• finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I have never met a leftist I didn’t like

    but I only consider somebody a leftist if they respect human rights.

    • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Political ideology is a spectrum, and I feel that Leftists tend to be as hostile towards those they deem ‘not as left’ as them, just as much as they are towards Fascists, Neo-Cons and their ilk.

      It’s basically the no true Scotsman fallacy manifest.

    • slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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      3 months ago

      I’m always under the assumption that everyone can be an asshole. I had a very good friend qnd we’re both vegans. To me it’s just a dietary choice that i made, for her it was almost like a religion. Like when she met someone who was also a vegan or saw someone on tv that was a vegan, she always assumed that it’s a good person, or just rooted for that person, no questions asked.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      3 months ago

      Unfortunately all the wanna-be Pol Pots out there also consider themselves to be leftists.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      So it’s accurate but they’re both wrong because

      1. He is the left.

      2. He shouldn’t even be trying to converse with literal USSR advocates and literal anarchists as if they were part of his base.

    • Soulg@ani.social
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      3 months ago

      Sucks that the system in the USA is broken but until it’s fixed and we have more than two parties, democrats are the left.

      • EzTerry@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        It’s better not to equate the two parties of the USA to the parties in a parliamentary system it’s a different beast.

        The Democrats are the coalition of the left of center interest groups of the current time, and Republicans the coalition of the right of center interest groups of the current time.

        These groups are more the parties of the parliamentary system and run candidates in the primaries of their respective parties, and possibly as independent from time to time (particularly when they feel a bit pushed out of the main parties). Also they push these candidates at all levels (local, state, congress ect)

        I would love some sort of rank choice/instant runoff ballots to make more choices easier in the voting lineup, however those who are pushing for third parties without trying to run local politicians or promoting policies ect will likely not succeed in that system either.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Just so we’re clear, democrats are blue conservatives and are not leftists.

    The meme is still accurate though. Why does Futurama look so anime? Did i miss a new episode?

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      It’s from an episode that does a terribly shallow parody of anime. Ya know the kind where there’s tentacle monsters everywhere despite me not being able to name a single anime I’ve ever seen that has that, just Western Parodies of anime and everyone talks in horrible Engrish in forced asian accents, even though not even dubbers as inept as 4Kids do that?

      Basically the “I’m 65 and the only Japanese Cartoon I’ve ever seen is Speed Racer, and maybe parts of one episode of Pokemon my nephew was watching? But I’ve still totally got this guys!” school of anime parodies.

      I fucking hate shallow parodies.

      The same episode also parodied a lot of 80’s cartoons; Namely Smurfs and GI Joe, and did a much better job of doing so… Mostly because the writers had actually seen Smurfs and GI Joe.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Political polarization is a weapon, heard of the phrase “divide and conquer” They know how to churn up, scramble and disempower those on the side of anti-domination And that’s why all Kulaks will get the bullet and the red empire must extinguish all alternative off the face of this planet and every other planet around all stars

      Cue the speech at the end of Team America World Police

      So peace was never an option

  • Mustakrakish@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Yugopnik made a good point on the term “Leftist” and how its so broad that it includes many different idealogies that are quite honestly conflicting, i.e. stalinists, anarchists, etc., so that it appears leftists are always fighting since they are all lumped into the same category.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I approve of any leftist as long as they are anti-authoritarian.

      so that it appears leftists are always fighting since they are all lumped into the same category.

      I always say it is because the left in general has its roots in old school liberal value of “think for yourself”. So there typically tends to be maverick attitude and in-fighting. The best example is the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War; you have soc dems, communists and anarchists fighting together not just against fascists, but also themselves. The right, meanwhile value order and hierarchy, so they tend to easily set aside their differences. Again, the Spanish Civil War is the best example, with the Spanish Nationalists also composed of various factions with competing agenda, but managed to set aside their differences, which made it easier to do because they had a strong man figure to rally to.

        • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          And the right won that war

          I assume you are from the US. It may be the case in your country, but it is not necessarily that the right as a whole won the war, considering that other parts of the world still have leftist and liberal politicians ruling. As a matter of fact, they have gotten more popular as Trump’s brazen corruption and incompetence is setting example why not to elect populist right wing politicians.

          For what it’s worth, if nothing existentially happens that would stop US from becoming a nation anymore like a civil war, politics typically swing back like a pendulum. Even at the extreme, politics could dramatically swing back to normalcy and empathy. We have had countries that were under dictatorship, but are now democratic like Spain and Portugal. Because the problem with dictatorships is that they become too corrupt and reality eventually catches up to those who were swooned by initial sweet promises of demagoguery.

