91–100 of 117 posts
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The US democratic party wants free welfare, free education for everyone: none of this has been historically supported by "right-wing" movements. So it's a difficult to support your statement.
Bernie Sanders wanted free college, but he doesn't represent the party.
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> "One of the greatest things the tech industry could do to decrease the economic inequality due to location would be to embrace remote work. Imagine what even having 10 developers living in the village could do for its economy. " In rural areas I think you have to start thinking more concretely about what "economy" means. With smaller populations things are much more micro than macro. One huge difference between rur…
> single large whitetail deer Are these widely available in Greece? > Get into things like raising chickens and pigs, and you literally will never have to pay a dime for food again if you don't want. Have you actually done this? I know people who have tiny farms as a hobby, and people who've retired from smallholding because it was uneconomic, and people who live in remote areas of Scotland .. and this resembles none…
Eh, I might be off topic, but to me Greece seems helpless and beyond saving. Here is a personal anecdote. Before finishing university, I got a job offer by a very prestigious international company. I accepted, and decided to register myself as a freelancer so that I pay my respective taxes. But... they would not let me do that. The person at the freelancer (TEVE) office, explained to me, that since I did not finish m…
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I think this would depend on what you consider liberalism. For instance, I think two of the most important components of liberalism are the autonomy of the individual and the consent of the governed. If we wanted to create a truly liberal government we might have institutions where you were given the option of paying an education tax. And if you paid this tax, then you would be able to opt in to public education bene…
> opt in to public education benefits which would be equitably distributed and could approach "free" depending on how many people paid in and the cost of the education institute any given student was pursuing. However, if you chose to opt out of this tax, you would be obligated to pay the costs and fees all on your own And if you opt out of the public education tax, every time you want to see a doctor or cross a brid…
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Liberalism itself isn't right wing at all. Consider that in the USA at the moment liberalism is most concentrated within the democratic party as most neo-liberals have left the party post Trump. Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough are two obvious examples of this shift.
Liberalism and the word liberty in and of itself no longer means anything concrete. Every side claims to defend it but in the midst of it all I'm reminded of the quote that those who give up a lottle liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. All who profess it end up being tyrannical. I've disabused myself of the schpiel that is the concept of liberty. It means nothing today b…
It means a lot to those who can understand the liberalism is the underpinning ideology of the west post enlightenment. All you have to do is understand russia and china's rejections of liberalism to understand that liberalism isn't just some buzz word that pops up randomly on left/right politics.
> I've disabused myself of the schpiel that is the concept of liberty. It means nothing today because is has been abused as a concept.
I mean I can help you understand liberty. Consider before the enlightenment we operated under a system of formal monarchism, where everything within the borders of the state were owned by the king who got his authority from the divine.
A liberal government does the complete opposite, it's authority in leadership comes from the people which are assumed to be independent sovereign agents.
The contrast between these two systems and the role of liberty should be obvious to most. While a formalized system of monarchy doesn't really exist today, countries like China don't fit into the liberal government category either.
> I like to think of it now as simply more state intervention vs less state intervention.
As a reformed Anarcho-Capitalist, I find such a view to be incredibly limiting. What about if the government classified social media companies as utilities?
It would be a large increase in government intervention, but those like Alex Jones and his supporters would see that as a huge gain in liberty while some on the other side would say their liberty is being violated by the existence of people like him on these websites.
What you could say contrasts the two takes is that one is valuing freedom from, and the other freedom to.
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Liberalism itself isn't right wing at all. Consider that in the USA at the moment liberalism is most concentrated within the democratic party as most neo-liberals have left the party post Trump. Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough are two obvious examples of this shift.
Both major parties in the US are right wing though.
At best they are meta-narratives about the potential of man (EG: The left focusing the moldability of humanity, and the right mostly focused the immutability of humanity) and at worst serve as a snapshot of a particular countries two competing power centers.
To apply left/right understanding from one country to another in anything but a meta-narrative level will usually be a fools errand.
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Liberalism itself isn't right wing at all. Consider that in the USA at the moment liberalism is most concentrated within the democratic party as most neo-liberals have left the party post Trump. Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough are two obvious examples of this shift.
I think this would depend on what you consider liberalism. For instance, I think two of the most important components of liberalism are the autonomy of the individual and the consent of the governed. If we wanted to create a truly liberal government we might have institutions where you were given the option of paying an education tax. And if you paid this tax, then you would be able to opt in to public education bene…
I would say these two aspects definitially are hallmarks of liberalism.
