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> insane, insufferable far left crazies Definitely this option. And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labell

by sho 9y ago

> insane, insufferable far left crazies Definitely this option. And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have nothing in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.

cinquemb 9y ago
>…indeed fear… For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear? You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's). If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.
walshemj 9y ago
Yes but there are no far left parties in the USA to vote for.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  Not only that, but anything that would be considered truly leftist by global standards has tiny support within the Democratic party. What Bernie Sanders advocates, for example, is firmly centrist by European standards.
  - adventured 9y ago
    There is no such thing as European standards. Czech and Poland are entirely different from France and Denmark when it comes to such. Germany and Switzerland are also far different from France. There are at least a dozen nations in Europe with very aggressive hard right parties, often derived from former neo-Nazi parties, that have won a political seat at the table in the last decade. That trend is still continuing. Europe overall has a worse far right problem than the US does and it's getting worse at an alarming rate. Europe even has multiple fascist dictatorships, in Belarus, Turkey and Russia.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      yes mostly former sov block countries where hard right nationisiam has taken hold
- adventured 9y ago
  The Green Party is a far left US party. To go much further left, you have to enter Venezuela style Socialism. The GP openly advocates for changing essentially everything about the US political and economic system and shifting every area much further to the left ideologically (by much further, I mean it far surpasses what even "liberals" in Congress advocate for).
  - walshemj 9y ago
    so are they are like the SWP in the UK - no they are not. I don't think so I get the impression there like a weedy version of the lib dems
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    The Green Party is a far left US party. With hardly any senior elected officials even at the municipal level. Like many fringe parties, it is just about big enough to qualify for public election financing but not to be competitive in any races that matter. http://www.gp.org/officeholders http://www.gp.org/officeholders
    - manfredo 9y ago
      Granted, with that line of thinking there aren't any far-right parties either. It's just Democrats and Republicans that have any substantial number of offices.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    The Green Party is not a far left party, though it's the biggest American Party that is unambiguously left (since the Democratic Party has a sizable, and still dominant though that is becoming less secure, center-right faction), so it's where slightly-pragmatic far left figures end up. There are far left parties, but they do even worse than the Green's two state lower house seats and no more significant seats anywhere in the country, electing exactly no one to any even modestly significant office.
- manofstick 9y ago
  As non-american, living outside of america (but having lived there for a year and a half starting January 2000), I concur. I still follow american politics quite a bit (too much for me to remain healthy actually) and I'm constantly bamboozled trying to comprehend what people mean by the "far left". To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in: - treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*) - believing in the science of climate change - believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders - believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
  - dcow 9y ago
    That's the thing, that's pretty damn central in the US too. The problem is that's not good enough for some people. In the US, legally, we treat everyone equal. However, we're (in theory) a meritocratic society based on survival of the fittest. The modern "far left" ideology is interested in equal outcomes for everyone and defines any statistical dependencies they perceive, and anyone who doesn't support correcting them, as racist, sexist, generally "-ist". So they've moved the goal posts. It's become a battle between equal opportunity and equal outcome and as far as the left is concerned supporting equal opportunity and not equal outcome is deplorable and should be shunned.
    - jakelazaroff 9y ago
      > In the US, legally, we treat everyone equal. Even if you start with the premise that no laws explicitly target any race/gender/etc, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone is treated equally under the law.
      - dcow 9y ago
        Agreed. The parent comment is asking why the idea of equal opportunity is seen as far left. I am trying to explain that everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities, and explain that the debate has now become about whether we enforce/regulate the distribution of wealth and jobs such that society ends up statistically "equal". And that this is a very controversial and political topic and has nothing to do with racism despite the rhetoric employed at both extremes of the horseshoe.
pureGuano 9y ago
I too dislike the right/left classification. It didn't really exist until the French Revolution, and the attempt to stretch it into a universally encompassing political continuum has resulted in an impoverished view of politics, imho. For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really? Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency. It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.
abusoufiyan 9y ago
You fear the far left (who couldn't even get their milktoast socialist candidate into the Presidential race) more than the far right (who are gaining actual political power in Europe with their openly neo-Nazi parties)? What world do you live in, man?