          Of course, what I just said now may not be reassuring to you because I am speaking from a place of relative safety, so you can take it or leave it.

          • ObliviousEnlightenment@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I am American, but I was more making a point about how the rights tendency to fall in line makes them more effective, and maybe we should emulate that

        • Mustakrakish@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yeah sometimes I get frustrated because I wish “the left” could be adults for five minutes and deal with the issues at hand. Like I don’t care about the socialist alphabet soup if you’re from PSL, or DSA, or ISA or whatever, we all agree that people are being kidnapped by I.C.E. is evil and alarming, can we just deal with this right now? We can get back to bickering about philosophy later.

          But even that is complicated since there are disagreements that can’t be ignored, like whether to work with democrats, who time and time again undermine and cripple movements whenever able and divert them for fundraising.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      For me, it makes much more sense to think about it all as pop culture. I’ll use America but this goes for any country.

      The right leaning party represents pop culture. A dominant culture. The popular culture is American Apple pie and blue jeans with letter jackets.

      The left represents everything outside the pop culture bubble. It’s a larger population as a whole, but they’re like little bubbles they all contain their own culture. Those cultures can conflict or merge and compliment each other. But they’re individually separate.

      The pop culture is always feeling threatened. It needs to maintain the status quo. Every outside sub culture is trying to fight their way into the dominant culture.

      So this is why the right leaning voters trend towards rejecting things like immigrants, minorities, LGQTB and often other sub groups that are not wildly accepted by the pop culture. This is also why the left leaning groups do not. They trend towards infighting about how to do things but overall they all focus efforts on taking status away from the pop culture.

      When I view politics as a clash between pop culture and sub cultures, it makes so much of it make so much more sense.

      Which is also why I believe this is useful because it highlights how to win. Pop culture is much more sensitive to culture jamming. If anyone remembers ‘yes men save the world’ they were buried a bit, but they managed to fuck with so many things in pretty smart ways. You can really start to see how to focus efforts on them with this context I think at least.

        • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I’m not sure what that means. I’m interested though. Is it something you can explain here or is there some topics you can’t suggest I read up on

          • Mustakrakish@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Its a bit of a complex topic, but in basic terms reactionary thinking is kneejerk reaction, what “feels right” without broader analysis. The popular surface level, like how people complain about trans people in sports cause it “feels unfair”, but when you look at the actual numbers there such a small section of out trans people in general, and even then they do pretty regular on average. Or how you here how believe all women will somehow make it “dangerous” for men dating, when in reality false accusations form less than one percent of cases, but one in four women experience assault. Whereas dialectical thinking is the thought that larger processes and symptoms influence outcomes, and one should take a step back and analyse the context and direct facts about something through critical thinking before coming to a conclusion. Like how study after study have proven that the number one factor contributing to a person engaging in violent crime is poverty, not just a person being born bad. Or how despite the narrative, immigrants commit crime at a lower percentage on average than natural born citizens. But since dialecticalism is a much bigger analysis and uses a fair amount of hypothetical and philosophical thinking you end up getting a fair amount of groups believing that their hypothetical analysis is best, such as you get with different philosophers.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Why can’t we have Leftist Unity? The fucking Rightists can agree on hating “The Libz”

    Why can’t we agree on hating cons? Sadly I can’t even get Leftist factions to agree on “LGBT Rights are based and cool”, because Left-Learning TERFs exist and I’ve had Tankies pull “LGBT Rights is racist because it means forcing Western Ideals where they don’t belong” crap on me.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Of course the only reply to this is a “srs leftist” who immediately proclaims you an enemy for shit you didn’t say

      We can’t have leftist unity because the right has never run short on useful idiots

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      People on the left love to “well actually…” every issue, every opinion, because nothing in the world is 100%, but when something is 85%+ we should just stfu about it, agree and move on to more pressing issues.

      But of course we can’t, so we keep losing.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        your lack of participation enabled an actual genocider. think things have gotten better in the last 5 months for gaza? ukraine?

        you think you’ll ever take responsibility for your own poor choices?

    • nectar45@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Because being a leftist just isnt as fun when you dont hate everyone and everything. Hate is fun

  • Soulg@ani.social
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    3 months ago

    Half the replies in this thread: so true bestie, except fuck those guys for not being left enough

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Reminder to all my homies: If any of ya’ll think trans rights are a bargaining chip, you aint leftist enough for me!

