This is photoshopped… the picture was with mitt Romney and trump with his shiteating grin… why the edit?
Right? There are now 1,000 images of these idiots together. Why doctor an old Mitt Romney photo?
Incoherent take. The right is a tool the billionaires use to take shit away from the rest of us.
But bringing people over from the right is important and attacking them is counterproductive.
Not an excuse for mystification.
Also I’m pretty sure most right wing people consider themselves “moderate” or “independent” anyway so it’s not like they’ll feel attacked if we correctly blame the right for its crimes
Can confirm. Interview a con for my class and he was dead set that he’s a centrist. Did have a single left opinion.
Well, when they stop attacking us for believing in human rights, maybe we can have a dialogue.
Exactly, the issues we are diametrically opposed on cannot afford compromise. You can’t compromise on whether or not trans people deserve to exist. You can’t compromise on whether all school children deserve to eat. You can’t compromise on the opposition of fascism, racism, and bigotry. These people can get on the right side of morality or they can get fucked and I’ll tell every one of them to their face now that the other shoe is dropping on it. They have been offered the open hand of reason and discussion since at least 2015. They spat in our face for a decade. Now they get the fist.
So to start a dialogue, ppl must agree with your premise that human rights exist? Or should we have a dialogue where you prove human rights exist?
The conversation has to broach:
- Medical standards groups have our interests at heart even if medical companies do not
- trans people exist and have a right to live how they like.
- Children have a right to some self-determination, including figuring out their sexual preference and gender identity.
- All people deserve affordable health care and affordable housing, regardless of their race, religion, or background.
- Criminals deserve to be treated as human beings. Jails directly stand in opposition to that.
- there’s likely more that I can’t think of.
These ‘dialogues’ are not about things the left can morally budge on, and they’re insanely exhausting, especially when your opponent isn’t arguing in good faith. No one is obligated to go through that social stress, and frankly it’s probably easier for most to just physically fight right-wing zealots.
Medical standards groups have our interests at heart even if medical companies do not
Why would they have our interests at heart?
trans people exist
Obviously
and have a right to live how they like
Depends on what they like.
Children have a right to some self-determination
Nah, they don’t
All people deserve affordable health care and affordable housing, regardless of their race, religion, or background
Why? What did they do to deserve this? And why do we ignore religion/race/background? IMO there are no “all people”. Shinto japanese and Arab Muslim are two ontologically different objects like a rock and a stick. We have no reasons to treat them equally.
Criminals deserve to be treated as human beings. Jails directly stand in opposition to that
How are human beings treated? What is your solution? Abolish jails?
And your disagreement on this demonstrates why you’re gonna get decked by leftists instead of talked to.
on a similar, related, note, integrating young men into society and not estranging them by telling them that they’re the worst, is also important to have a coherent society.
I think this meme is clearly made for the average American that sees politics as “left vs. right” being “Dems vs. Republicans”.
I don’t think it’s referring to “the left” as anti capitalist here. It’s meant to appeal to normies.
That was my feeling. It’s not a PhD thesis on economic justice or revolution, it’s just something I’m hoping might make my Uncle Herb and nephew George say ‘Huh’.
You’re right and you’re wrong. The ‘right’ is a made up label for class traitors who have been tricked into supporting billionaires. It’s incredibly useful for the billionaires because they get the support and it divides the rest of us and we put our energy into the fake boogeyman instead of focusing our efforts on them.
The right are the lackeys of the owning class and will fight the left regardless of the extent to which the left limits the scope of its engagement.
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Left is a tool of billionaires
Do the billionaires not use the left to their benefit?
The left is intrinsically opposed to the existence of billionaires as a matter of principle, so generally speaking, no.
How the fuck did all these dipshit enlightened centrists find their way onto lemmy???
How the fuck did all these dipshit enlightened centrists find their way onto lemmy???
That’s very respectful of you
You mean like using whataboutism in an attempt to invalidate a very real issue?
