I've noticed that lemmy as a whole is much more leftist than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
I can't really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by "both" sides of the spectrum. It's just something I find interesting.
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it's going to, but... Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It's a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others' needs.
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It's truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They're going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can't claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
What's a tankie? I keep seeing it.
I had to look it up too. Apparently it's an authoritarian leftist. Thinks state-socialism was a good thing. As while most leftists are more of the democratic, market, and anarchist varieties.
State socialism is a good thing, what tankies promote is something else, they're fascist that can't accept that fact because it would mean having something in common with the fascists in the USA, a country that they hate so much that they're ready to deny reality to have an anti USA opinion.
I'm confused, and you seem to be a lot more familiar with the term. I read the wiki link that explains tankies. I don't personally know any left leaning people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes. Maybe because of my America-centric viewpoint and where things are today, but typically people who are economically left are also socially and politically left (equal opportunity is more important than individual freedoms), which is very anti-fascist. I've heard people say how great a true communism could be if it were possible, but no one's ever made it past a dictatorship to get there.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right, and think someone has achieved a communist utopia without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
The problem is not state socialism, it's the authoritarian side of it. Tankies promote authoritarian views similar to fascists but with a different economics view (not even that different some times), hence they prefer the dictatorships like USSR (in these days even Putin, which is idiotic), North Korea, China; over what they perceive as imperialist, the USA (I agree on calling it imperialistic and disliking it, but not on considering it worse than dictatorships).
I'm a communist which likes state socialism, but what is and was present in those dictatorship (ignoring the authoritarian side which I despise) is state capitalism.
Thank you for taking the time to explain! I appreciate you!
Thanks for explaining for me, that's exactly what I meant, I just didn't have the time to reply!
The confusion comes from so much mass media that equates socialism with communism. They're orthogonal concepts! Saying socialism is the same as communism is like saying beer-making is exactly the same as cheese-making. Anyone who understands what beer and cheese are would be like, "I'm sorry, what‽"
The best way to think of socialism is that's it's a governance strategy that can be used wherever you want. Want everyone to pay taxes in order to fund and deliver government-run firefighting services? That's socialism. Want to do the same with the military? Socialism. Whenever the government is delivering some good or service by way of taxpayer dollars that's socialism.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems. You can have socialist government constructs under either capitalism or communism. It's just that communism doesn't really have the flexibility to provide goods or services in any other way than via the government.
Then there's countries like China that claim to be communist (and the Right loves to call them that) but really, they're more capitalist than communist. What they do have that most communists and fascist governments have is authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is what fascists and "tankies" have in common: Fascists support an authoritarian, pseudo-capitalist government while "tankies" support an authoritarian, pseudo-communist government.
They're authoritarian. Not fascist. There is a difference. Even if both groups are more dedicated to authoritarianism than anything else. I would not be caught dead voluntarily anywhere with a fascist. While I disagree heavily with ML communist I might associate with them a little bit. But just never give them power.
Thanks for not leaving out the anarchists
Thinks Stalin was cool and Lenin was correct to break the short lived democracy of the USSR. The rest is details.
Basically authoritarian leftists that are caricaturized as worshipping the Soviet Union
People who cheer when others point out flaws in USA but start screaming when flaws in Russia or China are pointed out.
The super rich are usually highly educated but they live in such a homogenous bubble that they’re opinions on the majority of society should be entirely discounted. They usually have a total lack of empathy for people and vote for politicians with the same attitude. I have met some super rich people who try very hard to go against the grain and not fall into that mindset, but something about the need for protecting your money and lifestyle usually promotes an untrustworthy and skeptical view of everyone in their lives including their own family.
Perfectly summed up.
Your username/instance combo is amazing. 10/10
That instance is epic lol .uk
lol, thanks
The political vibe on Lemmy isn't really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It's been part of the "golden age" of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
There's been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.
Lemmy was the first one that I'm aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.
They just have their own instance and are defederated by some but not all, which is the best solution as it means they stick to their part of the fediverse instead of hijacking subs that weren't right leaning in the first place.
Yeah, right-wingers flock to "safe-spaces" as much as the far-left does. Lemmy doesn't have the tools to make a single community isolated like they could on Reddit, so they have to go to their own instances and end up defederated.
The main differences between left-wing and right-wing communities is that the right-wing ones quickly deteriorate towards a lot of hate related things. This leads them to being isolated from the rest. The left wingers are mostly tolerable and are just over zealous in preaching things like forcing everyone to use pronouns, lmao.
And everybody wins!
Gotta act like we're in kindergarten for them 🤷
That's the important bit. The creators of Lemmy needed to be hard leftist to keep it from being taken over by right wingers before it could become popular. Now it's big enough that the community isn't as leftist as the creators, but will still reject turning into another voat.
Unfettered echo chamber of right wing ideals will always devolve into fascist authoritarian and nazism
Surprise surprise, echo chambers devolve into more extreme versions of the original views
That's literally just how echo works
progression tends not to be conservative
I'm afraid future will be conservative nevertheless due to the simple fact that they're the only ones making kids. I'm liberal myself but I don't have kids and will never have so my traits don't pass to the next generations. The conservative neighbours with 7 kids on the other hand..
Politics being genetic, of course.
What?
Politics aren't genetic.
But they ARE communal. Where you grow decides 90% of what you believe in.
It's actually why I disagree with the top comment chain that smarter means more left leaning. I think it's more that left leaning communities have better education standards and lead to smarter generations. Cause and effect reversed.
