Guys, at this rate I don’t think the revolution’s going to happen anytime soon.
No. The most important thing is to gain virtue points by pointing out other people doing something wrong.
maybe i’ve just instinctively avoided places like this but that isn’t my impression at all, i find that a lot of people agree even if they don’t call themselves leftist at all, in fact the whole problem is that basically everyone has nearly identical beliefs but can’t bear the thought of voting for leftists who want to actually treat people fairly.
frankly the sentiment of this post feels like astroturfing to sow discontent.
They suck because nobody is left enough for anyone else, this past year the left splintered and if you so much as lean a little bit left or right of another leftist, you’re a fascist and they don’t want your support.
Meanwhile the right is unified, so no wonder the left is getting its ass handed to them.
I swear you could introduce UBI and someone somewhere would complain about it not being left enough.
UBI is only surface-level leftist, it’s distributing some of the wealth while leaving the important parts - property - untouched.
So yes, I and many others would complain about UBI. I’ve long held it’s an untenable bandage slapped on the gaping hemorrhage that is capitalism.
If you know anything about first aid you know that slapping a bandage on is the first step to actually helping the patient.
And that is the issue. Ada is bleeding to death, and Bob is giving them a rudimentary bandage to staunch the bleeding. You could:
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Let Bob do their thing, and go get an ambulance.
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Complain to Bob that this will only slow down the bleeding. What Ada needs is to be in a hospital. Keep yelling at Bob for his shitty bandage.
We are all afraid that Jake will convince the doctor to refuse surgery claimimg the problem is fixed now (Edit: whilst letting the bandaid rot). He goes on to convince Ada and the world that she is healed and asking for surgery makes no sense.
I dont know if Jake will be effective at creating regressions nor if we can fight him off effectively.
Okay, but yell at Jake then.
What you’re saying is that the bleeding is good. The more people bleed, the more they’ll need “a real solution.” This is just accelerationism.
What you’re saying is that the bleeding is good
No. The bleeding is not good. There are likely resources on how and when fight Jake. Mabe more importantly, how to choose first aid and medical care steps to take so Jake isnt going to be a problem.
Accelerationism is as minipulative as Jake is, mabe even serving the same goals.
Jake is interested in status-quo economics—or worse, even. There is no first aid he won’t claim fixes the issue.
Billionaires love to pretend that charities are a solution to social issues, but we know they aren’t. Does that mean I should be happy the Red Cross lacks funding now? (hypothetically)
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Someone somewhere would because UBI is the capitalist techbro idea of a social safety net; it’s a band-aid that doesn’t address the underlying problems in a similar way to how the ACA helps but in reality is a very center-right idea that doesn’t address the underlying hypercapitalist healthcare system.
Well there yah go, we didn’t even need to introduce it and it’s already not left enough.
It was cooked up by Milton Friedman, one of the grandfathers of American free market libertarianism.
The whole impetus of UBI was to eliminate traditional social services because, it is argued, there’s no way that a government institution could be as efficient or effective as a free market.
And make no mistake, even modern proponents of UBI such as Andrew Yang propose funding it by hollowing out existing social services.
Like, yeah, UBI is better than having literally no social support at all, but the fact that its seen as this ultra-leftist idea, to the point that we apparently can’t even conceive of how it could possibly “not be left enough”, is an indication of how far right mainstream politics has shifted.
The UBI I support is only a replacement for unemployment benefits and all the welfare state social safety nets would still be provided for I.e. single payer healthcare, social housing
Is that still a capitalist nightmare?
Implemented like that it would probably be a step in the correct direction. I’m not trying to say you’re a monster who wants to turn the world into a capitalist hellscape. But let’s use an analogy:
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There’s a country with a public library system that’s been suffering from chronic underfunding and dysfunction. The buildings are falling apart, the catelogs are outdated, and many people don’t even have a library near them.
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Jeff Bezos proposes to eliminate public libraries, says it would be more efficient and effective for the government to give citizens a stipend to buy off of Amazon. Its called universal books.
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Years later someone says “leftists will infight about anything, someone would probably say universal books isn’t left enough.”
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Someone points out who came up with universal books and why they wanted it, then there’s a reply saying “the version of universal books that I support would still fund the public libraries but have the Amazon stipend in addition to that.”
