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Journal by takyon
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.
-- Paul Ehrlich
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2016, @04:02AM
The Donkeys are NOT "Left".
They never have been.
Click my 2008 link and see where they were 8 years ago (Right-Center).
They're also on the Authoritarian side of the horizontal line that separates them from Civil Libertarians (aka not Progressive either).
...and they have continued to drift toward the Plantation Capitalist edge and toward the police state edge since then.
The Donkeys have NEVER been about "the collective ownership of the means of production".
They have always been supporters of Capitalism.
As for European "Leftists", as soon as SYRIZA in Greece took power, they sold out the Working Class, imposing the austerity against which they had campaigned.
Podemos in Spain doesn't appear to be any better.
The "Leftist" mayors in Madrid and Barcelona appear to be pro-austerity as well.
Seattle's "socialist" city council member Kshama Sawant has been widely criticized in Socialist media for her Capitalist rhetoric.
As soon as modern self-professed "Leftists" get into office, they lose their spines.
Wanna see a "Leftist"?
Look up Eugene Debs.
(He ran for president while he was a political prisoner of Woodrow Wilson.)
N.B. Bernie has a portrait of Debs on his office wall but the 2 of them would be far apart if charted according to their politics.
...and Bernie's "joining" the Donkeys was simply a matter of political convenience; he's always been an Independent.
It simply indicates how screwed up USA's electoral system is.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday March 30 2016, @12:27PM
Left and right are just basis vectors that span a range of discourse. A unified theory of right and left that remains fixed across all time and space is kind of a silly thing that people get caught up in when they're particularly enamored of a particular political philosophy and they look to define all political thought in terms of its support for or opposition to that philosophy.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2016, @06:05PM
Your premise assumes that political thinking is
1) One dimensional
2) Binary in nature (no wishy-washy Center positions)
I attribute this limited concept to getting "information" from Lamestream Media, who are
1) Lazy
2) Beholding to their ideologically-driven advertisers|owners
...and, again, "Left" means that someone is anti-Capitalist in nature.
If an individual's philosophy does NOT include the concept of "collective ownership of the means of production", he is on the Right-hand side of the political palate.
...and WRT e.g. the USA's Libertarian Party vs the Socialist Workers Party, the concept of personal liberty (progressiveness) is clearly a separate value that does not track one's economic philosophy and belongs on a separate axis.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]