The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It's sort of the other side of the 'brain drain' principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they're probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.
Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they're inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.
A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there's simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.
In some ways yes but it can have the opposite effect too. I know lots of left leaning people who grew up in super religious/conservative families and hate everything about their beliefs.
politics aren’t genetic, but they are obviously still inheritable
I don't know. I think it depends more on where they grow up and who/what they're exposed to (in person and online). At the high school I work at, we have a bunch of lgbtq+ teens whose conservative parents have no idea they're queer or go by a different name. But I also don't live somewhere like Wyoming with a much higher conservative population. I live in a college town in a (barely) blue county surrounded by red counties in an ultimately very blue state.
I hope we find a way to kill the online radical right pipeline and continue to expose more teens to other ideas, other cultures, and other ways of life, and maybe it won't matter so much who their parents are.
Tell me you live in California without telling me you live in California
;)
But if that logic held wouldn't religion tend to increase instead of decrease?
The thing about that is, if they're ignorant, their kids will be ignorant too. And what that adds up to is just the same thing we've got: a large group of people who are subject to whatever momentary persuasion happens to reach them on any given day, and a political/ruling class that can work with that just fine, so they are taking steps to hamper education sufficiently that this can endure for an indeterminate amount of time before we all burn.
What those large populations do react to, is missing a meal or three. And so far, these aristocrats seem to understand that whatever else they try to pull, they must always service the fundamentals: bread and circuses.
See you at the coliseum.
Well by definition right?
Progressive outlook means your open to new ideas, exploring new territory, open to concept that challenge what you think and know, and gives you the ability to push boundaries, make new discoveries and try new things.
Conservative outlook on the other hand means you are content and safe with the familiar, doing things the way they have always been done because its tried and true, however this means if they feel unconfortable or threatened by ideas which are going to change the way the live and how things work which makes them dig their heels in and get defensive.
The progressive/conservative axis has nothing to do with the economical left/right, it was only forcefully merged in the USA because they have only two parties.
Lemmy is much less US-centric than Reddit.
I wonder if there are demographics by IP already? TBH most of the threads I've been in have felt very US Centric. I also came with the great reddit migration too though.
On my feed, at least, I have my frontpage set to whatever the kbin equivalent to "all" is. I see lots of other languages beyond English populating - particularly German. The Lemmy instance I chose when I initially made my way to the fediverse operates out of China. They're chill over there.
I dunno. I think if you're only finding people discussing the US here, then you've probably accidentally pigeonholed yourself based on your own interests. The fediverse is diverse.
Lemmy was initially created by communists.
It's still in the process of being created, and the communism is a bit less in your face now alongside there being other contributors to the code, but that's how it started.
Is it? Just look at the comments here - the thought is about political left and right and yet almost everybody is talking about conservatives, that's a sure sign of Americans.
Plus I bet a good portion of the extreme left here are Americans disillusioned with their government, swinging hard into the other extreme.
Thank fuck for that.
Reality has a well known left leaning bias.
Conservatives and their politics do not have equal status. In this climate, "both sides" is toxic and suggest each is equally supported and viable. They are not. The right is an incredibly hateful minority end should be treated as such.
This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they're opposed to Reddit's API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy's appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.
This is my thought as well. Lemmy isn't what everyone is looking for. It's a free open source software project for creating a decentralized federated network of content aggregators. For most people that sentence doesn't make any sense nor do they really care. They just want a site they can doom scroll for hours.
The people who choose to use Lemmy are people who care about open source projects, care about decentralization of online platforms, or both. These types of people by their very nature support groups of people coming together collectively to do something big.
A collection of people working together towards a common goal without a strict hierarchy. You could say these people are community focused. Maybe we could call that communityism or something. Where people make rules as a group, or a union you could say. So yeah, no idea where the left lean is coming from.
"communityism" was somewhat the goal of reddit by having subreddits but still site owners has all the control over you. Lemmy is a free software and many free software projects interact with the userbase with such a community. Before this reddit thing, Free software enthusiasts used lemmy. Same goes with mastodon users before twitter was bought by elon. Now i can see when whatsapp does something shit(maybe) and people porting over to federated and decentralised E2EE matrix for instant messaging.(or maybe they just switch to telegram)
Honestly I came here just a few days ago, right after Reddit admins removed that r/place guillotine. I wouldn't say that I am very far to the left, but I do enjoy living in something close to a social democracy. I wouldn't be happy in a place like the United States for example.
Maybe Lemmy was like this at the very start and is what helped Lemmy kick off, but I think a lot of people are looking for an alternative to Reddit. I think you're going to see a lot more people coming here for the content, not the politics of it all.
This has been my running theory as well. Wonderful to read all of the input on this thread.
I think you'll find a lot more leftists interested in platforms that are not powered solely by money and profit. Lemmy, much like Mastodon and other federated platforms, only need instances to run to be usable. It doesn't require millions of dollars to keep it afloat.
Generally speaking centrist and right wingers, especially in Western countries, tend to be very capitalist. They only understand the value in terms of money.
"I've noticed that lemmy as a whole has much more moral, empathetic individuals than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
21st century politics in a nutshell, lmao
Maybe because on reddit you have an absolute fuck ton of right wing propaganda bots.
Thankk you. The Overton window has been forcibly molded to what would've been the mid- Right when I was a kid growing up (90s-00s). This is because of Fox News. And then social media propagandists have tried ripping it to the extreme right, aka alt-right.
