As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me.
I used to be liberal, but then they changed what liberal was, now what I am isn't liberal and what is liberal seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you...
- Abe Simpson
Well yes, because liberalism is about "progress" while conservatism is about "traditional values". Liberalism is constantly evolving while conservatism is not. It is more extreme to fight for trans rights than it is to fight for gay rights than it is to fight for women's rights. If you magically transported a liberal from a decade ago to today, they will inherently be more conservative. Obama didn't support gay marriage until 2012. Very few liberal politicians today would be against gay marriage. Your views not changing means your views are becoming more conservative because they are falling behind the "progress" that liberals are always pushing towards.
And also it is worth noting that according to Pew Congressional "Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left"[1]
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polariz...
Or you'll change your opinion. Either way. Situational morality is actually a sign of progress.
What makes you say this?
The worst i can think of is wanting more equal rights for religious groups rather than special treatment of the primary group (in the USA) - which is seen as an attack by much of the right. Likewise i am concerned by the strong emphasis of rural over urban with respect to voting power and representation. Though i have no easy answer here, so i'm pretty unopinionated - just concerned.
I'd be really curious where i and the folks i know and discuss with marginalize other groups; as i want to correct that, if we do. Obviously no one here can answer that with specificity to my beliefs but.. my curiosity exists nonetheless heh.
With my own lack of doctrine classification i am unsure how to view them. So i tend not to take a stance on it, just like i don't with Christianity.
I'm not sure what support you think the left commonly believes in for Islam. Everyone i know is not a fan of most religions, Christianity included. I view self rights far more important, and many religions or denominations directly challenge that.
Do you believe most leftists are campaigning for Islamic support? This has not been my experience.
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-students...
Christianity: notoriously tolerant of minorities, supportive of the equality of women, and gay friendly.
There was a point in time where the Islamic world was a world leader in math, science, and technology. Of course, like with anything, time and money corrupts all things. Oil especially taints everything it touches.
I think you are conflating the left's support for minority groups who are demonized and targeted by society for support of the tenets of their respective religions. After 9/11, Muslims were a significant target of hatred and violence. The left, which again is not a monolithic entity, doesn't support islam anymore than it supports judaism or any other religion, it supports people who happen to follow that religion. It's based around humanist tendencies, which the right often doesn't understand. You can hate aspects of a religion while also being against any dehumanization and hatred against people who follow said religion.
Like the other 2 major Abrahamic religions, Islam has some good and some bad tenets. At least in the US, there are some extremely conservative muslims and some - perhaps shockingly - liberal muslims. Being that they are such a small percentage of the US population, there is a lot of misunderstanding and stereotyping of people who follow Islam.
I quite agree with this statement in the context of what i believe. Which is to say i tend to dislike religions and personally i dislike Islam more than most (based on what i observe), but above all i don't want to target people, Muslim or otherwise, based on their religion.
I think this also supports a sister comment i made where i describe being unsure what my stance is relative to Islam. Observationally it doesn't seem "good" to me, but its people are also target of a lot of hate in this country (USA). It makes it difficult to discuss objective qualities of a religion without it bleeding into racism or bigotry against those who practice said religion.
I'm not trying to give an opinion, just stating what I see as a person who doesn't interact with the online political sphere at all.
[1] https://www.frc.org/antisemitism [2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matters-jewish-p...
Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals have something against the Jews?
Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than right wingers, so yes. Or alternatively you could say "do you honestly believe most right leaving individuals have something against X" for so many topics, X could be black people etc. Right wingers are more likely to be against those things, but it isn't like all of them are evil, similarly there is more Jew hate among left wingers, but it isn't like most of them hate Jews either.
Most Jew hate today has to do with Israel, right wing is mostly pro Istrael, so most Jew hate comes from the left.
I appreciate the discussion nonetheless. I'll definitely be curious to talk to people i know (when politics comes up) to see their thoughts on Jews and Islam (as a different commenter pointed out). I suspect that no one i know will be anti-Jew or radically pro-Islam.
Appreciate the points of discussion/anecdotes. I can't say i agree with them, but they were certainly a surprise. Far from what i expected.
* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
Pretty much all "I'm only against Israel's policies" is shy Antisemitism. You can easily test this by asking them about other countries that have similar (or much harsher) policies as Israel and see whether the "no no, it's not about being Jewish, not at all" person is similarly upset about those and demands Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. 99% aren't and it really is only about the Jews the Antizionism is just a cloak over the Antisemitism because the pure stuff doesn't fly in polite society, but if you pretend that it's not about the Jews then you can go at it.
To be fair i know little on the subject, and don't claim to. The only reason i said "i can understand .." is that i know it's a hot-button topic. Israel is often portrayed in the west as being overly militaristic towards neighboring areas. The United States itself does similar, depending on who you ask.
I judge both quite harshly on this front. I also know very little about world politics. Both in ignorance and on purpose, heh.
Test them by pointing out behavior that they find abhorrent when done by Israel, and see whether they react similarly (by demanding action against them, denying them a right to nationhood etc). If they do: good. If they don't: it's about the Jews, not about the behavior. And from my experience, they almost always don't, and you really need to press them on the issue until they'll halfheartedly agree that yeah, that is also not good what the non-jewish country does. Case in point: the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" tried to sail from Turkey to Gaza to protest Israel. It's like starting a Journey in the Third Reich towards Stalin's Russia to protest the inhumanity of Finnish policies.
