aski3252

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634373403/d-c-couple-killed-in-tajikistan-attack-were-biking-around-the-world-together

Right but tourists getting killed because they cycled through regions where ISIS was active does not represent the middle east as a whole.. That's as if tourists were killed in America by a drug cartel and you took that as a representation of all of America.

As for the CRT stuff, I know there are some crazies and overreactions.

Those "crazies" are generally politicians who are trying to use the fear of "CRT" to create laws banning the topic from being discussed at schools.

I think this is actually what some of these “bannings” are; not that you can’t think it or read about it, just that government paid educators are forbidden for presenting it as some kind of truth.

That's how the politicians try to present it as of course. But the problem is that the way they use and classify "CRT", it can mean virtually anything connected to race, which makes such laws dangerous.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2021/09/29/critical-race-theory-bans-are-expanding-to-cover-broad-collection-of-issues/

Lol, most people don't "just trust the government".. But the thing is, simply hoping that government will just disappear will not in fact make it disappear.. And simply voting for the Libertarian party will also not make it disappear either.

What we can somewhat influence though is who has the most control/influence over the government. And I would rather have us, the people, having influence over government than just leaving corporations to do whatever they want with it while we pay their bills..

But we oppress some people. Criminals for one are people I would say are oppressed.

That's exactly right. Crime, punishment vs rehabilitation and the prison industrial complex are big topics on the left. Nowadays, it's popular even for people on the right to criticize the "prison industrial complex", but the left has been criticizing it since at least the 70s. The most radical leftists even argue for the abolishment of prisons and pretty much every leftist advocates at least for prison reform and focusing more on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.

You presented oppression as a bad thing.

Yes, I would say oppression is generally a bad thing. To explain further, I would also say that people shooting people is generally a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that in some special situations, people shooting people is a "necessary evil", for example when there is no other option and you need to defend yourself. I still don't think you shooting someone in self defence is "good", I think it's a situation that sucks for everyone involved, but you had no other choice, it was necessary and the best possible option.

I look at prisons in a similar way. I don't think people should be locked up for non-violent crimes or in cases where they are clearly not a danger to anyone, I don't think people should be tortured in prison as punishment, but I do think that in order to protect the lives (and personal freedom) of other people, we need to sometimes separate dangerous people from society.

Oh so you acknowledge that the "honest question" in this meme is completely nonsensical and should not be taken seriously in any way? Great, we agree then.

I can only speak for myself, not for "the left" overall, because again, a Marxist for example would not say that "oppression is bad", they have a more materialist and anti-moralist view.

I would say that oppression is generally bad because it violates people's autonomy/personal liberty. So why is that bad? Or rather, why is personal liberty/autonomy good?

Well in my view, personal liberty is one of the few things virtually every human wants for themselves, it's one of the few things we can "agree on". Nobody likes to be a slave, nobody likes to not be in control of their lives. There are some people, for example some people who are into S&M, that do like to give up their autonomy and "be a slave", but at the end of the day, they are still the ones who make that decision on their terms.

Even the dictator or king or whatever wants autonomy, at least for themselves. The reason why they don't want autonomy and freedom for others is often because they believe that restricting other's freedom gives them even more personal freedom to do whatever they want to do.

But the thing with personal liberty/autonomy is that from a leftist perspective, it has to be "equally distributed" to people, otherwise it's not really freedom. If you give people not only the freedom to control their own lives, but the "freedom to control other people's lives", we aren't talking about freedom anymore, we are talking about oppression or even tyranny.

To use an extreme example, if there is a country where there is only 1 person with complete autonomy/personal liberty, we wouldn't call that region "free", we would probably call it a tyranny. It means that one person is calling all the shots and does whatever they think is correct without having to consider anyone's opinions.

That person could argue that they are "the most free person ever" because that person has more "freedom" than anyone in a society where freedom is distributed equally. For example, that person could have "the freedom to just have someone executed" randomly in the streets, but again, we wouldn't call that freedom, we would call that oppression or tyranny. So in order to have a free society, everyone has to be equally free, so to speak.

To come back to your question, why is oppression bad?

On a personal level, because I, like pretty much all people, want to be in control of my own life and I don't want my life to be determined by somebody else against my will.

On a more societal level, I would say that oppression is bad because it leads to tensions and conflicts between "oppressor and oppressed", which leads to instability and violence. Because of that, it's bad for everyone, even for the oppressor, because in many many cases, the oppressor will end up either receiving retaliation for his oppression or spend the rest of his life being paranoid about retaliation by the people he oppresses.

I think I am right for one segment of the society, and you are right for another.

Yeah, there are always many many variables and of course there are always exceptions and nuances, but speaking overall, there is a huge difference in how homosexuality is viewed and treated by society overall if you compare the 80s/90s and the 2020s. I don't see how anyone alive during this time can deny that, even when you just look at popular media, you will notice that "gay" or "homo" was a mainstream insult that was universally accepted until quite recently.

Which is another reason to prefer decentralization, IMO: let each area address its own issues, and to have a standard be one of largely tolerance.

