computational linguist more like bomputational bimgis

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Cake day: April 2nd, 2024

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  • Well for the most part if we want to have a less context-dependent measure, with some caveats – “left” is advocates of a socialist (or communist if you wish to separate them) economic system and social equality, and “right” is advocates of a capitalist or fascist economic system and social hierarchy. Around the center would be where social democrats/capitalists who want strong social safety are, or in other words people who want a mixed-economy/regulated capitalism and are for the most part socially progressive.

    Also it’s hard to tell what you mean by “pure libs” but in most of the world that implies extremely free-market capitalist and pro-discrimination under the guise of “free speech” – very to the right. They’re usually called “libertarians” or “ancaps” in the US.

    If by “pure lib” you mean a principled American “liberal” then there’s not really much to differentiate that from a social democrat – in practice America’s liberal politicians are either social democrats, or corrupt politicians who suck up to corporate money and stand in the way of social democrats – the latter definitely not being centrists. Same goes for “social liberals”.

    Either way there is no chance that democratic socialists are as extremist as national conservatives. Democratic socialists are barely left of social democrats, so much so that social democrats label themselves democratic socialists all the time. The ideology is dependent upon reforming a fundamentally capitalistic system in an attempt to achieve socialism, while more lefty ideologies are focused on forcing the ruling/regressive capitalist class to comply (and some just outright skip to purging all the aristocracy who are anti-worker).

    An accurate-ish description may be “socialist” and “syndicalist” vaguely can be anywhere on the left, so 5.5 to 10; “communist” and similar adjectives like “ararcho-communist” encompass 9 to 10; “anarchist” contains ideologies between center and fully left, so 5 to 10 (although most anarchist ideology is very far to the left, a lot of them are communists); “democratic socialist” is 5.5 to 7; “social democrat” is 4.5 to 5.5; the American “left” is mostly anywhere between 4 and 6.5 nowadays, although a decade ago it’d be more like 3 to 4.5, with actual social democrats being considered fringe or “extremists”. US “conservativism” (or “conservatism”, pick your poison on the spelling) is pretty much entirely “sounds kinda like fascism” to “fascism” at this point, so 1.5 to 2.5, with some politicians in the faction maybe squeaking it out to 3 or 3.5. Full-blown Nazis are 1. Libertarians/classical liberals are harder to classify in this sort of system, as in practice they’re usually as right-wing and reggressive as American conservatives, but their ideology is theoretically supposed to be more like a 3.5. Ancaps are just straight up 1 to 2.5 though, a complete lack of law applying to corporations & companies in general, being anti-government funding except when it’s military or police (except some of the farthest right of them believe even those should be completely private). They’re on par with fascist in terms of the scale from left to right.

    Assuming decimals are out of the question, let’s just truncate everything higher than 5 and round up everything lower than 5.

    Generally, the American public (or rather, the white majority) hovers at 3 to 4, with younger people being more like 4 to 7.

    What’s fucked is most people think of prominent historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela as at a similar position in a political spectrum as American liberals, when in reality they were literally full-blown revolutionary socialists/marxists and belonged to communist organizations. And figures like Gandhi and Orwell were openly reformist socialists. I mean it’s intentional rightwashing by the government to get rid of any and all semblance of left ideology from now-near-legendary people, and it’s not surprising at all, but it’s still fucked. This is the framework of thinking Americans have when they try to categorize ideologies on a left-to-right spectrum; the most leftist historical figures they know that aren’t Stalin or Mao or something are all rightwashed into oblivion, portrayed to be liberal in the American sense, which tricks people into believing the farthest left you can go before you cross the centrist line is Bill Clinton or something.

    If we take “left or right” to “how far one acts to accelarate towards progressivism or regressivism”, though, then I could see your proposed comparison working decently, with the caveat being that democratic socialists wouldn’t be anywhere near communists in that regard either.



  • sparkle@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlcan we be all rich together?
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    6 months ago

    I somehow don’t think we will, considering the original commenter is seemingly pretending that they didn’t see the comment. I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard to believe that they’re actually telling the truth about any part of what they said considering they apparently think Trump is the best candidate we have. American centrist and right wing policies are pretty anti-poor.

    He uses “left” to refer to Democrats in his comments so I just assumed he meant it here too.

    My only guess is that they mean “a for-profit church” when they say “a nonprofit that feeds the poor and temporarily under resourced”. But I dunno, maybe they’re telling the truth.






  • sparkle@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlcouldn't be me
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    6 months ago

    That’s one difficult thing, it can be pretty hard to tell from the outside whether it’s the product of grooming or not. The same goes for a lot of very legal types of relationships though, so I don’t think the possibility of it happening is a reason to completely criminalize it. The difference compared to the other things listed (children and animals) is those things can’t consent, it’s an impossibility.

    I think enforcing some arbitrary age gap maximum for siblings though would make sense – incest between parents and children should be illegal full stop imo, and it’s hard to believe that any relationships between siblings who are 10 years apart isn’t from grooming.