Maybe adding the Amazon stipend to the existing public library system would be great. After all not every library can carry every book, and sometimes its not feasible to put a library in every tiny rural community.
I’m just trying to make the point that its not completely insane to get a little defensive about such an idea in a situation like that.
I agree with you. There is legitimate criticism of UBI especially of the Yang flavor.
I’ve just always seen it as increased unemployment payments with fewer conditions rather than a replacement of the welfare state.
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A lot of online leftists aren’t doing anything because they don’t know how to do something (or are scared, e.g. of losing their job or of getting brutalized by the police). If you aren’t doing anything in The Real World™ there are only so many things left to do, and the internet is genuinely terrible about people who make mistakes or change their opinion.
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I am honestly a bit impressed by how you managed to read all this into OP’s pic. Literally nothing there is about using Facebook, being guilted(???) into using it, nothing suggests that leftists shouldn’t build their own spaces. Are you really responding to the pic or to something else?
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Well then… Your comment showed up first when I opened the comments, and without any other context it baffled me.
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No the idea is the Left has a long history of infighting over which cause is most worthy or which step in the direction of progress to make to the detriment of making overall progress or actually working against the Right.
Letting “perfect be the enemy of good”.
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To be honest, if the leftist revolution promises Stalins USSR style economics and governance, then Western people are better off without it because most people in Western nations are relatively well off, so moving to that type of economic/political model will make the majority in a western nation poorer.
For example, 66% of US population are homeowners, that is they own both the land and property (if any). In this case, the humanitarian pov is that the minority should be lifted from poverty, and provided equal rights to achieve self-actualization. So housing assistance, education, health care and food assistance.
The democratic and humane way to achieve this is via high tax rates on the uber wealthy. People also deserve protections from discrimination to enable their self-actualization in a psychologically and physically safe manner. My own philosophy is that a person is born without any will to be born, so that person doesn’t necessarily owe anything to anyone else other than reasonable and mutual social contracts. People don’t have the right to be sociopaths or psychopaths, but they don’t have to be self sacrificing or altruistic.
My own pov aside, the U.S. could implement China-style market socialism and state-controlled socialism for itself and its citizens, but then it’s not going to be a haven for immigrants because such policies require cultural homogeneity. Cultural homogeneity requires strict immigration control, as seen in China, https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/why-isnt-china-considering-immigration-against-demographic-decline-163101.
But I think maintaining immigration to democratic and economically well off nations is important for lifting the world out of poverty and illiteracy. However, all of this necessitates that nations preserve democracy. Capitalism has ruined democracy, which is why we get neoconservatism/neoliberalism, two sides of the same fail coin.
Governance models have forgotten that people formed groups, communities and nations to ensure the betterment and self-actualization of the individual, not to create productivity or workers. Currently the world acts to enable self actualization for companies or nations, which is why we end up with genocides and corporate imperialism as a default state. People deserve better than the Stalin-style leftism or the Clinton-style liberalism. I think we need some type of humanitarian libertarianism, where we can ensure free markets, individual freedoms, but also governance models which ensure social fairness and justice.
Ah yes, the old enemy of the left: the left.
Damned Leftists! They ruined the left!
You leftists sure are a contentious people.
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
As a leftist its also important to keep in mind we do differentiate between leftists who hold some opinions we disagree with compared to a Liberal who disagrees with us on nearly everything. Especially when said Liberals demand to be treated like leftists yet support imperalism, genocide, apartheid, capitalism, bigotry, and yet constantly call people “fake leftists” or “tankies”.
yet support imperalism, genocide, apartheid, capitalism, bigotry
Yeah as a liberal I resent this. Im against all of these things except that I believe that the world is capitalist and would probably not be really any different even with a sudden communist takeover. Power corrupts any system just like it always has so you need safegaurds and checks that our system did have until everyone decided to throw out baby with the bath water
There are ideas i like that are communist(social programs, centralized production, not a huge fan of not owning my own stuff, but i dont think businesses should really own land), but i believe there is a lot of resistance to it and a slow burn towards utopia is a more fruitful endeavor.
Right… Except this is true for all online communities. People talk a lot of shit and complain a lot. Cope with it or log off.
Or blame it on the left, lol, whatever makes you happy.
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I am left and this is so fucking true though. So many pussy-ass towel wringing gutless cowards just want to pick bones out of tofu than actually act to make a meaningful difference because they are frozen with indecision over acadmic moral quandries
Bones out of tofu is a great expression.
