"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.
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 right is, quite literally, removing the freedom for undesired people to do what they want. If a woman needs an abortion to survive an 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?
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?
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.
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 mean no offense, but you are doing the exact thing you accuse others of doing. Trump is micromanaging by picking and choosing who’s free speech and who’s rights he’s going to protect and fucking over anyone who doesn’t care to bend the new if it’s news stations collages or whole groups of people. idk if you have seen recently but he’s straight up sending people to prison labor camps without do process. Look all im saying is that sure maybe at one point the republicans were what you said they were but they have gone so far off course that they have lost any ability to claim they are granting freedoms to any groups other then the hateful and intolerant
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?
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.
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.
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.
Then you add in the hard spun rhetoric that taxes they already don’t want being taken from them might be paying for things they personally disagree with and things get extra firey.
Meanwhile the richest people on earth have spent more money than is comprehendable on convincing people that going after rich peoples’ money will just make everything more expensive for the normal folk.
But that would imply that they were currently leaving potential profits on the table. They’re already charging absolutely as much as they can, and constantly trying to shift it higher. I’m sure they’d still fuck us on the way down, but we’re never going to fix things unless we find some way to adequately tax the rich.
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.
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.
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
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.
I thought tankies were the far left? Or are they… further left than that?
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.
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.
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.
Or that’s what you’d think, but the guy who created conservatism was a monarchist trying to figure out a way for the aristocracy to exist within democracy. The right is stanning for monarchy under a different name, as proudly admitted by their ideological leader. For details look up Edmund Burke.