I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.
Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?
I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.
I have no idea what box I fit into.
- I am generally anti-capitalism. The current system does not benefit human. We are constantly exploited in the name of profits
- vital industries and services need to be nationalized. Capitalism is a race to the bottom when it comes to providing the bare minumum, cutting corners etc.
- people should be free to do what they please as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. To this end, I am pro-inclusion of all walks of life, except for bigots.
- we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
I think we more or less are either too late to stop it or are unable to stop it. I think we should instead be focused on planning mitigations for the future. I expect at some point in the next century or two there will be large migrations of people from the equator going to the north (places like Russia or Canada).
Both will be necessary but it’s worth noting that the more we’ve emitted, the more damaging each additional unit of emissions becomes. So arguably it’s even more important to focus on emissions reductions because it’s too late to completely stop warming at this point. Even a small reduction in emissions may have cause a meaningful reduction in human suffering.
While I think your right, mama didn’t raise no quitter.
Depending on if you think Capitalism should be totally abolished or not, you could be a Social Democrat all the way to a
Libertarian Socialist.Edit: gotta have a state to nationalize things. So could be Dem Soc/Market Socialist to as far left as ML. But MLs typically are a little less pro-individual liberties, so probably not ML.
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True.
I’m with Track_Shovel on this. No particular political orientation, but I agree on all the issues listed.
Welcome, marxist!
I agree with this. I tend to be more of a “California hippy” as my far more conservative friends tell me.
Necessities need to be taken away from people who profit from them. At the very least. Realistically, probably less things should fall under capitalism, but if we start with transportation, medical, housing, education, fuels, electricity, etc we would be doing much better.
I agree that people should be able to do as they please, with a caveat. As long as it doesn’t affect other people. Guns are a pretty good example here (I’ll get back to this).
The environment is screwed, and I truly don’t think we can stop the spiral, but agree we need to try.
I’m waiting for all the angry replies to this one. Guns need to go away. Not completely, but we need to move to where they are only kept and used by highly licensed and highly insured people, or at highly regulated and insured clubs/establishments. Everyone having guns doesn’t work. Just look around.
And while I’m at it get all money out of politics. Bye bye lobbying. Close loopholes for all government officials that use their insider info to benefit their bank account.
Uhhh…
Uhhh…
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I believe that the means of production should be owned by the workers and that the purpose of work is to produce things we all need to meet our collective needs.
Capitalism is a dead end ideology which leads to concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority by design, and this minority of oligarchs exploits the rest of the people to subsidize their lavish lifestyle.
Furthermore, any system based around constant growth and consumerism is fundamentally incompatible with our continual survival as a species. We need a system that strives for sustainable use of our resources.
Marxist-Leninist. Of the type that would probably unironically be referred to as a tankie.
I don’t see capitalism as a sustainable model for the world, you cannot grow infinitely with finite resources, and there is no way effective way to “reform the system from the inside”. Capitalists will actively sabotage such efforts as they go against their own best interests; they are dead set on convincing labor that it is also against their best interests, and have been depressingly effective at doing so.
I believe that humanity will naturally move towards a more communist world order as a unipolarity gives way to a multipolar world. Probably not within my lifetime, but either humans will get there eventually or we will die out trying.
In practice, I’m a common social democrat.
At heart, I’m an Anarchist. I don’t have enough knowledge and confidence to believe it would work but I believe it would be beneficial for us to try to make it work, even if it ends up failing
Syndicalist. A federation of industrial unions could run society as a whole in a way that benefits all.
Marxist-Leninist unironically.
I’d like the GOP and right-wing media to be vaporized in its entirety, and I’d like the establishment/corporatist wing of the Democratic party to be smashed to pieces. Maybe then we can hurry up and get going on some stuff.
Social Democrat.
Lots of anti monopoly pro consumer regulations. But freedom to have private enterprise. High income and corporate tax. Free healthcare & education. Even rare diseases and university. Corporations can only lease and never own land. Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate “leftist”. But why “Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas”?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there’s private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about “government accountability”, but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its “tax money”
What specific services are you referring to? If there are multiple firms and the government competing then that really doesn’t sound like the situation I was describing.
Governments can also be sued though they sometimes grant themselves immunity. But utilities really can’t go out of business, can they? Generally they are providing what are considered essential services, so if they fail, the government will generally bail them out because they are the only provider and the loss of those services would be catastrophic. So there really is very little accountability. Just ask PG&E customers how much say they have in that company’s practices.
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for. Do you not have those in your country?
Governments can also be sued
My point is they don’t lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it’s not a deterrent, but simple restitution
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for.
