I’m Independent, but cannot support Republicans anymore … so I guess I’m a Democrat that hates gun control.
I’m a left libertarian. I embrace decentralization, collectivism, freedom from corporate and central government tyranny, and want to maximize individual liberty and progressive values as we ideally move towards a society like the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.
I’m not Anarchist because it’s too chaotic and unrealistic, and I’m not ML because I don’t like State authoritarianism and central planning.
Can you give some examples of how that works? Like, who pays for roads, who handles environmental regulations (or are there any), who establishes education standards (or are there any), etc. I’m not trying to argue, it just seems like on the internet people referring to “state authoritarianism” and “central government tyranny” ranges from “adults can’t be transgender” to “I have to pay taxes and the government won’t let me own slaves.”
There’s a few ways to handle, but for example:
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Roads: large towns and cities would mostly handle their own road maintenance. Roads connecting towns would probably be joint ventures. Projects would be funded and contracted by the towns and financed by town income tax. Rural areas would be underfunded, but that’s partly intentional - dense population centers are more sustainable.
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Environmental regulations: handled at the level of impact. for example, water quality standards for a river bind everyone who accesses the river. restrictions (e.g. standards for heavy metal levels) would be passed by minority vote - if 40% want a standard, that’s enough. carbon credits would be administered at the Federal or World levels, by a combination of central government and treaties.
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Education: probably pretty devolved, mostly a choice by municipalities in what they offer/teach. there’d likely be standardized tests that most places agree on for transferability (e.g. how the SAT works today.) religious schools could exist in religious communities, or you could have a Montessori program in your secular socialist Kibbutz.
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Slavery: illegal at the Federal/World level. same with indentured servitude and coercive contracts. one of the most important functions of the central government is to protect the civil liberties of individuals.
So the principles are mostly:
- Externalities are handled at the level of their impact.
- More power locally, less power centrally. City governments are more like micro-nations bound by a sort of EU.
- Cities largely have a lot of direct democracy with some representatives. Critically, city governments wield lots of power over the businesses that operate in the city. This is critical to check corporate power.
- Federal government exists as a backstop to safeguard fundamental rights and for truly national concerns.
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When asked, I usually tell people that I vote Dem because it’s as close to my anarchist ideals as I can get. I would consider myself a social-anarchist, in that I feel laws shouldn’t be written around societal structures and ideals. Society and culture changes, and I shouldn’t be punished because some dude generations ago decided that something was inappropriate back then. It isn’t now, and shouldn’t be codified that way,
Progressive who’s been here for a bit. The fediverse has definitely swung more left-wing recently - when I first started up two years ago there was a fair amount of conservative bs, libertarian tech-bros and russian bots - it was about a 50/50 split depending on what instance you were on.
The bot problem seems to have been largely dealt with now, and conservative voices have been more or less drowned out by the new influx of users fleeing twitter and Reddit crackdowns. Many are agreeing that the current administration is bad for everyone. There are a number of hard auth-left moral purity testers that kind of a pain in the ass that pop up from time to time.
I like to consider myself leftist. But it’s true that I don’t agree in all that most current left wing political parties stand for.
I think all human are born equal, and should have a good life. That politics should be used to improve everyone’s life.
But in the what does this mean or how to do it I feel more and more differences lately.
To give an example, I cannot really stand identity politics. I think that the best course of action is to dissolve identitarian (is that word real?) groups instead of exacerbating their differences. I feel like people should be getting rid of labels instead of having more and more labels every day.
That’s just a personal opinion, based on the idea that if you define different groups the chance of conflict between groups is bigger than if you define only one group. And I do get the idea behind identity politics within the left wing spectrum. I just don’t agree that’s the best course of action.
Minority groups didn’t make up identity politics, majority groups did, when they engaged in oppression of minorities.
Queer people don’t have that much in common. Straight people forced us to band together for our rights.
Gay people don’t have much in common with trans people, but straight people can’t tell us apart/treat us the same so we band together.
Disabled people, people of color, it’s similar stories.
I also have a hard time with ID politics and the like, but I’m also a privileged white dude so my primary gripe will always be focused around economic disparity. The BLM protests helped me see it this way: There is not war but the class war, but there are multiple fronts. If we don’t at least try a little to protect minority groups, we won’t have any progressives left
Anti-Conservative
There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
- Frank Wilhoit
Thanks, Frank! Very eloquently put!
My priorities in politics is:
- Don’t wreck the economy.
- Uphold the rule of law.
In my country that makes me right leaning. In the US with the current president that apparently makes me a leftist.
You communist!
Yes. Signing up is not easy. Most people here can understand written instructions and have some basic technical knowledge. People who are not stupid tend to lean left.
Yes. They are fanatics too. Like Twitter but instead of wanting to kill people for profit, IRS wanting to kill people for not being left.
Come on, that’s not true. We just want to “re-educate” you guys
I don’t consider myself left leaning. Both left and right are corrupt and neither actually practice what they preach. The left is the US is currently the lesser of two evils though. I do consider myself a socialist-libertarian. I think government should be there to keep the populace safe, and provide basic human necessities to all, and no more. The govt should not be able to execute capital punishment nor declare war. Retalitory strikes, defense and supporting allies defending themselves are all fine, but we could get rid of most of the military and funnel that money back to socialist programs and be a MUCH wealthier and happier country.
