- cross-posted to:
- whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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I dont like the left/right frame used in talking about societal structures because they are not anchored properly. How we define them can be so vastly different. This makes it easier for the machine to control the conversation to benefit itself.
They’re defined differently because liberals desperately want them to be.
The left is revolutionary-progressive politics. The right is conservative-regressive politics. Those are the anchors. Those have always been the anchors.
In the 1700s, when the term was first being used, being a liberal was left wing, because that was relatively revolutionary when there were still Monarchists around. Since the mid 1800s left wing has always started at anti-capitalism, because liberalism was the default view.
What about a middle ground like solidarism?
I agree
We should just abolish the left and right dichotomy tbh
I guess I’m right-wing, then.
I can’t tell what’s actually being advocated for here. And this run up to the midterms means that I seriously doubt the intentions of many on “the left”.
I strongly suspect meddling from America’s enemies to divide and conquer by convincing well-meaning people actually on the left that their votes won’t help anything.
fuck capitalism, all my homies hate capitalism
are these your kissing homies, your cuddling homies, your fighting homies, or do you make no distinction you kiss and cuddle and fight alongside all the homies
i got this homie application right here and i just want to have the right box checked
no distinction, its whatevs the homies are down for 😉
Fuck socialism. Both national and international.
easy solution to international communism: good dental hygiene
i can’t brush without my frauduline
Except Jeff. He’s the one with the job and a car who drives us around.
Unfortunately I must either choose between capitalism and living like a stray dog
Forced, coerced, under duress. “choose” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Capitalism is a private group using societal resources to make unreviewed and unappealable decisions. It’s absolutely an authoritarian base system of economics and it is already being used to strip away protected freedoms because businesses are not bound by civil restrictions like government. A typical example are phone records provided to the police by phone carriers. At no point does any user have the ability to voice their concern for being stalked by a system resistant to change.
Your left or absolute left? When the Overton window of a nation is so far off the centre that your left is the global right, and your right is in crazy-town right and left start to mean strange things.
it’s weird how a lot of us, our positions on specific issues has not changed (i mean a few have, i’ve learned a few things, but in general they’re all pointing the same direction) i’m looking at the meme @Godric@lemmy.world shared, and i’ve gone from “i mean it’s just a piece of paper. Grampas never got one and (at least when we were around) claimed to never want one” to “give them the same rights as us or i’ll stab you. yes i’m talking about the LGBTQ community but i really don’t care who Them is. Same rights for everybody.” It wasn’t until i got some deep education on the tax system that i didn’t just want to raise taxes on the wealthy, i wanted to hose them. like 95% ttop marginal tax rate.
I’ve always been told i’d get more right wing as i aged, but those were people whose education stopped at some point.
Working as intended…
This is why the left-right spectrum is functionally useless as soon as you start naming specifics. A person who supports all the above policies and is pro-capitalist would be a social democrat.
And the punchline is that yes, yes you are.
Well, UBI is a leftist idea. Even though, it’s a very right wing coded leftist idea.
None of the other points are in either side of that dichotomy. Almost like if it’s a false one.
that must be where you live. Out here in statesia, the dichotomy is kind of based around those issues. My point being, every country has its own politics.
Out here in statesia
AFAIK, your politics don’t even have a left wing…
Your press is somehow making a scandal out of the new New York “socialists” policies, like selling food at market prices in places the poor can access.
the concept of left-right divide is merely where the aisle in congress/parliament is. it comes from revolutionary France. it’s entirely relative to the country.
Statesia’s “left” does a lot of stuff that the rest of the global organizations that Statesia is included in (eg G7 or G20) would have them aligning with parties that sit on the right side of their country’s aisle. i get it. but there is still an aisle in statesia. it’s between y’alls right wing and y’alls lunatic fringe right wing. here it’s just our left and right. which sucks balls but i like my home and i’d rather try to push the overton window back left than give up on it.