Completely agreed. And maybe we should focus on the stuff we agree and the really core important stuff instead of having arguments that are never concluded.

The problem in my view is that most politicians use wedge issues to divide people. For example, they used to scapegoat gay men by claiming they are all pedos who want to rape and groom children and tried to pass/keep anti-gay laws. This basically forces the left to defend against this kind of legislation.

Lol, so you say developing countries don't have the same modern outlook on sex and gender identity? Homosexuality is still illegal in Morocco, so of course they don't support rights for LGBT people in any way.. I wouldn't call that "not being programmed" or "more normal", but I guess that's just me..

Additionally, the word "gender" is quite confusing for most non-english speakers. Traditionally, the word gender is not related to biology or people, but grammar. And as far as I know, in the Moroccan languages (both French and arabic), there are two genders, masculine and feminine.

I think it was far more widespread than you think.

Widespread is relative. Compared to before, it was very much widespread. But overall, it was still not popular or mainstream at all.

But it is also the case that people in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, etc. were all listening to what was being released from the coasts.

Sure, but this was during a time where even within the left or left leaning spaces, homosexuality was seen as a controversial and often negative thing. Even if somebody was sympathetic to some aspects of the "hippie movement", that doesn't automatically mean that they were accepting of homosexuality.

widespread experimentation with marijuana

Yes, experimentation with recreational drugs definitely exploded, but I don't think that just because people tried pot doesn't mean they were all ultra-leftist pro-LGBT activists.

In the days when pre-marital sex was taboo, many couples had at least one powerful incentive to marry.

Yeah it was the norm that pre-marital sex was taboo, that doesn't suprise me at all. But as is often the case, many people still engaged in pre-martial sex, they just did it in secret. And the same was sort of true for the LGBT community because homosexuals and transsexuals have existed before the 1960s, they just existed on the edge of society.

1/3 people saying it is acceptable probably indicates a far greater amount of people thinking it is somehow cool - like how being in a biker gang is cool, or like how being a drugged out disco burnout or hippie was also cool.

But those people were not seen as "cool" by most people. Yes, there was a certain fascination with both the hippies and biker gangs as they were seen as outlaw rebels in a sense, which has some coolness factor, especially in America where the "rooting for the underdog" narrative is baked into the culture. Homosexuals were not seen as cool just as trans-people or non-binary people today are not really seen as cool in the same sense because they don't really fit the rebel image.

Bikers and hippies were opposed by conservatives because they believed them to be revolutionaries who are threatening the system and causing instability and lack of order. Homosexuals and the LGBT community are/were opposed by conservatives because they are seen as degenerate, perverted, unnatural and weak.

I really don’t argue in bad faith for starters.

You as an individual human being maybe don't. But online, that's irrelevant. People don't see you as a human individual, for better or worse, people see you as part of a group/community. And by most people on lemmy, the community on this server is seen as rude and unpleasant.

And not only "the left" places individuals into groups, everyone does that.. You do it in this post when you say "They argue in bad faith, they are rude and generally unpleasant.".

the left and the right operate in two completely different paradigms. That is why communication is next to impossible.

It is possible when people actually try, but in order to reach a point where people want to try to understand the other side, you need a tiny portion of faith that the other side is willing to engage in good faith and make a step towards the other side to signal that they are actually interested in good faith.

One big reason (from the leftist perspective) why many online leftists have completely abandoned any hope to engage in good faith with right wingers is because online right wingers seem to go out of their way to be obnoxious, provocative, unapologetic, uncompromising and disrespectful in every possible way towards "the left" and seem to have the main objective to "trigger the left". And even when they themselves don't engage in this way, they tend to protect and defend those actions. At the same time, they also claim that "the left does not want a good faith argument" or "we just want rational debate" or "we just exercising our free speech".

As a leftie who has tried to engage in good faith with right wingers online in various forums, I have experienced a lot of hypocricy where people will say "this is a free speech zone, all views are welcome", but after a while, the admin would just have some bullshit excuse to ban me for simply voicing my opinion.

But as I mentioned, there are many reasons, it's not just all "the right's fault". Online people of all sides, instead of arguing and discussing with people they disagree with, tend to just kinda argue with themselves by essentially imagining the position of the opponents and then arguing against them.

The obvious problem with that is that due to the lack of interaction and the obvious bias, the view that one side has of the other does not represent reality or at least differs a lot from the view one side has of itself.

As a leftist, I appreciate the good faith effort, but as you probably expect, I don't agree with your interpretation.

So to me, the first issue is that "the left" does not have a universal worldview. You have people on the left who have a very materialist view and generally reject concepts like good and evil, you have idealists who focus on autonomy/personal freedom and you have moralists who have more religious and moralist roots and more connected to the idea of "protecting the weak". The last group is probably the group that comes closest to your interpretation. I personally fit more into the second and first group, but obviously at the end of the day, I can only speak for myself.

I would also make a distinction between liberals and the left. Liberals have adopted leftist talking points where they think it helps them, but they don't really believe in them.

