• Leftychat
    176 replies, posted
huh?
Marriage shouldn't be a government processes at all, cripples the middle class, shouldn't be a government process at all and we ideally want completely open borders, shouldn't be a government process at all, fuck the environment and also it shouldn't be a government process at all Are my libertarian views considered left wing enough?
I would prefer government to be out of marriage altogether. I find it offensive that I had to acquire a license to have the state allow me to get married. For a fee, at that.
what thef uck
Sure, but Conservatives aren't about getting the government out of marriage, they're about shutting down same sex marriage through the use of the government. My point wasn't about whether or not the government should have anything to do with marriage.
FOUND THE FASCIST 🤜
I feel as if "government involved in marriage" is the greater issue. Conservatives just haven't an issue with it because it fits their social agenda, but from an ideological point, I think same-sex marriage is only a part of a greater issue. Possibly a symptom of it, not the problem in of itself.
Traditional conservatives hate it because they're extremely pro-religion, and gays getting married and having a good time is an affront to god cuz you know, gays are icky. Again, shoulden't be a government process to begin with. That's the real issue.
I think it's worth experimenting with anyway.
This but, like, unironically. Conservative governments over here, despite being significantly less right leaning than US conservatism leans, have still managed to repeatedly fuck this country up. Ignoring the working class entirely to prop up their crony mates, gutting public services that were otherwise doing fine under the pretence of ruining said services so much that they can easily convince people they should become private (the NHS is the big one here), funding people and countries we would otherwise be considering enemies because arms deals are totally cool as long as we don't have to see the genocide that results from them. "But they lowered the deficit!!!", sure. By imposing austerity and gutting aforementioned services. Austerity doesn't work, it stagnates the economy something fierce as evidenced by our deficit crawling back towards zero. People don't have money to spend during austerity, money needs to keep moving around to encourage economic growth, cutting services and lowering interest rates sure as shit isn't helping that. Conservatives (particularly fiscal ones over here) are dumb-dumbs.
Honestly are there any conservative Youtubers that aren't terrible? The only one I can think of is PotHoler54 and he's a filthy green liberal by American standards.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/112373/93143224-6bb0-43f8-82cf-813365db88f6/libertarian_freedom.png I can't believe I forgot Barry.
So I identify, primarily, as a pragmatist. I support doing stuff that works, and not doing stuff that doesn't work. I don't subscribe to any ideology of "doing ____ is always the answer", whether ____ is socialism or capitalism or AI or jesus or whatever else your universal solution is. I find myself aligned with the left mostly because the American right is fucking insane, and seems to be actively trying to destroy the country. But I'm kind of curious how much I actually agree with leftist ideology, versus simply agreeing that the rightist alternative is bad and wrong. So how much of the following would actually be considered "okay" by modern leftist philosophy? A free market economy is the second-most-powerful optimization engine known to man, after evolution. When given an optimizable task, it generally finds a very good solution - eg. given the task "produce electrical components for as cheap as possible", it gets the price down to fractions of a penny. The hazards with a free market economy come from solutions outside the intended parameter space - eg. regulatory capture - which require a strong active process to constrain. This is a role of government - creating regulations that constrain the optimization engine's parameter space, and assign it a correct cost function. (I am, obviously, a fan of cap-and-trade or punitive-tax solutions, not so much hard limits, though they have their places) A free market economy is NOT a good way to make decisions about what tasks to try to solve - that is the role of a fair democratic government. A free-market economy trying to optimize a nation almost always optimizes for increasing the power of the wealthiest. A free-market economy trying to optimize distribution of wealth trends to maximum inequality. In a short, pithy metaphor, a free-market economy is the engine but a democratic government is the steering, throttle and brakes. A car with the throttle jammed open and nobody steering isn't going to go further than a well-driven car, even if the former has a hundred times the horsepower. As such, it is undesirable to completely abolish certain mechanisms necessary for a free market economy, most obviously currency and private property. A critical element of a free-market economy is that good businesses succeed and bad businesses fail. Thus, government intervention to prevent bad businesses from failing is wrong - if a company has become "too big to fail", it has almost by definition become simply "too big" and ought to be broken up or nationalized. I do not see class as something to be entirely eliminated - a difference between rich and poor is as necessary to drive an economy as a temperature difference is to drive a heat engine (both a too-low and a too-high Gini coefficient are problems). Rather, the goal should be to increase class mobility - make it easier for a successful person to rise in class, and equally important but often overlooked, make it easier for a failure of a person to fall in class. (By all rights, a wealthy businessman with four spectacular bankruptcies, numerous other failures, and no breakout successes ought to at least fall to middle class.) While the lower classes cannot be eliminated, they can at least be made better. A social safety net is entirely reasonable, and ought to cover essentially the bottom two layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - air, water, food, shelter, clothing, safety and health. The exact mechanisms to accomplish this are varied; I currently think a mixture of both specific handouts and basic income is most effective but I am not too attached to that belief; new evidence could change my mind quickly. We are not currently in a post-scarcity economy, and I do not think we will be capable of it in the foreseeable future. Theorizing about how to make it work is fine but trying to put it into practice at this time is foolish. (Note that "foreseeable future" is not necessarily longer than "my lifespan" - the future is likely to become unforeseeable much sooner than one might think.) Direct democracy has too many scaling problems to be suitable for a large nation (>1M people). Representative democracy seems to be the best we have currently, though I suspect a better system may exist because there are unresolved problems with almost every form of representative democracy.
