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Ah yes, the "You must always stand 100% behind ALL the political positions and decisions of my party, even the most extreme ones, or you are just the same as the worst examples of the other party." argument.
Even if one party is clearly worse than the other overall, it's still a messed up way to think. No one is above criticism.
This is completrly dishonest.
No political parties were mentioned whatsoever, and I'm curious which party you think reresents the "left", because no Western country has a legitimate left wing party present in their effective two-party systems.
No mention of loyalty either, to any people or groups of people, and certainly not blind loyalty. No mention of supporting positions at all.
What do you hope to gain from such a blatantly disingenuous comment? I'm honestly baffled.
Using the word "political party" might have been a misnomer of my part. By "political party" I meant the positions generally associated with the left and the right. And the whole point I'm trying to make is that the idea portrayed in the comic makes a case for blind loyalty to the ideologies of the political "side" that you identify with. This is the kind of attitude I am firmly against. This forces people into boxes that very few people truly fit in.
No, this does not make a case for any blind loyalty to "political sides". And this talk of "boxes" shows a rather naive view of the actual political landscape. There are fundamental beliefs about the world that underlie right wing political positions that are, by their very nature, absolutely in opposition to the fundamental beliefs underlying left wing political positions.
People for sure aren't monolithic, and there are variations, that's true, but you won't catch a left wing person beliving anything remotely right wing. They're incompatible. They might disagree about violent revolution, or they might lean towards or against the role of the state, but one thing you won't find is someone arguing for capitalism. And on the other "side", you might find arguments for or against regulation, arguments for or against certain taxes, you'll find conservatives and you'll find liberals, but you certainly won't find anyone advocating for socialism. Antithetical.
And do you know where this "centrism" actually lies? Between the liberals and conservatives.
People can have political opinions that are considered left wing on some subjects, and opinions that are typically right wing on other subjects. They can even have political opinions that tries get the best of both sides, where it can apply.
You can support gay rights while supporting private gun ownership. You can support a capitalist system while demanding for it to be better regulated to prevent abuse and compensate for its shortcomings with social programs. You can promote immigration while still maintaining rules and regulations on the immigration process.
For crying out loud just read the wiki on the Left-right political spectrum where they explain perfectly well what centrism is and how it takes place between the left and right. Maybe your interpretation of what centrism is doesn't agree with that. But that's just your opinion.
People can have political opinions that are considered left wing on some subjects, and opinions that are typically right wing on other subjects. They can even have political opinions that tries get the best of both sides, where it can apply.
Did you even read what I wrote? No. This isn't even remotely possible. It's like trying to be anti-gun and pro-gun at the same time. Stop trying to twist your incorrect view into being correct.
You can support gay rights while supporting private gun ownership. You can support a capitalist system while demanding for it to be better regulated to prevent abuse and compensate for its shortcomings with social programs. You can promote immigration while still maintaining rules and regulations on the immigration process.
None of these pairs are a mix of left and right wing views. Lefties generally are for gun ownership, for instance, because you need to be armed if you're gonna have a revolution.
For crying out loud just read the wiki on the Left-right political spectrum where they explain perfectly well what centrism is and how it takes place between the left and right.
Why don't you do that? Because it doesn't.
Maybe your interpretation of what centrism is doesn't agree with that. But that's just your opinion.
This is not "just my opinion" any more than the law of gravitation is "just Newton's opinion." These are pretty set in stone facts. You just don't like being wrong.
The left is against hierarchy in general. The right supports hierarchy in general.
All left wing positions come from a desire to break hierarchies. Every single one.
All right wing positions come from wanting to preserve hierarchy. Every single one.
You can't support the right to private property while also wanting to abolish it! It can't be done! You can't go left and right at the same time!
I will not continue a discussion on a concept with someone who uses his own definition of the concept and cheery picks the arguments he wants to respond to to make it sound valid and the attempts gaslighting like you did. All this after ironically accusing me of being dishonest. Good day sir.
This is not "my definition". You just never bothered to learn the definition. I also did not "cherry pick" - i responded to every point you made.
You're missing their point.
Wanting regulations on Capitalism is still a right-wing ideology. Capitalism itself is right-wing.
Secondly, the left and right are not a bunch of random incoherent thoughts aligned for no reason that people can freely pick from, but a set of underlying values and conclusions that support each other. Gun ownership is not a left/right concept, as it doesn't concern the Means of Production and who owns them in any way.
Centrism expresses itself in developed, Capitalist countries as liberals who are in between fascists and Social Democrats, not between the left and the right.
Bang on, my friend.
You can't just say that the "left and right are a bunch of random incoherent thoughts aligned for no reason..." right after affirming that Capitalism is a right-wing ideology without directly contradicting yourself. And furthermore that point, you omitted the other half of my argument that one can support capitalism AND support social policies at the same time, which are contradictory in basic ideology, but can still be used together.
You're right, I can't say that, because I didn't. I said the opposite.
Social policies are not leftist. You can have right wing social policies. Left vs right is Socialism vs Capitalism.
I'm more than willing to talk more, but you'll have to actually read my comments first.
