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.
fluid is good except that it also means easy for politicians to manipulate. and zero loyalty for longterm goals that require patience and sacrifice.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, member of an organized group.
I believe countries try to shape and weaponize citizens’ opinions about other countries, so I refuse to defend or criticize them unless I can argue that doing so is beneficial to my ideas (i.e., not based on feelings or ethics). Thus, I’m neutral towards most countries and defend multipolarity.
I tend to doubt my ideas as much as I can.
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
I’m socially liberal and economically on the left (as in I like democracy, I accept capitalism, but I want a lot more socialist policies). Downtrodden people should be given assistance, but everyone else should be free to live out their power and ambition unless it gets in other people’s way. I’m against most right wing political and social positions. But I’m even more against defederation and mass blocking. I don’t want a safe space. There are too many things we need to process with conversation.
more progressive than the mainstream parties in the us but too stupid / lazy / timid to actually find and use a specific label / ideology
I used to be an active socialist, but it felt quite hopeless when protests are ignored and democracy scarcely exists (you just vote for the least bad option once every 5 years). Now I moved countries and can’t even vote so am much more apolitical. I also didn’t like the shift of those groups into identity politics, and often focussing on treating symptoms rather than the cause - e.g. the push in many places to decriminalise theft under ~$300 instead of actually ensuring people have jobs and opportunities, or unfair rent control rather than building more housing and dealing with the distribution of employment.
But in general I just want a functional, meritocratic society with easy opportunities for education, wide use of technology and as little bureaucracy as possible. No monarchy or religion, etc.
I also think there should be much stricter punishments for violent crime, and better use of technology to investigate it. Ideally everywhere would be like Singapore with almost no crime due to excellent enforcement, and also good provision of education, housing, etc. to make it less attractive overall.
I really like the Singapore model and Singapore in general but I feel like it’s mostly successful because it exports a lot of its negative externalities to Malaysia. I’m not sure if it would be a sustainable model without its neighbour.
I have many things to say, but I just can’t bring myself to discuss it in a public forum anymore. It’s not that I expect that I’d be on the opposite side of a lot of people so I’d be flamed and shut down. In truth I find myself fairly middle of the road, but politics has become so polarized and hate filled that I’m more saddened for the future than anything else. I worry for what world my kids will inherit from my generation. I have hope though for genZ they seem to fully get behind the concept of FAFO. I just want them to start voting before it’s too late.
Working class, independent, American nationalist.
The government should be working for the people, not for corporations. Sadly both parties would rather continue shipping out manufacturing jobs while pretending a few chip factories are a major victory for the working class.
It’s crazy how we spend billions on relief for people in poor countries, but when it comes to helping the American citizen we either “can’t afford it” or are supposed to go on welfare, as if that’s something desirable.
I’m a trans woman and the stuff that affects my life the most deal with are affording food, shelter, healthcare and bills. I’m going to guess that’s the same for the majority of Americans.
The amount we spend in foreign aid is basically negligible (wars don’t count as aid).
By far, our biggest expenses are internal. The military-industrial complex and inefficient healthcare make almost all other spending a drop in the bucket.
What percentage of the US annual budget is spent on foreign aid?
I think the “billions on relief in poor countries while we can’t afford helping Americans at home” bit is a false dichotomy. The money spent on other countries isn’t to help their people, it’s to curry favor with foreign governments and advance American empire.
Really, the people who are stealing our rightful wealth are not poor people in other countries (or “welfare queens” at home) but the rich and powerful who aren’t paying their fair share.
It’s not a dichotomy, it’s just an observation of fact. We give corporations so many breaks and benefits, help feed billions across the globe, but can’t seem to focus on giving people worthwhile jobs that they can thrive on. There’s no reason it must be this way.
We clearly do not disagree on where the problem lies.
I just don’t think framing the issue as “Us, the first-world middle class vs. Them, impoverished third-worlders” is a helpful one. We are both victims of Imperialism. Nationalism can be important for these third-world countries but I think it’s counterproductive in America as it exists.
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.
A social democrat or democratic socialist or whatever, though I did vote for the left-party last time
Syndicalist. A federation of industrial unions could run society as a whole in a way that benefits all.
I use libertarian socialist for myself and others 9 times out of 10, but if I really need to get a little deeper, I will drop the “A” word paired with the “C” word to describe my ideology.
