Guys, at this rate I don’t think the revolution’s going to happen anytime soon.
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.
‘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!”
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.
Look, I can’t help that you have limited real life experience, but the middle is crowded with people of a wide variety of political beliefs. For some, like me, I’m more center-left, supporting things like obvious human rights issues, but I won’t go all in on some of the more outlandish financial policies. And I simply will not give machine politics a moment of my life. I’ve seen it fail miserably too many times to think it can work just because one side does it.
But so when your retort to someone not exactly like you is “you don’t deserve respect until you’re someone exactly like me and think only how I think,” then your genuine intolerance is out there on display, and yet you aren’t self aware enough to realize you’ve just said it.
It’s disappointing that you jumped into that within A single comment. Seriously?
then your genuine intolerance is out there on display
Did you really just “so much for the tolerant left” me? Hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, considering where this conversation started. I’ll put it to you this way seeing as the concept seems so difficult for you to understand. If you go around condemning gay people to burning for eternity and telling women things like “your body, my choice” then I am not going to respect you because you clearly have no respect for anyone else.
And just to clear things up in case this is the reason that you’re taking it so personally, when I say “you”, I am not pointing a finger at you, I am using it in a general sense, talking about the people that do these things.
You arrived here telling me that my first comment was actually about right wingers while calling yourself a centrist, but you’ve already started clutching your pearls just because I don’t want to ever meet in the middle with hateful bigots and tried to shame me into changing my position by pulling “iNTolERant LEft” schtick. So I dunno.
I’m asking you if you understand if what you in particular are saying is, by it’s nature, a contradiction. You were never tolerant from the start, and never really pretended to be. You just think you have labels that magically confer this value on you without having to do the work.
You don’t represent the Left as a whole. But you’re picking up a lot of cues with Left-leanimg terminology that create a dogmatic point of view, regardless of the left/right side of things.
Friendo, I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this, as it adds to my understanding of a diverse range of points of view. Tell me more.
From the condescending opening line to the blatant straw man, it almost sounds like you’re replying to the wrong comment.
Ah yes, the old enemy of the left: the left.
You leftists sure are a contentious people.
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
You’ve just made an enemy for
lifeleft!ftfy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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It’s how we’re conditioned to behave by society from birth. Break the rules and you get punished.
This so fucking much
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”.
Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I have yet to see anyone who’s not genuinely a tankie being accused of such.
Ive seen people be called tankies for not supporting Kamala and opposing Liberal Democracy
for not supporting Kamala
That’s wild. I’ve never heard that take and have a difficult time believing that it is common.
opposing Liberal Democracy
What alternative were they in favor of?
That’s wild. I’ve never heard that take and have a difficult time believing that it is common.
World users were literally calling anyone who critiqued Kamala Russian bots, were you not paying attention for the last several months?
What alternative were they in favor of?
Depends, some leftists support a workers democracy, im personally an Anarcho Syndicalist
World users
Ah. I think I see where the problem is. I believe my instance defederated from
lemmy.worlda while back.You arent missing out on much
I’ve seen conservatives lob the word tankie around before like they do with other scary sounding political words. But not here on lemmy. “Tankie” has a very precise meaning on lemmy that everyone here seems to understand, despite a few tankies trying to gaslight people into thinking the term has “lost it’s meaning”.
For those who don’t know what it means, what is “clear definition of tankie”?
someone who claims to be leftist but tacitly or gleefully supports authoritarianism, imperialism, or violent repression. Many are easily identifiable by their pointing to places that are not The West™️ and smoothing over, apologizing for, or denying, blatant horrors on the basis that they are unfriendly with the west. sometimes called red fascists.
It’s actually important to ostracize these people as they are obviously the most blatant opportunists in leftist movements looking to implement authoritarian repressive regimes.
claims to be leftist but tacitly or gleefully supports authoritarianism, imperialism, or violent repression.
including those resisting US evil? Not supporting a war on Russia is tankie, because being too stupid to not understand we the people lose, and Russia needs to defend itself, is not as important as believing US propaganda that Russian leadership is evil for defending itself?
on the brightside ya’ll normally just can’t resist outing yourselves.
Is there a name for leftists that believe everyone deserves every war the US tells them is a “strategic imperative”? Even the ones where they use motivated nazis and very illiberal Islamist rulers?
Spoken like a true lib who hasn’t grabbed a history book in their lives. You have done exactly ZERO study of this so-called “authoritarianism”, its characteristics, actual comparisons with western systems, and the reasons for certain degrees of oppression in different systems. Your entire analysis is vibes-based, and doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny, and leads you to being on the side of the US Department of State propaganda on 99% of occasions. Remember, people called us tankies 20 years ago for opposing the invasion of Iraq, because “Saddam is a rabid dog”.
really searching for straws to grasp here eh?
“I’m a leftist, and I proudly support 0 historical leftist movements which actually achieved anything”
In a nutshell, alternative-imperialists with a leftist bent. They’re hypocrites. “Imperialism is evil…with these exceptions, those empires are cool”.
It’s frustrating trying to talk with tankies, because really I agree with practically all of their criticisms of the US and a few criticisms of NATO and the West at large. But then that gets turned around into a justification for X formerly-socialist country drafting soldiers to invade sovereign country “Y” with practically unanimous resistance, and I just don’t see how the hell that’s supposed to help the working class of either state.
Except in crisis, a society benefits when everyone does nothing renegade.
The problem is we’re in crisis, largely due to a lack of information about the scope and breadth of that crisis.
The Left: Fractured Butt Hole. 😞
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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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Preach
I think you underestimate my ability to fuck things up. Especially my plans to do nothing.
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