Just wanted to prove that political diversity ain’t dead. Remember, don’t downvote for disagreements.
That the dense city movement, of building up, instead of out, is ultimately ceding a huge proportion of our lives (our dwelling sizes and layouts, their materiality and designs, how the public space between them looks and feels, their maintenance and upkeep, etc. etc.) to soulless corporations trying to extract every dollar possible from us.
When we build out, people tend to have more say in the design and build of their own home, often being able to fully build it however they want because at a fundamental level a single person or couple can afford the materials it takes to build a home, and after it’s built they can afford to pay a local contractor who lives nearby to make modifications to it.
What they don’t have, is the up front resources to build a 20 story condo building. So instead they can buy a portion of a building that someone else has already built, which leaves them with no say in what is actually built in the first place. Ongoing possible changes and customizations are very limited by the constraints of the building itself, and the maintenance and repairs have to be farmed out to a nother corporation with the specialty knowledge and service staff to keep building systems running 24/7.
Yes, this is more efficient from an operating standpoint, but it’s also more brittle, with less personal ownership, less room for individuality and beautification, and more inherent dependence on larger organizing bodies which always end up being private companies (which usually means people are being exploited).
In addition, when you expand outwards, all the space between the homes is controlled by the municipalities and your elected government, and you end up with pleasant streets and sidewalks, but when you build up with condos, you just have the tiniest dingiest never ending hallways with no soul.
And condos are the instance where you actually at least kind of own your home. In the case of many cities that densify, you end up tearing down or converting relatively dense single family homes into multi apartment units where you again put a landlord in charge, sucking as many resources out of the residents as possible. In the case of larger apartment buildings, you’ve effectively fully ceded a huge portion of the ‘last mile’ of municipal responsibilities to private corporations.
Yes, I understand all the grander environmental reasons about why we should densify, and places like Habitat 67 prove that density does not inherently have to be miserable and soulless, however, the act of densifying without changing our home ownership and development systems to be coop or publicly owned, is a huge pressure increasing the corporatization of housing.
In general, I disagree with you. I think the two things you fixated on (souless architecture and rentals) are bad approaches to density, but you will notice that for the most part, this is the form of “density” that places who are notoriously bad at density do. Its what happens when we deliberately regulate ourselves into not allowing other options.
There is a pretty crazy amount of “density” in well bit, low rise structures - though actually I dont personally hate on towers as a concept.
Also, i would like to highlight that a very small portion of people are living in newly built homes, and only a small portion are really able to make meaningful design impact. Most just buy the builder-grade suburban model home. The idea that suburban single family homes are some design panacae is just wrong.
In general, I disagree with you. I think the two things you fixated on (souless architecture and rentals) are bad approaches to density, but you will notice that for the most part, this is the form of “density” that places who are notoriously bad at density do. Its what happens when we deliberately regulate ourselves into not allowing other options.
Soullessness and rent-seeking is what happens when housing is controlled by for-profit entities, and once you start building housing as system that is bigger, more expensive, or more complex, then one person / small family / support network can manage, then you inherently need to cede control and responsibility to a larger outside entity, which ends up being a corporation.
Even cities like Boston that have a relatively large amount of mid rise housing still have massive housing costs that suck residents dry because it all ends up being landlord controlled.
Also, i would like to highlight that a very small portion of people are living in newly built homes, and only a small portion are really able to make meaningful design impact. Most just buy the builder-grade suburban model home. The idea that suburban single family homes are some design panacae is just wrong.
I’m no fan of suburbs, but at an inherent level (assuming no crazy HOA), you have far more control of any house that you own over any space in a building that you do. Your average 100 year old suburban home will have far more charm and look far more unique than your average 100 year old apartment unit or condo.
To your last point, I don’t value the external appearance of my home at all. I see the outside when I’m exiting and entering. I see the inside for all the time I spent at home. So being able to change the internal appearance is far more important, and condos, as long as you don’t compromise the other units, generally give the freedom to do what you want. We need more affordable condos. Renting is still a useful housing supply, but the condo market needs to be absolutely flooded.
