Anon searches for normal politics

Debian. It should run debian. We should genocide arch users.

every time i see an argument about what distro to use i'm like "why the hell would anyone run something other than mint unless they're in the fbi most wanted or they hate free time"

War is over. It's Gentoo.

Most united the Linux movement has been.

All of those have all the mentioned, they're purposefully exaggerated stereotypes

The internet and its devastation upon the human race.

Lmao this is just as ridiculous as them saying Reddit is communist. Massive exaggeration in both cases

Can agree. On Lemmy now and I can feel the ghost of Marx over my shoulder whispering about the proletariat.

Nah liberals make up the majority of Reddit, the rightoids are just more active politically.

That was the goal at least.

Lemmy is full of anti-drone bigots too

Jesus wants us to make America white again

I love this. It's so dumb in so many different ways, but I can easily see people unironically saying it.

Right? More like Faux news.

Enlightened centrist moment

I remember when those crazy Democrats got a bunch of their voters to storm the Cap- oh wait…

...prosecuted for their crimes.

It'd be nice but unfortunately there's too many batshit republicans in office to pass any laws for that to happen.

THIS... Literally, god forbid we try to have reasonable debate and actually listen to the other side. All this "my way or the hogh-way" BS is fucking annoying...

I was raised in a particularly right wing environment, grew up with those values, and have shifted dramatically leftward in my adulthood, and I can say with absolute certainty that you're either lying or willfully ignorant. Are parts of the online left prone to litmus tests? Yes, but most often in the sense of "hey, I'd appreciate it if people who claim to be in my corner don't join hands and sing Kumbaya with people who want to eradicate my particular minority from the face of the Earth, please." They're a reaction to intolerant right wing fanaticism, rather than a statement of intolerance themselves. You have to go all the way around to the extreme fringe of tankies way out on the left arm of the political-alignment horseshoe to find a level of ideological fervor equivalent to what is now mainstream in right wing politics. The right pioneered single issue voters with the Moral Majority way back in the Eighties, and have led the charge on (sometimes literally) demonizing their opponents since the early days of talk radio. I know, because I was there.

If the modern left doesn't really want to try and find common ground with a right wing that views them as something between subhuman scum and actual literal hell spawn, I'd argue that's entirely the right wing's fault.

The reason people say that is because a lot of the time these centrist people just vote Republican every time. They're not really independent and as much as they say they don't fully agree with people like Trump they keep voting for him despite everything he's done.

Liar.

It was right wingers and centrists who allowed the holocaust to happen... source: rise and fall of the third reich

I like to break out this when people claim centrist/moderate is neutral. Nazi's: kill all Jews and Aryans. Non-Nazi's: don't kill Jews or non-Aryans. Moderates: let's compromise and just kill Jews instead guys.

If 9 people sit at a table with 1 nazi and none leave or make the nazi leave, you have 10 Nazi's sitting at a table.

If you try to compromise between two moral/legal viewpoints, you're still supporting the worst side

(assuming that would be even be possible)

Putin will not let Russians negotiate anything.

I'll go even a step further, there is usually a correct answer. Like, objectively provably correct answer.

I blame the American political system which seems purpose designed to be dysfunctional. Europe had perfectly normal political debating until about the mid 1980s, when people started to see American style politics on the news and that gave them the idea that they could act like that when they became politicians. Then 2001 happened and suddenly they could do whatever they wanted if they just blamed it on terrorists.

And then of course Trump came along and taught them that you can straight up just lie about things.

I get what you're saying, but an "enlightened centrist" is someone that argues for compromise between a sane position and an insane or evil one -- their "middle ground" is still awful.

A "centrist" take between two relatively sane positions isn't enlightened centrism. "Moderate" used to be the word for that, but given how extreme the political discourse has become the meaning of that word is changing too. You're better off qualifying what positions you're moderate on and how, or people will make unkind assumptions.

Well, US is not a functioning Democracy, and centrism in US means "pretty right wing but pretends not to be".

