this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Right-wing in-group: "So long as you be just like us in every way and fall in line, you will be accepted. Sort of."
Left-wing in-group: "So long as you're not an asshole, we don't care what you believe or do."
Right-wing out-group: Anyone not like them.
Left-wing out-group: Anyone who is an asshole.
The key being what constitutes being an asshole, and what you allow yourself to do to someone once the label can be pasted onto someone. It's really the same thing seen through different gross stereotypes - they could literally say the same thing.
That's not to say there aren't very real differences between parties, but they aren't extreme sides of a one dimensional line (or vague notions in a two dimensional mapping) which is basically a propaganda tool for the ego.
It's funny. I have a blog post from Ken Arneson who talks about "The Right to be an Asshole" and here's how he defines an asshole:
He goes on:
He goes on to recount the tale of COVID Patient 31 from Seoul, South Korea. Shortly after receiving her diagnosis, she decided to seek comfort at church. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections were traced back to her through contact tracing. So, now we come to intentions vs. consequences. Patient 31 wasn't intending to make anyone sick or die, she was merely seeking comfort through faith. Any reasonable non-asshole could have told her and probably did tell her, that attending church while infected would cause others to be infected and possibly die. How should this asshole be judged? If we judge her by her intentions, then she's as much a victim as anyone. But if we judge her by her consequences, then she's a mass murderer.
So the question we have to ask as a free society is: What the fuck do we do about assholes?
Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.
If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?
Why is he downvoted? One is not an asshole if one is just too dumb to get what they are causing. The problem is that we not educate our children good enough so that they not fail to get what makes sense and what not.
But as long as we have stupid religious fanatics in power, we are doomed. Fuck Religion!
Religion has done something very clever, too. Christianity in particular has, through some means, found a way to divorce actions from character, as opposed to viewing one's actions as a reflection of their character. They see good and evil as things that someone is instead of what someone does.
You ever notice how suburban white Karens clutch their pearls when called racist? Well, consider what I just said about their view of evil. Now, make "racism" == "evil". By calling one racist, you have effectively called them evil, and they most certainly do not view themselves as having an evil character.
Or how, when doing evil deeds, they don't see themselves as being evil despite their actions? Or when someone does a good deed, they accuse that person of being evil?
It's just intriguing how they've pulled off this alchemy.
You confused me a little with that text 😅
Simple. Dicks fuck assholes. Its necessary, but the problem is they get shit all over the place!
Socialism is literally transferring all risk to other people. Nice try though.
no, socialism is transferring everything to the people, the current not-socialist capitalist model already transfers all the risk to the people, but keeps the gains to the few
💎exacta-mundo friendileeno
Hope the left sees that there are assholes turning to nice people if you take away the fear right-wing media puts on them.
Left-wing out-group: Everyone, especially other leftists
I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with the ideology, but the far left is famously like that.
I don't usually use this expression, but you might need to touch grass. I pretty regularly hang out with far left people and other than debates over personal philosophy we're all pretty chill. The internet is not an accurate representation of any actual social dynamics.
Yup. That's some truth.
All my liberal homies smoke weed and shoot the shit and try to vote for people who don't want to kill outgroups. So agreed, he needs to touch grass.
The ones I'm thinking of would not appreciate being called "liberal".
Well, I meant my lefty friends. If you look at my comment history, I'm not much a liberal myself, but I don't consider tankies on the left. I consider them authoritarian fuckbags that will say anything to get power. Just like authoritarian fuckbags on the right.
I consider them flat Earth theorists that weren't right-wing enough for the normal conspiracy pipeline. The Stalin stuff is pretty much just decoration.
I've seen plenty of anarchist gatekeeping, too, although when you haven't organised in the first place there's less to split.
TBH there's barely a center-left where I live, even, so you're right that I wouldn't know. However, the history of real-world Western socialist organisations doesn't inspire confidence that it's any different.
to be fair, tankies arn't left wing, they fully support the most Draconian right wing solutions to everything, but pretend that their führer isn't evil or something.
Anarchists are in this picture too. Gatekeeping about who's anti-authoritarian enough is one example.
I mean, they have a point, you literally can't go "but Lenin created vanguardism" as a reason why the all powerful single party state supposedly controlled by the "will of the people" and get upset when people call you out for being an authoritarian.
Anarchists gate keeping tankies isn't some moral wrong, it's just learning from history, because they would rather work with literal Nazis/ ethno-fascists than with an anarchist, the anarchists were the first to be shot by all the fascists, German, Romanian, Italian, or Soviet.
Yeah, but even if you allow that, they'll gatekeep each other over dietary systems, for voting or not voting, over which economic systems are too market, over who was on the right side of a personal falling out, for believing in rules of any kind and on and on. There never is an end to it.