It’s quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don’t fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It’s much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
But utilities really can’t go out of business
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
loss of those services would be catastrophic
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it’s bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
That sounds like a pretty insane situation that would not be tolerated in most developed countries. Generally lapse of service for essential utilities is considered a major problem that would absolutely be relevant to local elections in my area. It sounds like your government is very poorly run and needs dramatic changes—such changes could be implemented through elections. In the meantime it’s good that private entities are filling the gap but I doubt they are able to provide the same level of service as most people expect from utilities.
Governments can also be sued
My point is they don’t lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it’s not a deterrent, but simple restitution
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for.
It’s quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don’t fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It’s much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
But utilities really can’t go out of business
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
loss of those services would be catastrophic
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it’s bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
I’m not the person you replied to and this isn’t well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.
How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There’d have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don’t know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don’t want to lose money. And let’s assume the government doesn’t pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can’t we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there’s nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.
What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
I can’t dispute that. I hear people claim that in my country too. But I just wonder how they can know that for a fact. Like okay, maybe they’ve seen a service provided by a private entity for X amount and a comparable service provided by the government for Y amount more. But how can we know what’s going on behind the scenes? Is the company being subsidized by the government? Is the government charging more for this service to offset and lower the price of some other service? Or is the government charging us more for the overhead of having thousands or millions of customers where on the other hand, it can charge a company to lease the infrastructure for less for the reduced overhead of only having that company as a “customer”? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. I just question where the motive comes into play for private companies. Their motive is to make money. Do they have us in their best interests? They can cut costs and have huge failures like what happened in Texas with their power grid. But then there can be huge government failure too providing these services like with what happened to the water system in Flint, MI. I’m not really educated on either of these so it’s possible I’m totally misrepresenting these. And I’m not claiming that there isn’t waste, abuse and corruption in government either. At the end of the day, public and private entities are run by people. But anyway, thanks for indulging my stream of consciousness.
Just conservative not a republican because I feel they’ve lost their way as much as democrats did.
Elephants and asses, screwing the masses.
💀
As I’ve gotten older I find myself being more of a conservative in the true definition of the term: a preference for slow and steady change, caution towards new ideas, and some amount of reverence for tradition.
The issue is that the Republican party is not a Conservative Party. Joe Biden is a Conservative. The Republican party is a party for Reaction and Neoliberalism.
Yeah, very much this. As a scientist, my place on the political spectrum ought to be looking at a proposed change that is supposed to help and demanding “prove it” (and providing said proof when possible within my field). The hard part is then being ready to accept proof when given and swap my stance accordingly from opposition to agreement. This is where conservatives have failed. (People also need to accept that in the real world it’ll probably be imperfect proof and come up with reasonable expectations for what counts as adequate proof, ideally based on expert review.)
But at this point there are many good ideas (like housing-first approaches to homelessness) that are well supported by data but are being held back because of “common sense” and emotions (we can’t just give people free housing!). So instead my place is sitting with the Progressives and saying “holy shit, how can we get conservatives to listen to reason?”
As funny as it seems to say, I feel that “Conservativism” is unfairly maligned. Most of the bad things about what is called “Conservativism” are not really parts of Conservativism at all but are ideologies associated with Conservativism - “Rugged Individualism”, Neoliberalism in general, religious fundamentalism.
We’ll probably disagree on this point (and that’s okay), but you can look at China. China is a very conservative country, with strong cultural values regarding family, social conformism, and civic nationalism. It is Conservativism without Capitalism, Individualism, or Religion.
Anticapitalist and socialist, but not straightup communist. Everyone deserves free healthcare, mental healthcare, water, food, electricity, internet, education and housing
I’m a moderate, but in America they’d probably call me a LefTiSt because things have shifted so far to the right here we’ve reached the point of absurdity. Basically, I think that democratic republics with a strong social safety net, meaningful regulation, and personal freedoms are the least terrible system we’ve come up with so far. Unregulated capitalism is a danger to humanity, as are totalitarian governments.
I’m more or less a milquetoast anarcho-communist.
I am a Social Democrat in the European sense. There is nothing wrong with the free market per se, but it is the responsibility of the state to intervene with regulation where necessary (e.g. safety), and the responsibility of the state to provide a stable system of social services, e.g. health care, education, housing.
I’ll point to Austria as an example, where social housing is widespread and high quality and public health care is exceptional and pensions are reasonable. With this backdrop, the market economy is appropriate.
I don’t think the unregulated capitalism of countries like the US is sustainable nor would I want to live under that dysfunctional system.
Be glad that you don’t. It’s as bad as you think. Also, same (regarding ideology).
I’m just gonna call myself a “leftist” and leave it at that