Our conservative and center right parties aren't that much better. After concluding that it is alright to perform genital mutilation on children, they moved on to ban a piece of clothing, and are at the moment shoehorning a debate about weather or not you can be Danish if you don't want to shake hands. Spying on your citizens is alright as well, btw small state!
Notice how they are not reacting to increasing wage inequality and prices? Or how they are selling off important infrastructure to private companies whom they have ties with? They are completely fine with rich profiting from the hard labor of the working class while giving nothing back. If you want to look at a capitalist dystopia just see how US is doing right now. And for obvious reasons conservative and center right parties are looking US as prime example to become like. Here they are doing a fine job at that, dismantling everything that Finland used to be praised on.
It took conservatives nearly 40 years to fully dismantle the power of unions and working class as a united front. If other countries are beginning to work on it, chipping it away, you have time to stop it but still act quickly. Every chip that falls off labor's political power piles up after a while.
The social conservatives over here tend to not be super high profile thankfully. And the ones that are in power know that trying to walk back something like gay marriage is actual suicide as it has more than enough support country wide to work. But that hasn't stopped the reactionary cons from pushing the whole "fear the Other" stuff like yours are. Though thankfully we aren't at the point of outright banning clothing or trying to unperson people for not taking part in a social norm. Instead our guys are all about hyping up the potential for terror attacks, despite it being their very policies that are dividing the population enough to have started these more recent ones. Top tip guys; it's a lot harder to radicalise a ethnic or religeous minority if you aren't making the lives of anybody from outside the country, or who are just generally not white, harder! Shocker that but comfortable people don't tend to decide "y'know what sounds great! bomb vests and truck hire!"
I agree with some of the earlier posts about missing Youtubers but specifically Three Arrows. Shaun and hbomberguy are a bit more hit and miss but I haven't watched a Three Arrows video yet that wasn't impeccably presented and cited. It's something I've seen a lot. Steven Molyneux is the most easily accessible and illustrative example of someone who seemingly holds libertarian values when it comes to criticizing the left but on the other hand openly calls for and defends patently fascist actors, actions, and opinions. I think there is a genuine viewpoint that holds that Polidicks is mostly about posting and discussing news. It's a split from Sensationalist Headlines which never had chat threads on it's own. Personally i like the idea and as I said earlier, while I wouldn't have framed it as a "xyz politics thread" its hard to argue with the effort put into the OP. Would really like to see even one of the people who agreed with the first post or disagreed with the second post actually explain why Contrapoints is "the Sargon of the left". I used to be a subscriber and daily watcher of Sargon before he went off the deep end and I don't feel like both of them are similar in any way other than they both talk about political/cultural stuff on Youtube. Would that we could all contribute to discussion on FP as you have. I agree with a lot of this post. I consider myself center-left but "pragmatic" is a good word for my philosphy. In reality I disagree with a lot of what the progressive and far left side of politics. I don't really know if I'm center-left so much as the right in America and other western liberal democracies have shifted the Overton window to the point where anyone reasonable would be seen as left of center.