I’m a libertarian, leftist, socialist, and I’m strongly against digital copyright, politics and patents. I believe in freedom and free competition, and government investment in education, technology, and quality of life.
Libertarian: People are overwhelmingly good, and freedom allows the good people to reliability outmenuver the bad. People should have every freedom in so far as they are not encroaching on the equal or greater freedoms of anyone else. No technology is inherently bad, tech in the hands all results in the victory of the good. A notable acception is weapons of mass destruction, as any use against any population is very bad morally. In general when tech is outlawed the good loose the ability to use it against the bad or for the betterment of humanity, and the bad maintain access and use it against the good. When only the bad guys have Drugs, Encryption, Guns, The internet, etc … the society is much worse off for it.
Leftist: When governments invest tax money into the common good of the people, via things like education, technology, and quality of life, then societies are healther, wealthier, more innovative, and the people are happier for it. No one wants to be homeless, sick, or stupid, or to be surrounded by people who are. Government investment stimulates the economy, and if money is spent domestically it lands right back in the pockets of working tax payers.
Socialist: When workers own stake in the companiess they work for, companies act in the interest of the workers (socialism). When companies are owned by investors, they act in the interst of the investors, usually against the interest of workers (capitalism). When companies act in the interst of the workers, wages are higher, workers are more free, and cost of living is lower. The people are happier. Governments does not need to be so big to keep the peace like they do today.
Digital copyright: the belief in the lie that copying and or improving upon an ethereal digital resource constitutes theft, is a massive detriment to society. It is clearly false because no one looses anything. It is defended by perpetuating the fear that it it would be harder to profit if information was free. It would be a different world, but you can still make a profit through art on a physical medium, and in other ways. The lie is used to justify unjust control of software vendors over their customers, and to justify fake sales in which the physical computer hardware is sold but the ability to actually control it is not part of the sale. And sales where a book or movie is sold, but the user is never given the copy they purchased. It is also used to deprive the poor access to educational material, and to justify the destruction of cultural archives for future generations.
Politics: Politicians are lower quality than ordinary people, because they are the people who wanted to rule, not the people who understand the impact of positive and negative of every singe decision. A monarchy has better chances of honest leadership because the quality if the monarch is random, instead of picked by might of advertising dollars out of a list of the worst people. The way to make a real good government involves a little lotocracy and a little meritocracy. My vision in short: a console, selected at random from the population, chooses qualification criteria for voting on a proposition, and a console is selected at random from the qualified public to make a decision.
Pattents: A temporary government issued monopoly on a process or mechanism. Patents were the single worst lapse in logic of our society, they are anticompetitive and slow innovation (the incredibly successful free software community, operating on very little time and money, is a glimpse of what a patenless society could be). A free market cannot coexist with patents. Arguments for pattens boil down to, if i invest as though i have patent protection from competition and i don’t have it, my investment won’t pan out. In a society without patents, companies build and improve on each others work, making R&D cheaper and faster. Sure, billion dollar research investments would not pan out, but they would also be completely unnecessary, because starting from scratch or waiting a decade would not be required to participate in innovation.
A while ago I watched a great video on Youtube explaining how a system without copyright could work for commercial software development (specifically for games), advocating for a “pay for production” model instead of “pay for access”. Unfortunately I can’t find the video anymore.
Whats the solution to the issue small startups would face w.o patents when the mega-corps just take their innovation and package it differently?
Don’t detail exactly what the innovation is before its ready to sell, it takes time to get something into a product and to get that product into production. Name recognition is everything, for some time the small starup is the name of the innovation, and that recognition does not just vanish. Other companies have built comparable or beter electric cars by now, but you know who im talking about when i say that electric car company.
Alternateivly copy something a large corporation is doing, or better yet, build on something they are doing.
Also employee owned companies tend not to aggressively expand. And governments need to break up the kind of company that is large enough to destroy all competition. That leads me to another opinion, buying another company should not be allowed in a capitalist economy, because that only ever makes the market less free.
I’m in reality probably center left. I find that I tend to have nuanced views about a variety of things but I probably wouldn’t hard commit to a particular political stripe. I tend to vote Democrat but I often disagree with them on certain things as well. Sometimes I think they are not doing enough on social and environmental issues and sometimes I think they have gone too far on other issues. There are some republican theories I don’t mind but I don’t generally see this current party actually focused on anything I agree with.
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.