Yet.
Most smart right wing people (not me obviously), long ago gave up trying to discuss anything important with the left.
It’s not productive, and everyone that I know has just gone to more private chats and channels and don’t even have social media accounts.
You get banned enough times for saying something reasonable, or constantly get called a nazi or something ridiculous and you just stop using those places to talk.
The separation and division has already happened. For anyone hoping to have a discussion with anyone who has different opinions than you do, that train has left the station.
There are bots, lots of them (I’m sure from the left and the right) and that’s it’s own problem. But I doubt we will ever see a place where people can just disagree anymore.
No one seems to have the balls to let these conversations happen on either side.
As someone who skews quite far left ideologically but believes that people on both sides have been painted into polarised caricatures in each others’ minds by social media, I wholeheartedly agree.
The concept of enlightened centrism is nothing but a tool to drive people into extremism. How can you not see that?
Ah yes, the right wings reasonable arguments. Things such as “kids don’t deserve food” “Trans people shouldn’t exist” “LGBT doesn’t deserve the same things” “Slavery was good for the slaves”
If only we had the balls to really discuss this stuff instead of just calling it evil.
Your user note is now ‘right wing shit head’
Except …. None of those things are true
But thanks for proving my point. This is why I (and no one else) should even bother with online public discussions
So when Michael Knowles said “Transgenderism must be eradicated” That was not “Trans people shouldn’t exist”? Or when Italy decided to remove lesbian mothers from birth certificates, that is in fact not “LGBT people don’t deserve the same things”?
All of those things happened quite recently, you should keep up with the news if you’re gonna comment about this stuff
It’s just very hard to find a compromise or “agree to disagree” when the topic of debate is something like should LGBT people be allowed to exist. The days are long past where the right/left divide was all about economic policy – the divide lies along basic human values at this point. You’re going to be hard pressed to find people who can engage with you calmly when you’re defending a party whose primary concerns right now are stripping away civil rights from their least favorite human beings before all else.
This is something people on the right just find absolutely ridiculous. No one. NO ONE, think LGBT people shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
This is a big part of the problem, another response to my comment said people who think like I do support genocide.
Like this just sounds so hyperbolic and absolutely laughably ridiculous that no one has the patience to put up with it. It’s not a discussion.
You think I want an entire group of people to not exist. You have been taught this from somewhere and it’s not true. But you’ll never realize that.
So what’s the point?
No one. NO ONE, think LGBT people shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
What I’ve heard IRL and what I’ve read online in less moderated spaces speaks to the contrary.
Then explain to the class what you do believe in. Give us 3 bullet points you’d want a candidate to also support.
I’ll start as an example:
- I believe in complete and unequivocal abortion rights for women
- High speed rail should get more funding in the US, and car based transport (where rail could be a realistic replacement) should not be a cheap as it is
- Gerrymandering should be ended, and federal level elections should be taken over by a nonpartisan 50-50 committee to create new maps when local governments continue to submit unacceptable voting maps to intentionally stall so they can keep using the old gerrymandered map for the next elections
Would you care to explain the policy changes right wing politicians are making then?
But there are people recently that have said they should get stuck into asylums.
Does existing not include participating in society?
for saying something reasonable
“Something reasonable” tends to be sexist, racist, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic, etc. in my observation.
Tbf, they’re a self-acclaimed smart person who doesn’t want to get banned. At least they haven’t gotten themselves banned yet, so can’t find fault with that statement yet.
Honestly, I have started to block political keywords on Mastodon (can’t do this on Lemmy unfortunately), because I am tired of the lack of nuance in online discussions and I am really not that interested in reading the same things over and over again.
People just group each other into two drawers marked “left-wing” and “right-wing” and that’s it. Some go even further and block instances with people they don’t completely agree with. In my opinion this stigmatisation just further and further divides people and will eventually result in less and less respect for each other (or should I say “hate towards each other”). If people would discuss more (without instantly putting words into the other side’s mouth), they might see that they share common ground on some topics, even though they disagree on others.
I am pretty confident that the political believes of most of the general public can’t be categorised into just two drawers. Most people probably have political views that are a mixture of different ideologies and they might not even know if those views are considered “left-wing” or “right-wing”.
Exactly, this is what all of my conservative friends think too.
They are just tired of it all.
