Fixed the font. All else is unchanged.
[serious] Who is this for?
It’s made as an informative meme. Freely distributable.
There are lots of ways to think about it. Saying ‘think about it this way, that’s it, stop thinking about it’, is fundamentally a fascist message.
Perhaps it’s fascist for some definition of fascist I am not aware of.
That’s it. in this case, is meant to express the logic should be obvious.
Perhaps to you it is not so obvious?
Lol, a thought terminating phrase isn’t an argument.
It’s not a fascism either.
Saying ‘this oversimplified thing is the way it is, stop thinking about it’ is fundamentally a fascist message.
Do some self reflection.
Meh. I think the logic I present is simple enough to follow, and no, I’m not discouraging additional thought, rather dismissing more complex models that muddy the proverbial waters.
I’ll leave you to your own presumptions; I can’t reach everybody.
Meh. I think the logic I present is simple enough to follow,
It is, and it’s not an invaluable to lens to look through.
I’m not discouraging additional thought, rather dismissing more complex models that muddy the proverbial waters.
By saying ‘that’s it’, you absolutely are discouraging additional thought. You are confidently saying that that is the only possible lens to view things through.
At an extremely basic level, another lens is the anarchism vs communism lens, i.e. one of distributed decentralized systems, or one of controlled centralized systems. And there are numerous other lens that you can view the left/wing right/wing divide, on top of the fact that that divide varies wildly by region.
Distracting & strawmaning much?
No, just pointing out that oversimplifying things and then using a thought terminating phrase to make it sound like you made a conclusive point is what fascists do.
Creating a model of some process to better understand it is a scientific approach. Also, feel free to “terminate your thoughts” but don’t go insinuating deviating meanings to everyday expressions.
‘That’s it’ is the fascist thought terminating part.
It does not invite further inquiry or scrutiny, it acts like that’s the only possible lens to view left wing / right wing through, when at its core, left wing / right wing is a massive oversimplification of literally the entire population’s political views into a binary us vs them pattern.
It’d be like dividing the entirety of the animal kingdom into birds and not-birds and saying ‘Birds have wings, not-birds don’t have wings. That’s it.’
Fixed the font.
Yet still made an image of text.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative:
- usability
- we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
- text search is unavailable
- the system can’t
- reflow text to varied screen sizes
- vary presentation (size, contrast)
- vary modality (audio, braille)
- accessibility
- lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
- some users can’t read this due to lack of alt text
- users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
- systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
- searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
- fault tolerance: no text fallback if
- image breaks
- image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
I thought OP’s message was cut-and-dried political science everyone knew, then I saw the comments here debating it. Wow, people on lemmy are lost. This information is everywhere: just go to wikipedia.
The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and parties, with emphasis placed upon issues of social equality and social hierarchy.
It’s the 1ˢᵗ axis of the political map commonly shown.
The political compass is propaganda. There is no such thing as auth-left or lib-right. There is no division between social and economic axes.
The definition of the right-left spectrum is rooted in the french revolution. Rightism is about consolidating power and creating strict socio-economic hierarchies so the more-privileged can subject their will on the less-privileged, while leftism is about flattening those hierarchies to prevent anyone from subjugating others and ensuring equality and egalitarianism are maintained.
Whoever has power controls economy and vice-versa. Period. So rightism will always be authoritarian, hierarchal, and have a functionally captive economy. How benevolent this authoritarianism is toward the populace is meaningless as any liberty is an illusion provided at the pleasure of the more wealthy-powerful classes.
Liberalism arises from the willing abuse of an under-regulated economy that allows consolidation of wealth and, therefore, accumulation of power. Therefore the end result of unchecked liberalism is always rightism.
There are many forms of leftism, because leftism is about tearing down and preventing accumulation and consolidation of power. The goal is to prevent runaway snowballing of wealth or power that would allow any person or group to subjugate others, ideally in a way that is sustainable and stable. Therefore leftism is about personal liberty and freedom as long as it does not threaten to diminish or supersede the liberty or freedom of others.