what
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGl1CCprCeU this thread
god theres so many babbies in this thread Fp is basically a leftychat no need to echo chamber more than what it is This thread is doomed to shitposting
Hey everyone just got back from sleeping and moving furnitu- https://media1.giphy.com/media/13871fiv9kBfkQ/giphy.gif I'm glad to see that there's at least a bit of a start of a discussion going on and at the risk of distracting from that I'll take a bit and address some of what's been said so far. The OP somehow manages to be 100% effort and 100% cringe. I believe you when you say this because I'm weird and I got really into it. What you see is what the op looks like AFTER I edited a lot of it out lol. I want to change it but I need help with the direction. This thread is redundant / facepunch is already left. I should have seen this post coming and pre-answered it. There's a concept Noam Chomsky describes in Manufacturing Consent that I'll try to communicate: We have a conservative government and liberals who disagree with the policies. The Liberal media actually bounds the discussion and prevents people from imagining a more radical view because "we already have the leftmost viewpoint right here" and they get called radicals. There's a failure to go beyond the bounds of currently existing society in our collective imagination. Policies like free healthcare or more welfare like in Norway and Sweden are not necessarily "being a lefty". You kind of need to be able to imagine a radically different world. I don't consider most of FP as actually actually left. FP would dump on Obama a lot more and we'd see viewpoints like "Bernie Sanders is a moderate" daily if it was. This thread will be a safe place for radical views. Hopefully! The forum has an ideology of its own even if you don't realize it. That's something we might discuss and you may realize here. What's considered "normal" is not necessarily neutral or fair, it's just that some ideology has successfully hidden itself. We on this forum have a unique culture with its own values and preconceptions that makes it a battle just to talk from my perspective in other threads. Another way to put this answer is "the whole rest of the forum is a circlejerk why can't I have one in here". Also a good way to breed a viewpoint and also get it out there is to have people just do it and talk about it and just have it out in the open. I don't want to be the feminist guy in the picture: http://i.imgur.com/T8egYQl.jpg What if we just end up with one type of "correct" lefty? I don't think it'd be the best outcome and I will run into the woods never to return if it turns out we all become tankies. As for having a "right chat" I wish them luck and I hope they put in the effort to make it nice and I can sort of see some of the topics that they could cover like the end of the korea situation or they can avoid Trump altogether or something.
Was this post meant to be ironic? If that's how you feel, why not attempt to contribute to fixing it?
someone Kill this thread now before it ends up as ironic shitposting and then attracts unironic morons who think we're being serious and then hijack it and use it as a organization tool for rallies..
Lmao breeding radical viewpoints is a good thing? What a joke. It would be fine in a non echochamber where it would would be discussed in a bipartisan way.
So this is how Bernie still has a chance
Even as a left leaning person. I seriously don't get the point of this thread. Cause for one it encourages political discussion that's closed off. Creating a fortress of isolation that is sealed away from regular political discussion. Allowing anyone to fling whatever thoughts and/or opinions from its ramparts without fear of being challenged. And causing whoever to remain within its walls to become more paranoid of the ones who refuse to remain or attempt to challenge the ones who live within as not being "Left" enough. Radicalizing themselves and becoming more of a threat to the image of left leaning politics and acting as firewood for the Alt-right/Far-right to fuel their fearmongering narratives. Like if you really want to help out the left. Attempt political discussions everywhere, instead of one "Safe place". Cause if thats the case, then nothing is getting fucking done. Causing it to devolve into a thread of virtue signalling and constant circlejerking.
i think that "some more news" channel is really bad. talking entertainment value tho, not opinions, idk how good he is with those because frankly, it's just hard to watch. that stripped down, jon stewart/old colbert/john oliver format, it asks a lot of the presenter. he's not good at it also OP why didn't you make this "political chat"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QQvok0ywng
Your current viewpoint to me is kind of eclectic because at the same time you have competition for money and a state that decides where the market is going and a mechanism where the state picks up businesses for itself which seemingly results in a system where a businessman could be following an order from the state, become broke, and then tumble down the class ladder while his company is nationalized. (at least the way I'm reading it). It's like a sort of marxist-leninist-rothbardian state capitalism. You'd pick up a lot of farms and banks on the way since those are particularly fail-prone and need subsidies (so that people don't starve)
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