I imagine a lot of what younger people think of as left/liberal was very much a moderate view point just a generation ago.
So when you move to a new medium not propagandized yet (or at least a new venue like Lemmy) you might find that organic discourse is a lot more sane, tempered, and moderate.
Remember during COVID, some people thought washing your hands is being left.
Remember when people thought that a virus sweeping through the human race was politically affiliated?
A president fomented a rebellion in the capitol of the United States to hold power. In the current landscape that statement alone makes me a leftist.
The words them selves have been so changed and loaded that it's nearly impossible to even write a post about what I want to say. The political discourse around the 'right' has driven conservative politics right out of the conversation.
What passes for conservative politics is literally insane to me. There used to be some kind of agreement that there were problems and what the problems were. The main discourse was on how to solve the problems facing the America people.
The main effort of the 'conservative' discourse is no longer around solving shared issues. It seems to be centered around the idea of legislating 'solutions.' The idea seems to be to weaken all of the government checks and balances so that this can be achieved.
For an 'classic' conservative this is when I walk to keep checks , balances, voting rights, governmental oversight and freedom of religion. No conservative leaders are standing for this.
The voices in the Gop that had that kind of sanity focus have been sidelined and are all of the much older generations. That last semi-effective voice I heard from the right was Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking out against Trump,nazis and anti-antisemitism.
Don't tell me what to do.
This is the actual Republican platform. They don't care a whit about what we consider to be 'problems'. The only thing they think is problematic is that they might not have power, and that we might have power. In the pursuit of the 'right' people telling the 'wrong' people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the 'wrong' people from telling the 'right' people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder... anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
It seems as though the only "problem" that the modern American right are concerned about is how to ensure they have unquestioned power and authority and that noone ever oppose them.
That is quite true as well. Lemmy gets Russian shills on Ukraine coverage worse than Reddit though. I don't know if that would be tankies or Russian trolls.
I've noticed several pro-china shill accounts as well. Fortunately their attempts at astroturfing are made in China, very obvious and poorly done.
You have to appreciate their stupid confidence though. It's entertaining.
Anti-corporate platforms don't generally appeal to people that built and uphold the existing corporate status quo.
The first wave here were anticapitalists, anarchists or communists. The second wave are the most anti-corporate "liberals".
Probably because this migration may be related to the anti-corpo sentiment, which is more common in leftist circles
reddit had given into the "work the refs" strategy of the American right wing. That artificially elevated the voices of the right and suppressed the voices of the left. It's actually the case when you look at surveys and voting behaviors that right wing ideas are abysmally unpopular.
So when we're on an actually free platform that doesn't have an "engagement" based algorithm driving anger and division, with no one putting their thumb on the scale (or people who try getting defederated), "leftist" ideas come up.
The confusion reflected in the OP is the obvious outcome of the post Fairness Doctrine "both sides" media landscape. There really aren't as many right wing people as left wing. We are legion.
Reddit has banned most right wing subs and clearly has a pro left bias from the top. The userbase was more right wing before most right wing users were pushed off the platform.
They didn't exist before the 2016 election. They were mostly astroturf. The original Donald sub was entirely bashing him and intentionally killed off.
They very much existed and were active. The donald wasn't the first or the only one.
Cite your sources.
Left and right are two stupid categories built up by propaganda, get them out of your head and start to think on your own terms
The main thing I don't like about these categories is how they try to lump both moral and political issues into one group as either right or left. They're two different things. Societies do legislate morality, but as far as defining a person's overall views I think it's a poor metric. Personally I have some left views politically, but some right views morally.
I think it can be expected people participating in the Fediverse are somewhat anti-capitalist. We come here to get away from corporate driven media. That being the case I think it's not erroneous to say Lemmy is more left politically and I appreciate that. However that does not mean I agree with all left views. There are some moral issues I may not agree with, but I don't engage since I'm not interested in debating morality in these forums.
Finally words of wisdom. The rest of the comment section is a dumpster fire.
Amen. I wish more people would do this.
This. There an infinite number of ideologies that you could have, but our first past the post voting system (in the US) only allows for two candidates, so an infinite spectrum gets funneled into two camps.
Nah, it's a fairly good way to differentiate between collectivist and individualistic ideas.
Lemmy is exactly as left leaning as Reddit was before the wave of propaganda and bots emboldened the right wing crazies to think they were the majority or welcome. I remember the falsely inflated upvotes that made those morons think they were the "silent majority".
Federated sites overlap with leftist-adjacent interests. Software freedom, opposition to Facebook, weird illustrated porn, that sort of thing. Even if we're not leftists - we're the people who heard about Lemmy and went "oh, like Mastodon."
Many leftists were also familiar with Mastodon, because they saw Twitter as a harassment engine. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results. Even before Elmo took over, Twitter was a continuous source of misery by design, if not on purpose. Now it's definitely on purpose. And it's been tilted against leftists, specifically, for a long damn while.
Some people are here because the mainstream options were a threat to their physical safety.
Meanwhile, right-wing assholes aren't leaving Twitter until they run out of victims. They just want an outgroup to yell at. They don't even like alternatives made for them specifically, because they can't stand each other, either. When they get tired of suffering their own company they'll migrate over to Threads. And then endlessly whine that Threads is "bias" against them, no matter how blatantly Zuck ignores their abuse and silences their victims.
