TomatoPotato69

Excellent! Fuck the terrorist yanks!

9am Atlantic Time! That's not so bad!

It would be animal abuse at worst. So just make sure it's fast, clean, and humane. ;)

Just peeled, rinsed, tossed in olive oil with an oodle of salt and some paprika, and cooked in the oven.

That still doesn't make it undemocratic. If anything, whipped votes are the undemocratic part. Crossing the floor is a feature of our democracy, not a bug.

That's valid. I suppose I would tend to use the terminology that left and right relate only to capitalism, etc, and would use progressive or conservative to refer to non-economic and things that shouldn't be political, like gender or genocide. Lately I'd just use 'shit-person' instead of conservative given... the obvious I assume. But it's good to know that terminology is changing. We can certainly agree that tankies, nazis, rowling, hateful people, and genocide all suck.

The US has spent a lot of time and effort trying to stamp out left-wing governments around the world. Here's a decent summary of their involvement in South and Central America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America

Fair enough about USSR and China vs Communism, that was a poor example. The point, though, is that social decency doesn't inherently pick sides. Left leaning ideology tends to favour socially progressive viewpoints, because if the goal is to create an equitable society in one form or another, human rights and other social progress tend to also be be values that are important to people with a left-leaning ideology. Some aspects may be more intertwined than others, but the statement that being opposed to genocide is somehow a left wing only viewpoint is absurd. Most people with a left-of-centre viewpoint likely view genocide as bad, but is in no way a viewpoint exclusive held by people left-of-centre. People can be right-of-centre and compassionate, and view genocide as bad, and not be racist. People can hold a variety of different viewpoints, even conflicting viewpoints, at the same time. But being opposed to genocide or harming people is, or at least should be, just be basics of being a decent human and has nothing really to do with political ideology. Perhaps it's 'left' in the context of neoliberalism being the only option and US politics and their severe polarisation as the reference. But in general, it's not really an inherently 'left' viewpoint.

In Canada, many people would consider the Liberals to be right-of-centre, even more so with Carney as PM, and the NDP to be left-of-centre, but yet both can be opposed to genocide. Many Conservatives voters are, also, opposed to genocide despite leaning right in many ways. Being anti-genocide is not, however, a viewpoint commonly held by fascists through history and the present time. But that's generally viewed as extreme right, and in no way centrist or just right-of-centre.

Viewing genocide as bad is not a 'left wing' political view... You could be firmly into capitalism and still believe that genocide is bad. You could be fully into communism and think genocide is a stellar way to advance your goals. Socialism is left, in it's many forms, including things like universal healthcare, education, etc. Communism is extreme left. As long as someone believes that more privatisation or a more open market is the way to solve social issues, they are right of centre regardless of whether they think that slaughtering a group of people bad or not, or think that the environment needs to be protected. 'Left' is the economic way in which one goes solving social issues, not just believing genocide is bad or that climate change is an issue to be addressed.

Use healthcare as an easy example: People of many different political viewpoints can agree that healthcare is important to society as a whole. A left wing approach to this would be to create a universal centrally run healthcare system that treats everyone equitably, accepts that some people will use more benefit than they pay, and others will pay more than they use, but overall society will be healthy and everyone pays less in general as a result and lives in a place where people suffer less and are happier. A right wing approach would be to allow private companies to provide healthcare incentivised by the ability to earn a profit, and let them figure out how to deliver that service, maybe the government steps in to try and regulate different industries, provide tax breaks or investments, or otherwise try and coax them to provide a better service or prevent them from being too greedy.

Just simply believing in a social cause does not make one 'left'. It's all about the implementation of the solution that counts. The Democrats in the US are quite right of centre, and the US has spent generations trying to violently overthrow and prevent social governments from forming and spread their propaganda far and wide that anything left of centre is full blown authoritarian communism.

Lenin and Stalin were very very left. But they were filthy butchers who went on a slaughtering spree and did much more harm than just their ideology. Viewing genocide as bad as just a 'left' wing issue completely dilutes what 'left' is. That's how our political parties keep moving right.

Do they mean getting a taxi to/from the party? So you can get ham-diddly-hammered and get home? That's what one of my companies did

People seem to think that supporting a social justice cause somehow makes them left of centre. It doesn't. The US has spent a lot of time and money trying to stamp out governments with left of centre economic policies for many decades and has framed anything even remotely socialist as full-blown authoritarian communist butcher-dictator, and therefore anything short of full capitalism and privatisation of everything is bad. They over-thew social democracies in Latin America and installed brutal military dictatorships to privatise and sell of the resources. They napalmed Vietnam because something-something commies. The US has no concept of what left-of-centre is because they have bombed, raped, and pillaged pretty much everything that resembles left-of-centre in this world. I even hear people in the US calling themselves 'left of centre' and then finish their sentence hating on socialism - which is a pretty broad spectrum of ideology.

It took ~16 years for Chile to get rid of their US installed military dictatorship when the US decided to ruin their popular social democracy and slaughter people and fuck up countless lives. And much longer to rebuild after Pinochet fell. I wouldn't be suprised if it takes at least 16 years for parts of the US to start crawling out of their current dictatorship (with or without donny). And it sure looks like it's going to be just as brutal if not more. It's just getting started and there is a very long way for them to fall. 2025 is going to look like a very tame year compared to what is coming, I suspect.