Its a Chinese idiom that works very well
I wish we could all just agree on a few basics and do it. Like, can we support unions and do mutual aid? Yeah, it’s not nearly enough to fix all our problems, but it’s a start. Maybe it will help bring about anarcho syndicalist trotskyist solarpunk feminism, and maybe it won’t, but it’s a start.
I haven’t figured out how to channel it into convincing others, yet (though I haven’t done a lot of activism for, like, going on a decade now), but I have been having the thought, for the last 4 years, that focusing on tangible goals could really help us.
Just seeing the Republicans turn half a century of steadfast obsession into actually overturning Roe has me thinking we need material results fast.
Because, if the one constant for our side since the 60s has been anything, it’s been a slow erosion at our ability to even effect change.
I feel like even the need for lockstep consensus to work together wouldn’t be so direly needed if we had rank-choice voting and a dismantling of the two party system.
To use your union example, more unions mean a slow of concentration of wealth which means less influence for the wealthy upon our society including more stability so there’s less desperation to vote for a Hail Mary solution like thinking Trump ever gave a single care about the price of eggs.
Just…really concentrating on tangible goals and carving out progress on them.
Of course, we’d need your aforementioned agreement, for that…
It’s interesting how your comment undercuts the message that it’s trying to express. You got the vocabulary wrong. It was a good try though.
I remember when the election happened I saw so many people on the left complaining that they needed a left wing version of Joe Rogan.
Motherfuckers you HAD Joe Rogan. He just talked to people you didn’t like sometimes so you literally pushed him into the open arms of the right. Good job idiots.
Yeah I don’t think that’s what happened.
We doing revisionist history now? Joe endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. He was a self described Democrat for the majority of his life.
But because he invited guests from both sides of the isle onto his podcast the left decided he was a problem. God forbid anyone want to even hear what the other side is thinking once in their lives. The left abandoned Joe and guess who was there to snap him up when they did that? The alt right dumbasses. So now we have Joe endorsing Trump this time around.
The left is not tolerant of any amount of different thinking among their ranks. You gotta agree on everything or you need to leave. You can see it situations like Joe or even smaller situations like myself and many others who spent their entire lives being Democrats only to be shown the door when we disagreed on one or two things.
Whether or not you believe that’s what’s going on I can tell with absolute certainty it is. The 2024 election results fall more on the shoulders of the Democratic party messing everything up than Trump or the Republicans doing anything particularly right.
Y’all need to stop thinking in such black and white terms when it comes to people. Someone can be all for universal healthcare, but also want their own gun to defend themselves. Some of the more moderate left can understand that, but the grand majority will view that kind of person as a full on righty so they push them away. And guess what happens when they do that? You lose elections because you’re so up your own ass about things that you lose people who were on your side.
From “leftist” to democrat real quick there mate.
And yes, platforming people who think trans don’t deserve rights is harmful and the left rightfully should criticise it
I don’t understand this recent claim that the left and Democrats aren’t the same thing.
Progressives, secularists and liberals have always been lumped into “left” and those people overwhelmingly overlap with what the Democrats claim to be all about.
The term “left” and “Democrat” are basically interchangeable for the most part.
Kinda like how Conservative/Republican/right have been pretty much interchangeable for a long time now.
As far as I can tell the only difference is the right doesn’t seem to care as much about labels and the left gets super upset when they aren’t labeled exactly right at all times.
The term “left” and “Democrat” are basically interchangeable for the most part.
Only if you’re dumb and American. Democrats are right wing. Exclusively.
…do you even know where the term left and right wing started??? The Democratic party definitely has more overlap with the left than the right.
I’m curious what alternate reality definition you’re using though. Please explain your thoughts process. Show your work.
- Supports capitalism over socialism.
- Supports imperialist projects to dominate the global south and destabilize competitors.
- Supports more funding to police.
- Rejects single payer health care.
- Rejects nationalizing oil and gas industries.
- Rejects any form of trust busting.
- Rejects any measures to reign in corruption, lobbying, or corporate influence.
I could go on all day.
The only meaningful difference is that Democrats hate gays slightly less and try to avoid using the n word in public.
I’d ask you for math, but I’m just going to spend an hour debunking Washington Post links claiming dems want things they never bothered to try implementing.