Reddit was in a damningly similar situation, long before Spez decided to burn down every scrap of trust and goodwill. Some of us have been waiting on a better alternative for ten fucking years. There wasn't one. There still isn't. The bastards in control just made reddit itself worse, in ways that make even passive use feel like a failure and a betrayal. Spez could personally hunt me down and kick me in the groin, and it wouldn't leave me any less likely to waltz back in with a smile on my face. Dumb bastard made insane demands, killed the best interfaces, told us stupid lies, threw away our money, declared protest powerless, and threatened the people who do all of the fucking work on his empty box of a website... then says 'they'll come crawling back.' Nooo shit the first people out were principled self-organizing curmudgeons.
That aside:
People here reasoning from what they pretend "conservative" must mean are actively doing harm. Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It's just a label. It's the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is "Well someone has to be the king." That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default. That's why dealing with it is such frustrating bullshit.
Fun fact: if you're raised in a chaotic environment of abuse, distrust, and neglect, you can go blissfully free of the need for leadership for the low, low price of CPTSD! I assume that this leaderless way of thinking can be imparted to children without truama, but I only know how I got there. For better or worse, I've never trusted or craved authority because my formative authorities were infinitely untrustworthy and unsafe.
I've never been more proud to be categorized!
I don't know if you strung that set of words together yourself or read it somewhere, but I had never quite heard it put that way before. Very succinct. Sorry, I'm very into language, sentences are like flowers to me and that's a particularly nice blossom.
Re "conservatives," it's an extremely frustrating word because of how it's been misused. I took Intro PoliSci once, my teacher was an open Marxist like me, and he taught us a non-loaded, non-controversial, non-toxic definition of political Conservatism - it was along the lines of, "Conservatives believe that societal change should be done slowly, with careful consideration, with as little disruption to the existing society as possible." - and in all honesty, I once knew a few people who fit that description pretty good. They are long dead now, and I considered them devils at the time we knew each other, but I wish they were around right now, because I know we would all pretty much agree about all this bullshit - we spent a lot of time debating in places like this, and we got into a lot of what ifs. I don't believe any of them would pinch their nose for the current leader of our (Canadian) Tories.
I'm not saying, if we were to apply your maxim about "observed results" to the matter, that that is what Conservatism is "perfectly designed" to do, but that's more or less what the word actually means, and what the traditional branding of Conservatism has been; neither a desire to anachronistically cosplay the worst parts of the past, nor a desire to pointlessly harm life (another word they have barbarized to the point of uselessness), is actually an ideological feature of the traditional Conservative political body. In the 1950s the SBC approved of abortion. Look it up if you don't believe me - there was once a time when they really did believe that life was precious. Jimmy Carter was one of em.
It's the most fundamental aspect of how the modern Right uses routine gaslighting to sell their baldfaced neo-aristrocrat sceheme, because whatever individual opinions modern Conservatism might share with the GOP Nixon admin that started the EPA - an institution with a foundational intent so thoroughly conservative that they should be running CPAC - they are the ones attempting to radically change society in as short a time as possible.
If we go back to my Marxist professor's definition, my Marxist ass is generally the most conservative one in most of the rooms I occupy.
I absolutely stole that from somewhere else. It had a similarly revelatory effect and has been wedged in my brain ever since. (Oh hey, I made a note of who to blame: r4b1d0tt3r, MD.)
Not to speak ill of the dead, but... there's every chance the reasonable bastards you knew would update their bullshit and be even worse. I think your professor did you a disservice in exactly the way I'm sore about. Fascists are conservative. Fascists are hyper-conservative. That never means they're extra-vigilant against change. They openly demand transformative destruction of existing society, so they can reinvent something that's always been around. If that sounds contradictory it's a side effect of how it's total fucking nonsense. They're just saying words. It's not a rational worldview. It's the innate tribalism of the human animal, cranked to eleven via modern rhetorical gimmicks.
"Branding" is the only place conservatism makes any goddamn sense, because it's a story they tell. They're lying. They're just saying words. When you were in college their reputation was bullshit they made up about times before you were born, and when you were born their reputation was bullshit they made up about when your parents were young. Right now they're surely selling bullshit about twenty-odd years ago. I'm sorry to say I haven't paid much attention on account of US politics being such a dumpster fire that your worst scandals seem quaintly desirable. We've got people wistfully apologizing for George W Bush's rainbow of doom and torture prisons, or the Gingrich-era witch hunts against against homosexuals and liberal activism, or the goddamn AIDS crisis under Reagan. Even here, you're hand-waving that absolute scumbag Richard Nixon did one good thing under intense duress because he expected it to flounder. This is a con job that has been pulled on you. And us. On the world, really, at scale and continuously, to this day.
The traditional branding of conservatism is "we did everything good, but now we're angry."
That myth of eternal innocence as justification for outright violence is the only consistent story of this tribalist mode. It is pure ingroup-versus-outgroup storytelling. Good things in the past? Us us us, fuck them. Bad things now? Well they must have stolen the good things from us. (Nevermind who was in charge!)
When you find yourself saying 'by this definition of conservative, leftists are conservatives,' that is a shit definition. My apologies to your professor.
I gleefully ride the wave of your disdain. At the same time, I do think that we need to provide a path for people to come back, even if only a very faint one. :>
It was because at the time of the exodus from Reddit somehow the conservatives (echoed on the sub by that name) felt that protests were ridiculous and they were on Reddit's side. So less likely to be jumping to an alternative.
Somehow the right has turned into not meeting any authoritarian boot they don't suddenly feel an urge to lick?
In their defense, they don't see the authoritarian boot and feel compelled to lick. They see how their hated enemy, normal people, get upset because of that authoritarian boot and in response lick the shit out of it so those normal people feel sad.