But property is for some reason considered a retirement plan so causing a housing crash would be political suicide.
Condos and townhouses also spawned HOAs which are yet another layer of an even pettier form of nosey neighbor government you get to live under.
Get a home outside city limits if you can, then it’s just county, state, and federal… Though depending on the city, municipal government isn’t as bad as HOA typically.
grander environmental reasons
No. Humans are not separate from “nature”.
Know the terrible intentions of “environmentalists” who would put you in battery cages.
The animals we create are morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children. Leftists practice tolerance but they’re not really willing to go as far as actual compassion, empathy, and mercy. A lot of the things they tolerate, they should not.
You haven’t met my parents.
Can you elaborate a bit more? I don’t seem to understand what you mean.
I agree, animal rights are important. I am not sure that animals are worth as much as humans morally, but even so, the argument for shrimp welfare is extremely moving. Well worth reading. It’s easy to imagine shrimp are undeserving of compassion because they are small, have tiny brains, and have a silly name.
I took a look at your link. I find it reprehensible, and exactly what I mean when I say the left is incapable of having compassion and mercy. This charity is exactly the sort of thing people use to psychologically enable themselves to continue torturing animals rather than changing their behaviour.
It seems pretty mind bending to morally rank organisms. By what metric do you estimate humans are more valuable than a random animal?
Well, I didn’t say all animals, I said the ones we create. When you create an individual, the act places you in that individuals debt. You don’t own them, you owe them. We have a duty not to harm all individuals on Earth so far as we can help it, but we have far greater responsibilities to those individuals that we bring into existence. There is no difference, morally, between forcing a child and forcing an animal to exist.
I don’t really know what constitutes a “political creed,” really, so I don’t know how to answer.
This question is difficult to correctly answer, as anyone can define their own political boundaries. They can be wrong about those boundaries and they can define many different ones that are all valid. Is my “political creed” to be a communist? Which subset might that mean? Am I friendly with certain subsets despite disagreeing with them (yes) and if so would they potentially count as the majority? Am I a (de)famed Western leftist or part of a worldwide effort in terms of having a less popular view of a subject?
I would say that among the people with whom I have the most general agreement, my least popular opinion is the potential for imperial core workers to become radicalized and organized for the left. A very large amount of organized resources is constantly poured into efforts to prevent this from happening, including those that reinforce settler, white supremacist, and chauvinist attitudes that permeate our cultures. That means that our struggle is very challenging right now but also means that if those flows are ever cut off or undermined, there will be immense opportunity and we have to be ready to channel the inevitable accompaniment to the conditions (austerity) that got us to that place away from neoliberal fascistic movements.
Basically, there is a common pathway in understanding that goes from hope for revolution from within the imperial core (no successful precedents) to attempts to understand this and explain why it’s least likely to happen there. This can lead to a self-defeating cynicism towards all imperial core organizing or to curb vision. But I think it is our duty to continually reformulate as needed to discovery organizable enclaves, to grow with current and upcoming conditions. We owe that to each other.
I think I agree with your unpopular opinion. It might be an unpopular opinion because it’s conditionally-expressed, and conditionals are hard to reason about (“I think if X happens then Y would be a good idea” really sounds a lot like “I think Y is a good idea.”)
Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.
The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.
The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of “settling” it for the imported culture’s definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a “family farm for 7 generations”. Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class’ demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie’s harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. “Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!”, they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.
It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations’ simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.
So I basically agree with you, semantically, about the problem that needs to be solved. I just think it’s not a good idea to call non-indigenous people “settlers” in general. For one thing, it doesn’t fit the literal meaning of the word settler (somebody who comes from away to settle down), since most so-called settlers have never moved to a different country in their whole lives. For two, it causes a knee-jerk reaction to those who are called settlers, which is not conducive to converting centrists to leftists. It’s just not productive to call people settlers in most cases. I don’t mean to say settler-colonialism isn’t a useful concept or doesn’t exist – I just mean specifically that the word “settler” applied to individuals is a bad idea in most cases.