The concepts cannot be separated. They travel together and influence each other directly. The political compass is merely an attempt to make “both sides” seem equivalent without addressing the actual cause-effect of wealth and power accumulation, which serves who? Rightists. Capitalists. Liberals. Those who would seek to selfishly hoard more power, privilege, comfort, and authority than everyone else at the expense of anyone else.
You definition seems right to me. However it imply the following : Staline ant Trotsky are right figures and individualist saying that “the system will change when everybody have change themselves” are leftist
Stalin was extreme right, using leftist trappings to seize and consolidate power for himself as Lenin withered away.
Trotsky was leftist, but still a believer in the ML vanguard gamble that resulted in Stalin seizing power. Rightist means will almost always lead to rightist ends.
Tolstoy, being generally anti-state and anti-capitalist, was also leftist. His famous quote philosophically addresses the stability of any leftist movement.
There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.
The path to leftism and the methods to preserve it against rightism are very much the realm of philosophy.
Your comment is propaganda.
no such thing as auth-left
Tell that to Marxist-Leninists or North Korea.
or lib-right
Tell that to conservatives or right-wing libertarians.
The definition of the right-left spectrum is rooted in the french revolution.
Wikipedia refers to division over Ancien Régime, ie, the monarchy & aristocracy of nobility classes. It was specifically over the right of the king to an absolute veto of the new constitution: opposers sat to the left of the president of the National Assembly & advocates sat to the right.
That’s a distinction in political authority rather than entrepreneurial economics. That political power of the king aligns with social inequality & concentration of authority. In that society, social inequality was related to hierarchal authority of aristocratic & royal privileges culminating to the king. Their reforms had more to do with ending the unequal inherited privileges & authority of feudalism: legal equality (equal access to justice, equal legal punishment, equal eligibility to public office, equal taxability, equal imposition of authority) regardless of (aristocratic) class or birth.
Whoever has power controls economy and vice-versa.
Here’s an exclusive: power[1] is power. It’s not always economic: wealth doesn’t necessarily lead to power. Someone with enough iron or lead can carry off anyone’s gold, so authority can deny wealth power. Authority also is power, so whoever has it[2] unrestricted necessarily poses a threat for subjugating others or repressing personal freedoms. Considering power that way is simply more general than claiming all power is economic & guarding against only that.
Power can come from anything: ability to inspire & indoctrinate, popular support, social ties, institutional (ideological, moral, traditional, governmental) legitimacy, (dis)information, expertise. People who haven’t deluded themselves with idioticly reductive ideologies into thinking the only power is economic recognize this.
The National Assembly of the French revolution were keenly aware: they ended unequal power relations due to feudalism & lineage, not due to wealth, to gain personal freedom.
So, personal political freedom isn’t entirely dependent on economic equality. That’s why totalitarian communist states are considered as oppressive as fascist states despite corresponding to opposite ends of the political spectrum. That’s why political scientists find utility in splitting distinct considerations like authority into separate dimensions: they reveal a similarity hidden by a simpler model.
There are other models with more solid academic work such as the cultural map of the world values survey along dimension of secular-rationalism & self-expression. There, ex-communist societies systematically cluster toward less self-expression.
Liberalism arises from the willing abuse of an under-regulated economy that allows consolidation of wealth and, therefore, accumulation of power. Therefore the end result of unchecked liberalism is always rightism.
If that’s the case, then why are liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia more economically equal than most communist states? Could your approach is too reductive?
The goal is to prevent runaway snowballing of wealth or power that would allow any person or group to subjugate others, ideally in a way that is sustainable and stable.
The same can be stated for all other freedoms. In a completely unregulated society, people would be free to abuse each other. Government authority already restricts people from abusing each other economically & non-economically. The huge concern you’re overlooking is not abuse between individuals, but between the government & its people, ie, abuse of authority.
The concepts cannot be separated.
