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You only ever hear the left talking about dog whistles because it is primarily people on the left who say things they don't actually mean. Socialists like to hide references to destructive & parasitic ideas in flowery language so that they will gain both the support of the uninformed & the support of those who already understand the references. But then they project that same sort of dishonesty & deception onto their opponents & claim that rightwing dog whistles are everywhere. Which as far as I can tell is largely untrue, but it persists because it helps them to innoculate their supporters against hearing anything that the opposition has to say.

There are people on the right with awareness that leftists have this paranoia about the language used and they will troll them by coming up with meaningless slogans specifically to elicit hysterical reactions. "It's okay to be white" & rumors about the OK hand symbol were consciously created to this end.

Some small subsection of people who identify themselves as "libertarians," the subset that is far too caught up in seeking approval from the rest of the political system, has tried to use halfway deceptive leftist tactics to trick some of the left into supporting libertarian ideas, but these are never the things attacked by the left. And the reality of the matter is that it really only works in one direction. The effort required to understand & apply the sort of ideas needed to solve problems is always greater than the effort required to create the problems, so you really can't trick people into supporting anything but destruction.

But everyone who believes a politician or political party is going to save them, no matter which side of the isle, is caught up in the same religious cult where the govt is their god or their imaginary paternal figure. It's not even all that unusual to hear people on either side refer to govt as a needed parent. It seems odd to me that grown ass adults would openly admit to such an infantile way of thinking.

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utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 1y ago

"life saving gender affirming care"

frozear 1y ago

Holy fuck you've been doing peyote. It's like I'm reading some G. W. Bush fan fiction. What exact references are you speaking of?

Jeff Swann 1y ago

"Universal" healthcare, UBI, "fair share," gender equality, gender affirming care, "equal" pay, "green" anything, build back better... All of these things are blatant lies that no policy maker actually believes is true. The fact that people lose their minds & issue odd denials & attempt to cancel anyone who calls these things what they are is basically all the evidence needed to see that they are lying & most of them know it. They are after power & they will say anything to get it. They are using the tactics of socialists repackaged under the guise of social justice & social equality instead of economics, since the economic impact of socialism has closed that door.

Still they talk about "redistribution" as though things were distributed rather than created & earned in the first place. Most know they are talking about theft & they are counting on the fact that people tend to feel sorry for those who don't have as much to keep people from calling it what it is.

The Bushes & the McCains of the world aren't much different, they just don't use as much leftspeak to sell their power hungry policies.

frozear 1y ago

Well not all of us on the left have gone insane. The previous iteration of left isn't what we see today. We used to be unequivocally the side against war and on the side of free speech. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi talked about this recently on Glenn's Rumble page.

It's funny how even the right is anti-corporate now. I remember when the right saw no distinction between the corporation and the neighborhood entrepreneur. The right is appropriating anti corporatism just like it's appropriating Anarchism. I guess this is what success looks like.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

A lot of politically connected corporations have stopped producing goods & services that people want & are clearly just doing the bidding of the govt. Facebook and others are paid & staffed by the govt, so they serve you the product up to their biggest customer, the govt. JP Morgan is running & making money from the govt EBT program. And the govt uses many major corporations as a means to enforce tax collection on a huge portion of the working public via withholding. Businesses, no matter how big, are not naturally the enemy of anyone in a free society. But at some point govts get big enough, & powerful enough, that they determine which businesses are allowed to exist, & then the inverted morality of govt infects basically every organization they allow to survive.

The fact that Glenn can't get a hearing from anyone except people on the right now, he was kicked out by leftists at his own publication, & has a show on a video platform that is considered a place for rightwing conspiracies is pretty good evidence that the left isn't what it used to be. But this is a decent indication of the process that Ayn Rand describes in Atlas, "the murderer wins over the pickpocket." When you have an ideology of half principles & half loot, half rationality & half greed, those who are more greedy & less restrianed by any sort of rational ethics will eventually take it from you. The right is mostly moving in the same direction, it's just a few decades behind the left. Trump is just a 90s democrat.