You're missing the point of "enlightened centrism". The whole point is that it isn't actually attempting centrism, just a (almost exclusively) far right wing ideas with lipstick on.

Except when the political climate is between slightly center left and extreme far right "centrism" ends up being pretty far to the right instead of actually in the center.

Being center of left and right means being about where the Democractic Party in the US is. Anyone who considers themself a "centrist" between Democrats and Republicans is right-wing because the GOP is so far, far right and the Dems are so center-left.

DO NOT FUCK THE TOASTER

And most communist states have actually just been fascists. Like, the USSR and China didn't really have the people owning the means of production, or anything near equality, egalitarianism, or fair wealth distribution.

It doesn't make sense to call a semantic claim factual. I'm fine with trying to push a different definition for Communism, but by the common understanding of the word, the USSR, (past) China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., were or are all Communist states.

Not debating is mostly about what is beneficial for me. Interpret it as you will, I'm a happier person not trying to convince Internet strangers that they haven't theorically solved the puzzle of how to organize society.

This is the frustration I had with so many people back when the ACA was the issue of the day.

Like, sure, there are issues with the ACA, single payer, universal healthcare, etc. but at the same time, look at privatized healthcare, where the wealthy have no issues and get the best care and want to maintain the status quo, the middle class are forced into lower classes by medical expenses, lower classes are just sort of expected to quietly poor themselves to death, and the actual poor get underfunded state provided care...that the upper classes loudly complain about having to fund with "their" taxes. It's a system that's been corrupted into a socio-economic instrument of control by ownership classes to maintain their grip on both the money of the country and the lives and upward mobility of everyone beneath them.

But yeah let's not try anything different because your wait time for your sore throat might be a few extra minutes.

The criticism isn't really supposed to be about how nice or not nice you are anyway. The landlaird bad meme is just a good way to open people's eyes if need be and allow people to vent which they have the right to. The fundamental problem is with the ownership of an asset that is a necessity. And probably the fact that it even is so commodified.

it's easy to just clump everyone into a single category and then point at it and say 'that box bad'. it's also a mental shortcut our kind has taken throughout our history and, for better or worse, it has served us.

the alternative would be to actually take a step back and do some thinking instead of just agreeing with the hivemind. that takes effort, and it's significantly harder to find someone to agree with you on a fine-tuned idea. hence 'me smash landlord'. it also introduces the risk of becoming to trusting and getting burned by a bad landlord you would have judged as good. human adversity to risk plays a big part in favouring heuristics as well.

it's way easier to catalogue the kind of landlord you present here as a corner-case, no true scotsman, in order to prop up the general idea. for what it's worth, I don't think anybody is doing it out of any explicit form of malice.

No, not at all lmao

Or they say mainstream positions like "there are only two genders", "it's too late to stop climate change", "liberal capitalism is the best economic system", and "police are here to protect us"

Not necessarily, being around people who are obsessed with politics is a good way to put you off politics.

Being on Lemmy is bad enough sometimes.

Depends on the person and how well they are aware. Ive had discussions with people who were all over the place on the political spectrum. In the end with some i had a calm talk and exchanged ideas, that have made me realise things that could lean both ways and in others i left angry, but not changed because i was aware what was happening with me, emotionally, because of the discussion.

It isnt for everyone, ill grant you that, but self knowledge and being open to new ideas is key when talking about mundane politics ( and not extreme topics )

That's not a fiscal policy. A country or block of countries can be right about 1 thing and wrong about others.

If there's one thing the right are good at it's indoctrination. They co-opt spaces and then use them to infect people with their mindset.

And damn is it ever effective. Someone close to me is normally a leftist – she proudly supports her union (and unions in general), is strongly in favor of LGBT+ rights and environmental protection, mistrusts most political parties as they're too much in bed with big business etc.