The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.
You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and “Israelis”. They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or “bringing up the past”, they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the “settlement” is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily “feel bad”, but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn’t warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.
I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.
These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).
Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don’t know how to deal with it because they don’t understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn’t the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A “centrist” sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that’s rarely the place a person can improve from.
The overwhelming majority of leftists I know used to be centrists at some point in their lives. Also, I’m really astonished that you openly admit that you use the word “settler” specifically to be antagonizing. I kind of thought that was the bailey, not the motte.
Strong advocate for people under 25 and over 75 not having the vote.
Why?
The first ones haven’t developed their brain fully yet, and the second group shouldn’t get to decide the future for the rest since they have so little of it left 😄 I’m also a staunch believer in youth parties forming politics and main parties implementing it
People should be free to vote outside the two party system secure in the knowledge that their vote will still be counted if their preference didn’t win.
Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
I’m really appreciating how much restraint y’all guys are showing with the downvotes. Thanks everyone.
I’m a pro-downvote extremist and you’ve just made an enemy for life
Donald Trump isn’t stupid.
Yeah I’m starting to agree. At the very least, the aggregate of “Trump + his advisors” functions intelligently, which is what matters, and that’s scary.
Intelligence and stupidity have nothing to do with each other. He can do stupid things out of pride, narcissism, etc., and still be an otherwise intelligent person.
He is far from the first flim-flam snake oil man making it big and performing atrocities in America. You could even look at the founding of the country as a sort of real estate scam gone darkly awry.
There’s plenty of evidence that he actually is very stupid, and that he may even have a learning disability. To be honest, once you accept the thought that he may be mildly retarded, you can’t unsee it. For example in the recent talk about rare earth minerals, it seems to me that Trump thinks rare earth is actually soil in the way he talks about it and it drives me nuts that the media doesn’t point this out:
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things…They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it."
But he makes up for it politically with great skill in appealing to people’s base emotions.
I think of him as astoundingly stupid. But he ain’t dumb.
While I have progressive ideas and believe the Republicans rule with malace, I also strongly believe the democrats rule with incompetence.
I would love to run for president on the party of burn down the two party system and restart from there. Make politics boring again and not some partisan winner take all spectacle. We keep pushing to out ‘wing’ the ‘wing’ and it is driving us to some bad extremes.
So yes, I will vote straight ticket Democrat for 99% of the time, but I am also disgusted by the fact anyone is even allowed to do that and people have little party letters by their name. If you didn’t research your candidate to at least know their name, then you shouldn’t be voting for them.
It is mind-blowing to me that some things are not seen as human rights and are instead seen as political posturing. In Texas we had barbed wire intentionally strung up in the Rio Grande river with the intention to drownd people and it took multiple rounds of court cases to make them take it out. Somehow killing people is acceptable rather than booking, ticketing, and sending back. Politics have now taken a place above literal lives. At the same time, when I express this I have democrats immediately agreeing and adding “just let them in!” Or “just let them stay and we will figure it out” and that is where I stop them and ask, is that what I said? No. Simply that human life is worth more than politics. Again, stringing up barbed wire in a river to intentionally drown people it true malice. But saying let them all in and figure it out later is naive at best, and incompetence at its worst.
Democratic politicians tend to be cynical more than ignorant, friend. They feign incompetence because taking actions is against their larger strategy of holding to whatever the current status quo is or whatever pleases donors (these are usually the same).
We’re talking about a group that acts like it can’t deliver on basic platform promises because of a parliamentarian they can just fire and replace like the GOP has done reoeatedly and then turns around and breaks plenty of its own rules when a SocDem grandpa (Bernie) gives people some hope for positive change.