I’m a communist and not from the US, saying that the democrats are at the left is laughable
Ohhhhh you’re a communist. No wonder you don’t understand anything. Your brain is completely void of logical thought.
Well you have fun with that. I won’t be responding to you after this message. While I am generally open to discussing most things I have learned that trying to have a real conversation with self described communists on the Internet is a complete waste of time.
Have a good day.
Lmao get rekt
…be shown the door when we disagreed on one or two things.
Did your girlfriend break up with you over that tiny little issue of believing she deserves bodily autonomy?
Go ahead, tell us the tragic story of how the Democrats forced you to change sides not because of the issues that haven’t changed, but because your feelings got hurt.
See you’re proving my point for me right now. You don’t even know me or any of my stances yet you assume because I have said I don’t agree with all the ideas on the left that I must be a Trumpy.
I am staunchly pro-choice. I’ve never been broken up with because of my political beliefs.
You seriously need to take a step back and reevaluate how you interact with people.
No, I did not assume. I read the part where you said you spent your entire life as a Democrat. That’s the past tense which means you no longer are.
Nobody kicked you out. You got upset when somebody pushed back. Just like now.
What opinion of yours got challenged enough that you left? Let’s hear it so we know if it’s bad enough to deserve whatever you got or you were unjustly maligned.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to and I am interested to hear his response, but also I’d like to point out that you jumped to conclusions faster than Superman can jump over a building. But hey what do I know? I’m just a libertarian minarchist. Personally, almost all of your purity tests are repugnant from my point of view.
Maybe you should look into egotistical altruism.
I used to be an Ayn Rand libertarian minarchist when I was a teenager. There’s a bunch of reasons I disagree with it now, but the utter failure of people’s butthead behavior during the pandemic is just the latest things that you’d have to completely ignore to maintain egotistical altruism is something that can be relied on in the real world. Not really interested in a discussion about it; I’ve had all of them long ago and I don’t think we’d have anything to budge the other person.
No opinion of mine got challenged at all. There is no calm discussion with most Democrats. My mom is the only Democrat in my family that is even open to conversation with me on topics we disagree on. The majority simply scream or walk away the moment you say something they don’t agree with. I have my beliefs about certain things that don’t align with the lefts playbook. I have had lifelong friends (and family) stop speaking to me forever because I disagreed with them about one thing. We agreed on all other major political topics but they couldn’t stand my different opinion on one thing so they “kicked” me out of their group. They don’t want anyone with even remotely different thinking in their bubble. These are the same people who were 100% sure Kamala had 2024 in the bag. They built those garden walls a little too high and lost touch with reality.
I am friends with many people that I disagree with on a myriad of topics. I do not drop them as friends because we disagree on a few things because I’m not a child that views the world with this black and white/us vs them mentality. People are complex and to condemn anyone who doesn’t think exactly like me would unbelievably idiotic.
Your comments remain to be another prime example of this behavior. You don’t even know what I think about things and simply because you heard that I used to be a Democrat you have already started attacking me. Behavior like yours is precisely how the Democrats lost the 2024 election.
I am pro-choice. The government should have basically zero input on this. The only three people that should have anything to say about a pregnancy are the two people that caused it to happen and their doctor.
All for universal healthcare. Our current system is a bloated mess that actually ends up costing us more than universal healthcare would.
Don’t care about gay marriage whatsoever. Let people marry whatever consenting adult they want. The government should have basically zero say about this.
I believe in actual freedom of speech full stop. Not like Elon Musk who claims he’s a free speech absolutionist, but he immediately removes people he doesn’t like from twitter. Fuck that guy forever.
I believe everyone has a right to defend themselves. Guns or otherwise. We have a rampant mental health problem and blaming whatever tool the crazy person uses is a massive waste of time and energy. We need to be addressing the root cause.
I think taxes should increase as you go up in wealth. People struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed themselves should essentially pay zero taxes and those who have three homes in 3 different countries need to be paying more.
Churches 100000000% need to be paying taxes and it’s a fucking joke that they still don’t.
We need to have term limits on all positions and a maximum age for all political positions. If we were smart enough to know that people under the age of 35 aren’t ready to run the country then we need to also agree that someone over the age of let’s say 70 is also too old to reasonably understand what the majority of the country needs or wants.
