You must log in or register to comment.
Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left. This is how far the Overton window has shifted to the right. Meeting everyone’s basic needs is left-of-centre. Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
Far left would be state owned and controlled everything, redistribution of wealth via any means necessary, all public services fully state funded and free for all at the point of use.
“Socialism is when the government does stuff, and communism is when the government does all the stuff. What is a mode of production?”
God I fucking hate how the capitalist authoritarian states of the last century managed to gaslight everyone into believing this shit.
I am responding according to the context of the original statement. Yeh, you could go even further left and have anarchy, but that would be utterly impractical in today’s world.
[screams in communist]
Meeting everyone’s basic needs isn’t even far left.
When saying “Please stop bombing Palestinian children” is the most ultra-Tankie Iranian Revolutionary Guard propaganda printed in modern history, it does appear that public amenities are outside even the farthest fringes of left-wing ideology.
Far left would be state owned and controlled everything
I remember Elon Musk calling himself a socialist. And now that I’m looking at how he and Trump are running the country, I guess this does fit the above definition of Far-Left.
Noam Chomsky is Far-Left, and he advocated for a stateless society. But yeah the idea of liberty has definitely changed in
AmericaThe U.S.It’s because Marxists/Communists and Capitalists like to pretend Anarchism isn’t half of socialism because it hurts their arguments.
No, that’s authoritarian left as pure left is communal ownership. Market left would fit better and would use worker and consumer cooperatives and market syndicates rather than state ownership. I hate how Marxists convinced everyone they were the only form of socialism despite people like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon coming before him.
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.
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.
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
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.
Capitalism goes through different waves and has grown to accept government involvement insofar as to reduce market failures of which monopolies and externalities are some important ones. Unions are justified in capitalism by solving the market failure of asymmetric information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The simple version is that there is no Constitutional mandate for the Federal government to do anything related to education, which is why education is a function of the states. Yet it’s also 4% of the Federal budget, so depending on how much of a strict constitutionalist you are, the root question is more about what does it really need to be doing, and why. I would argue that this far after the end of Jim Crowe, and the proliferation of for-profit universities, ED isn’t maintaining standards, and is moving too slow to not simply feed Univ of Phoenix publicly-backed loan and GI Bill funds at a net loss to both taxpayers and students.
At the state level, from what I hear second hand, ED does little more than manage overly complicated and tonedeaf grant mechanisms that flow down to state Education Departments, and then becomes this sort of Leviathan of distant micromanagement. Often with feckless management, confusing and unclear terms, and making the District/State/ED relationship unnecessarily odd and overly burdensome.
Carter carved a new Department out of the Proto-HHS, and it’s been a target of elimination since it was created. Its necessary functions can either get folded into DOI, or maybe back into HHS, or maybe even just a smaller independent agency, though that alone raises the specter of duplicitive administrative costs.
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.
Closed primaries. I never got a chance to vote for Bernie.
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.
Yes, that’s what “barrier to entry” meant in my comment. Happepend to Bernie, happened to a family member of mine at the county level.
Parties prevent YOU from being ABLE to vote for qualified candidates. That’s all they are for, to give unqualified rich or charismatic people a chance to sell the party to you. Nothing else.
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
I think we can all agree that adding religious parallels to anything is a waste of everyones time.
this
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.
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.
In practice, they just capitulate every time.
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
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.
Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology.
A dictatorship of the bourgeois is radically different from a dictatorship of the proletariat, both in form and in function.
Both sides did horrible things
Guys with their “Ask me about the War of Northern Aggression” baseball caps are constantly saying this
purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.
DSA: “We should open up the Medicare rolls to anyone who wants it and grant everyone in the country universal basic income through Social Security”
Libertarian: “This gives the government way too much power. If you can give someone health care or a basic income, you can control who gains access to very fundamental basic human needs. And that will lead to tyranny.”
Also Libertarian: “I love the DHS. I love the DHS so much. Strong borders! Private prisons! Deportations without a court hearing! This is the network state I always dreamed of! Can’t wait until Trump starts issuing EOs to form charter cities and America is just 1000 Singapores in a trench coat. Also, everything Javier Milei is doing in Argentina is fucking based. I love how MBS is running Saudi Arabia. And I can’t wait to join the private mercenary army that reclaims Greenland from those weak-kneed namby pamby socialists in Denmark.”
First comment I have seen here that’s even half intelligent. Most people seem to be confusing leftists with Democrats.
