Repost because @Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com’s original post got removed from !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net for dunking outside the dunk tank
left leaning
only liberals talk like this
EDIT: lol. a landlord
“I think that trans people shouldn’t be genocided. I think it’s safe to say that I’m very left leaning!”
Anyone who openly identifies as “a leftist”, “extremely progressive” or “socialist leaning”, or any other variation of some mealy-mouthed description gets all of my skepticism and disdain, especially when these people always do it to insist upon themselves.
When tell people that I’m a Marxist it’s because it’s relevant to the discussion (e.g. when discussing theory) or that I’m an ML when it’s a matter of stating my political biases or using shorthand to skip over describing that I adhere to dialectical materialism etc., or that I’m a communist if someone accuses me of being a liberal. That sort of thing.
But when people hedge their statements or they feel the need to qualify what they’re about to say by asserting their political identity, I look on it with about the same enthusiasm as a statement that opens with “I’m not racist but…”
At least have the guts to say “I’m an anarchist” or “I’m a communist” or plain old “I’m a liberal” ffs.
It’s also worth noting that the pearl-clutching anti-“tankie” left often spends time in their echo chambers lamenting the fact that the evil MLs have sullied the good name of socialism amongst the unwashed masses (completely whitewashing the ongoing history of McCarthism and liberal indoctrination btw - and in fact I’d argue that this is an example of internalising this), and how they either must abandon those terms or they must redouble their efforts to exclude MLs from their precious definitions.
I mean, to be honest the majority of MLs I’ve come across have a very lukewarm attitude towards identifying as a socialist at the best of times. The idea that MLs need to be forcibly excluded from the label of socialist is largely a non-issue because they already avoid the term in most situations and saying this stuff just serves as in-group reaffirmation and grandiose statements of intent from the Anti-Praxis Aktion gang.
“MLs are the ones who are responsible for anti-communist sentiment in the US! We should all concede ground to liberal indoctrination and use a more palatable term which is more amenable to liberals to describe our political identities with!! Tankies bad!!! Updoots to the left.”
Reposting from the other thread
ConfuzedAZ: “I’m a pretty left leaning person”
Also ConfuzedAZ:
of course theyre a landlord
“im a pretty left leaning person but i also want to leech off peoples wages and drive up the price of housing”
oh, how magnanimous of you, barely making a profit. YOU ARE GETTING SOMEONE ELSE TO PAY FOR YOUR HOUSE. it’s all profit since it all goes to equity in the houses, maintenance, or straight to their pocket. these scumbags will say anything to make themselves feel better when they know they are despicable
a bare minimum profit
YOU GET TO KEEP THE HOUSE MOTHERFUCKER. How the hell is “a free house in 30 years” not a shit load of profit? Dingus doesn’t even do his own maintenance.
Doesn’t even do their own landlording, they pay a property management company to do the villainy for them (pay them out of their tenants’ rent checks, that is)
400k/house in 15 years? Frankly the only way to not be making profit is to actively be paying their tenants for keeping the place clean.
i tied the future of my kids to these houses, have you thought about that huh? every house you take from me you’re taking from the tiny toddler hands that i personally put them in, stop being so mean :(
To give a serious answer, landlords have a material class interest in conducting the unearned expropriation of rents from workers/tenants (and to be honest, literally everyone who isn’t a landlord). Even from a classical liberal perspective (i.e. Adam Smith) landlords have done nothing to merit these rents, they’ve simply partaken in the principal expropriation (that is, the expropriation of what once was and ought to be the provenance of all people, the land and nature more broadly). Landlords do not merit the revenues of their property, since any revenues they obtain are generated from the value of the property itself: all the landlord does is own it (i.e., “passive income”), and that ownership was/is established by a system of violence. In the modern day, landlords rely on the state system of violence to protect their property and force others to fork over rents to use it, which is a change over the original landlord system, where the landlord and their armed flunkies would have to do it themselves. So, an individual landlord can preach liberal platitudes, but when it comes to the fundamental economic relationships, their existence as a class is predicated on the preservation of a fundamental/primordial injustice and the deprivation of their fellow human beings.
In summary:
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
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Ever-increasing land values (largely financial speculation and the creation of housing-limiting regimes).
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Private ownership of housing as a profit-generating asset (commodity) rather than a human right.
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State violence in the form of the police, who function to protect private property interests.
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The direct extraction of working people’s money simply because you have more than they do. You could afford the down payment, they could not. Now they pay for your mortgage and more simply because they are poorer.
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Landlords are traditionally shitty people that think of others, particularly their renters, as trying to pull one over on them.
You can but it’s exceedingly unlikely because your own material interest is tied to these things:
People are more complicated then that, you really think this is an accurate point of view?
Engels was a dirty blue blood who owned a factory but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that ConfusedAZ’s idea of ‘left-leaning’ is more right wing than Boris Johnson.
I think it’s subjective, but this quote seems to align with my perspective:
Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”
Hexchan
HEXCHAN
lmao the pearl-clutching is so hilarious.
but hexchan ain’t helping either
These people so goddamn precious it’s unbelievable
What is hexbear about? I heard its like exploding heads but from my experience yall are just leftists.
Hexbear is a left unity lemmy which existed for three years in isolation and is not accepting transphobia, ableism and other things. This makes us not really liked by (white) libs who feel superior to others while sending their kids into private schools and who like to be ableist.
We also don’t care much for tone policing. Some people don’t get that it matters why you throw milk shakes at people
We are also a book club for Trans Liberation, The Jakarta Method, The Shock Doctrine, How to be an anti racist, Read Settlers, What is to be done or State and Revolution, etc. highly recommend the second one.
We also love our trans comrades 🏳️⚧️
We’re a radically anti bigotry and anti capitalist leftist unity instance, most of the people mad about us are just mad that they got mocked for being right wing or ableist or racist or transphobic by our users - we also got defedded from lemmy.ca for “anti landlord bigotry”
Hitler posting on lemmy.world: “Vell, I consider myself pretty far left, but diese giftigen Tankies von Hexbear”
Yeah, it is funny that people are still falling for the idea that the nazis were socialist 80-90 years later.