I missed the "not" at the beginning, that's what I get trying to argue on the internet on my phone in the morning before being late to work. So apologies for that one.
That being said, I get the point you're trying to make. I don't agree with it, but I have also come to realize that this has become one of those internet arguments that won't do anything but ruin people's day. So I'm pulling the plug on that. Have a good day.
Now you're showing either extreme dishonesty or an inability to read. They didn't say the left and right are random incoherent thoughts. They implied that's your position, which it seems to be, and said this isn't the case.
Supporting capitalism while supporting social policies is not a contradiction. That's the basic platform of new liberalism, and is an example of the capitalist order asserting its primacy. As the other guy said - adding regulations to capitalism means preserving capitalism. Adding social safety nets to capitalism is shielding capitalism from criticism.
The mere presence of Capitalism does not itself define the left/right spectrum. How capitalism interacts with the spectrum is actually pretty nuanced. The actual solid foundations of what defines left versus right is whether the system should preserve old institutions of heirachy. Originally they were monarchists but facing that they became simply the gentry and then the investor class. The core conceit of the whole thing that is public facing is that some people earn power and power should only be weilded by those who earn it (As far as actual meritocracy goes it's something of a grift. What counts as "earned" counts as the amalgamation of what your predecessors owned and hoarded and passed down). What it generally means is upholding a sort of empire building conqueror mentality where past gains can be seen as nothing but legitimate - it presupposes there is a correct and incorrect weilder of power. The rich deserve their influence and the poor should suffer. Anything that "artificially" attempts to correct this curve is not just unnatural but going to stir up some sort of rot that will cause social weakness. "Conservatives" are generally conserving this aristocrat structure. Every generation basically changes their presentation to seem more appealing to the masses but that's it's underlying structure.
Leftist structures tend to look at the dissolution of those structures. It asks to create something like a universal humane. It presupposes that we try and upset and disolve the mindset that any one person deserves either incredible misery or perfect comfort backed by power. It looks at lateral ways of looking at things like wealth and minority inequalities as being to the injury of a true meritocracy. Existing inequalities are flaws in need of correction or at least some form of gentle leveling off to allow equal participation in society where those of merit can actually succeed. It concerns itself with the idea of "public goods" and tends to be pro-democratic but it isn't always. The meditations on things like money and capitalism run a gamut between communist ideas of manual state manipulation of assets with very little independently held property existing at all, to socialist worker lead co-op structures where businesses are democratically steered and profits divided amongst the producers... To just a highly regulated version of capitalism where capstones create enough incentive to motivate but not to snowball. Wealth is redistributed via programs or things like a universal income to alleviate issues poverty holds for society. It's actually called Market Socialism and technically speaking it is on the leftist spectrum.
What ties each era's incarnation of the left/right spectrum into a continuity is the relationship of heirachy to social structures. Basic rule, if it attempts to scatter existing power it's left if it tries to consolidate existing power it's right. If a regulation stops food producers from being able to put sawdust and alum in food for instance that is removing a choice from someone to allow a consolidation of money at the expense of the health and wellbeing of others. It stems from a leftist notion that there exists a baseline public responsibility that outweighs a personal right to exert your position's advantages against that good. It is working in inside a capitalist structure but it's still left.
That's more of a philosophical, vibes-based approach than a practical, structural, economic outlook, and since it must be applied to each case individually within the context that it was applied, it ceases to be a universal measure.
The commonly accepted Socialism/Capitalism divide, ie anti-hierarchy/pro-hierarchy, is more practical for day to day analysis.
Practical perhaps for a taxonomy... But politics are philosophy really. The history shifts. John Locke's conception of liberalism is both foundational to the law of the land which is both oppressive but also a radical dissolution of the powers of monarchy... And also created from observations of things that already existed. Our concepts of right and left flow from a history where those where once very physical positions in relationship to powerful people and what individual philosophies of political structure were at play change in their relationship to those points. Libralism was once left when in opposition to monarchism or autocracy...now it is right as the shift of power makes those old power structures obsolete.
The common day to day analysis that places these things in strict opposition to each other is perhaps helpful shorthand for navigation of the very basics... Or a sort of surface level conversion. But every short hand is always somehow wrong because realities hold too much nuance to be really useful. Every topic or study has it's point where you have to discard that riddled with contradictions but easily accessable shorthand given to the beginner because at some point it simply stops being useful. The "commonly accepted" tends to just lend itself to arguments of divisions and sharp delineations where really spectrums exist. Why would one need a universal measure? That lends itself more to tribalism. Economic theory and history has a plethora of words describing many different individual forms societies use to divy up resources. Is the Haudenosaunee confederation's idea of land and favor trading culture Socialism? Or is that simply applying a framework made from a retrospective where a Eurocentric idea of property ownership muddies the waters and crunches everything down into a palatable shorthand we made up to something that it really has no business being applied?
The political spectrum is philosophy but it is also history. Focusing the lens onto the most popular take in the present does a disservice to the idea of a fixed point to really navigate.
You are the sucker
What sucker? There's a sucker? Wrong thread, maybe. We're not discussing gullibility.