The party relishes in scapegoats for inaction because they do not, in actuality, oppose the status quo nor even most of the changes made by e.g. Trump. Their opposition is performative, it is meant to get someone to do that 99% voting for them thing and then call it a day politically. Their main agenda is to say there is no acceptable alternative beyond their controlled neoliberal duopoly.
“Make politics boring again” simply means you have no connection to the immense violences carried out by that status quo, or do not recognize them as such. Tell me, for which period of time was US politics boring? During slavery? Settler colonial genocide of the people who lived here? Jim Crow? Labor fights? Imperial conquests throughout the Americas, Hawaii, The Philippines? Both World Wars? The Great Depression? The Cold War and its many sponsored coups and genocides? The forced unequal exchange for the countries it dominates? The frequent hot wars it begets around the world?
Christianity should be criminalized.
Only Christianity, or all Abrahamic religions, or all spirituality?
Can i still like Jesus? Can i still study Christ as a historical figure?
What about ancient religious art? Destroy it?
What’s the punishment if i get caught thinking about The Lord, or God forbid, praying!?
Just for context i am not religious or spiritual, but it seems like a thought crime.
Other Abrahamic religions play around with a lot of the same themes of excusing and encouraging ethnic cleansing and other classic biblical virtues-against-humanity such as massacring all living things in an entire city, but their stake in the present distribution of global power is much smaller, and they consequently represent a smaller threat to human life. I am not opposed to subsequent criminalization of Islam, as it is no better, but in the name of curbing the racist element which is highly likely to result from such policy, and also mindfully of the difficulty of phasing out Islam, I do not believe that it is productive to put it together on the chopping block with Christianity in the world we live in now. Judaism isn’t so much of a problem due to its more widely practiced interpretative principle and due to its weaker practical hierarchy compared to Christianity.
Can i still like Jesus? Can i still study Christ as a historical figure?
I view following biblical orders as the defining characteristic of a Christian person. (This view is generally uncontroversial among Christians, who generally do not take seriously those who claim to be Christian without having faith in the Bible’s inerrancy.)
There is a set of terrorist beliefs prescribed by the Bible that the average person who simply likes Jesus Christ as a literary figure probably doesn’t hold. Those people tend to have different socialization and visible attitudes compared to Christians of the definitively violent variety, and aren’t difficult to tell apart. I certainly do not believe those people should be gone after.
What about ancient religious art? Destroy it?
We must preserve the historical account of Christianity being the leading force of anti-intellectualism and collective narcissism of Christian nations, in addition to being an indispensable tool of fascism around the world and a significant contributor to solidification of Nazi rule in its time. Destroying the artistic record of history would not accomplish anything useful, much like how removing swastikas from museums of World War 2 wouldn’t help with doing away with neo-Nazism.
What’s the punishment if i get caught thinking about The Lord, or God forbid, praying!?
Refer to the legislation prohibiting display of Nazi symbols as implemented by many European countries. Countries like Germany have had a rough history with the way they implemented such legislation, with false-positive rulings and enforcement that were at odds with preservation of history and antifascist self-expression, but modern legislation against rehabilitation of Nazism is much better than that, and offers some valuable experience on how to tackle this inherently difficult problem.
The fact that you have to ask means you’d judge people on skin color. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh because if the answer is yes, they’re white, you’d attribute it to that but not bother looking any further. They are mostly white, but my friends wife isn’t. I know my fair share of people who have had extremely bad interactions, too, and they are white. My brother was pulled out of his car at gun point for making an illegal turn. Do dwb happen sadly, yes, but those are not as frequent as you’d like to believe.
have to ask what?
I believe in the possibility of bigfoot being real.
Seeing as people have pushed out to every tiny corner of the country if it exists they would’ve found physical remains by now.
My only issue with that is taking from regular people to fund it. Tax solely corporations, many of them view increased profits at any cost as the only objective, which means they have more to spare. If you take it from the people who take all the risk by investing their own money, I don’t see that as fair. If I work hard to make a living, invest what I can to improve my life and future that shouldn’t be touched by any tax. Where I’m from, we have capital gains tax of something assured, like 55%+. I don’t see how that is fair. If I go bust, I don’t get a hand out or do over, but if I succeed, I have to fork over more than half…
I think we need to figure out how to make leftism more appealing to centrists, and particularly to the cis/straight/white/male demographic.