There are more philisophical libertarians & ancaps in the world today than ever before, which is good news, & we have more wealth and more tools to bring about positive changes than ever before. But it would be better if the people that the new left has left behind would let go of their remaining greedy socialist leanings & support strict property rights so that we can all trade & get along like civilized human beings 😉

frozear 1y ago

I just think the terms "left" and "right" are too broad. More specific names for groups is needed. I'm on the left, I am certainly not for appropriating property from others and I certainly don't give a shit about this Gen Z gender fluid shit.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

So what do you think it means to be on the left?

Here is how I see it:

The left/right divide is between collectivists & individualists.

Collectivists (the left end of the spectrum) believe rights come from the collective or from what the group decides or allows. So they prioritize the needs of "the collective" or "the greater good" over individual rights, which ultimately leads to justifications for all sorts of theft & destruction of individuals in order to maintain the collective which is actually some sort of imaginary abstraction.

Individualists (the right end of the spectrum) believe that all rights come from the existence of the individual (via self ownership), and are willing to dissolve any group or abstraction when it becomes destructive to individual needs. In other words, all individuals should be free to exit or refuse participation in any group. And groups should only exist to the degree that all parties benefit. Mutual trade like relationships.

Socialism is built on the idea that the capable owe some inherit debt to the incapable as a result of being more capable. "From each according to ability, to each according to need," right? That doesn't sound like trade, it sounds like an effort to enslave anyone with ability into service of the needy using guilt or force or whatever means the group decides is necessary.

One is built on delusions & the other rooted in reality. Groups are abstractions, they aren't real. Groups don't think, they don't decide, & they don't have needs. Individual people do those things.

frozear 1y ago

Can we leave the boomer state of mind behind in 2024 please? Left-right is not collectivist vs individualist despite what the cold war MSM tells you.

Left/right is oriented toward hierarchy and class.

Rightists believe in pecking order through meritocracy, success and innovation.

Leftists believe in egalitarianism through fairness where nobody gets power over another because of an underserved station in life through hereditary means. (or something like that)

This means the American Revolution was a leftist movement IN IT'S TIME (<------emphasis) because they were fighting the hierarchy of the colonial/feudal system.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

If one person has earned more money than another person via greater effort or greater knowledge, or a greater effectiveness when applying either, does that give them power over the person who has earned or achieved less?

What constitutes a class or pecking order or heirarchy in your mind?

frozear 1y ago

The left fighting hard for equal rights between man and woman is one example of removing a pecking order.

Another example is the left fighting hard for equal rights between blacks and whites.

The left generally dislikes the statist military more than the right. The military is very hierarchical which is less appealing to a leftist.

Do you want more examples of why the left dislikes hierarchy? Jonathan Haidt covers this well in his book "The Righteous Mind".

Jeff Swann 1y ago

You really didn't answer my question, but I think the people today who want to believe they are fighting for equality between men & women, & between races, are just cowardly moral hysterics who emerge only after a battle has long been won. It became safe to say that races or sexes were equal & so they now strive to gain some crumb of social status by "fighting" for a cause where there is no enemy. But their lack of an enemy is driving them to create enemies. And in the process they are trying to erase the idea that men & women are distinct & separate beings with fundamentally different characteristics. It is some very erroneous idea of "equality" at the root of the idea that women can BE men or vice versa, is it not? Seems that something similar is also at the root of fat acceptance & "healthy at any size" which is also a denial of reality.

It all seems to stem from a desire to flatten a social heirarchy that cannot be flattened. They want to disconnect certain forms of recognition or respect or admiration from the reality that produces those forms of recognition. Whether it's via outright theft of earnings or some sort of effort to celebrate people for their insanity or their vices as a means of balancing social capital, it's all completely disconnected from reality. And identity politics IS collectivism, where group affiliations & the elevation of "marginalized people" is far more important than any sort of respect for individual rights. Steal everything from all the rich white males or cis gendered people to save the trans black women or whatever.

It's still the same "boomer collectivism" at the root, just twisted into a new form & rebranded. Abstract groups & group consensus are still more important than individual rights.

frozear 1y ago

Agreed that imagined enemies are no good for anyone. That battle has already been won in north america as far as I'm concerned. Maybe the big tech overlords are amplifying it, I dunno.