I don't know who you've been hanging out with, but anarchists don't care if you're vegan or not, and generally their issue isn't with markets, it's with the system giving all the power to a small group of feudal lords, but I think the issue is that you only know anarchists by shitty online memes, maybe you should go get in contact with your local lawn dealer
Sure. All the anarchists fucking up for the last 150 years don't count. You folks in this thread swear there's different, cool ones; they're just conveniently invisible.
And yet, pretty much none of them like ancaps. Mutualists or whatever other in-between are prime targets for purging from your not-a-political-party.
"fucking up" interesting way to spell murdered and betrayed
I'm just going to say to that, that anarchist infighting exists, and you can't just blame everything on everyone else.
Since fucking when?? The far left is famous for infighting and purity tests, has been for decades. It might even be the number one thing Leftism is known for.
Pray tell, what are the current purity tests in use by left-leaning politics in America?
"Don't be a bigoted piece of shit" is not a purity test, just as a point of clarification.
Meme says far left, not left-leaning. Left-leaning is cool. Far left are fucking idiots.
I'd love to hear your answer to his question, you forgot to answer it.
It was the wrong question, dumbass. Left-leaning people don't use purity tests.
Why are you calling me a dumbass? Are you angry? You forgot to answer his question. There are no wrong questions, maybe some you don't want to answer. Every group uses some form of purity test.
Calling you a dumbass because you're a fucking dumbass. No other reason. It's not a difficult concept, but then again you would have trouble with it.
Ok, whatever makes you feel better.
Not only are you wrong, you're a total prick about it lmao
Just matching the energy. But also, no I'm not wrong.
I mean, the only groups using purity tests are shit stains like tankies and terfs, they of course are SOOOOOOOOOoooooo.... left they routinely work with literal neo-Nazis (hint they arn't left wing at all)
Such as... ?
I mean if you need to narrow your scope to the "fAr LeFt," in America to make your point then I can narrow my scope to the "fAr RiGht" and the difference is eco terrorism versus lynch mobs, so...
Theres a lot of nuisance in the definitions of left and right that are lost in reductive and polarizing statements like this. For instance a far left idea is an extreme belief in the philosophy of equity. When brought to its pure conclusion you end up in a communist environment where the state ends of being the dictator of exactly how much resources every individual is allowed to have. The conclusion to radical left and radical right policies is actually exactly the same. Authoritarianism.
There are plenty of ideas and philosophies on the right and left that are absolutely reasonable. Universal Healthcare on the left. Some immigration reforms or trade tariffs on the right.
These types of memes are very reductionist an unhelpful in terms of influencing people who are already woefully uneducated in the world of politics, philosophy, or trade and finance and only serves to try and convince stupid people that one very large and diverse group of people are literally evil while another very large group of diverse people are the good and virtuous.
Communism is when the shared public mechanisms under socialism run so well a government is no longer necessary at all. If it has a dictator or a government it is, by definition, not communism.
Ignoring the dictator bit, this is an anti-Marxist take, Marx never stated that Communism would have no government. When speaking of the State, Marx specifically speaks of the institutions of a Capitalist Government that etrench the Capitalist class, ie Private Property Rights and the militarized institutions that uphold them (the Capitalist police).
Marx was not an anarchist, he was advocating for central planning, and you cannot have central planning without central planners. Simply saying that the public mechanisms would "run really well" hides the fact that government would remain, planning and administrating.
Even Cybernetics would still need to have human administration, elections, and so forth to represent the will of the people.
You may wish to visit Critique of the Gotha Programme.
I may be misremembering, but the way I recall Engles describing it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is that as you dissolve class relations you remove the previous purpose of government, which was to enforce class roles through, for instance, enforcement of private property rights. As the "Administration of People" becomes unnecessary, the government is relegated to "Administration of Things" which moves it away from controlling people, and let's it "melt away" as it's remaining functions become less "governmental" and more of just managing logistics of things.
Sort of. You remove the classist aspects of previous society. Socialism itself emerges from Capitalism, and Communism emerges from Socialism. When I say Communism has a government, I very much mean there would still be laws, social workers, central planners, administrators, elections, even police, but not the elements of previous class society like Private Property Rights.
This is why Marx specifically describes this process as "whithering away." He is not arguing that the government will dissolve itself, this argument has been levied against AES countries falsely. Instead, it is through lack of maintenance that these aspects erode over time, like how the Monarchy in the UK is vestigial, or how there are no longer streetlamp lighters. As technology and society progresses, what once was considered necessary makes itself obsolete and fades.
This is the core of dialectical materialism, ie a tree contains within it elements of its past as a seed and elements of its future as an older and eventualy dead tree, everything is a transformation of its previous self.