Which backfires because we typically don't feel sad and they look like idiots.
Left wingers: "The right is full of neo-fascists who want to exploit natural resources, subjugate minorities, project their own pedophilia habits onto us, roll back the clock on women's rights, and are willing to lie, cheat, beg, borrow, and steal to get it all done!"
Right wingers: "The left is ANNOYING!"
Isn't it obvious? Most of the recent wave of users to federated sites was caused by the enshittification, which means:
This is a problem caused by capitalism. Therefore many of us will be anti-capitalists. Many of us will value creating things that put people over profits.
When discussing the whole space of possible political views, there is no "both sides". There are seven zillion different axes on seven zillion different issues, some of them concrete ("should we forbid chemical companies from manufacturing neonicotinoid pesticides?") and some abstract ("what is the best relationship between individual creativity, the marketplace, and the state?").
"Both sides" (polarized duality) is partly an artifact of specific electoral systems. It can lead to people shooting at each other over tiny differences in doctrine — or, even more often, over which leader to follow this year.
Also: for example both US parties would be considered as a (far) right party here in Germany
Nah, one center-right (formerly centrist) and one far-right (formerly center-right). See discussion here and here.
In gist:
The Democrats have become the party of international free-trade capitalism with appropriate regulation, and with international policies that represent loyalty to the nation's traditional alliances.
The Republicans have become the local representative of the international far-right: the Putin-Trump-Erdogan-Orban-Netanyahu-etc. axis, focused on granting strongman leaders the ability to loot their states, purge opposition even among the elite (see DeSantis-Disney), betray the nation's traditional alliances (e.g. NATO) in favor of the far-right axis itself, and excite their "base" through hate & oppression of various minorities (e.g. immigrants, LGBTQ+).
The Democrats are the party of "keep the system working, but when you get a chance, try to make it work better for everyone."
The Republicans are the party of "tear the system down, and replace it with loyalty to our authority figures; keep the masses stupid and busy trampling on queers & foreigners."
Folks on the left may think that "the system" is shit, or that it can't be made to work better for everyone. But "keep the system running, it can be made okay" is pretty different from "tear the system down, all you need is loyalty to a strongman" which is what the far-right has to offer.
Hot take: you shouldn't subscribe to an ism.
You know what my political affiliation is? I'm an engineer. You want to solve a problem, you break it apart and fix the broken parts.
Abortion? Sure.
What's the problem? Women are pregnant and they don't wanna be.
Well how'd they get pregnant? They had unprotected sex, or they got raped(including all kinds here). Teach people how to use birth control and make it easy to get. Teach men about consent. Fund sex crime policing.
That takes care of the input side of the equation. What's next? Oh yeah, they don't wanna be pregnant. Why not? Because it could kill them, or wreck thier bodies. OK, well let's fund research and support for maternal mortality issues (including post-partum). If a pregnancy is likely to kill a woman (like double the normal mortality rate) she should be allowed to abort, even if she's not in immediate danger. You can't force somebody to risk their life.
Any other reasons? Because the fetus is severely deformed and will die in pain if allowed to make it to full term? Abortion, no question. Honestly any other position on this one is fucked up. I'm sure of very little when it comes to God, but I'm sure it doesn't want preventable suffering.
What else? Families can't afford a kid? Free high quality childcare for everyone. Free healthcare for kids and post-partum mothers (probably for everyone but that's a different topic).
What about adoption? Well, as they say, adoption is the answer to a different question. Just to cover all cases though, let's fund high-quality adoption services, including counseling for the birth mother for as long as she needs.
How do we pay for it all? Taxes. Taxes are good for society. Shut the fuck up and pony up your fair share. If you use our stuff, eat our food, drink our clean water, taxes are what you owe.
These are just off the top of my head. The real answers are probably way more complicated, but it's going to take work to figure it all out. This is how you fix a problem though. Lots of hard work to understand the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then you fix it all.
Does that make me a leftist?
You just described steps that would actually reduce abortion by quite a lot, without making it illegal at all. The sex ed and contraception stuff is basically exactly how it's done in other western countries that don't have nearly the issue with teen pregnancies we do. What you're proposing is practical and effective.
And in the eyes of the MAGA crowd, you're not just a leftist, you're a baby-murdering, Satan-worshipping communist America-hater.
You are detailing exactly what would reduce abortion. Republicans/conservatives would probably call you a socialist (while meaning it negatively) and say that you are encouraging teens to have sex by offering contraceptives and encouraging people to be lazy by offering free child care. These are the things that would really help. It feels to me like they don't care about actually helping, just punishing people and creating wedge issues.
There's nothing wrong with what you're saying on a vacuum. The problem is deciding what is actually a problem, and once it's been decided, which one solution out of many possible ones we're actually going to pick.
Is unequality a problem? If it is, up to which degree? Is it a problem that the richest person has four times as much wealth as the poorest person? Is it a problem that the richest person has x100000 times as much wealth as the poorest person? Are we going to solve that through redistribution? Through better public, accessible education? By empowering worker unions? By socializing the means of production in order to prevent capital accumulation?
Once you're perfectly aware of what values you're defending, you can find the most efficient way to let society advance forward according to them. But since not everyone shares the same values, even if everyone was perfectly rational and had access to all information, different people would still defend different solutions. Of course, people's values evolve all the time and everyone is irrational up to some degree, even if we put effort into perfecting our epistemology and use the scientific method to approach as many issues as possibles (which we should nonetheless do), so even that ideal state of things is very, very far away.