I have some left wing view points on things, I voted for Trudeau the first time he ran (I consider this a mistake now), I also have right wing view points on some things.
I’m not at all an activist, but it feels like online everyone is expected to be.
I use common sense, that’s all. I don’t see any of these kind of conversations happening out in the real world, we don’t sit around and argue about this stuff face to face. It only really exists online.
Sorry, but I agree with Chapelle “Twitter is not a real place”
Given rw bots are given free-reign over many political topics on mainstream sites, seems like there no issue with having conversations as long as the conversation is pro-corporate talking points on topics like climate change and the bots are overwhelmingly on the rw side of the issue.
The only area where people are likely to get banned is things like being overtly pro-genocide against groups other than all humans.
For all we know the people that are on the right have gone to other platforms. That doesnt stop you jerks from saying im on the right even though im not. For some reason both sides have adopted a “with us or against us” mentality and everyone is a nazi.
I like seeing things forbwhat they really are, so I consider myself a centrist. Both sides hate me they are so brainwashed.
Neither side has all the answers. Both sides have valid points, but these fools choosing a side stop using their brains to think for themselves, and just puppet whatever the rest of their cult is parroting.
Well you just got it all figured out!
I’m waiting for your centrist answers for everything! Please do tell.
Centrism is just being able to acknowledge that both parties have flaws. If you can’t find any issues with the party you support, that means that you got your political views from someone else instead of developing them yourself.
People on a left-leaning site don’t wanna hear it, but US Democrats aren’t perfect. Their policy on immigration is not sustainable. A de facto open border policy for refugees and people who cross illegally while people with college degrees can’t even get a work visa is absurd. As a nation we are not obligated to help others when many of our own citizens are struggling. Biden’s student debt relief plan would have caused tuition prices to increase at an even faster rate than before and guaranteed further debt relief executive orders would be required in the future. Plus it set an insane precedent that the president could authorize billions in spending without any congressional oversight. Democrats were frightengly authoritarian during COVID with stuff like vaccine mandates and online censorship. Things were labelled as “misinformation” and later accepted to be the truth… repeatedly, and people simply didn’t care. One day you could get banned from every social media site for saying COVID may have come from a lab, and the next day it was perfectly plausible. That stuff would have been unthinkable prior to 2020 and it’s just apparently normal today.
And then there is the stuff where they’re just hypocritical or simply providing lip service. Biden could remove marijuana’s schedule 1 classification today with an executive order, but he won’t. Instead his administion argued in court that marijuana users cannot be trusted owning firearms and the ATF is right to prohibit them from buying guns. Speaking of guns, Biden also signed an executive order declaring pistol braces to be stocks after years of the ATF saying they weren’t stocks, making millions of gun owners into felons, many who didn’t even know about the reclassification. A piece of plastic that was legal one day is now 10 years in federal prison. Democrats are guilty of putting corporate interests before individual interests, much like republicans. Democrats love to talk about how much they care about the environment and climate change, but would sooner pass a law saying people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees than dare invest money into nuclear power or stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
You don’t have to agree with everything I said here. But if you can’t find anything to criticize about your preferred party, or at least acknowledge that these are valid criticisms even if you disagree with them, you are part of the problem.
“Centrists” gets tons of hate online that’s unwarranted IMO. “Centrism” is just a label people like to put on independent voters because mocking them by acting like their political position can be summed up as “Democrats have some good points, but the Nazis do too” is an easy way to dismiss them, when the reality is that most centrists are voters who get no representation since we have a broken-ass two-party system. Admitting that the two-party system is bad doesn’t benefit you if you support one of those two parties. So here we are.
Centrist doesnt always mean fence sitter… could just mean you agree with different points opposite of the eisle. Its almost like this whole political system wasnt intended to have a 2 party system or something…
It’s hard because everyone 100% has a different definition for every political party/leaning. I’m proud of you for sticking to being open to consider all points if view.
I’m a leftist, but I love having my views pushed against, and I am open to having my views changed on what I believe and think if I find the argument persuasive enough. It really is a sort of cancer that both sides tend to refuse to even consider they might be wrong on anything.
Keep on doing you, the downvotes don’t mean your outlook politically is wrong or bad.