      • Soulg@ani.social
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        2 months ago

        Ok but who thinks that, I’ve not seen anything about that anywhere on lemmy, so it must not be very common

  • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    If there’s an actual debate you’ve got to define terms. People’s definitions of ‘leftist’ can be pretty wild, especially if the debate is between an American and… mostly anyone outside America.

    I have seen people waxing poetic about Imperial Japan and the Jakarta Method who consider themselves leftist, while at the same time associate outright NazBols with the left.

    So ‘what do you actually mean by tankie/liberal?’ will usually cut through a lot of debate perv noise.

    • Zenith@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      And people love the no true Scotsman fallacy and constantly throw out that the person isn’t really this or that

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      I have seen people waxing poetic about Imperial Japan

      What? Who? Where? That’s an absolutely wild take.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    3 months ago

    See Ken Loach’s Land & Freedom on how factionalism and in-fighting within the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil war allowed the fascist Junta to win.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Political LeftRightism (n.)

      Definition:

      Political LeftRightism is a spatially encoded meta-framework of political orientation that frames ideological discourse along a singular, bipolar axis, left versus right,thereby reducing the full multidimensional landscape of political thought into a linear spectrum. As a memetic penetrator and perceptual instrument, LeftRightism functions not as a neutral map but as a meta-weapon of the ruling class: a cognitive architecture designed to channel dissent, structure debate, and neutralize system-level critique by confining political possibility to a predefined, adversarial dialectic within the system’s own terms.

      Operational Mechanisms:

      Perceptual Confinement: Constructs a false totality of ideological space by placing all positions, grievances, and aspirations on a left-to-right continuum. This flattens pluralistic thought into a binary schema and frames radical alternatives as fringe “extremes.”

      Cognitive False Equivalence: Establishes symmetry between left and right regardless of historical asymmetry in power, violence, or systemic entrenchment. This symmetry encourages the illusion of balance where structural inequality remains.

      Controlled Opposition: Absorbs political resistance into legible categories that the system has already immunized against. By permitting debate only between “acceptable” sides of the spectrum, it constrains opposition into predictable, ineffectual loops.

      Ideological Compartmentalization: Prevents synthesis of cross-axis or off-spectrum worldviews (e.g., spiritual leftism, post-capitalist traditionalism, decentralized communitarianism) by declaring them incoherent or invisible.

      Map-as-Reality Substitution: Through repetition and institutional embedding, LeftRightism replaces the messy, evolving reality of political life with a static cartographic abstraction, inducing conceptual dependency on the spectrum itself.

      As Meta-Weapon: Political LeftRightism operates as an epistemic instrument of enclosure, a framework-level tool of hegemony rather than a position within debate. It disguises its own structural function beneath the appearance of neutrality and exhaustiveness. By scripting political meaning into a legible diagram, it enables elites to:

      Predict, manage, and diffuse unrest;

      Legitimize centrism as “reasonable” and extremes as dangerous;

      Fragment class solidarity into partisan identities;

      Avoid exposure of vertical dynamics (top vs. bottom, ruler vs. ruled) by focusing attention horizontally.

      Distinction: Unlike left- or right-wing ideologies, which offer substantive (if partial) theories of value or structure, LeftRightism is not an ideology per se but a cartographic control mechanism—an ideological exoskeleton that shapes and constrains all ideologies that operate within it. Its power lies not in its content, but in its pre-conscious adoption as the default schema of political orientation.

      • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        If partisan identities are different enough that they don’t ally then that means their differences are too great.

          • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I’m not interested in trying to meet in the middle with people who are happy keeping our systems of slavery in place.

            Any time I have seen people attempt to change the perspective in which we look at politics (ie. The Political Compass) it is always just an avenue for right wing extremists to be validated. The Political Compass helped cause the rise of authoritarianism we see today.

            Maybe if your ideology is only appealing under a certain light then it isn’t an appealing ideology.

            • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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              3 months ago

              Yes I agree the political compass as a political framework pushes assumptions embedded in it’s structure that reify power itself.

              The political compass and “leftrightism” are the same kind of political meta-weapons. Structure that anchor a political understanding and prepare the terrain to amplify those forms of power that understand the world through an austere and reductive model.

              This disempowers exactly the kind of people most vulnerable to the concentrations of power that the framework seeks to highlight but because tge framework is so reductive it weakens its users by obscuring political reality.

              We need better ways to understand political realities of the world to counter them with the sufficient and required nuance.