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I once went out with a Serbian woman, and she asked me what âright wingâ means. After ten minutes of the most quintessential mansplaining lecture, I started a Youtube video, then asked âIs this guy left wing, or right wing?â.
âYou stopped the video after one second!, he hasnât said anything yetâ, she protested.
âRight, but heâs 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 peopleâ.
She gave me a look which suggested how stupid this all was, and she was right. Itâs really, stupid.
The Serbians donât 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 donât question gun ownership, but demand public healthcare. Theyâre 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 âmostly rightâ, or âmostly leftâ, and peppering in some exceptions, or apologizing for accepting some premises from some other camp.
Imagine someone identifying as a âvegetarian, except for bacon, and sometimes fish when Iâm at a good sushi place, and chicken when Iâm at my mumâs, and sometimes a cheeseburgerâ. âYou are not a vegetarianâ, you might say, if you were feeling polite.
Personally, I unapologetically like accepting supply and demand curves as a reality, and donât need any excuses about it sounding âright wingâ, as if banning abortions were right round the corner. Iâve supported refugee movements, but donât 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 donât 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 theyâre 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 âwokenessâ or queer folks or unions are your enemy, trying to get you to look the other way while they take your money, but it isnât, 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 âLeft-wing elementsâ, 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 âSunniâ, and others âShiaâ, 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 itâs 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.
Iâm not sure what the alternative is, but Iâd be all for it if it existed. If there were some way to fund whatever trees do, like housing wildlife, thatâd be great. Of course that funding had better be in terms of cash, rather than paying people in turnips.
And itâs gonna have to be a pretty radical idea. Trees have been valued for their wood since people first learned to cut them down. Weâve never seen a society capable of building wooden homes which also decided not to.
In one video[a], 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.
Emmaâs article[a] discusses how shocked she felt when the Satanic Templeâs Lucien Greaves preferred free speech to censorship.
Anyone could have told her that the Satanic Templeâs Philosophy emphasises the individual over all else. The highest Satanic holiday is oneâs own birthday. Given the article, itâs clear Emmaâs a fairly intelligent person, so this isnât 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 âLeft Wingâ. But TST does not mention âleft wingâ anywhere in its ideology. Itâs fiercely pro-choice, but also expects adults to form their own opinions about everything.