For some reason both sides have adopted a “with us or against us”
I hate this. I hate that if you are not 100% aligned to a certain groups policies, you’re pretty much the devil in disguise. A leftist Democrat that supports the 2A? You’re a “hard core racist bigot conservative that needs to home someone you love die in a shooting to see how you like it!”. Those people are insane. It’s not how the majority thinks, but those that do are very outspoken and loud so they have way more visibility.
There are a lot of people (on both sides) that can see how extreme parts of their “side” are and are very self aware of those things. They’ll call out their own side for going too far, being too weird, and saying unfactual things. Those are the people that you can have real conversations with. You won’t agree, you won’t change opinions, but the conversation is generally very informative and you’re not getting pissed off at each other (or you do, but you still show each other a mutual respect).
I cannot stand those with the “with us or against us” mentality. They really need to GTFO. And they absolutely cannot say they are patriots and support America first and everything that goes along with that. Because our country was founded on different principals, people with different viewpoints, and we created ways to allow those various viewpoints to exist together. We WANT to have different viewpoints instead of just allowing one to flourish and grow to an extreme and heavy handed policy. If you support the “Us” part of that, we are ALL with us, even if our views are opposing and we refuse to even meet in the middle.
I cannot stand those with the “with us or against us” mentality. They really need to GTFO.
In other words, if they aren’t with you they are against you?
Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”
Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.
Exactly. Blame/credit (blame in this case) doesn’t travel that way.
Take the following example: Alice and Bob both support view X. Bob also supports view Y. Y is evil. Then, Bob can be deemed responsible for supporting view Y. But X does not become evil because Bob is. And so Alice is completely fine.
The right has moved onto other platforms.
A lot of people on the right who would post online have been banned from most of the left leaning platforms and have found their own places to talk.
And the end result is that every site is an echo chamber.
The state of the internet in 2023 is more or less, “Do you want the left-wing circlejerk or the right-wing circlejerk?” And if you want a place where people are allowed to express their views even if it disagrees with the majority opinion of the site, that no longer exists.
I’m sure it must be great if you identify as left or right, but it sure as hell sucks shit if you don’t align completely with either side.
The end result is that some sites have a lot of white nationalists and some sites have very little white nationalists.
Conservatives have nothing humane to bring to the table at this point, even if not proudly saddled with your average ethonostate enjoyers, the platform is nothing but a fight against progress during a time where crisis requires it.
I agree so much.
I love discussing things with people who think differently than I do, that’s how we learn. We should be able to disagree in a civil way and exchange ideas and understand each other and eventually agree to disagree.
But we can’t.
Online it’s either one extreme or the other.
When is someone going to have the balls to create a place where people can argue and talk shit out? Or is that just too mature for the kids online these days who cannot handle a disagreement?
Maybe there should be online discussions that are age restricted. No teenagers, 30+ adults only. I wonder if that would be better or worse
People throw around the word too much, there are actual Nazis around and we need to reserve the term just for their special brand of evil. Otherwise the phrase gets so watered down as to essentially become meaningless.
Otherwise they are just rightwing dipshits.
Watering down language is part of the right wing platform. I think they actually want to be seen as nazis so the term is less powerful. On the other side, they are calling everyone groomers to water down that language as well.
There is also the fact that this isn’t a platform as much as it’s a framework that uses and open protocol. Right leaning people can setup Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, and so forth as easily as left wingers.
The biggest problem in general has been people treating Fediverse setups like traditional ones. Facebook, Twitter, Discord are all run by central companies.
Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, have the benifit of being usable as bases for people to setup individual communities for themselves and still have some networking.
That’s reaching a quite a bit. Reddit itself is very left leaning. Pair that with the fact that the (probably few) ring wing people leaving Twitter recently might not be interested in a forum style platform such as Lemmy.
My guess is that the number of right leaning people joined Lemmy in this last wave of new accounts was small in comparison to the left leaning ones.
Reddit used to be very left-leaning, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. Even if you look at a community with a conventionally “leftist” moderation like /r/europe you will see a huge amount of authoritarian and outright fascist comments.
The definition of right wing politics is being pro-hierarchy. Or believing hierarchy and inequality to be normal. This fits well with authoritarianism.
The left, by definition, wants to end inequality, or make things as equatible as possible. This is the antithesis to authoritarianism.
So, no. I’m not aware of this and don’t believe it. If someone told me they’re both left and authoritarian I would tell them sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken.
