive when the feds do it, okay.
Abolishing gay right hasnt happened, but is something conservatives clamor for at every twist and turn. Conservative justices write opinions about how decisions regarding the accessibility of birth control should be limited, but i guess thats not restrictive either.
And i am sorry, did you just pretend that the entirety of the conservative debate around trans rights is about bathrooms? No, they dont want trans people to exist. The feds just said “There are only two genders.” How tf is that not interference?
The far right is, quite literally, removing the freedom for undesired people to do what they want. If a woman needs an abortion to survive a ectopic pregnancy or a trans person wants HRT, the far right says no.
There’s lots of things going on, and the Far Right is certainly doing evils. But so, I think, is the Far Left. And Centre. And people and politicians of all sorts.
My point is about perception. If you pick and choose your naïvete (and your lies, misunderstandings and oversimplifications), you can make it look like this meme for either side, and then wonder at people (like the centrists in this meme) who go against an extreme. How then can you understand anyone except your own echo chamber?
Sadly it undercuts your point too, to anyone outside your group who might be learning from you: because if you call people stupid for things they actually don’t mean, that turns them away from you.
If you want to see far right evils, all you need is to look at the news. The comment you replied to contains a straightforward example. Could you tell us which evils the far left is committing right now?
Are you off the opinion, then, that no evil is done by the Dems, or farther-left people and politicians? I’m not American, and I won’t now compare to the countries I have lived in. But from what I hear, for starters the Dems are much accused of taking money from big companies to influence policy - and the blocking of Sanders for presidential bid was suggested to be that. The pharmaceutical industry, whilst nobly providing the world with COVID vaccines and many other great things, is not exactly known for its honest policies. People more specifically? I don’t care to take the time to look at their lives, since I’m not part of your country and don’t vote for them. Will you claim to me that Bernie does no wrong? That Biden has no hypocrisy? That latter I remember a couple of notable incidents.
Yes the far right evil is plain and obvious these days. That will not mean the Left, or Centre, will do no wrong if in power. I think quite a small look at history will show that, but my experience is outside of America. Maybe the Dems in America are saintly and perfect? Loving and incorruptible? Putting their country first in every situation and caring for all people fairly, not letting money sway their interest? What lucky people you are, to have such a party! How strange, that so large a percentage of your countrymen could not see the perfection that shines in the Dems! How unnecessary, that every day I see on Lemmy pro-Dem propaganda that twists the truth and sensationalises the mundane; for with such a perfect party, you could stick plainly to the truth, and their goodness would shine out without problem.
It must be nice in America to know you have a political side entirely without evil. For such a side I have not seen in the world.
None of what you complained about is the far left, but rather the center/right of the Democratic party.
To be clear, the far left doesn’t have political representation in America, so you can’t give actual examples because those would require the far left actually had power.
But if you think Biden, a literal fucking segregationist, represents the far left, then you don’t actually know what the left is.
No, I realise that. Hard to give examples of American far left abusing power when they don’t have any!
The far right’s definition of “people” is super limited. It doesn’t even include women.
I mean, that’s just lies. That the ‘Left’ around here enjoys as an oversimplification, but doesn’t help you understand other people at all.
There are some people who treat women as not people, but even the far right, as I understand it, are much broader than that, and less-far right certainly.
The far anything is miserable, left and right.
Except the Far Side.
This is correct. 😂 Great comic
What counts as “far” is entirely relative. A few centuries ago, democracy and abolitionism were “far” left
Clearly. Go back a thousand years and it makes no sense. We’re talking about today.
Really? Your comment definitely doesn’t make sense then
If only you had a brain, you might not have missed the point and construed it so far up your own ass it came out your mouth.
The more… favorable right wing points I’ve heard are more along the lines of “I’ve busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren’t trying to work?”
Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you’re trying.
It’s not even quite “fuck you, I got mine” because so many of them barely “got theirs” as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.
The “barely got mine and defending it” thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school “sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier.”
When I wanted to get food stamps “sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications on a technicality.”
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn’t use it “not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry.”
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let’s face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn’t be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It’s all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It’s so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought tankies were the far left? Or are they… further left than that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What no theory does to an mf
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?
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.
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.