by sho 9y ago

cinquemb 9y ago

>…indeed fear… For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear? You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's). If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.

walshemj 9y ago

Yes but there are no far left parties in the USA to vote for.

acjohnson55 9y ago
Not only that, but anything that would be considered truly leftist by global standards has tiny support within the Democratic party. What Bernie Sanders advocates, for example, is firmly centrist by European standards.
- adventured 9y ago
  There is no such thing as European standards. Czech and Poland are entirely different from France and Denmark when it comes to such. Germany and Switzerland are also far different from France. There are at least a dozen nations in Europe with very aggressive hard right parties, often derived from former neo-Nazi parties, that have won a political seat at the table in the last decade. That trend is still continuing. Europe overall has a worse far right problem than the US does and it's getting worse at an alarming rate. Europe even has multiple fascist dictatorships, in Belarus, Turkey and Russia.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    yes mostly former sov block countries where hard right nationisiam has taken hold
adventured 9y ago
The Green Party is a far left US party. To go much further left, you have to enter Venezuela style Socialism. The GP openly advocates for changing essentially everything about the US political and economic system and shifting every area much further to the left ideologically (by much further, I mean it far surpasses what even "liberals" in Congress advocate for).
- walshemj 9y ago
  so are they are like the SWP in the UK - no they are not. I don't think so I get the impression there like a weedy version of the lib dems
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  The Green Party is a far left US party. With hardly any senior elected officials even at the municipal level. Like many fringe parties, it is just about big enough to qualify for public election financing but not to be competitive in any races that matter. http://www.gp.org/officeholders http://www.gp.org/officeholders
  - manfredo 9y ago
    Granted, with that line of thinking there aren't any far-right parties either. It's just Democrats and Republicans that have any substantial number of offices.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  The Green Party is not a far left party, though it's the biggest American Party that is unambiguously left (since the Democratic Party has a sizable, and still dominant though that is becoming less secure, center-right faction), so it's where slightly-pragmatic far left figures end up. There are far left parties, but they do even worse than the Green's two state lower house seats and no more significant seats anywhere in the country, electing exactly no one to any even modestly significant office.
manofstick 9y ago
As non-american, living outside of america (but having lived there for a year and a half starting January 2000), I concur. I still follow american politics quite a bit (too much for me to remain healthy actually) and I'm constantly bamboozled trying to comprehend what people mean by the "far left". To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in: - treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*) - believing in the science of climate change - believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders - believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
- dcow 9y ago
  That's the thing, that's pretty damn central in the US too. The problem is that's not good enough for some people. In the US, legally, we treat everyone equal. However, we're (in theory) a meritocratic society based on survival of the fittest. The modern "far left" ideology is interested in equal outcomes for everyone and defines any statistical dependencies they perceive, and anyone who doesn't support correcting them, as racist, sexist, generally "-ist". So they've moved the goal posts. It's become a battle between equal opportunity and equal outcome and as far as the left is concerned supporting equal opportunity and not equal outcome is deplorable and should be shunned.
  - jakelazaroff 9y ago
    > In the US, legally, we treat everyone equal. Even if you start with the premise that no laws explicitly target any race/gender/etc, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone is treated equally under the law.
    - dcow 9y ago
      Agreed. The parent comment is asking why the idea of equal opportunity is seen as far left. I am trying to explain that everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities, and explain that the debate has now become about whether we enforce/regulate the distribution of wealth and jobs such that society ends up statistically "equal". And that this is a very controversial and political topic and has nothing to do with racism despite the rhetoric employed at both extremes of the horseshoe.

pureGuano 9y ago

I too dislike the right/left classification. It didn't really exist until the French Revolution, and the attempt to stretch it into a universally encompassing political continuum has resulted in an impoverished view of politics, imho. For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really? Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency. It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.

abusoufiyan 9y ago

You fear the far left (who couldn't even get their milktoast socialist candidate into the Presidential race) more than the far right (who are gaining actual political power in Europe with their openly neo-Nazi parties)? What world do you live in, man?