I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of "Driving While Black". Israel is "Being A Country While Jewish". Some cops will pull over Black people all day long and claim that the color of their skin has nothing to do with it, it's just about how they drive. But you'll see them letting white drivers do all kinds of stunts and will quickly understand what the deciding factor is. You can do the same with people's opinions on Israel.
I suspect that's true for most people.
And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism?
Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.
Personally, it seems absurd in the extreme to think the lefts ideas concerning Israel have anything to do with antisemitism. Anecdotally, I have never encountered it, and my Jewish friends find this idea absurd as well.
Every BDS-supporter is aware of all the other conflicts, they just don't care because no Jews involved. Hell, they'll happily ally with Erdogan and support his regime.
> Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.
Of course, and pulling over Black drivers is perfectly reasonable. But if you concentrate only on Black drivers, it's not their driving that you have a problem with, that's just the excuse you make.
> While antisemitism in the U.S. is often written about through a “both sides” lens, our evidence — the first of its kind in testing hypotheses through experiments on a large repre- sentative sample — suggests the problem of antisemitism is much more serious on the right than the left. This evidence confirms that the antisemitism that has been on prominent display in white nationalist protests is not merely confined to a tiny group of extremists; antisemitic attitudes appear quite common among young conservatives, and much more so than among older conservatives or among liberals of any age.
* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
So like how Trump said there were fine people among that crowd, the left in Europe says there are fine people among the crowds that goes and harasses and murders Jews. You shouldn't judge individuals for being from a group, but that isn't what is happening here, they are trying to downplay the acts of individuals just because they belong to a specific group.
This covers many countries, and does have multiple years in many of them, but it doesn't distinguish by political views. Just gender, age, and religious affiliation by country.
You know who says that? The same US intelligence agencies that conspired to censor twitter and who said the hunter biden laptop wasn't real. Who actually supports Israel? Consistently the US right and the Republicans.
The Canadian government leaned heavily into this fabrication early in 2022 for the trucker protest. They called it white-supremacist (despite videos of the crowd dancing to Banghra with visibly Sikh truckers - one of the largest minorities in Canadian shipping) and accused the event of being anti semitic because one of the organizers blogged something silly about Jews in banking years before. During this time a leftist government consultant tweeted “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.” and it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.
The are thousands of calls on Twitter for the jews the be pushed into the sea and none of them are from conservatives.
"Far right" has become a term for things the left says but doesn't want to own.
Academics looking at data: https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...
> it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.
Appropriate responses should happen the moment these things come to light.
Yes, I remember that left wing protest where people chanted "Jews will not replace us". Remind me, which president was it that said there were "good people" in that crowd?
His own words: "you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too."
There are many good reasons to dislike Trump but you weaken them by association when you repeat the false accusations and misrepresentations.
"Once you let a nazi in your bar, it becomes a nazi bar."
And does that apply equally to Antifa?
Are you really defending that based on who does it?
Because their motivation is to remove any “undesirable” from their sight, and their definition of “undesirable” is wide and expanding and imminent, at least in the US [0]
In contrast, there has been one single murder in the past 26 years, where a far left activist was charged in the US, although subsequently shot and killed by the police [1].
So, I’m evaluating motivation here.
There’s no such thing as “both sides are bad”. Centrism is a lazy and uninformed view of the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...
No, there's no such thing as "your side is also bad so my side therefore is not".
But both sides can easily be wrong. You don't need to draw false equivalences to condemn two sets of people at once.
So if your image of left is "twitter left" maybe reconsider recalibrating it to "half of hn."
Maybe on economics (I'd say closer to 2/3 left), but on social issues it's overwhelmingly left. What percentage are anti-abortion, for example?
The main split seems to be between old-style liberals who support free speech as a fundamental principle and progressives who believe that speech should often be restricted in order to protect marginalized groups.
Looking at HN, I see a bigger divide on topics such as Cloudflare discontinuing services for Kiwi Farms. I tend to see vigorous discussion that seems civil and then a handful of comments that are "strong" in tone. I really don't see anything as overwhelmingly left in general.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139040227/abortion-midterm-e...
We're really going to pretend the left hasn't been demonizing certain groups and sanctifying others based on inborn traits? Hint: "X privilege" Economic and worker's rights considerations traditionally considered 'left' have, in practice, taken a back-seat.
I don't personally think "punching up is ok" is a valid viewpoint. But even if I did, I don't think white people are "up" or men are "up" in the way that the proponents of punching up consider rich people, or oppressors to be. Skin color isn't oppression. Gender isn't oppression. Oppression is oppression.
Economically, white people and men are clearly advantaged, and money is probably the purest form of power there is.
We can, but present day leftism is doing pretty much the opposite. You can't have race quotas without pushing race. Talking about "white priviledge" is enshrining the idea that your race defines who you are.
I agree we could decide to drop the idea of race. It would be really nice. Humans are always forming out-group hatreds, but it would be very nice if we could not consider another race the out-group. I don't think it's just as simple as just deciding to do away with the idea of race, any more than we could just decide to do away with the idea of money or like, the legitimacy of the court system. Sure, it's a social fiction, but it's self-reinforcing, which means it's hard to coordinate to get rid of.
I know it's common to look at the most unhinged people on Twitter and say all leftists are like that, but I really do think most left leaning people would say that it isn't a good outcome for it to be biased in this way.