Leftism is unpopular by definition, especially to the privileged classes. Leftism seeks to upend the status quo, and loss aversion is a problem.
Not that efforts can’t be made.
Where in the definition of leftism is it said that leftism is unpopular?
it’s manifested in our reality; only the liberal branch of leftism is permitted (particularly in the united states) while the other branches are openly denigrated by moderates and rightists alike and persecuted by our governments and militias.
Are you active in any socialist parties?
I would like to be, but I just can’t figure out how to get involved in my area.
I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I’ll just be normal, ha.
It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn’t happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.
The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others’ experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism’s worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.
Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It’s a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can’t really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, “sometimes votes”.
So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.
The white nationalist movement preys on alienated young white men (more than other groups). Creating avenues for including these people in our movement means less people we have to fight.
I’m not saying everyone is able to fit into our movement, or they may require so much education that we just don’t have the resources to depropagandize them, but as a mass movement, more is generally better.
100% agree. I honestly think that in ~2015, the left’s failure to appeal to young white men caused them to turn to the alt right. I think we scared them off with things like “check your privilege” etc., and should have focused more on getting them amped about class warfare.
As a person in that demographic it’s wild to me that leftism isn’t appealing… we’re supposed to just blame everything on everyone but ourselves I suppose?
The person on my left whispers about equality, and the benefits of social safety nets. The person on my right yells lies that equality means I have to give up things, and that social safety nets will be abused by people who want to steal the fruits of my labor. The person behind me (financially) says nothing, they’re too busy just trying to live. The person ahead of me points to the person behind getting food stamps and screams “how dare they take your taxes” while they quietly steal the actual fruit of my labor.
Any time leftism gets loud enough to get enough attention to appeal to anyone, rightism is already loudly complaining about the noise. If one doesn’t think about it too much, all they’ve heard is negativity about the left and positivity about the right. Call it brainwashing, gaslighting, or indoctrination, but rarely do the facts of both sides come to play. You have to work to find the truth of leftism while also working to ignore the bullshit being screamed from the right.
That is a controversial opinion here.
(And I agree with it. I don’t know what the way is, but I hope it can be found)
I think the first thing to do is to shift sentiment toward solving the problem of how to make things appealing to centrists and the apolitical. Let’s get “I agree – but that has bad optics so let’s focus on something else first” into our lexicon. Once the left is able to be more strategic about this, then I think we’ll gain a lot more strides. I have some thoughts about what that might look like, but it’s outside the scope of this post.
When you’re coming from a position of extreme privilege and you’re either a bit stupid or lack empathy or general social awareness being treated equally with “lesser people” (like women, brown people or people from particular religious backgrounds) can seem an awful lot like you’re being discriminated against.
I think you’re missing the point a bit. Liberal/centrist values are already to treat everyone equally, but not equitably. So when leftism comes in with suggestions for change, it looks to centrists like inequality. If you listen to centrists objections to leftism, this is what they say repeatedly, so I’m inclined to believe that is how they legitimately feel. This is why I think we need slightly different messaging/branding/whatever, or to talk about these issues in a different way, so that centrists actually understand what we’re getting at. It’s also not hard to find instances of leftists who, when angry, lash out at the majority – which while relatable to me, doesn’t help make leftism look appealing.
(By “majority” I mean the average joe, not billionaires.)
Fundamentally, what Centrists want is stability, for people to get along, to find solutions that the majority on both sides would agree with. For the status-quoish state of stability.
A Centrist would be a Liberal (as its defined today, and not how it was defined in the 70’s/80’s) before they would be a Leftist. They perceive Capitalism as a stable foundation of the society.
