Ah yes Tucker Carlson, famous liberal
I assumed the meme referred to all the interviews being done at CPAC right now.
I’m in favor. Expose the rot. Too much of the US citizenry doesn’t understand the threat these people pose. It takes them actually showing their stripes to understand what’s at stake.
I was just imagining him holding Putin over a fire, while Reddit looks on and shouts, “cast him into the flames!”
…while Lemmy.ml chant in the background, “hero! Hero!”, and Truth Social make paper aeroplanes of money and toss them into the general vicinity, and Facebook is scrambling up the mountainside shouting, “I’m going to save him!” “No! I’ll push him in;” and
Nah, I’ve no idea. Just what came to mind in the moment
I don’t understand the memes connection between liberals and fascism.
Maybe like in Sweden, where the liberals went from calling themselves proud of being called the enemies of fascism, saying they will hide refugees if made illegal, to just straight up calling it “liberal politics actually”, and are now collaborating with them to form a government. Crazy how that happens every time.
Liberals have a tendency to tolerate fascists more than is reasonable. They believe in granting fascists basic respect as serious political actors. They treat disagreements with fascists as intellectual debates with decorum and rules.
Joe Biden shouldn’t have gone to the 2020 presidential debates armed with facts and arguments. He should have stepped up to the podium and said “this man is a murderer and deserves to be killed.” It is the result of liberalism that this cannot be said in such a setting.
Yelling at other lefties for not being left enough is a long and proud tradition.
The difference between liberals and the left is the stance on capitalism. Liberals believe they can make capitalism work, leftists insist we must move beyond it. The people obfuscating liberal and leftist are the people who want the discussion of moving past capitalism to stop. Don’t help them.
The difference between liberal and left is not fully capitalism dependant. It has more to do with lateral vs horizontal power structures. Liberal rhetoric tends to focus very much on personal property rights which means it basically is a machine to enable unchecked capitalism because it resists anything that would enable seizure or social checks on acquisition or regulation. It reinforces heirachy by legitimizing and protecting wealth and ensuring it snowballs creating greater inequity over time. Any check on what is considered personal property is anti-liberal to some extent.
There are actually liberal and social attitudes towards capitalism. Anti-trust measures, stock restrictions, union organization, reabsorbing privately held services and property into public trusts and services. These things exist as social counter measures to unchecked capitalism but not an attempt to explicitly remove the basic idea of investment capital existing in some form or another. The focus on decentralization of wealth agrigation and empowering labor still makes it nominally left of center.
So that’s it, is it? I can support all the social progressiveness I like, but as soon as I balk at the prospect of an autocrat hosting a violent revolution and instating communism, I’m the enemy?
Here is the definition I run on: Anyone left of centre is left. Anyone reaching for the guillotines (or more likely just meming about them from a basement) is far left. So far left that they will never see power and see everyone right of them as an enemy.
Thank you for demonstrating my point without the slightest hint of irony.
Nobody but tankies understand that.
In Tolkien stories, all the good guys are liberals. Saruman and his uruk-hai are perhaps the most leftist things there are in those stories. Elves are moderate conservatives with some questionable histories.
In Tolkien stories, all the good guys are liberals. Saruman and his uruk-hai are perhaps the most leftist things there are in those stories.
Welp, that’s simultaneously the most “Enlightened Centrist” thing and the most batshit crazy dumb as a rock thing I’ve read in 2024 so far!
Donald Trump himself has less stupid takes than that!
and the most batshit crazy dumb as a rock thing I’ve read in 2024 so far!
Aww, don’t sell yourself short.
Saruman and his uruk-hai are perhaps the most leftist things there are in those stories.
What? How so?
Because I don’t like leftists, probably :)
No but seriously, I was thinking of the tankie type there, not all leftists. And wrote lazily. Sorry.