I can’t think of all the major political disagreements between the parties right now, but if you were to count them up the grand majority of my opinions fall into the “blue” side of things. I have never had any right leaning friends stop speaking to me for my various left leaning opinions, but I have had MANY left leaning people in my life completely cut me out of their lives immediately upon the first disagreement.
I am not the only person I know with those “mid-left” ideals that has found themselves similarly abandoned by the left. I’m no longer a Democrat because I will not associate myself with such a elitists group of close minded pricks. For completely different reasons I won’t associate with the religious conservative morons on the right either.
Because I don’t fully subscribe to either side I don’t have a “home” but I have only ever been shunned by Dems. Republicans has either been indifferent or open to conversation with me which is precisely how the Democrats lost 2024. They will likely continue to lose in the future unless the whole party makes some rather significant shifts.
None of your opinions are anything I really disagree with except the guns. You claim elitists turn you off but claim you know better than everybody. Your antagonism towards nearly everybody is why I wouldn’t like you, not your opinions. Maybe there are others like that that you blame differences of opinion for why you’re not in their lives anymore.
since when are the democrats considered left… do you mean liberals?
Joe endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020
Like how he endorsed RFK in 2024? but sure bro he was totally a leftist.
I don’t know if you’re being intentionally dense or if you just never watched his podcast before 2020 in your life.
Joe was constantly disagreeing with right leaning people for years on his podcast before his eventual flip in ~2021.
Watch that man talking to Bernie and you tell me what you see. He holds many opinions they are firmly democratic at that time.
giving fascists a platform then going “hmm I dunno if I agree”
what a great asset for “the left” to have
Rogan has a huge platform that reaches a lot of people and, in my opinion, along with that platform comes a responsibility to be careful about the voices and ideas he allows to be amplified on his show. There are already plenty of sources out there for people who want to check in on what the right is thinking. Rogan didn’t need to be one of them. He rightly faced criticism. If his political stances weren’t solid enough to survive the criticism, then I wonder how strong his convictions were to begin with.
Do you people even hear yourselves?
It’s HIS podcast. If he wanted to spend 7 hours s day talking about chimps that’s HIS choice. Hell he used to do that sometimes lol.
He originally had people on from all over the political spectrum and every time he dared to have someone the left identified as “problematic” he was torn apart for doing so. Then people from the left stopped wanting to be on the show for fear they were also going to receive backlash for going on it. Look at Bernie. That guy bleeds blue and when he went on he was also shunned for daring to spend a few hours talking to a guy who might not agree with the mainstream left ideals completely.
You created a self fulfilling prophecy. He had red and blue on. You yelled at him for having red people on so less and less blue people wanted to go on the show. Now he’s having more and more red people on the show. Now he’s a full on Trumpy.
People like you turned him away from being a blue moderate and now we have red conspiracy theory Trump Joe.
You go back and watch his earlier episodes when he’s talking to anyone even sorta red and he disagrees with them on practically everything. Joe was what Democrats used to be. They leaned left on most things but they were open to talking to people across the isle. They kept an open mind. Now there is zero nuance allowed. You agree with the left on all stances or you are dead to them. You guys are so stuck in your way of thinking (and thinking you are objectively right about everything) that you can’t even see how you clearly created the situation that resulted in Trump winning in 2024 again. The moderates and the right both told you this was going to happen but you are either too prideful or egotistical to listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with you implicitly.
Freedom is a humanist value. Curtailing freedom to do wrong is of course acceptable. Something most people here won’t like is that the best gender/sexuality is hetero-CIS. That doesn’t make the freedom not to be forced into the best humanist production of 20+ births per lifetime to not be a valid freedom. A feminist/queer supremacy can define wrongs as hiring practices, or not believing their preferred side in any accusation.
Autocracy, oppression, warmongering is not a left/right exclusivity. Warmongering against those less liberal than “us” is common. All of these are huge wrongs, not the slightestly cured by “leftism”. Freedom has to be more important than good, because there is no non-evil way of imposing “only good”, or especially, letting a ruling autocracy corrupt definition of good.
UBI is especially important as a solution to divisiveness. It is incredibly empowering to workers, and empowers both forming relationships, and empowering those unhappy into leaving relationships.
People who seek first to run away to greener pastures rather than try and maintain their own are the true scourges of society.
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