/r/europe will ban you for insinuating that rich people are making the world worse for everyone because “it’s communism”
I mean, the political situation in Europe has changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Lot’s of those may be the same users/mods who’s opinions have shifted along with that.
I was going to say this, I’m glad you did instead.
People’s opinions have changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the late 90s we got to see the last gasps of the real power of the religious right, in the early 2000s we got to see the dominance of the neoconservative right, in the late 2000s we got to see a massive shift leftward as a backlash against the religious right and the neoconservative right, then from the more chill hippie left wing we got to see the rise of the authoritarian woke left, and right now we’re starting to see a backlash against that. It isn’t always from different people, it’s often from the same people changing their minds.
For quite some time I’ve thought of it like steering a car. If you steer hard to the left you’re going to hit the ditch, if you steer hard to the right you’re going to hit the ditch. Really what you need is to course correct at times just stay on the road. Sometimes you need to turn the wheel pretty hard in one direction or the other, other times you want to just nudge the wheel, and get other times you don’t really want to move it at all.
Some regions voted hard for Clinton, then voted for bush, then voted for obama, then voted for trump, then voted for Biden. Such a thing might look completely inconsistent, but politics is a dynamic system where circumstances change, certain movements win and then we get to see the consequences of those movements, new movements form, and maybe old movements collapse.
This isn’t a new idea. Hegelian dielectic proposes that in politics, a dominant idea (thesis) eventually leads to its opposite or challenge (antithesis), resulting in a resolution or synthesis of the conflicting ideas. Such an idea predates Marx, so it’s been around for quite some time.
There are quite a number of examples historically of people completely changing their mind on a topic. The father of Canadian universal healthcare, Tommy Douglas, was a powerful advocate of eugenics when he was younger, and as he got older he realized that he made a terrible mistake and changed his mind. Solzhenitsyn apparently early on in his life believed in the Soviet project but once he learned of the gulags had his views fundamentally change. A lot of people like to pretend that national socialism died with Adolf Hitler in that bunker, but a lot of people believed in and supported national socialism in Germany, and those people continue to exist after world war 2, but I think it’s safe to say that for the most part they learned the error of their ways. I’m sure there are lots of people who supported Putin internationally in the 90s who wish they could go back and change that decision now.
To me it’s one of the deepest dangers of the purity spiraling we are seeing from the left right now. The fact of the matter is, as you kick more people out of the left, it becomes a less and less viable movement. As the left acts as if people become irredeemable the moment that their opinions are wrong, it becomes something that will inevitably fail.
I feel like the modern left would take a look at post war germany, and post to japan, and would just immediately start implementing genocide. “Nope, they were Nazis they are irredeemable they need to be pushed into the sea”. The most amazing thing about the end of world war II is the incredible wisdom with which the world powers helped to rehabilitate Germany and Japan into some of the most powerful nations in the world today, but for the most part lacking in the qualities that set them off to war and atrocity way back when.
I come here to not read about politics, left or right
Lemmy is left-leaning because the vast majority of its users are Reddit refugees, and Reddit is left-leaning. There is no other reason.
As someone around before the Reddit diaspora, I disagree. It was very left leaning before with a significant population of communists and socialists. The Fediverse dovetails perfectly with the communist dream: not doing things for profit, but instead for the common good.
Since the Reddit influx, I’d say it’s actually less left leaning. Questions to the effect of “why so many goddamn commies” were not common.
Do note that I said “vast majority.” Would anyone argue that most of Lemmy’s user base doesn’t consist of ex-Redditors? Weren’t there about 1200 people on Lemmy as recently as a few months ago? Lemmy is basically now an open-source subreddit for memes and anti-Reddit brigading, with occasional tech news links from Beehaw. It probably wasn’t that before, but that was before.
As for the roots of the platform being communists and socialists, who are more to the left than ex-Redditors, I can’t argue that. Reddit is mostly young American liberal democrats, and that’s not communism. So I’ll take it back.
Really though, I’m unsure why I’m even posting. Maybe it’s because the OP’s premise seems so ridiculous and reminds me of the kinds of posts I see on Reddit? With posts like this, generally from the young and uninformed, I sometimes get triggered into commenting.
I’m a reddit refugee, but the increase in the ‘why so many goddamn commies’ has been noticeable in my short tenure here. Also the astonishment that standard neolib ideological utterances are met with considerable pushback is a feature.