However, she also hangs out on 9GAG, which apparently has been pretty much taken over by the right. This has greatly affected her views on immigrants since she's exposed to unchallenged right-wing drivel every day. It was "fun" when she told me how refugee facilities are hotbeds of violent crime and then it turned out that the unspecified statistics she was basing this on were mostly about violence against refugees.

(Not that those camps perfectly safe by themselves but not in the way right wingers make it sound like refugees and immigrants (who are conflated) are all violent anarchists who are above the law.)

Recently she just had to share this "joke" with me. The whole thing consisted of two police officers with Turkish names finding a generic German name exotic. That was it; I couldn't find any punchline in there, just a "the immigrants are replacing us" message. I'm just writing for the day when I hear the word "Überfremdung" ("overforeigning", a standard term of the far right) out of her mouth.

It goes on like that. Politically she's convinced that the Greens are completely unviable as a party and the worst part of the current government – the FDP (our liberal party for rich people) gets no mention despite being diametrically opposed to most of her core views. Ricarda Lang (a Green politician) being fat is much more important and will never get old.

I have no idea how to counter this but I'm afraid that she'll drift off into the hard right with time. She seems unwilling to accept that her main source of funnies is also chock full of right wing propaganda.

Yeah this seems to be the case all over.

It feels like the internet paints Scandinavian countries as a social paradise when in reality they have extreme problems with racism & require you to conform to the norm to a high degree, have a massive issue with wealth inequality & corporatism (although unlike the US you're not completely ruined if you're poor), and a lot of other things people complain about when referring to America (but obviously they don't come even close to being as ass backwards as the US in most regards).

Seriously, Sweden has the 12th highest wealth inequality of any country in the world, it ranks worse than Russia, the US, India, etc. Denmark and Norway fare far better in this regard, but they're still the highest in Europe along with Germany and the Netherlands (excluding Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey, which are completely fucked in their own right).

If you want country that actually comes close to meeting "social" criteria, go to an eastern European country like Poland or Czechia or Slovakia or Albania. Now, you'll get shanked if you appear even slightly gay, but otherwise it's pretty great; people don't steal (theft/robbery rates are EXTREMELY low, the lowest in the world probably), sexual crimes are low, there's not a culture of fearing for your safety constantly like in other places (you can walk alone at night in Albania!), eastern European countries are often ranked as some of the safest in Europe (shocker) and people in those countries generally feel safer, it's a lot more equal due to all that communism and stuff that happened, everything is inexpensive (although your income will be a lot lower too), it's very easy to find employment if you're skilled due to shortages. Poland has especially been growing economically and now getting better politically. Plus, Albania only has the third highest rate of cocaine use (behind the US and England/Wales, of course)!

But generally internet people don't even consider eastern Europe as a viable option to move to because it's too poor and nonwhite for them lol. Oh and I guess not being able to be gay in public is pretty bad.

I mean it's not like most people wanting to could move to the EU regardless, they'd be lucky to get in anywhere (yes, even Hungary). It's extremely hard to get in unless you're a highly skilled worker or you have a claim to citizenship/residence by descent from having e.g. Italian/Lithuanian/Hungarian ancestors or recent German/Slovak ancestors or the likes.

This is the talking point anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily true however. The underlying assumption is that you can't have Nordic-style socdem countries without the exploitation of other poorer countries, but I don't think this has been shown at all.

Socdem countries are great for the people living in them

That's sorta the whole job of a country afaik

True whiteness has never been implemented.

Yes

Listening to Privs explain why they plan to not vote this year, both.

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

Jewish kibbutz

There was also the hybrid communism system which was called a technit

Family or tribal unit is single agent

The term was specifically created to describe the status quo when Karl Marx was knocking about.

Ah. We need an anarchist state so we can give capitalism a proper go /s

I don't believe that, but it's certainly true that some people compare real world capitalism and hypothetical utopian communism, etc., which is obviously not a serious comparison.

What du yie mert? Theiere comletey forn.

Whoops. I really should have read that before posting. Thanks lmao. Yeah, just bad typing.