Apply the scientifc method. Look at places and times with wide economic disparity. Were/are those good stable places with happy healthy populations, or was it bad. If you decide it's a problem based on evidence, then look at solutions. If you don't have examples, try things out and record the data. What worked and what didn't. Don't let your values bias you. I think that welath inequality is a problem, but I'm willing to listen to thoroughly researched, peer reviewed, data backed conclusions.
Problem solving should be every politician's goal. The only difference is what "problems" they are trying to solve. That's what separates left and right, the problems. And frankly, they are radically different problems to the same situations.
Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.
Would you mind clarifying your standpoint on what should be done in case a woman is raped and becomes pregnant? You kind of glossed over that part of it. I understand that you want to prevent the number of pregnancies due to rape, but what exactly do you propose when that happens? Same for pregnancies due to incest.
It seems you already know most of what will actually help this issue, and it does include social programs. Does this make you a leftist? No, it makes you a realist. That is, unless you ask this question to most conservatives who will instantly label you as one. How dare you actually suggest something progressive!
Reality has a left-wing bias.
A person's body is their own. From the skin in, it's yours to do with as you please. You can't make somebody wreck their body or risk their lives to satisfy your morality. I'm willing to debate this issue with someone who has done everything I'm their power to mitigate the risk of unwanted pregnancy. If not, I assume they're just trying to control women's bodies in order to secure their place in heaven, because the rest of christianity is hard.
Lol you just glaringly leave off the option of having an abortion for a woman who just plain old doesn't want to have a kid. If she just doesn't want to have a kid (no medical issue going on for either the mother or fetus), and it's been say, 3 months since inception, can she have an abortion? You seem to really only be mentioning abortion when it comes to threatening the life of the mother or if the fetus is deformed. What about just a purely elective abortion, less than 12 weeks let's say? Would you want to see that illegal?
Edit: Nevermind, read your response below to a similar question.
What is your answer to a scenario in which a woman using birth control properly in a loving monogamous relationship becomes pregnant when neither party wants a child? The most common form of birth control (the pill), when taken properly only has a 97% effective rate. Pair that with a second form of birth control (i.e. the pullout method) and it will go up but it will never be 100% effective.
And she doesn't want to put the child up for adoption? That's valid. Pregnancy has long term negative health impacts. Morally, I'm not opposed to abortion. I know some people are. I feel like I'm unwilling to debate the morality while all the practical steps to mitigate the risk haven't been taken.
I would add, free, easily accessible sterilization should be the norm. I don't want more kids, so I got sterilized.
You missed one thing: Some women just want to abort regardless, and also have all through history, including prehistory. All those policies you listed there are in place in Germany as the constitutional court ruled that the state has a duty to protect life (also the unborn) and thus has to take steps to minimise the number of abortions, and social means are to be preferred over prison sentences because a) more effective and b) proportionality, but: You don't catch every case with those social means.
Now, if you penalise abortions that fall through those cracks you get backstreet abortions -- which you have no control over. You can't convince people at the last moment, you can't drown them in flyers explaining all the social services they're going to receive and smother them with support. That's why at-will abortion in Germany is decriminalised if you're willing to sit through what's called pregnancy conflict counselling, there's no notes taken or result given in those you get a piece of paper that says that you were there, then there's a three-day cooldown and you can bring the notice to a doctor who now can perform the abortion legally. If you're poor, the state is going to cover the costs (not your health insurance because pregnancy is not an illness).
In a nutshell: For the state to be maximally effective at minimising the number of abortions it has to tolerate abortions being carried out legally, and even pay for them to be performed.
And this, btw, to many an American's surprise, comes from a rather firm "human dignity starts with insemination, the right to live starts with nidation as that's when nature decides to bring a particular life to fruit" type of doctrine. (The human dignity stuff comes into play e.g. during preimplantation diagnostics: You can be tossed out of the pool for carrying a genetic disease, but not for your sex, hair colour, or whatnot).
We shall call in Huckleberryism. Subscribed!
Don't tell me what to do.
They don't care if you're a leftist or not, they care that you're telling them what to do, precisely because they don't want to be told what to do, even if it's good for them, because if they're being told what to do, it means they aren't in power, and they want power at any cost. In the pursuit of the 'right' people telling the 'wrong' people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the 'wrong' people from telling the 'right' people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder... anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
I like your thinking.
I think unwanted children are the worst. lets put aside that the family won't be happy. It's these children that will cause trouble, populate prisons. They'll be an absolute drag on society. It's not even they're fault. Growing up without love is tough
Just to clarify...is /showerthoughts just a place to post an opinion?
I think it's just a place to post things that pop into your head while taking a shower.
That's how I've always experienced it.
Well maybe they're just taking it literally, and actually thought this while taking a shower? 🤔
I guess opinion is a thought. I imagine being in the shower is complementary, not mandatory :p
I'll quote Drew Curtis of fark.com fame:
"Reality has a liberal bias."
Didn't Stephen Colbert coin that phrase? I thought he said it at the White House Correspondence Dinner or something.
So was reddit a long long time ago. I watched and felt it shift to the centre the heavily to the right. Conservatives destroy everything in the world. I don't doubt your favourite communitues will start heavily skewing right soon enough.
You can’t actually be serious can you?