To get a Centrist to believe in Leftist ideals you’d have to try and show that Leftism is also stable, AND describe how the transition/change to Leftism on its own would not be an unstabilizing thing. And also how Capitalism is a dead-end alley for the species ultimately, and how its ultimately hurtful to a society by encouraging fighting and competition between its members.
You’d also have to show Centrists that Rightists would understand that Leftism works. Centrists want both Leftists and Rightists to be ‘happy’ (loaded word I know, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to opine on).
No idea how to do all that, but IMO that’s what would need to be done. You’d have to get the Right on board with Leftism, and you’d have to show Centrists that moving to Leftism won’t be destabilizing to their current way of existing.
Best guess would be to appeal to common belief systems (safety, fairness, freedoms, respect) that all three pillars would have in common.
An overall generic example would be to prove to a Rightist that a hand-out to someone is not being unfair, but its just helping someone out until they get on their feet, and can’t be exploited, to try and “raise all boats” in society. And you’d have to tell some Leftists to stop trying to exploit the system, that they’re now back on their feet, and that they need to put in as much effort as everybody else does.
For Leftists/Rightists stop yelling across the divide at each other, and start talking to each other, trying to understand what is important to them, and see if both sides can meet in the middle on those things that are important to both. Centrists will be happy that the fighting has stopped, and then you’d have to be extra careful not to destroy that non-fighting in trying to move the center to the left.
Oh, and do all of this while we have freedom of speech and people purposely trying to shape the narratives towards what they just want and to F with everybody else. A.k.a., “Free Will is a Pain in the Ass”.
Thank you for coming to my 🧸-Talk.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves. This is why fascism starts with minority groups. Centrists will accept fascists “coming for the” communists/trans/migrants/etc, since it mostly isn’t effecting their status quo.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves.
That’s not true at all. I know Centrists who care about everybody, and want everybody to be safe/happy/successful. They see it as a “floating tide raises all boats” kind of thing.
But only in a kind of theoretical sense. They think the status quo is best for everyone, but it’s really only best for them. What is a more centrist sentiment than “our system may not be perfect, but it’s the best there is”? See Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for an eloquent condemnation of “moderates”.
I think an awful lot of them actually have more leftish values, but they are convinced (and there is a huge self reinforcing bubble of that mentality, between media, politicians, and voters) that only the weakest, most watered down version of that can possibly succeed, politically.
I think you should read J. Sakai’s Settlers. It explains this (in a US context) quite well and I think that it refutes the concept of just making leftism “more appealing” for people
I can read the book, but… I just don’t understand how leftism can be successful without followers.
That doesn’t make sense. You need to start with a correct historical and material analysis before you can approach anything else. Socialism is based on dialectical materialism, not gaining ‘followers’. Leftism is not a religion that aims to have many converts but rather should understand why neocolonialism and other such institutions would deincentivize white people from being leftists in the United States in the first place.
The acab movement has caused more harm than it has salved. Furthering the ideas that there are no good cops means that nobody good will become a cop in the future, furthering the issue
In capitalist states, the core mission of the police is to 1) protect the bourgeoisie’s private ownership of the means of production and to 2) discipline the proletariat, cracking heads if necessary. Historically in the US, they began as slave patrols, because slaves were private property, i.e., means of production.
Step 1: proving ACAB wrong
Law enforcement is one of the last careers that still offers a pension, has a union that fights for its members, and is a good source of income without going into massive college debt.
Seems like something the left would be in love with, but systemic issues have demonized the entire profession. I think an influx on left-leaning officers would be great, but like politics- people who would be good at the job stay away from it.
Teen Vogue (I know, right?): Police Unions: What to Know and Why They Don’t Belong in the Labor Movement
Police unions have always been outliers among organized labor, and there are many reasons why the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union has long refused to allow cops (and prison guards) into its organization. […] Actually, police unions themselves used to be illegal, because local governments worried about the consequences of allowing armed state agents to organize. And historically speaking, the police have been no friend to workers, whether officers were shooting at the families of coal miners during the Battle of Blair Mountain, crushing the ribs of immigrant garment workers during the Uprising of the 20,000, or teargassing working-class protesters in Minneapolis after police killed George Floyd.