    That being said, I’m not sure that with our current shitty justice, law, and health system (in the US) that it’s worth it to start giving equality to those types of relationships considering we just don’t have the infrastructure or society to effectively prevent the legality being used to facilitate grooming. Society is too corrupt to prevent or bring justice for abuse at the scale needed. But people made similar arguments for incest being illegal as for interracial relationships being illegal so maybe I’m wrong.


  • sparkle@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlCapitalism and fascism
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    6 months ago

    Fascism in the most vague sense that you can get while still being accurate is enforcement of a hierarchy, practically no social mobility, based on traits like ethnicity, sex, wealth, etc. supposed to be the “natural order” of society; often involving some sort of mythological/religious/idealized “past” or predecessor society/civilization which was then upended by some sort of evil group(s) (the targetted groups/scapegoats), which stole from us and which are an evil that need to be stopped. This, of course, is slightly different from how Mussolini’s fascism was originally visualized – which was a corporatist nationalist dictatorship about “might”/the strong coming out on top (translated into militarism) justified by religion/mythology (in fascist Italy’s case about being the successor to the great ancient Rome and seeing through to a greater Roman Empire) – but it’s how the world has become to understand the concept of fascism as time went on.

    This is the reason many see capitalism as sort of “diet fascism” – it’s entirely about a hierarchy based around socioeconomic class/groups, with highly restricted social mobility (although not completely closed off as fascism’s is), and it’s seen that your place in the hierarchy in a hypothetically purely capitalistic system is the natural order of things – your place in the hierarchy is supposedly based on how hard you work, rich people are rich because they’ve simply worked smarter and harder than the people under them, and anyone can go up the hierarchy if they simply just are a better person. Of course, in reality we know this doesn’t work and among other things generational wealth & systematic roadblocks created by the wealthy play a major factor in this hierarchy, but I digress. The reason classical liberalism / free market capitalism hates class equality, hates a system like socialism which calls for abolishing unjust hierarchies, is because it sees the abolition of the socioeconomic/class-based hierarchy as going against the natural order and forcibly placing people in the “wrong” places in the hierarchy (all on the same level) when some people deserve to be below others because they’re lazy, illegal immigrants, “criminals”, etc. In essence, they see equality not as equality, but as an “upside-down” hierarchy where the former upper class is forced below the formerly marginalized groups; to a more privileged person, equality feels like oppression. Capitalism needs an underclass to function, in a capitalistic system people with certain traits always have an unequal distribution throughout the hierarchy (scapegoated/marginalized groups significantly tending to pool at the bottom with only a few “token” examples truly traversing upwards, and people closer to the top of the pyramid being less and less prone to falling down the hierarchy). It sounds a lot like fascism, because fascism and capitalism are ideologies/systems with loosely equivalent structures but capitalism being far less pronounced.

    Additionaly, classical liberalism & moreso conservative capitalism are centered around reggressing to a supposed “golden age” of the past where things were better before “they” ruined it (whoever “they” is and what specifically “they” did is vague and changes from belief to belief but usually includes taxation/redistribution of wealth/power away from the people at the top of the hierarchy, or some shift in the hierarchy). It’s like a much less pronounced form of the mythologized predecessor civilization/society of fascism, instead of hundreds or thousands of years ago it’s more like 30-40 years ago.

    Fascism in the way we currently understand it doesn’t even strictly require dictatorial/autocratic rule, it can be enforced in a technically “democratic” system as long as certain groups are excluded from the democratic process. Of course, the line between democracy, broader oligarchy, narrower oligarchy, and autocracy becomes blurrier the more of the population you exclude, since democracy is more of a spectrum than anything, but generally there’s a lot of possible fascist systems where people would still consider it democratic enough. Your perspective is pretty deeply tied to which group you belong to as well – the average German thought Nazi Germany was a democracy even when Poland was invaded and throughout much of the war, but obviously the Roma and Jewish populace being genocided would definitely not agree. Capitalism does this exclusion to a large extent too – just usually not in the form of outright completely banning a group from participating – and the upper classes have signficantly more say in the democratic process, to the point where the upper classes can choose to completely eliminate options they collectively dislike enough from the equation regardless of the consent of the lower classes.

    Overall while fascism and capitalism aren’t a complete overlap, fascism is for the most part a progression of capitalism (or, as more and more people see it, capitalism is a derivation of fascism and/or feudalism where we keep trying to patch up the flaws using a few socialist/progressive/democratic qualities) and pretty much requires a capitalist (or capitalist-adjacent) system to exist. Fascism can’t use, say, a socialist system because socialism inherently requires working towards the abolition of the power structures/hierarchies which fascism is based around. Of course, in fascist systems the supposed “superior” class often has power redistributed to them in the form of e.g. social welfare benefits and infrastructure investments, which isn’t straight up classical liberalism obviously, but that doesn’t necessarily violate capitalism/the capitalist power structures as a whole, it’s just using a different form of capitalism in order to keep the currently-not-scapegoated but also-not-highest castes content and thinking that things aren’t so bad.

    If you have any questions about this or can’t see the reasoning of certain parts, I’m sure I (or someone else) will be happy to answer it for you.