Indeed! These are the definitions of the political systems in respect to left and right
Hypothetically you could be educated enough to know that Marxism is a better way to organize and distribute resources, while also hating the human race enough that you are a capitalist because you yearn for human extinction.
my economics degree feels seen thank you. i went to a right wing econ school and if you even mentioned that economies had goals of both efficiency AND equity (not accounting equity. closer to equality but not quite) and capitalism ignores equity, well, you failed the class.
Are you doing okay? You do realize that I was the person you were arguing with the other day. The one where you threatened to report me for “impersonating a physician”, and that you had several post graduate degrees that were “better” than mine, and taught physicians who are all idiots? When I asked what your education was you acted like you couldn’t give me any information because I was going to dox you?
And now you randomly respond to me in a different post unprompted to tell me you have an econ degree, and post that you’re a private music teacher?
Like, I don’t care about the stuff from yesterday. I’m just wondering if you’ve been feeling off lately, or if you have recently been under a lot of stress that may be affecting how you communicate with others? I don’t mean to pry and I’m not trying to be rude, just checking in on a fellow human. Something about your writing and switch in tone is ringing some alarms. If I’m out of line, let me know and I’ll drop it.
i’d be willing to discuss it in private, but there’s a chance it wasn’t “me” you were talking to, it was “I”. short version, my asshole drives the ship sometimes. and he’s a real asshole. he got off his leash back in… february? march? i can’t remember. getting him back on it has been difficult.
yes, i have a bachelor’s in economics (from a terrible university) i also have multiple other advanced degrees. each is from the leading institution in its field. simply put, if you’re going to denigrate my experience, i’m going to denigrate yours, dude.
the reason i consider most physicians idiots is because in my [medical. i offer one in medicine and a few others] CPE i offer, i make them take a pretest like they’re in elementary school. It’s over basic anatomy. Only one in five passes.
thanks for checking in though. a silly, though heated argument, shouldn’t be the end of a relationship. i got out of line. sorry dude.
No worries, it’s just the internet. I don’t specialize in any kind of mental health care, I’m a bones and joint guy. But growing up my mother was afflicted with pretty bad untreated bipolar disorder so I’m pretty empathetic to anyone trying to wrangle their mental health to a better place.
If you ever need a sympathetic ear, feel free to shoot me a message.
thanks. if you’re ever not sure, just ask me who you’re talking to (or tell me i’ll be eaten by clowns) and it should be enough to get the sane one of me back in control. most people don’t notice duality.
Sure thing. Gotta be able to recognize duality to embrace nonduality.
“Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers; when I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; but now that I have got its very substance, I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”
If someone can’t benefit personally from intellectual property then why would anyone take the time to create IP? Of course some will do it for the love of exploration but I have doubts it would be to the same degree without that carrot to chase.
Edit: imagine developing the cure for all cancer and you don’t even get a pizza party or Friday off, much less any sort of raise or financial incentive.
I haven’t earned a dime from teaching music. I do it anyways because i want there to be a thriving [my instrument] community where i live. i teach something very, very specific that is my intellectual property (the dude who helped me develop the technique named it after me). you can’t exactly copyright doubletonguing on the sax, so i haven’t bothered filing for mine.
people like us exist, but damn i would enjoy earning a little money from my music now and then. i gotta earn it busking or playing other people’s music/instruments.
You are choosing to volunteer, that’s cool inside any system. Imagine putting in 100 hour work weeks, developing a product like the blue LED or lithium ion battery thus creating billions upon billions of dollars of revenue and you don’t even get a pizza party or a Friday off. You get the same base pay and your family gets no benefit no matter how hard you work so may as well not create any value and just do the minimum beyond what you’re impassioned to do for free like volunteering.
Also sidebar I am so awfully tempted to make a joke about double tonguing the sax. Like a sax on the beach type joke.
Oh I remember those hundred hour weeks. They nearly killed both me and my relationship with my wife, who was also doing hundred hour weeks at the time. Fortunately it only lasted five months, but like we saw each other awake twelve hours those months. It was hell.
And double tounging is the wall I’m hitting in sax right now. I think I’m breathing wrong or something. But yeah, sax and it’s techniques are full of double entendrés.