Does Hobbiton have any sort of government that I’m forgetting about or otherwise unaware of? I’ve always thought of it as an anarchists paradise
“The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government.’ Families for the most part managed their own affairs. … The Thain was the master of the Shire-moot, and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms, but as a muster and moot were only held in times of emergency, which no longer occurred, the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity.”
Sounds like night-watch libertarianism that had declined to something even more minimal. Which ironically was easily run over by a smooth-talking old man with a broken staff and a pretty small bunch of ruffians. You had one job.
Hobbiton is definitely capitalist or feudalist in some idealised fantasy manner. Samwise is employed as Frodo’s gardener because Bilbo’s dragon treasure made the Bagginses rich.
Tolkien was a wonderful man personally, but he struggled at thinking outside of the paradigms he knew, which were based on catholicism. Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally christian story in a lot of subtle ways that have had negative ramifications on the entire genre of fantasy in the decades since. I will say that Tolkien believed in the selfless, loving christianity that Jesus was talking about, and that’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect. It leads to blindnesses like the fact that the only governments present in Middle Earth are feudalism (hobbits, men, elves), theocracy (orcs), and just literally being one with nature (ents). Jesus may have said to give a poor man the cloak off your back, but by the 20th century those ideas had been filtered through Rome’s horrible point of view and England’s worse one. The possibility space for what a devout christian can conceptualise had been reduced, even when reading the words directly from the bible.
Anyway if you’re curious about the more significant problems with Tolkien’s worldbuilding, the big one is the racial controversy surrounding orcs that arose when people started moving an explicitly christian myth into realist settings, and to a lesser extent there’s the “fallen empire” trope that I just find really annoying in everything except Halo and Warframe (this is because both of those games state that the fallen empire sucked and were destroyed by their own hubris, which is just so juicy. Those games are antifascist as fuck).
Lol, saruman was more or less a theocratic monarchist with highly authoritarian practices like killing any who opposed his will. He literally used magic to dominate the wills of others. If anyone was leftist in that series it was the Hobbits. They were outright Communist with no government. Though there was certainly still a class structure of sorts there. It’s just tough to get a better look at Hobbit social politics. The books tend to just say “then they talked about their family history for 3 more hours” whenever it comes up.
Regardless, the stated intent of the story was to relay his experiences with war. Not with any political system. The forces of sauron and saruman just represented war itself. The feeling of its inevitable March towards you no matter how much you don’t want it and dread it. It’s very much how I’ve been feeling lately.
In Tolkien stories, all the good guys are liberals. Saruman and his uruk-hai are perhaps the most leftist things there are in those stories. Elves are moderate conservatives with some questionable histories.
I hope everyone here appreciates what a special moment this is. This has potential to be the most downvoted comment on Lemmy.
That comment somehow manages to be more divisive than the Palestinian conflict. A truly remarkable sequence of specious assertions that is guaranteed to piss off vast swathes of the population. Almost brings a tear to my eye
It’s a bit sad for Lemmy if 76 downvotes gets you to such a status. But mixing an interpretation of Tolkien with an anti-left message might indeed be one of the best ways to get there.
You might enjoy my other greatest hit: https://suppo.fi/comment/3202858
As a left handed person I don’t know why people hate us so much, what is wrong for using left hand as main?
No but if you tug your meat with your left more than your right by the time you die, believe it or not, straight to hell
…not wrong. Except remember that an idea cannot be genuinely destroyed, since it’s not an actual physical thing. Even if you did somehow manage to destroy it in the present day, nothing prevents people from creatively coming up with it again.
Netanyahu wants to learn this the hard way.
Find another way that doesn’t involve death, destruction and ill-fated attempts at control.
A platitude. The fascists are already trying to kill us, we need to fight back. Both sides are not the same.
Not a platitude, a harsh and brutal reality. Though I do agree that it is time to fight fascism. Just don’t think you can actually destroy it by fighting like this is all some fictional story with a happily-ever-after. Real life doesn’t work that way, only fiction.
Real life needs more difficult and complicated fixes.
On my podcast.
