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.
“this isn’t right vs left, this is right vs left”
uh… okay?
Reads as: I hate it when people have more money than me
this is egg vs noegg
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.
ヤクルト
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.
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.
Don’t fight class war.
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.
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.
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.
lemmy has convinced me that neither conservatives nor communists know what a liberal is.
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.
I refuse to believe that Elon Musk is human
Incoherent take. The right is a tool the billionaires use to take shit away from the rest of us.
Left is a tool of billionaires
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’.
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But bringing people over from the right is important and attacking them is counterproductive.
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.
Well, when they stop attacking us for believing in human rights, maybe we can have a dialogue.
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 idiots.
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.
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
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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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?
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.
That is exactly why its Right vs Left
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luigi is the only solution
If they don’t respect our lifes, how can we respect theirs?
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.
Culture war manufactured, class war real.
Class reductionism is a reactionary and deeply flawed analysis. The abolition of the class system alone will not bring with it the abolition of all other injustices if if no attention is given to those.
This sort of post really brings out all the concavebrained centrists and red-brown alliance types who somehow think leftists and fascists aren’t axiomatically opposed to each other, as well as the whining brocialists who are happy to oppose the hierarchies that oppress them but will throw a shitfit if anybody points out any societal problems to which they could still be contributing.
ok so to sum it up, you’re saying that not only capitalists, but men in general are also evil.
well, i guess i disagree. you’re engaging in a pithole of fallacies there. consider:
class struggles lead to poverty, and poverty leads to angry people. the people lash out against one another, and that creates the social issues. fighting against capitalism means fighting against the problem’s root, not just its symptoms.
I’ll go easy on you here because your username implies English is not your primary language, but you should perhaps work on your reading comprehension.
Firstly:
I did not say that.
“An annoying subset of leftists has a tendency to dismiss the issues faced by workers who are not able-bodied cishet white men” ≠ “men in general are evil”
Secondly:
What fallacies? You didn’t point any out, you just made a weak counterpoint.
Thirdly:
fighting against capitalism means fighting against the problem’s root, not just its symptoms.
Like yeah, as a fact of how intersectionality works, capitalism does make other social injustices even worse, but racism and misogyny have existed since long before capitalism, and will not be fixed by any sort of anticapitalism that doesn’t specifically work to address them.
Yo man, please use terms that we can understand or explain your terms
Okay girliepop, here’s your glossary:
Class reductionism is when people act as though literally all of society’s problems could be boiled down to the class structure under capitalism. The class structure/class system is the relationship between the owning class (called capitalists) and the working class they exploit.
“Reactionary,” put very simply, is a word that describes beliefs or actions that react to efforts to improve society in an oppositional way.
“Concavebrained” is an adjective describing someone whose brain has a dented shape to it. It means stupid.
People or groups being axiomatically opposed means that they operate under values systems and thus motivations so different from each other that they cannot work towards common goals.
“Brocialist” is a colloquial term that describes a leftist who dismisses the struggles against certain social injustices, especially those of feminists. A brocialist is basically the sort of person you’d expect to engage in class reductionism.
Hierarchies are systems that place different amounts of value on different elements. In the context of a social structures, this means treating some people as more valuable than others.
A shitfit is when someone gets really mad.
the fucking left will never understand the need for fighting back in the class war. pointless to keep trying. they just don’t understand labor issues.
Eat the rich
tax the rich
3% of their net worth annually, give it all to the people. universal basic income.
No war but class war!
Class war is literally the least important war
You do not have any “left” to speak of. You only have fascists and neoliberals.
yeah, the left has been systematically eroded in america, and what’s typically considered “left” in america today, is actually center-right (i.e. capitalism with small social elements in it).
Hey, we got some soc dems. Like at least 3!
Do you see a path to move the US to the left that doesn’t involve first shifting the overton window leftwards through the democrats?
yes actually, by waiting 200 years until the republicans shoot themselves to mars, at which point presumably the not-so-far-right would stay behind and maybe form a new society.
but not in your lifetime, no.
You can’t abstract things to a simple continuum, centrist policies and centrist politicians are wildly unpopular with the US public (a.k.a. the DNC and most democrats) whereas someone like Bernie or AOC frequently gets disengaged or more centrist people to say “huh, well yeah actually they are right about that”.
If you look at the polling universal healthcare is very popular, leftist policies often have majority support in US when polled.
The catastrophic danger comes from thinking being more centrist is a winning strategy, the right abandoned that strategy years ago and they have been unstoppable since.
I am telling you, USians of all political stripes are mad and want to burn everything down, trying to reach people with centrism right now is batshit crazy. Reach people with honest, straightforward leftist talking points, emphasize that collective benefits and community focus, emphasize that leftists are actually serious about inclusion and equity unlike centrists.
Most importantly emphasize you are a leftist because if you try to reach someone as a centrist no matter what you say they aren’t going to trust you will fight to protect others when the time comes OR the values you claim to believe in, because I mean turn on the news, why would they believe you?
People want the status quo to be smashed, don’t sell your ideas as the status quo.
Yes, through labor struggle and organizing. I’m not convinced there are going to be elections for much longer, which means we need to organize outside of the ballot box.
I 100% disagree with that statement. I might be in a bubble, but I’m in a bubble of amazing, kind and helpful people who go out and help the homeless, volunteer, etc. Community is first.
Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free-market capitalism, minimal government intervention in the economy, and the belief that economic freedom leads to social progress. It advocates for policies like deregulation, privatization, and reduced government spending.
I was referring specifically to your two party system and the errant belief that one of them is somehow “left” when it is a group of turbo capitalist corpo swine lobbyists which are only the better choice because they are not straight up fascist kleptocrats.