I’m pretty sure we’re both double tonguing these comments right now so to speak. If by chance you are being serious then I hope you were both appropriately compensated for the efforts and ultimately that the work was worthwhile. The innuendos seem endless.
Then don’t do it. We can tell when it’s a crass cash grab anyway.
Also how do we determine what to spend resources on for R&D? It would be difficult to come up with an idea, know that it will take lots of labor and know there will be no benefit to oneself or their family vs doing the absolute bare minimum and getting more time with ones kids for the same outcome.
Spend more time with the kids. It’s ok. You don’t need capitalism’s permission.
Let’s be honest here. Most corporate r&d is another flavor of soft drink. We’ll be fine without. Most actual research is autists (complimentary) pursuing their special interest. They don’t need daddy dollar to tell them their work it’s important. They feel it.
Spend time with your kids.
Imagine generating billions of dollars of value and you don’t even get a pizza party. Not one dime for you or your family beyond your base pay. There’s less incentive to go out of your way to produce value if it’s not going to benefit you. No reason to work hard for anything if you’ll just be paid the same either way.
You just described capitalism.
Not really though. Under capitalism people are free to quit their job, and go start a company to test their idea and develop their own IP. The vast majority of founders worked for someone else Nvidia is a good example currently. Jensen Huang worked for AMD, Chris Malachowsky worked for HP, Curtis Priem worked for IBM. They had an idea, they quit their jobs and profited directly off their IP. Under a pure socialist system would you be able to quit your job? Who would you get capital from to test an idea? Also if it worked you wouldn’t get any profits from it, not even a pizza party or a Friday off even after producing billions of dollars in value. There would be zero incentive to doing anything but the absolute minimum because the compensation would be exactly the same if you did or if you didn’t. Why put in 100hr+ weeks of labor for nothing? No matter how hard you worked you and your family wouldn’t get anything, your children would be treated the same as the children of a man who put in the absolute bare minimum.
I’m cool with socializing a lot of things but we need to compensate people proportionally to the quality and quantity of value they produce.
Please don’t just downvote this. I’m open to discussion and to standing corrected. If you want to downvote then downvote with a worthwhile counter to the point at hand.
I don’t have to imagine, I used to work in commercial r&d. What you are describing is the reality for almost everyone under capitalism already.
No one ever got rich by working hard. The rich got rich by exploiting the work of others.
But if they wanted to they were free to start a company and profit from their IP directly, they chose not to (assuming they didn’t personally choose to sign some perpetual non-compete of which would have still been their choice). That’s different than it being illegal to do so. No one ever got rich from working hard? I’m guessing you’re unaware of most tech founders who had an idea, left the company they were at, started their own and became wealthy. Nvidia is a good example currently. Jensen Huang worked for AMD, Chris Malachowsky worked for HP, Curtis Priem worked for IBM. They had an idea, they quit their jobs and profited directly off their IP.
This story is extremely common across so many industries. Most founders once worked for someone else, had an idea, quit, and started their own company. Imagine you just work for the government, if you have an idea well cool for you we’re not funding that and you want to quit? How about no. Oh we actually let you quit and give you funding for your idea, well your pay will never increase no matter how much value you produce or how many hours you work to bring your idea to life. You work 35 hours per week or 100, same pay. You generated 10 billion dollars of value? You don’t even get a pizza party or a short day this Friday.
I’m cool with socializing a lot of things but there needs to be a way to compensate people to some degree based on the quality and quantity of their labor. There needs to be some freedom for a person to do what they want or even take out financial risk (loans) to change what they are doing aka go to school, start a company and so on.
Edit: please don’t just downvote, actually respond with a worthwhile point. I’m more than willing to concede a debate and hopefully you are as well.
I think the entire idea of free and open source software is an example of people working for something without personal benefit. We wouldn’t be talking on Lemmy right now if people hadn’t created the ActivityPub protocol and developed the infrastructure, for instance. Hell, I’ve developed software purely out of spite.