This and the rest you wrote are nonsense that overlooks the significant role of government in the abuse of individual liberties & rights throughout history. Government can authorize itself to abuse all rights & liberties equally or prohibit itself equally: both approaches can deliver social equality. It’s a separable consideration as demonstrable by ideologies on the map failing to all align on a single diagonal line.
- usability
By this measure, Putin, Xi, and Maduro are right wing.
Not saying it’s wrong, just extending it to the logical conclusion.
you seem to think this is an absurd statement
By this measure, Putin, Xi, and Maduro are right wing.
Today you learned…
I don’t know enough about Maduro to judge him, but as for Putin and Xi? Yes, absolutely.
Putin, Xi and Maduro are autocratic despite what they might say about themselves. They’re absolutely right wing.
Yes.
Welcome to logic.
Now if only that would dawn on everyone else (especially tankies): trading one brand of inequality for another is still inequality.
Right and left as terms are so undercomplex, they can’t really describe modern politics. Ib this case “authoritarian” vs “Democratic” would make more sense. But then the meme character could get lost…
It’s more complicated than a one-dimensional left- right. That’s why someone came up with the political compass. Still doesn’t tell the whole picture, but it’s a more meaningful oversimplification.
The political compass is worse than an oversimplification, it’s propaganda.
I mean, to me, that comment reads like a lot of mental gymnastics and propaganda.
The world is divided into two clear sides, and whatever the other side does is bad, even if it seems benevolent, because of [way of seeing society rooted in the theory of your side].
Also, there’s no such thing as authoritarian left, they always give people as much personal freedom as possible without jeopardising the movement, and any repression is the minimum amount that’s needed for the greater God!
That doesn’t really make sense at the end…
Like, it’s structured so that logically it’s a conclusion but it’s not.
A bottom-up power structure is left wing, but in it the power lies with the voters, not those elected to office:
The federal party, works for the state parties and the presidential nominee.
The state parties actually do a lot here, they have a lot of primaries to organize (neutrally) and then assist all the campaigns.
In both cases though, the politicians are beholden to the voters, and should be governing based on the wishes of the majority of their constituents.
What would go a long way to fixing that would be an easy route to recall elections.
Arguably the sweet spot in any representative democracy is somewhere in the middle. So the struggle of left and right ensures a balanced political landscape. Too much distribution of power ensures nothing gets done, to little and we get that dictator situation.
I know this is supposed to be “left good right bad, mkay”. Let’s have some balanced takes around these parts. <3
“Guys, why can’t we compromise, let’s find a balance with the people who want total, private control over the means by which to survive and build a society so they can personally enrich themselves from artificially created scarcity.”
This is you right now.
Yeah let’s not compromise and be the same assholes and become what we seek to destroy. If only we had a lefty dictator then his benevolence will make everything better. Hitler was a problem, let’s to Stalin again… ;)
Cool story, thanks for highlighting you know diddly squat about political theory and alternative ideologies.
Sounds alot like more than you assume about political theory my friend.
Yeah, in one of these scenarios, things don’t get done and in the other, people’s freedoms are taken.
Real difficult to decide which extreme I’d take.
And yes, I know the actual implication here is that public services fail and infrastructure isn’t as viable. But I would take free and struggling over oppressed and struggling no matter what.
If the direct reward for obeying the system was health and riches, it’d probably be a genuinely difficult choice, but that’s not the actual choice we’re being offered. They want to take your freedom and your wellbeing.
Um… is this sweet spot in the room with us right now?
This is a presumption we make, but CIA analyses of societies as they democratize (reform their election systems to better represent the people) don’t seem to slow down as much as we predicted. Perhaps the metric is misgauged much like the Laffer curve, and the sweet spot is to the left of center, somewhere that no nation has yet explored.
Ideally, as citizens have the time and energy to become civically engaged and aware of their own best interests, as information is better accessible to them, distribution of power outward can be afforded with much less slowdown.
And to be fair, progress in neoliberal states is ratcheted back by right-wing institutions such as SCOTUS, not due to the power distribution of the election system.
Hook, line, and sinker