There will always be hierarchy, nobody is denying that. However it shouldn't span multiple generations and regions. A human being's greatness should come entirely from their actions in their lifetime and constrained to their region. If someone invents something that improves humanity then let him profit. Upon his death the descendants shouldn't benefit from intellectual property, it should be a gift to humanity.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

IP shouldn't exist at all, ideas are not rivalrous & person A should not be able to dictate what person B can do with their own physical property just because person A publically filed dibs on a certain pattern of arrangment first. Without active govt enforcement there would be no real IP anyway. But wealth earned belongs to the person who earned it & they are free to leave it to whoever they please, because it is theirs to give away. It would require active & violent efforts to seize & redistribute things from heirs.

IP is one of the things I think Ayn Rand got wrong. She also contradicts herself when it comes to advocating non-aggression while also supporting the idea of a night watchman state. Without taxation there is nothing to distinguish a govt from any other voluntarily supported service or charity that must compete for customers.

a source familiar with the matter 1y ago

Do you think fraud should be a cause of action without breach of contract? For example I sell you a branded item and you discover it's a knockoff. Is that fraud, and if so should you have legal remedy?

Jeff Swann 1y ago

Yes, fraud & lies, particularly those resulting in physical or material harm should absolutely be grounds for restitution.

IP should exist to whatever degree that clear identification via branding or trademarks is necessary to keep people honest.

Organizations like "Komen for the Cure" who go around suing other charitable orgs for using different colored ribbons & "for the cure" in their own slogans is kind of ridiculous though.

The person donating or purchasing the item should be the one to seek restitution because producers charging different prices are not stealing anything from their competition, they are only harming or misleading customers. No producer is guarateed future sales so nothing has been stolen when a copycat enters the market. If the customer believed they were buying the genuine item maybe the restitution should be that the fraudulent company be required to purchase the real item from the original company.

a source familiar with the matter 1y ago

Do you have a property right to the truth? In what way does my selling you a belt with the Gucci logo manufactured by myself rather than by Gucci violate your rights?

I realize if we eliminate fraud laws then any transaction beyond trifles will likely involve explicit contracts and many would prefer to have law rather than contractual arrangements for every little thing (although we currently seem to have contracts for every little thing and most people agree without reading them)

Jeff Swann 1y ago

A trade is basically a contract with a receipt as proof & we generally treat them as refundable in the short term based on the idea that the buyer's expectations must be met. I suspect we will eventually get some sort of 2 party escrow system for 2nd layer retail payments that will eliminate most fraud problems before the txns are even complete.

IMO the contracts today that no one reads are more a product of a fiat legal system where laws are designed to confuse & tax & complicate transactions rather than facilitate trade & clarify things.

frozear 1y ago

Maybe entrepreneurialism without the state is egalitarian enough. Problems arise when rich people start forming governments and making rules for the poors, it amplifies their economic power. Maybe libertarian/authoritarian thought is more relevant. Maybe left/right thought is irrelevant and outdated and will die with the boomers.

Anarchism was once the boogeyman to the powerful before the Bolsheviks. It was so much a threat that they actually changed it's meaning to a synonym of chaos.

SpacemanSpiff 1y ago

The right plays the language game too. Patriot Act. No Child Left Behind. War on Drugs. Axis of Evil. When the game is to see who can promise the most impossible things in order to get their hands on the newly stolen money first, sociopathy consumes every ideology. Maybe there's a difference of degree or timing, but really that just means you're the sucker in a rigged game.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

Sure, all politicians do, I don't think there is a political solution to our problems, but the right's base had Ron Paul as the CPAC straw poll winner like 5 times in a row until the establishment kicked him out. The Trump supporters are certainly of a lesser quality than the Paulites, but they still believe trump to be an outsider that will "drain the swamp" & stop the wars, & reduce the size of govt.

The Left's base now is completely unhinged. They believe men can be women & vice versa. They believe there are hundreds of genders. This lack of basic attachment to reality allows them to believe that basically anything is possible with respect to policy so they want everything. And they think anyone who won't give it to them is just evil. It is to the point that all sane (non post modern social marxism) leftwingers can only get a hearing from people on the right.