this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Just wanted to prove that political diversity ain't dead. Remember, don't downvote for disagreements.

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[–] deadcatbounce@reddthat.com 8 points 2 months ago (6 children)

I don't seem to have a political creed anymore.

I believe in honesty and being honourable.

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[–] 0x01@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (10 children)

The acab movement has caused more harm than it has salved. Furthering the ideas that there are no good cops means that nobody good will become a cop in the future, furthering the issue

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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (12 children)

I'm generally leaning towards progressive or left-wing ideas, but with a few exceptions.

  • While I support the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I believe that DEI initiatives are highly susceptible to exploitation because of the widespread and largely uncritical public support of the concept (or even just the abbreviation) with little regard to the implementation; and by tokenizing ethnicity, gender, and identity, it is at risk of doing what it was meant to prevent.
  • I believe that law enforcement is a deeply flawed system to say the least, but ultimately necessary because the alternatives are lawlessness or ineffectual systems. This is of course colored by my European perspective where guns and driver's licenses aren't handed out like candy.
  • The "tolerance is a social contract" mentality is hurting society. A person who experiences rejection and exclusion from progressive communities for voicing "intolerant" opinions will not be interested in reconciliation, and will inevitably fall in with a more radical group where they experience acceptance and belonging, where they will never be exposed to different ideas and their views will never be challenged. Integration should be sought whenever reasonable.

The last point is especially important to me. I grew up in a fairly conservative environment, and it took me a lot of conscious effort to un-learn my prejudices and learn acceptance. But whenever I get downvoted and shouted down for voicing an opinion that aligns with conservatives, or simply isn't "leftist" enough, it makes me want to distance myself from "leftist" ideology and adds to my disillusionment.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The first point is a fairly common opinion among communists, who understand "DEI" to be a liberal cooption of liberationist language and thought that tokenizes identities and reworks the concepts in favor of exploiters (and was doomed to be shed the moment it was less profitable for exploiters).

It may be beneficial to consider the second point with some nuance that is often neglected in order to agitate. Again with communists, you will find many that hate their country's cops but acknowledge the necessity in a post-revolutionary framework, either in their own visions for their own revolution or in defending the actions taken by their comrades that rapidly discover the need for some form of organized enforcement. One way to think about this is that the police are an arm of the state, and who that state serves via its structures and nature changes how they operate. In OECD countries, cops primarily serve capital. They protect profits based on shop owner complaints, shut down capital-inconvenient demonstrations, etc, and spend little time helping average people. In many capitalist countries, cops are underpaid and openly corrupt, so they do the same things while being more obvious bribes. In countries run by socialists, cops of course still do many cop things, but you will find them spending more of their time on other tasks, there are fewer per capita, and the job of being a cop in capitalist counties has been split into many different jobs that don't involve having a gun or otherwise carrying out the worst actions taken by cops. So, in short, it is entirely coherent to hate your local cops as an arm of capital that will beat you for protesting while not condemning the mere existence of cops in other countries while also understanding that we want to create a society free of them.

For the third point, it really depends on what you mean by accepting. Socialists need to educate people where they are, warts and all, but you also cannot be taillist and morph your work into accepting reactionary positions. That defeats the entire point of rejecting reactionary positions. Patience in explaining is valuable, tacit agreement with racism/xenophobia/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/etc is counterproductive. In addition, getting dunked on can and does create results. Despite growing up conservative and getting dunked on by those to your left, you now think of yourself as non-conservative. Are you sure none of those dunks ever led you to question your positions?

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[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Humans aren’t worth it.

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[–] Lauchs@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I think on the Left we have a "virtuous" cycle/feedback loop that results in increasingly outlandish positions.

Essentially, for most people there's a serotonin feedback when people upvote, applaud, reteeet etc. People, responding to incentives like anyone else shift their online discourse to match.

Similarly, even beyond the positive feedback, on thr Left no one wants to be a white cis male contradicting the feelings, emotions or arguments of a POC or LGBTQ+ person.

The Right doesn't really have this problem as the Far right opinions are generally understood to be reprehensible to most people so those movements have evolved to work on dog whistles etc.

It's a structural issue but one that puts us out of touch with the mainstream (consider defund the police, transgender athletes or immigration until we were getting murdered in the polls and it was too late to do anything.)

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[–] random@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I'm anarchist left, but I do think every human should have the right to defend themself and thereforce should be able to bear arms

I'm not american if anyone's gonna ask

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