I think if you remove the carrot from the equation, most people will still do the things they love and would still need the things that they need. If I didn’t have to work 40-60 hours a week to afford things like healthcare and housing, I’d likely be working on software that improves the lives of those around me.
I can also see projects where massive achievement wouldn’t have been accomplished without some discipline in where time is spent.
One example in games is accessibility support. That is a region where indie devs are terrible, usually because it’s not inspiring to work on. Easier to just reply to your one blind user “Look, I have limited time and a long list of bugs. It’s a video game.” But AAA, and Xbox earlier in the gen, were much better about refining that experience for people.
There’s constantly memes mocking yellow tape, but that aside the improved ways in which games teach people and bring on non-players is like night and day to the old times. You can see that when you try picking up some old games for the first time.
I love Linux now on a technical level, but I probably wouldn’t have the theme I use for the UI if not for Windows, a paid product containing lots of expensive user research and telemetry-driven changes; a lot of GNOME and KDE authors were insistent about the technical efficiency of their old window setups until they finally gave up and started copying Windows - and it IS genuinely a more intuitive environment for a lot of people.
Talk with artists about all their abandoned projects, and you can find that there’s some benefit in balancing “Do what you love” and “Ship the damn product in a complete, wrapped box”
I think we’re getting into different discussions. The jobs people don’t want to do wouldn’t evaporate. I mean unless you’re imagining a future where the majority of labor and menial mental effort is automated then yes I could definitely see people having the freedom to do whatever they desired. As of now though there are a lot of jobs that people would not want to do if there was no personal benefit in it but are still wanted or needed by society.
If the “carrot chase” IRL wasn’t so blatantly rigged, I would tepidly agree with some aspects of your thesis.
At least in academia people who produce valuable IP get credentials, fame, a percentage of the money it produces, and of course more money dedicated to their R&D. If for instance there was no benefit in them producing that IP it would be pretty tough to justify the sometimes overbearing work it requires.
Also I agree, value isn’t appropriately compensated currently. Money as a concept has departed from value production and it ought to be corrected.
In the past value was direct, food, medicine, clothes, tools and the sort and if one produced more value they could exchange it for more value aka trade more cows for more clothes and tools. There was no real way to fake value like there is with money.
i would agree with you if anyone actually used a sane definition of what “political right” meant. i don’t really see that happening today so i have difficulty agreeing with you.
but yes.
Being delusional is not an excuse.
As annoying as the consensus on some words can be, prescriptivism is generally not very productive.
The meaning of “literally” now includes “Used non-literally as an intensifier for figurative statements: virtually (often considered incorrect; see usage notes).” And “Used as an intensive before a figurative expression.”
I think fighting language changes is a bit like standing firm against an avalanche. Ultimately if you want to communicate with people you’ve gotta speak their language.
There is some truth to that, but taking it at face value leaves the door wide open for malicious interference. Like, for example, redefining the entirety of the spectrum into your preferred range, leaving anyone outside of it both stripped of language to self-define and by default branded a loony.
Don’t get me wrong, language war is a thing, especially from liberal and fascist media. I just think making a case for a deeply held belief in a word to be wrong is unhelpful to just advocating for things they like. It’s scholarly or long-form discussions where it makes sense to dispell that, but with media existing entirely in soundbites of their choosing I don’t think it’s the best way to move the needle towards results to also have to fight a bunch of unfounded fear.
Depends. I’m not big on prescriptivism, and pedantry is fun but counterproductive, but at the end of the day, language is a tool of communication. If you let people fuck with it too much it breaks down, and you end up in a loop of “-No, socialism doesn’t work-Norway works-No, that’s not socialism-OK, let’s do that-No, socialism doesn’t work-”. Like, in this thread, you have a jackass who thinks “drug legislation”, whatever that is, is an inherently leftist position. One thread over, you’re talking to a jackass who thinks rent control is left wing economics, and doesn’t even read your reply if you don’t follow the Leftist owned-ass script he’s been rehearsing in his head since he saw Ben Shapiro do it. If you let people make up what words mean, they’ll build themselves a whole alternate reality and get lost in the sauce completely.
Literally
Feh.