Your next steps go down a libertarian or "right" path but if we were to add to our bucket of values some form of egalitarianism, which is quite common amongst those on the "left" or "progressive/socialist" you would end up going down a completely different path of conclusions.
In the end you would still both be operating under the pretense of liberalism, but i'm sure there would be disagreements about who is truly being liberal :P
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Just because the US Democratic party is associated with economic liberalism doesnt mean it isnt right-wing.
I second this. Both Democrat and Republican parties are much too right wing to get elected in the UK. I am aware that it may seem surprising that Obamacare is too right-wing, but compare it to the NHS. Likewise, one of the things which makes no sense to me about American politics are sentences like “liberals want to take away our guns” (sarcastic use of the name?) in response to limited control; in comparison, the UK…
Most people refer to left/right in terms of it being a snapshot between two competing power centers which occur in democracies.
You could try going down the path of common narritives or meta-narritives of the left/right but you usually end up conceptually a lot higher than some like Socialized healthcare.
Hitler's germany had forms of socialized healthcare, does that make his government left-wing? He was a vegan who promoted environmentalism and animal rights, is hitler left wing?
It's kind of silly espicially when you look at a country like america's political history and how the democrats of 200 years ago seem more like the republicans of today.
> Likewise, one of the things which makes no sense to me about American politics are sentences like “liberals want to take away our guns” (sarcastic use of the name?) in response to limited control; in comparison, the UK is so anti-gun even the police don’t usually have any.
They don't want to end up like the UK where you need a license to watch tv, own a knife, stack rocks on the beach or put rubbish in your own van. They look at a city like london where crime has skyrocketed and pensioners are being arrested for defending themselves in their own homes and wonder what on earth is wrong with the brits.
Because despite what a lot of gun control people bang on about, getting rid of guns doesn't get rid of crimes. So who cares if less people are scared by a gunshots, if more people end up being violently attacked with knives? Makes absolutely no sense why anyone would be proud of reducing gun crime while ignoring the overall rise in violent crime.
> One of the other left-right splits we see in American news is on the topic of gay marriage (left-wing pro, right-wing anti). In the UK, gay marriage was legalised by the most right-wing of the major parties.
Gay marriage is another example of being a liberal policy and this kind of proves it. The modern western left will usually be ahead of the curve on this because they appeal heavily to minorities and gays are kind of setup to be the minority compared to hetrosexuals.
In the end though it's a violation of "human rights" and the freedom of the individual under liberalism and the only way you can counter that is to introduce non-liberal arguments such as traditionalism which could then argue that it's important to maintain the monogamous man/female relationship structure.
Maybe via liberalism you could claim that the rights of the child are harmed by the lack of a biological father/mother to raise them but i think that's a bit of a stretch in most cases.
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Liberalism itself isn't right wing at all. Consider that in the USA at the moment liberalism is most concentrated within the democratic party as most neo-liberals have left the party post Trump. Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough are two obvious examples of this shift.
> Liberalism itself isn't right wing at all. Classical liberalism is considered right wing in Europe because most of the the classical liberals are also culturally conservative (against gay marriage ect...) and globalist. Although plenty of socialists are not that open either. It's just a weird mix and really depend on the situation of each countries. The "far right" is also most of the time anti-liberal, and sometim…
If you don't, then you are pretty much by virtue of being illiberal or as you say anti-liberal then you will be considered either far-right or far-left.
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>The leftist agenda has been to portray Greece as a victim of capitalism and/or neoliberalism. This was mostly dispelled by facts, and I rarely see this kind of propaganda in 2018. It was both capitalist governments that created the crisis and capitalist governments that tried to remedy it (no government has moved away from a market economy and privatizations since the late 80ies, including SYRIZA). We Greeks are 100…
> It was a capitalist/neoliberal system that created the crisis You don't seem to realize there is such thing as "personal responsibility". Nobody forced the Greeks to borrow way more money than they could ever hope to repay. The Greek government created its own problem and hoped to get away with it. There's no world where you can make it the fault of someone else.
I never said that. The Greeks voted for such a system, I never said they didn't. But you can't say that this "leftist agenda" as you call it is wrong. It is the system that we had/have (and voted for, sure) that created and failed to solve the problem. Any leftists with this agenda are not wrong.
No one in Greece is trying to shift the blame (except for some fringe conspiracy theorists from the extreme right). That Greeks are looking for someone to blame is a popular EU myth.