Undeserved suffering is evil. Undeserved suffering is the only evil there is.

Here I already completely disagree. Suffering isn't evil, suffering isn't even bad, suffering is an fundamental part of the human condition, arguably a fundamental part of life itself, it's kinda beyond being strictly good and evil. A human who has never suffered is unimaginable, a world without suffering sounds like a distopia to me.

Deserved suffering is fine, so you can torture Nazis - they deserve it.

99% of leftists are against torturing anyone, not because it causes suffering, but because it violates people's autonomy. Many leftists tolerate violence against fascists/nazis, but they see it as self-defense.

Since undeserved suffering is the ultimate evil and the only evil there is, we must rearrange government and society to eliminate all unwanted suffering.

If you replace "suffering" with "oppression", you get closer to the real picture. So again, this does not apply to all leftists, but many leftists are focused on "oppression" (which is essentially restricting people's autonomy/personal freedom).

Abortion is seen as a heroic act

Abortion is not seen as a heroic act, it's seen as a morally grey/complicated act, which is why most leftists want this complicated choice to be made by the person most directly affected by the moral dilemma instead of having the state forcing it's morality onto people by force..

Even if it is murder they don't care.

Abortion is seen as different from murder because a fetus is not considered to be an independent person. A human fetus is indeed human, it is indeed alive, but a person only becomes a person once it is born and is able to exist as a seperate entity. That's why we celebrate birthday's as the start of a person's life, that's why we have a birth certificate to document a person's life and give them a name. It's impossible for a fetus to be removed from it's mother without dying, which means a fetus cannot posess any form of autonomy, so in function, it is part of the mother's body.

This doesn't mean that abortion is morally clear or unproblematic, but leftists do believe that the state should not make that decision for the mother.

They will deny this, but the rampant nihilism on the left all but proves my point.

Nihilists do exist and they do indeed tend to be lefists. But nihilism doesn't argue that "existance is evil", nihilism rejects labels such as "good, evil, rightous, ..." and in a radical form rejects a "higher purpose/higher meaning" in a religious and/or spirital sense. So no, the left or even leftist nihilists don't believe that existence is evil.

Need a carbon tax to save the planet but it will kill a billion people?

This argument does not seem to be written in good faith. People who support a carbon tax don't do so "to save the planet" and they certainly don't do so to "kill a billion people".. Also, carbon tax is not a leftist idea, it's is supported by a wide part of the population accross the political spectrum. 73 of all Americans support a carbon tax, this includes more than half of Republicans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/ps_20-06-11_climate_featured/

And the idea behind carbon tax is a pretty moderate one, it has nothing to do with "saving the planet", it's about who pays the cost that is generated by emissing carbon. Without a carbon tax, the cost is covered by everyone, irregardless who produced the carbon emissions. This means that even if you don't produce a lot of carbon, you have to cover the cost.

Most people think this is obviously unfair and believe that the cost generated by carbon emissions should be paid proportionally by those who created the carbon emissions and generated the cost in the first place.

Just imagine you are going out to eat with a couple of people. You just take a water and a salad, most just take an average meal and some just take the most expensive meal on the menu. Do you believe it's fair if the bill is split by everyone equally so that everyone pays the same? Most would say no because it means that those who ordered cheap food have to pay more than they ordered and the people who ordered expensive food have to pay less than they ordered.

I'm not saying carbon taxes are the solution for everything or that they could not have negative impacts, especially depending on how it is put into practice, but implying that "people who support carbon taxes" do so because they think people existing is bad and they want to murder everyone does not seem at all like an attempt to make a good faith argument..

I don’t understand why they can’t just chill out and turn off the politics.

When you go to other lemmy servers, most of the posts are not about politics. On this server, every other post is about "how dumb everyone on the left is" or about "how trans people are pedophiles". Of course there will be people who will react to that and of course people will assume that you aren't interested in "civil conversations" when you have that attitude..

If conservatives can navigate reddit and come out alive, I don’t see what the problem is.

Most people just don't want to be in an online space that they see as toxic.. It's not that they will get traumatized or anything, they just aren't particularly interested in a forum that feels like a teenage boy's locker room. That stuff is interesting when you are 14, but after that, it gets old pretty fast.

From what I’ve seen so far, especially on lemmy and some of the leftist psychopaths from beehaw, they want everyone who disagrees with them to just die basically.

It's funny, the only place where I have seen people calling for the execution of people is this server. And then you wonder why most people don't want to have anything to do with it..

You’re not having civil debates with them because they don’t want that in the first place. Their goal is to ‘prove’ that anyone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, is evil It’s really fucking annoying

And it's exactly those kind of blanket statements that make people not want to engage with you..

Nope, I'm still here.

They argue in bad faith, they are rude and generally unpleasant.

I'm sure they say the exact same thing about you. After all, about 80% of the posts on this server are about how "stupid and dumb everyone on the left is" and seem to have the only purpose of "triggering lefties", so most of the "pleasant" lefties don't think it's worthwhile to engage in good faith, which means it's mostly trolls who visit..