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  • The differences of opinion are still there in irl leftist spaces but it alters how it feels when you’re actively doing something. Online you only see the differences in opinion but the real leftists aren’t just arguing details online (though they do that too) they’re running food banks and organizing housing cooperatives and coming out en masse when someone is being evicted. They’re putting together food packages and sending books to inmates. They’re hiking out into the desert to leave water for migrants and waiting by the train tracks to toss food up to travelers.

    Bickering about details online might seem ridiculous to someone who isn’t involved but for the actually active leftists that part is only a sliver of their leftism and it’s not necessarily a bad thing— it’s very hard to imagine the world organized other than it is and one way we can be prepared to make the right decisions together when gaps appear is to discuss everything from every angle. I’m not going to pretend all the stuff online is in good faith and I suspect a good percentage of keyboard warriors who are not actually involved in leftward movement, but I do think in the context of real activism the bickering makes more sense.

  • 'Centrists' don't help much either because they too hold the left to a higher standard than the right and always seem to be looking for any excuse to whip out the ol' "so much for the tolerant left" so that they can feel better about themselves when they vote for who they really wanted to vote for anyway.

    People on the right can say in plain English "I want to dismantle women's rights and put all gay people into camps" and the 'centrist' will be like "hmmm yes that seems like a valid political opinion". But the moment someone on the left drops the high road shit for once and bites back, the 'centrist', clutching pearls is like "See? This is why I'm supporting the bigots that hate everyone, because you SWORE and that's unacceptable!"

    • You can see it plain as day in the last election's rhetoric. Democrats insist that a simple Republican Majority is enough to end democracy nationwide. However, they also believe Republicans can trivially block any liberal initiative from the legislative minority.

      • "As you can clearly see, in this info graphic design I am the Chad and you are the Wojack."

        Palestine is now going to get genocided even faster, trans and gay people are going to suffer, and there's a real chance of a country falling into actual fascism which will then cause a domino effect Rippling out into the entire world. This is your fault. You did this. You and your idiocy.

    • That's not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That's a solidly right viewpoint.

      The Centrist would, however, say "look, if you're going to make your whole vibe about tolerance, that's cool. I love it. But my homie, that's a slippery slope you haven't fully negotiated yet. So when your less disciplined people start to be big picture tolerant through on-paper intolerance, don't expect me to do the same mental gymnastics to defend it that you do with your mom at Thanksgiving. How about you solve the problem before you create it by not being sloppy and bumbling your way into an obvious trap every bully has pulled since the dawn of time?"

      But hey, as a Centrist, the Left can't discern me from someone like Bush 43 or a raging MAGA freak because anything right of far left is a legit fascist. Which is why I cant hang with you all, your labels are weird. But the Right usually wants to hang me for being a traitor, so one of y'all is far more worth dealing with occasional cringe.

      • That's not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That's a solidly right viewpoint.

        Well then all I can say is that there's a fair number of right wing people that consider themselves 'centrists' either dishonestly or genuinely believing it. It's actually what I was going for by putting centrist in quotations.

        But something that I will never go near the centre on is human rights (whatever that looks like). For example, women should have full rights over their own bodies and not have to die in hospitals when something goes wrong because doctors don't want to risk harming a foetus (that ends up dying along with her anyway), trans people should be allowed to exist without fear and persecution from other people that can't mind their own damn business and everyone should be able to choose their religion or lack thereof. For me personally, these are the kinds of things that are more important than the price of eggs. And anyone that ignores those issues because of the price of eggs, does in fact look pretty similar to a MAGA to me.

        As far as the slippery slope goes, I believe in no tolerance for the intolerant. Once you've shown that you just will not give other people the respect that you personally want, you don't deserve it.

      • But hey, as a Centrist, the Left can’t discern me from someone like Bush 43 or a raging MAGA freak because anything right of far left is a legit fascist.

        :-/

        How about you solve the problem before you create it by not being sloppy and bumbling your way into an obvious trap every bully has pulled since the dawn of time?

        There is an argument that politics is the art of representing the aggregate interests of ordinary people on their behalf. And what a successful politician needs to succeed is a rapport with the community such that they can channel the socio-economic demands into the bureaucracy efficiently.

        Unfortunately, we live in a country where seats are heavily gerrymandered, information on candidates for leadership is either highly censured or ludicrously unreliable, and singular individuals are expected to represent populations on the scale of 300k to 40M at the national level.

        Socratic Rhetoric isn't the issue here. You're not engaging in an Ivy League debate between peers. You're talking entirely about the ability to manipulate public opinion at a national scale. A lot of that boils down to mass deception, demagoguery, and pure tribalist politics.

        There's nothing you can say or do that won't result in the opposition calling you a foreign infiltrator or a degenerate loser or a reactionary terrorist. You're trying to play chess with a stampeding bull.

      • I'm still always surprised when people say "slippery slope" in earnest, as though it isn't a well-known logical fallacy to be avoided. As though, at no point along the slope, would we be able to reverse course. "This thing must necessarily lead to that thing over time!"

        Okay Nostradamus.

    • A large portion of "cancel culture" also was the left (and liberals) choosing the "moral high road", because they convinced us someone's 8+ year old mistake made them unfit for anything. This got so bad, the right started to manipulate it, even on the old internet, and nowadays there are a lot of callouts astroturfed by kiwifarms and other far-right doxing groups (some of it moved to Discord/Matrix).

  • 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.

  • From my casual observation, leftists tend to be a lot more individualistic and tribalistic than people on the right, to the point where they would much rather join the right just to spite another left group.

    • I'm not sure about the right, but the amount of arguing over labels and shit is ridiculous on here. Half the time people never get past whether something is left/liberal/tankie/right/whatever and completely ignore whether an idea or policy is good on its merits.

      And if they do, most of the time it devolves into whether or not it's the most ideal in every way possible. People are content to let perfect be the enemy of good.

  • 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.

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