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)
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
Flipping through my big book titled “Victims of Communism” and it says here that the German Nazis and Italian and Spanish Fascists were both Far-Left and Victims of the Far-Left. Also, I see hear that every unborn child out to the latest generation resulting from famines common to the 1930s through the 1960s is a Victim of Communism. Nothing in the fine print about lives saved through the universalization of health care, housing, groceries, and pensions, though. Neither can I find anything about the Peace Dividend reaped by the industrialized Soviet world following the end of WW2… weird.
Also, absolutely nothing in here about the Bengal Famine, its causes or the millions of tons of relief the USSR sent to end it. So strange. Michael Parenti, do you have anything to say about this?
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
-Michael Parenti Blackshirts and the reds
Americans with their white or black bullshit
Straw man
Do you not think the far right wants to exterminate groups because they are impure?
They do. The problem is that the far left wants the same.
The meme is comparing the far right with the moderate left.
Genuinely asking. What groups do the far left want exterminated?
Depends on the group and the country they’re from but it goes from anyone with more money than the person speaking, to any foreigners, to anyone with a brain that dares to think differently (“counter-revolutionaries”).
See Cuba, north Korea, Soviet Union (and puppet states) and the lemmy instances most people defedarate from, like lemmygrad.
Maybe it’s just my definition of left then, but that doesn’t seem compatible with leftist views, at least in my opinion
Well most people on the right would say that the extermination of a group is also incomparable with their views.
far right. And I was specifically referring to authoritarianism with my above comment.
Well, we are talking about far right and far left, not moderates.
If it’s meant to be US politics, they’re comparing the far right to the near right. Our left is carefully contained so it can’t affect anything.
Genuinely asking, not trying to be a dick, do you think the far left actually want that too? What makes you say that?
Well the far left (tankies) are actively supporting genocidal authoritarian regimes. Comparing extreme right wingers to non extreme left wingers is just complete shit.
Are tankies actually far left? I may be wrong but I don’t think you can be far left and authoritarian. Those two don’t seem to align, to me that is.
I think the political scale is the problem. Left and right doesn’t give enough nuance. We should be focusing on individual problems in their own rights and circumstances instead of using umbrella terms to write off the problems as sypmtoms of said term.
Yeah that’s fair
I think they want to expunge groups because a monoculture is easier to control. If everyone fits into a couple of narrow boxes that all speak the same language, fulfill the same roles, have the same hard limits on expression and are all able-bodied, mentally tuned to function as desirable cogs in a machine you get an easily exploitable force. It’s why they want all costs of maintenance and risk borne by the individual and more specifically the family unit which has the power to ostricize and disenfranchise on a micro scale. Pluralistic societies mean that the individual is supported by a culture of acceptance and those groups all run off of different rules which make demands of society. They want a society that makes very few demands but feels catered to thus earning higher levels of compliance.
deleted by creator
every meme is in essence a straw man XD
you really thought you were smart here
The far left and far right are both bad. If in doubt, look at any country which has gone down either path.
Both sides are the same amirite?
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?
Hey I wasn’t denying your claim, I was just curious what you meant by it. At the end of the day, they will do what is most likely to get them elected. If they had given Bernie a platform, the votes would have been more split and given them less chance to win. I’d say this is a hate the game not the player situation. Advocate for representative democracy. It would make way more vote for Bernie instead of democrats and way more vote for a moderate right party instead of Trump.
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.
That’s the dumbest centrist I’ve ever met then
But the far left are commie bastards idk what else to tell you
/s for whoever the fuck needs it
in my book far left are hexbears hence centrism is something like social democrats a la usa bernie
gotta hate politics and its muddy definitions but I unironically like to call myself centrist. Then I am surprised how controversial it is on the interwebs because apparently everyone has different definitions. They routinely make them up on the fly 🪰
For me centrism is a fine art 🎨 of staying far away from the madness of extremism 🤪. I love centrism. I huff centrism. I breathe centrism.
I fuck with centrism.It is deeply based in the sense of superiority and moral high ground. As all politics but this is a fundamental part of centrism. Centrism is saying “You all suck” I am better than you and enables feeling of superiority over the biggest swath of
Redditorsinternet activists 🤓 which is a lovely perk. It is a true essential trick of the ultimate hedonist. If politics were about sex, centrist would be someone jerking it off to the mirror.I think you might’ve accidentally added sarcasm tags to your admission.
sarcasm tags are for the weak willed, we don’t do such things even in the autism central online. What happens, happens
I have unironically read my comment 10 times already just to savor how perfectly and tastefully it is composed. Truly a masterpiece of some kind.
Poe’s law has bested me. I’m just gonna hope it’s all a joke and leave, now.
You are free to leave.
Far centrist.