Reddit back in the early 2010s was infamous for worshipping Ron Paul. In the early and mid-2010s there were literally subreddits dedicated to racism. It was controversial in the 2010s to ban or censor anything, meanwhile today all of the big subreddits are run by a handful of mods who will ban anyone who says something they don’t like, or even ban people automatically if they comment in a sub they don’t like.
If you think Reddit is somehow more right-leaning today than in the 2010s, I think that might just mean that you became far more left-leaning since then and everything else looks right-leaning in comparison.
I'm curious, what specifically did you notice about Reddit shifting to the right? I'm talking about the content on it btw
Conservative trolls are by and large generally stupider than Liberals, and can't figure out how to onboard the Fediverse yet, which is great
It's funny how people think both this and states 4chan has always been rightwing since 2000s. The truth is your political bias says nothing about your intelligence. Stating otherwise just looks like boosting one's ego to me.
Also the reason you don't see right wing opinions on Lemmy is probably by and large because the right wing instances are being defederated by larger left-leaning Lemmy instances. Not saying if thats wrong, but that's just how it is.
good
I once got dogpiled in r/lsd of all places for saying employers shouldn't be allowed to drug test for thc. I got swarmed for "being a druggie" in a sub about lsd.
I quit reddit for good not too long after that. What a fucking shithole.
By definition, people with a conservative mindset are less open to change and new experience.
Federated social media is still in the new and formative stage. So it is not shocking it is still dominated by those more open to new experiences. But don't be surprised if that shifts if/when Lemmy/kbin reach critical mass.
The internet itself has followed a similar path.
Came here to say this. The most literal definition of the word conservative in the context of the party is "to conserve old ways". They are resistant to change by definition.
Leftists use change as a tool to try to make things better. They're naturally more likely to embrace something new.
Makes sense that leftists would be more likely to reject the platform that is centralizing power
Centralized power is authoritarian. Authoritarianism isn't exclusively right. In fact the right/left dichotomy is a simplification of politics that belongs in the stone age. People have different values across a range of issues, that often don't fit a specific mold.
centralisation of power is not an inherently right or left wing ideal, and some of the largest left wing communities on the fediverse are practically or outright authoritarian
the centralising power thats being opposed being a profit oriented organisation does make it more of a leftist thing, though still not exclusively
I think its more anarchist which skews moderately left for obvious reasons.
Edit: No mods, no masters ;)
If it were just that dimension, where's all the (right-)libertarians?
I'm here, hanging out mostly, shitting on commies in my feed the rest of the time and watching them scramble to try and fix lemmy.ml has been fun.
hello 👋
smash the state!
It's not corporate based social with a mostly US based audience.
It was literally started because of political censorship of leftists on reddit.
Everyone gets censored on Reddit, literally everyone. There's no ideology that stays intact apart from sucking spez's balls
I think it's because it's still smaller than Reddit.
This is just my opinion, but since modern right wing is reactionary they (by definition) require people to react to and rally against. In turn they need people to react to them for validation. Just look at any of the many right wing social media clones, without a "leftist" audience to perform for they inevitably get bored and leave, causing the site to slowly wither and die.
All the right wingers went to Gab, Parler, Voat, Poal, Truth Social and other places.
Nazi servers, including but not limited to freeinternetspeechextremist and some holes like those.
The developers of Lemmy are the type who have jumped the shark when it comes to leftism.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs
I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.
North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They're all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they're filthy, selfish capitalists.
Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).
The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There's definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They're just all-inclusive resorts with free "cultural lessons" to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn't consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we've heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they're all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur "resorts" to prove to the world that it's a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!
Every time I see something that looks like Chinese/Russian/anti-Western propaganda I check the profile and it's usually a user that's been here for years. I'm starting to think the Fediverse was born as a misinformation shithole, here's hoping the new users can get that content to fuck off into it's own little defederated corner of trolls, bots, and edgelords.
It really did start as an underground commie circlejerk, luckily it's gotten a lot better with lemmygrad and lemmy.ml dead in the water.
Ugh, is this on the Jerboa creator's github? FFFS.
I think he's the main dev for Lemmy itself (and admin for lemmy.ml)
I'm still new here and still trying to figure out what the community is like.
I consider myself left of center on most (but not all) topics. I have a deep hatred for the GOP and everything they stand for, but I also am willing to nitpick the endless things that the Democrats do wrong. Ultimately I consider myself a pragmatist - in other words, you will never get your left-of-center policies enacted if the country as a whole is still leaning to the far right. Try to shift the country to your side first and THEN go for more progressive stuff. It absolutely doesn't work any other way. Trying to push for change too fast and too much will only get you a ton of blowback which will ultimately hurt your cause.
So having very briefly explained my overall stance even I was surprised by some of the comments I've seen - like far left stuff. But it's weird here because there are just simply not that many people, so even one or two comments in a lightly trafficked thread might make you think a site is heavily biased one way or another.
Also, please note that we have already entered US campaign season. Like the FBI has been warning us for literally years now (but few take seriously), there are indeed "bad actors" out there on various social media platforms (Reddit was notorious for this) trying to sway the US election toward Trump. They will do and say anything for it to happen, and that has been proven time and again. Like they fooled some gay groups a few years back and convinced them that Trump would support them, or back on Reddit reading Bernie-focused subs trying to convince progressives that, once again, Trump was the candidate who Sanders would prefer to win. Wild, and crazy stuff, but all it takes is a few percentage of people to buy into this mess to swing an election. Lemmy is not immune to these propaganda campaigns either.
Since I didn’t subscribe to any communities that are clearly all about politics, I haven’t really noticed many political views in my feed. Just like with Reddit, I’m here mostly for the science and technology.
