4 ms·

Not sure what your position is here. “The left is trying to hold people to account, but that makes them less popular.”?

• lazide 1y ago
  Clearly that is not what I said. The only people the left are capable of holding accountable appear to be other people on the left, or disposable flunkies on the right, so the only thing the left appears to be accomplishing with this approach is self destruction, or clearing out deadwood on the right. Mostly just self destruction.
• kristopolous 1y ago
  Anyone who says the left is doing anything which requires power should not be taken seriously at all. The left is people like Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Nader, Norman Finkelstein, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Michael Parenti, Cornel West. The left has almost no organized political power in the US. Except for a few city councils and a couple state houses, it's zero. When people use "the left" as a catch-all for "not us", some broad brushed painting of "outsiders" this isn't a serious conversation, they're just waving their arms around and making sounds.
  • lazide 1y ago
    ‘The left’ held the presidency up until quite recently, among other things.
    • Vilian 1y ago
      Us-american left is considered right in the rest of the world
      • lazide 1y ago
        Which has nothing to do with the situation at all, does it?
    • kristopolous 1y ago
      Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits? No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation... Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things. The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politics and the Republicans are the right wing party. They did things like protect against junk fees and go after phone scammers but pursuing financial criminals is hardly leftism just because the right wing doesn't do it. Bush and Reagan would have done that. Reagan and Bush did a bunch of prosecutions during S&L... It's a conservative party and a right wing party. There is no center, there is no liberal, there is no left. There was no right until Trump. There was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan but they didn't go anywhere. I can fully acknowledge this and not just look at things I don't like and say "bah! Right wing" Once you can look at things that you don't like and not say "bah! Far left!" Then we can to have a meaningful conversation. Until then you are acting in bad faith
      • lazide 1y ago
        Or we’re talking about the US, so what the US considers ‘left’ vs ‘right’ politically matters, not what some other arbitrary (generally european) criteria is. Or have you checked in with Africa and China too?
        • kristopolous 1y ago
          but it's not. it's dictated by the right. The democrats don't call themselves left. The liberals don't. The centrists don't call either of them "The left" - not even the soft republicans like liz cheney does. There is one group that calls all these people "The far left" ... just one. It's the same one who believes in jewish space lasers, that there's secret tunnels under the getty, that hillary clinton is an actual child sacrificing witch, that there's a secret basement in a pizza parlor, that the holocaust was fake and simultaneously that 6 million wasn't enough. Those people are not using reality and there's nothing we can talk about because they simply make things up based on fantasy and fiction