I didn’t think you guys were not looking for discussions at all. My bad on that assumption.
Thank you, I’ve been training my restraint and decided to put it to use in what I think is a pretty diplomatic tone.
No, they use the culture war to divide and confuse people. Not because they want minorities to be respected, but to direct hate to gay and trans people, rather than them.
Yup. Rainbow capitalism. Whatever way to pit us against each other.
Rainbow capitalism is still capitalism. What the fuck does that have to do with the left???
The left isn’t the issue, I’m saying the left has also been used as pawns. We are not beyond manipulation and we have absolutely been pitted against each other. This is a huge reason for all the infighting on the left.
Yeah that is true, but like you said, poor choice of example.
rainbow capitalism is mostly marketing towards polite liberalism. Homophobia/transphobia is their attempt to pit people against each other. Just like racism, it is not that these things didn’t exist before capitalism, but the exacerbation and use of it to divide the working class is what capitalists and reactionaries use.
You’re absolutely right, my example was not a good one. Although we are still not exempt from being used as pawns, even though we are often a little more educated about the methods that are being used to do so.
Messaging aside, be aware that this photo is edited, Musk wasn’t originally in it.
Wasn’t it Ted Cruz originally?
EDIT: ah it was Mitt Romney.
What do you think “the left” is??
I’d love to see a poll of how people in the USA would answer that question.
Leftism is just a fat woman with pink hair yelling at me for no reason.
I’m not a Leftist, I’m a Pan-sexual Afro-Future Longtermist Egalitarian Social Radical Centrist With Kropotkin Characteristics. I believe in a single worker owned commune unfettered by the cloistered norms of a 50s era revanchist white colonialist culture. But also I reserve the right to think white women with pink hair are shrill and want nothing to do with them. That’s why I voted for Trump.
OP should have phrased it as “It’s not Democrats vs Republicans; it’s the 1% vs the 99%”
Why did they photoshop the miserable Mitt Romney dinner picture
Oh my, his anguished face. This is a work of art.
because that, without context, might make someone feel sympathy for one of these ghouls.
But surely there are enough pictures out there of those ghouls together that you don’t need to create fake ones. There’s enough misinformation on the internet as it is.
even if there wasn’t any misinformations on the internet, you still wouldn’t need to create new ones.
libs don’t give a shit about truth. they literally can’t understand the idea. telling a liberal the truth is like reading poetry to your dog. it’s a sweet romantic idea, and maybe it makes you a good person, but only the tone actually matters.
lemmy has convinced me that neither conservatives nor communists know what a liberal is.
“Liberal” means different things in Europe vs America, and that confusion has been specifically exploited by propagandists as well, just making things worse.
I myself am a stupid american. I cannot say that I’ve read any great works of philosophy that discuss the espoused ideals of political movements.
What I have read are dictionary definitions. I have observed how people behave, what people think these words mean, and how almost everyone who gives themselves a label is either a liar or just wrong. Obviously, this is about the american versions of the words.
Liberals: “everything sucks, but it could suck less if we put in a tiny amount of effort to fix things. You may be mildly inconvenienced by these efforts.”
Conservatives: “everything sucks and it’s the libs’ fault! They changed things and now everything sucks! Fuck {insert racial slur here}!”
Communists: “everything sucks and it’s the libs’ fault! They’re just as fascist as the conservatives because capitalism!”
Republicans: “We’re conservatives!” (they’re actually fascists)
Democrats: “We’re liberals!” (some of them are, but most of them are conservatives. Also spineless failures, but that part isn’t important to this conversation.)
Am I on to something here, or am I just stupid?
yeah, that seems to me how people use these words
nevertheless, “liberalism” used to have an actual definition. it meant somebody would would say “things are allowed unless they are forbidden”, which is contrary to the anti-liberal (sometimes identified as conservative) view that “things are forbidden unless they are allowed”, which means, liberals don’t bother with things that don’t matter.
now, if you’re a trans girl shitting in a public toilet, that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t really change anything. that is why liberalism says “ok, it shouldn’t be forbidden, so by default it’s allowed” while anti-liberalists claim “i don’t see why these people are doing this, therefore they are faking it (being trans) and also it should be a crime until proven innocent”.
fuck yeah, invisible, like the ring of power. that’s… that’s what this is, right?