I'm not surprised that people who reject a platform with centralized authority for shifting to "deliver value to shareholders" mode would be more leftist.
I was expecting more libertarians.
Libertarians can be both Left or Right, Libertarianism is just the opposite of Authoritarianism. Left/Right just indicates economic policy.
What if I told you reddits antiwork was basically a glimpse of everything we're seeing on far left Lemmy. Lemmy just doesn't have a honeymoon stage for it.
Funny, just a few hours ago I was telling a friend that I noticed the opposite. This conversation started because while r/antiwork and r/work_reform had mostly incompatible ideologies, with antiwork being more radical, Lemmy suggested to me a community titled "Antiwork/Work reform" which is noticeably more status quo compacent. Additionally, the rate of posts going "capitalism isn't that bad, actually" and "fuck tankies" in my TL is higher than in Reddit.
I think this has to do with the amount of active users. If, say, 2% of active users are very vocal about abolishing wage slavery, if there are like 1000 users, that 2% is just 20 people, which wouldn't make a very active community, whereas if it's 100 000 users, then that makes 2000 people who can already make a sort of "echo chamber" where they can openly and actively discuss their ideas.
Also, not to forget that Reddit, like all mass social media, has algorithms meant to maximize your session lengths and that usually involves exposing you to more extremist ideas, both left and right.
IDK, seems like European right wing is considered left wing in USA.
So for most Americans, most Europeans are left wing.
Maybe lemmy has more Europeans?
Mastodon managed to fight off bigots and nazis very successfully, maybe they do have enough brain cells to remember something I guess.
Unfortunately the chuds have started pouring in, because we all know those people cant just let people enjoy themselves if it means they're not getting attention.
See, my worry was Mastadon's Fascist rep. Lemmy's left twist is no sweat of my back.
Does/did mastodon have a fascist reputation? I didn't know it had any reputation at all, aside from "Twitter but different" to be honest, lol
pretty sure mastodon is like 99% gay cat girls posting long-winded info dumps about niche tech stacks... i have no idea where that person is getting their info..
Only outside of Mastodon. People confuse decentralized, P2P and federated and think it's a free to all, which means fascism...
I don't mind. Fewer conservatives means higher quality and higher general IQ.
It’s made by Communists
I am not that leftist.
I am not American so I don't care about your left winged ideas.
My dude, America is one of the most right-wing places in the world by comparison lol
Compared to what? Developed European nations?
Most of the middle east, south America, and central/southern Asia are absolutely not.
By comparison to Europe, maybe. The world? Absolutely not.
The ultraconservatives already left for gab and truth social. There are some conservative instances and a few nazi ones as well, but the aforementioned two scooped up most of right wingers willing to jump ship.
I've got a bad news for you, they have their own Lemmy instance.
Post 2016, the worldnews/geopolitics subs that I follow on reddit have become nonstop sinophobic and anti-China hate subs. Prior to 2016, there were a lot of complaining about Chinese tourists and kids that shit on the streets, but after Trump got elected the cold war rhetoric went into full effect.
This got worse during and after Covid19, especially in America, Canada, and parts of Europe.
The cold war propagandizing is just so incredibly prevalent on reddit. It's like people forgot what the cultural/business relationship between the US and China looked like prior to 2016.
You're saying it's conservative for being anti-China? China may say it's Communist but any leftist is against the CCP.
Well it small anr mostly made up of young techies. So yeah a left leaning bunch.
ITT: left = progressive and right = conservative
Not my opinion, but from what I'm seeing it seems more like in this thread: Left = Good, Right = Nazis
Seems to be the American thing of pretending all the members of the party you don't like are extremists and all the members of the party you do like are moderates
I think there's a wide range of people on Lemmy too but the extreme right and extreme left have ended up on instances that have been defederated from the main group. So what you're seeing are the sensible, rational people, and in America such people are considered left wing I guess 😉
I feel like there's a lot more queer focused instances available. Tbh that would most likely make it easier for queer people, and those more accepting of them, to easily and comfortably move to an instance.
ALSO, makes it that much easier to get banned if you're even slightly conservative imo. Imo we won't see many conservatives until we get a Steven Crowder or Daily Wire Instance.
Just speculating here. And building off some half-remembered On The Media pieces. But as (for any number of reasons) the faith in a social platform collapses (and often the safeguards against toxic stuff go down too, a la Twitter), people with a low tolerance for that shit are likeliest to bail and the 'call people the N word on Xbox' folks are likeliest to stay behind. People who could watch what Reddit did and stay behind aren't bad, I'm not saying that, but their tolerance for unethical stuff is way higher than the tolerance of those who decided to find a new home. Self-selection, ya know.
Huh, a very intriguing thought; thank you for sharing
Well I strongly disagree with most of the communists so I just avoid lemmy.ml
The communists are from lemmygrad I think.
Yep, just came from there lol
Fortunately, this happened mostly on political-related topics
I'm more right leaning and I use this website. I just hate Reddit and it's blatant censorship. Down with the tryants.
It is driven entirely by the moderators. r/Canada got taken over by alt-right moderators which attracted alt-right redditors.
Yup it is. There are a lot of communist techie people I guess. I still generally state my political opinions here though. Let them be downvoted.
It's a more techy community since that tends to be early adopters. They tend to lean pretty heavy left and are more informed. You still have the techys with anime profile pics and are 4chan/incel that are right wing though. They get defederated really quick though.