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I once went out with a Serbian woman, and she asked me what 'right wing' means. After ten minutes of the most quintessential mansplaining lecture, I started a Youtube video, then asked "Is this guy left wing, or right wing?".
"You stopped the video after one second!, he hasn't said anything yet", she protested.
"Right, but he's an older man, salt-and-pepper hair, leaning over, patronizing stare, suit and tie. So we can tell his views on abortion, taxation, gun ownership, Marxism, Feminism, military history, and trans people".
She gave me a look which suggested how stupid this all was, and she was right. It's really, stupid.
The Serbians don't have this nonsense, although every foreigner attempts to pin their beliefs on this country. The lefties I know think of the Serbian government as right wing. I have no doubt that the right wing people think of the Serbian government as left wing.
The Serbs themselves typically like public transport, but have mixed feelings about abortions. They don't question gun ownership, but demand public healthcare. They're generally Orthodox Christians on paper, but the priests themselves might be pro-choice or anti-abortion.
I persistently hear people putting up unnecessary little excuses about being 'mostly right', or 'mostly left', and peppering in some exceptions, or apologizing for accepting some premises from some other camp.
Imagine someone identifying as a 'vegetarian, except for bacon, and sometimes fish when I'm at a good sushi place, and chicken when I'm at my mum's, and sometimes a cheeseburger'. 'You are not a vegetarian', you might say, if you were feeling polite.
Personally, I unapologetically like accepting supply and demand curves as a reality, and don't need any excuses about it sounding 'right wing', as if banning abortions were right round the corner. I've supported refugee movements, but don't feel the slightest guilt talking about the problems of cultural integration.
Public transport costs have nothing to do with trans rights. Someone who wants strong market competition to keep companies producing lots of cool stuff can hate billionaires better than people who just think they have too much money. We should take the issues as they come, and if anyone has broadly left or right wing views, we can take this as evidence that they can only parrot what they hear at a short range, and have never managed to think about a single issue independently.
Political wings can act like star signs. Once someone identifies as a Virgo, they might gather art-supplies (or whatever), and with enough people believing the hype, patterns will eventually emerge.
Political wings have much more force, because:
But these additional pushes don't show that gun-rights have some innate connection to freedom of speech issues, simply that tribes have developed.
The moment the union movement started gaining power Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk stopped pretending to be liberals and moved right at light speed. What they're showing us is that fascism is what happens when capitalism goes into decline and tries to defend itself.
Late capitalism makes for a really dangerous time. And I wish it was obvious that billionaires directing your anger at "wokeness" or queer folks or unions are your enemy, trying to get you to look the other way while they take your money, but it isn't, so we need to say it.
This Tweet tries to draw some natural link between riches and hating on minority groups. In reality, Musk only has problems with Unions, because they could lose him money. If he allies with the Republican party at all, he might let a few more anti-trans notions slip past, but at this point, the notion of natural political alignment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lots of money, pooled together, has no innate push towards hating trans people, or supporting gun rights.
Iran performs the second most gender reassignment surgeries in the world, allowing trans people (or at least trans women) to enter heterosexual marriages. Thinking in terms of wings would demand that Iran has 'Left-wing elements', but it has nothing of the sort. It has one form of Muslim thinking, or more accurately, it simply does what it does.
If an Iranian person were to come to a European country, then call some politicians 'Sunni', and others 'Shia', we might laugh at them.
Under capitalism, a tree holds no value until it is cut down
We hold this statement as if we personally value trees when not cut down, while it's the system (man) which fails to value the non-cut trees. Perhaps if we could change to a tree-valuing system, trees would not get cut down.
I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I'd be all for it if it existed. If there were some way to fund whatever trees do, like housing wildlife, that'd be great. Of course that funding had better be in terms of cash, rather than paying people in turnips.
And it's gonna have to be a pretty radical idea. Trees have been valued for their wood since people first learned to cut them down. We've never seen a society capable of building wooden homes which also decided not to.
In one video, someone tries to examine how FOSS software works against, or in a different way to, capitalism. Caveats pepper everything, as so much of FOSS software came from large corporations, such as Redhat, or Google. In fact, large corporations, such as Google and Facebook, have benefited immensely from FOSS software. The analysis bears no fruit, and provides no insight, because the speaker wants to fixate on a dichotomy which does not exist.
The standard dichotomy of proprietary vs libre software has a clear legal definition, but the bogeyman of capitalism only obfuscates the issue.
Emma's article discusses how shocked she felt when the Satanic Temple's Lucien Greaves preferred free speech to censorship.
Anyone could have told her that the Satanic Temple's Philosophy emphasises the individual over all else. The highest Satanic holiday is one's own birthday. Given the article, it's clear Emma's a fairly intelligent person, so this isn't simple idiocy. My guess is she was bamboozled by the emphasis on bodily autonomy (a major rule in TST), which lead her to think of the temple as 'Left Wing'. But TST does not mention 'left wing' anywhere in its ideology. It's fiercely pro-choice, but also expects adults to form their own opinions about everything.