The only reason the left is the lesser of the 2 evils right now is because they aren’t in power.
“I’m 15 and this is deep”
Lol
I’m team right-wing.
The right chicken wing is always tastier, so I eat that first.
Edit: Wait, this is politics? Wrong thread.
I promote right-wing policies: you should always use the right wings for your airplane, using whatever wings you happen to have left in stock is a recipe for disaster. Left-wing policies are dangerous.
See, this is why so many right-wingers are seen as simply not intelligent enough to understand basic science. Numerous studies have shown that the left-wing is on average, plumper, juicier, and more tender.
I bet you probably also believe those wing pieces with two bones are better than the big one-bone wings that look like little chicken legs, too. Typical right-winger, your brain has been melted by right-wing propaganda.
Sorry, but reality has a left-wing bias. Educate yourself, and do better.
I’m as left-wing as they come but to imply that drummies are somehow superior to flats is wrong-headed and shows your own biases. I’ll concede that the little chicken legs are easier (and more fun) to eat, but the quality of the delicate meat between the two little wing bones in the flats ones makes them more of a delight to me.
Do Twix have wings?
By LEFT do you infer compassion, empathy, and class solidarity? In contrast, by RIGHT do you infer me-first, only my rights matter and only those in my clan deserve to be cared about?
Then, yes.
Spoken like a true liberal.
Well we know where you stand without doubt
yes
Most people everywhere are slightly left of centre*. Most leaders everywhere are slightly right of centre*.
*Not in the American sense. Y’all crazy.
Not only that, I’ve tried pitching the fediverse to right wing people, but they didn’t bite.
Even the crypto bros that were all about decentralization couldn’t see why a decentralized social media platform was superior.
This also didn’t matter for people who care about “free speech”.
You think the allure of being fully independent and having your own instance would be right up their alley given how they value independence, but nope.
Seriously? Why isn’t there a right wing instance? My guess is that a right wing person can’t fathom owning something that benefits others which doesn’t give them back profit.
“free speech”, as your quotation marks imply, does not really exist outside of theory. In reality, free speech is a set of laws governing hate speech or other dangerous speech.
Both the right and the left have ideas of what they think these laws should be.
But there is no such thing as “free speech” in the real world.
Maybe they would like nostr more
Like everything on the right, decentralization is a means to an end, not a value in itself. They only care about it when it’s useful for helping them get ahead. Just like they only care about free speech when it’s them speaking to people who don’t want to hear their bullshit.
You think the allure of being fully independent and having your own instance would be right up their alley given how they value independence, but nope.
Because it’s not about freedom of speech for them, it’s about freedom to force people to listen. Having their own server where they can shout at each other all day doesn’t serve their purpose. Their panties get wet by forcing others to listen.
Trump’s tremendous social media platform truth dot barf runs on Activity Pub, they just don’t federate with anyone by default. It’s like they don’t want dissenting views on there. Weird.
i think there were one or two right wing instances, but they got defederated from everyone
Which were they? As in what was their domain name?
Do they still exist? I’m honestly curious if they are active or if it’s abandoned
The only one I know of shut down and the admin posted this message:
I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.
So they shutdown because they couldn’t federate with any other instances and considered that censorship. A few people in that thread linked to another instance I’ve never heard of as an alternative and that one 404s if you type in the address so I guess they’re all still on reddit and twitter.
So they shutdown because they couldn’t federate with any other instances and considered that censorship
Damn, I actually didn’t see that coming, I guess they will move the goal post from any starting point.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask: How is it not censorship?
Cause no one is stopping you from going to said instance and just having the discussion there.
If there was this super important leak that needed to be out there, if it’s posted on a right wing instance that is a defederated ghost town, it’s still out there. People can link to it and leverage the instance to have the needed discussions.
Censorship means removing access, defederation does not wipe it off of the Internet.
I would argue that censorship includes the suppression of information in its definition, not only it’s removal.
Because “crypto bros” care about making money, not any ideology, except in a performative sense. If you pitched the fediverse to the original researchers inventing cryptocurrency and the early adopters, they would likely be receptive. But these are no longer associated with the current crypto crowd.
They don’t care about making money, they care about gambling and having a gambling addiction and trying to justify it
Why isn’t there a right wing instance?
Because all other instances would assume that it’s for Nazis and defederate.
there are 3 major right-wing instances: lemmy.ml(ran by the Lemmy developers), lemmygrad.ml(the openly fascist version of lemmy.ml) and hexbear.net.
if anyone wants to argue, I don’t. Anyone supporting Russia is right-wing. Authoritarianism is inherently conservative, reactionary and therefore right-wing.
Authoritarianism is inherently conservative
Sorry, but no
There’s a reason the step up from just left/right axis is the up/down of libertarian v authoritarian. Auth-left is very much a thing and is what tankies are