Yeah in europe liberals are liberals, while in america liberals are liberals but it must not interfere with capitalist interests
Eurocentrism lol
life has convinced me that liberals certainly don’t. I guess if we’re both right, only we anarchists can see the truth. as if my ego needed that.
Here’s a work going through every major liberal philosopher and what liberalism meant to them, and how they dealt with the contradictions. It’s the same definition used in every serious work for the last 200 years or so.
This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean “far left” as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter’s policy too liberal. Later on, the American “left”, social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.
I’ll read that, but not today. For the sake of responding within the current month, I had chatgpt summarize it for me. The gist I get is that “liberalism” is a lie, and it’s secretly fascism (I’m paraphrasing the summary pretty hard), benefiting the in-groups and oppressing everyone else. Would you say this is an accurate, if oversimplified, description of what you want me to understand?
Not really, it’s more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same “freedom” is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.
It’s important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.
I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it’s own contradictions become unsustainable, but that’s not really in the book.
We’re not “confused”, we have a different variant of English and a different definition for “liberal”.
i guess you’re wrong about that. what you’re referring to is the fallacy that all liberals are extremely short-sighted and can’t make reasonable decisions, which is why they’re constantly manipulated and that causes them to be liberal in the first place.
there are liberals who can see reason.
if they could see reason in 2025, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore, I don’t think. the only thing liberalism ever had going for it was a big tent that could at least get its distasteful monkey paw version of good things done, and now they don’t even want to do that.
ok i get your point. you were referring to “liberals” as a political party, i.e. the democrats. i was referring to liberal individuals, i.e. people who engage in the rights of liberty.
more an ideology that closely aligns with the political party; there’s a certain kind of brain rot.
“this isn’t right vs left, this is right vs left”
uh… okay?
What these dumbasses don’t realize is that they do rely on these things - every minimum or even low wage worker absolutely needs these services to make ends meet. These people aren’t just evil, they’re stupid.
They’re in a cult.
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How did low wage workers survive throughout history without Medicare and Medicaid?
They died substantially more often and sooner. Look up the working conditions prior to the union wars in the US.
How much is “substantially”? And why do you think union wars were the reason for the decrease in deaths? Maybe it’s just the technological progress or something.
Because I’m not deluding myself. You wanna continue being a dip shit regarding how improved workplace conditions decreased workplace deaths be my guest. I’m gonna actually use my brain, though.
EDIT: got alittle heated and used some mentally ableist language. I’m trying to break that habit so I’ve edited that language to reflect that.
Statistics tell me there is a relation between healthcare and life expectation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
Note the US is the outlier here: that’s the only country in the world with significant spending and no universal healthcare system (only 10 countries in the world don’t have one). And even with that, medical debt is still the first cause of bankrupcy.
If you slash medicaid, you go to the left of that chart, but you also go down. That’s a political choice, really.
Fortunately, enough institutions were torn apart that soon the US will also be the exception for being unable to provide numbers for the years to come.
Generally, people just made more money. Things cost less. Relative to buying power, wages across the USA have fallen since the 70s. We are currently sitting in the culmination of decades of people getting poorer, propped up by credit cards and mortgages.
And free healthcare was the norm rather than the alternative through history. It was rarely as commodified as it is today. If someone was sick, they weren’t expected to work and other people took care of them. Generally. Another way the current system in the USA is an outlier, and all the more barbaric for it.
As I live alone and pay $500 a month just to be able to see a doctor, I am more and more enraged yet disillusioned the older I get. This is not living—this is fascistic technofeudalism.
Fight a class war, not a culture war.
And you, who thinks you are in the “upper class” by making 500k a year. You’re not, you are among the poor.