The issue is structural, there are no “good cops” in the same way there are no “good pimps” or “good slave owners.”
There were some slave owners who were kind to their slaves, taught them to read, allowed them to have some free time and make a small amount of money.
That doesn’t mean that what they were doing was morally acceptable. They still were buying and selling human beings like property.
Policing, especially in the USA is rotten to the core. There are absolutely some cops who are kind people, who become police officers out of a naive belief that they can do good for society as a whole in that profession.
But those people don’t usually last long. They either leave after seeing the ugly underbelly, or they become corrupted by the system. The police will always act in the interest of the rich and powerful, or else they get fired. If they are told to break up a protests, they will always comply. If they are told to block a corporate skyscraper so that protesters cannot get into it to stage a sit-in, they will do it, even as ultra wealthy oligarchs stream safely past them to conduct horrifically corrupt dealings that hurt and kill millions of people across the world.
The cop’s job is also to go around trying to bust people for crimes. If a cop comes up to you out of the blue and starts up a conversation, 99% of the time they are fishing for information, trying to sus something out. They aren’t just trying to be friendly, they are doing their job. In the US at least, the cops are allowed to lie to you in an investigation in order to try to get you to admit guilt. They are allowed and trained to do it, to use all kinds of trickery to manipulate you into a confession, or to get Intel that helps them.
In addition, the examples people frequently cite as good things the cops do would be better done by non-cops. First aid? Suicide intervention? Disaster relief? Theft deterrence? Wellness checks? Those are all things that would be better done by non-cops if we funded and grew those kinds of organizations instead of further militarizing the police.
ACAB has never meant that all cops are evil people, it means that no matter how good of a person a cop is, they will always be empowering a corrupt and evil system.
Why don’t we see the same sentiment about paramedics, firefighters, and heck, even soldiers? Because the systems that those folks are a part of don’t have the same corrupting effect. Even soldiers are generally looked on much more favorably than cops, even though politically and socially, there is a large amount of overlap. Part of this is propaganda, but another factor is the standards soldiers are held to in the US. They are expected to carry themselves extremely well, and can be severely punished, even jailed for misconduct.
As a personal anecdote, I grew up in both worlds. My dad and several members of my family were both in the military and were cops. I was around both cultures a ton. I’ve had many bad encounters with police officers over the years, and that’s with me knowing all the classic, “always keep your hands visible and comply” stuff that my dad and his cop friends told me.
I’ve never had a single negative encounter with an on-duty soldier. They’ve always been extremely respectful and grounded. Like I said, just an anecdote, but interesting to think about. If cops could be fired or even jailed for relatively minor infractions, even have their lives destroyed like soldiers who are dishonorably discharged, ACAB would probably never have became a thing.
What an interesting take…I assume you will be down voted into oblivion, but it is thought provoking all the same. When I was younger I thought police helped people and I probably would have considered being a police officer. Now, I can’t imagine who would want to and I immediately question anyone who would. I have to imagine this is causing the people who truly want to help people to avoid the profession.
I know a few people who are police, one being a very close friend who is now retired from being a cop. Not a single one of them is a bad person or cop. The stories I hear from them make me wonder why they would do it, and the universal answer is usually to help people. The best part is that of the six or so people I know counting my friends, they are all quitting because people treat them so badly juat for doing thier job, and they will be replaced with cops who show no compassion. I myself have many stories of cops being understanding and caring and, in turn, being very lenient. When I talk to people with the acab mentality, the police never go easy. It’s odd how just treat people how you want to be treated works.
I’m asking this in good faith, but are you/your police friends white? Historically speaking, minorities have been profiled, been more likely to be arrested, and been subject to harsher sentences than white people have. This is no small part to the reason that the ACAB sentiment runs much deeper in minority populations. And I say this as a white man with a mother and brother that work for the police.