We fight the people who own billions, not you.
500k a year is a doctor or something. Someone who actually contributes to society. That’s someone who should be rich because of how hard they worked to get there plus how important they are to our society. Elon musk shouldn’t get paid a fucking dime.
Elon isn’t getting paid. He’s not a wage worker.
Semantics
I mean technically how they make that 500k matters. If it’s all just being a landlord we are definitely fighting them too.
We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Let’s handle the people owning a thousand homes first. Then move on the ones who own a dozen or less.
I’d disagree. Though I understand where you are coming from. I’m not saying behead the petty landlords first. However, often times the easiest way to fuel class consciousness is on these easier fights. Obviously a mom and pop single property landlord isn’t making 500k a year I’m not talking about grandmas that have a property as their retirement savings.
But these small petty bourgeoisie (think the dude on tiktok telling people how to make passive income) of 10-100 tenants are often the ripe conditions for the creation of tenants unions which can fuel class consciousness. They lack the power of large capital and the power of state violence in the same way. I think material support to these areas absolutely helps the working class.
But we might just be disagreeing on definitions here.
Don’t fight class war.
We aren’t talking about massive tax breaks. That’s what’s insane.
Currently SS is capped at ~$180k dollars @ ~5%. That means if you earn $180k, you pay 9k in SS tax. If you earn $2 billion you pay 9k in taxes.
These greedy leeches are destroying one of the only semi-decent systems all next to no money from them personally.
The actual tax increase from trump’s expiring tax cuts is also something like 4%. Meaning these billionaires are doing all this work to save an extra $0.04 on every dollar of income.
They keep talking about the dangers and problems with debt, yet the blindingly obvious solution is a moderate increase in taxes. But instead of even broaching that subject, they are trying to also give themselves a tax cut while destroying social programs.
It’s robbery, plain and simple.
Meaning these billionaires are doing all this work to save an extra $0.04 on every dollar of income.
$0.04 for every dollar of income doesn’t sound like much until you’re talking about a billion dollars, in which case it’s $40 million.
That’s a whole extra yacht!
I know, they might have to give up the guest private jet.
Luigi is the only solution
If they don’t respect our lifes, how can we respect theirs?
Social security isn’t a tax. It’s an insurance program and structured as such. We have to decide if there should be more national insurance programs. I’d be down.
I just started talking. Sorry you’re probably right.
at this point i’m actually convinced they’re not doing this to enrich themselves.
they’re doing it to crush the population, to keep it living paycheck-to-paycheck, so they can’t afford an uprise when they need to fight back.
I don’t understand everything that you said, but as a devils advocate. Social Security is not supposed to be tax. It’s supposed to be an insurance program.
Everyone should have to pay their fair share. Hell, I bet if they just did a flat 15-18℅ tax on everyone, middle class to the uber rich then we would have all the money for the programs like SS and medicare for all.
It is not just saving money on taxes, but having desperate old people as cheap labor and pre-retirement people as customers for annuities. Particularly as desperate, cheap labor, since that helps push wages down for any sector that they could work in.
That is exactly why its Right vs Left
The only war is a class war.
and what tool do we fight wars with?
guns.
The only tragedy is our lives.
Speak for yourself.
Eh, thanks, I will. Who else would I speak for?
I don’t know. My elderly neighbor might be poor like me but his giant fucking Trump flag kind of makes me hope he dies because of Trump’s policies, as well as miserable and alone.
I’ll admit that’s pure irrational spite politics. But the irrationality doesn’t change how completely disinterested I am in joining forces with him against billionaires if he realizes he was wrong.
No, this is Good vs Evil. Right vs Wrong. Truth vs Deception. But yeah, Billionaires are the dark half of those and develop extreme sociopathic megalomaniacal malignant narcissism apparently. How else can we explain it?
No war but class war!
Class war is literally the least important war
So where should I focus my efforts? Because I think the current political situation in the US is not untenable but is not working well.
