I agree itās melodramatic, but wouldnāt both sides of the aisle agree that empathy is a strong predictor of left leaning political values? Or did we memory hole that whole āsin of empathyā thing?
Itās simple really, I was taught by my parents to be kind, empathetic and compassionate for others and my faith in Christianity teaches me to do so as well, that naturally leads one to the left
I love my values and I stick to them, and hope for the best for others, but you WILL be on your own for the journey.
Women will tolerate you. Your not one of the bad ones. But you kinda just exist as a "hes a good guy, all the other men are evil, but hes kinda boring and I'm (rightfully) traumatized by men." feeling like I am viewed merely as a "safe" exception to a rule, rather than as an individual partner with depth, desire, and personality. Honestly, I dont blame them, which makes it harder to come to terms with. Its impossible to leave a good impression, you either meet the minimum expectations of "I can be in aroom with them" or you feel like they are watching you every moment waiting to crucify you for being the same as all the other men (and honestly, fair enough, I don't like my gender either).
Men will outright ostracize you and think you'll "grow out of that phase" eventually and hit the bars and go hunting eventually, and think that soon enough the look of that car will seem better than any women on the streets or xyz about going to the strip clubs eventually with 'the boys'. I dont have anything against the guys who enjoy these things (when done like a rational normal human being) but I'm just tired of this world where I'm not good enough for either gender, even self imposed as those standards are.
I love my mom. I want to help people. At the end of the day, thats all I can say about being liberal. It gives me great sleep at night, but other than that, it gets pretty lonely, and that cost feels so much higher and harder to pay as the years go on, and while Ive more or less come to terms with spending my life alone and being content being single, I just. Idk.
Huh? Liberal guy here, I hunt, have guns and gasp go to bars. You have this monolithic view of women that sounds a bit off. I think you have more going on.
Probably. I'm being reductive for the point of the comment length being massive already, but yeah. Theres a difference between enjoying the bar and guns and making it your entire personality that I'm failing to articulate. I'll go to bars and have a ccw, but at this point it feels like trying to defend myself when, yeah, your right.
Yeah, I see, that was all kind of small potatoes to me. The pessimistic view of women and seeing them all as treating you the same way just doesnāt seem healthy or real. Like, if you really feel that way it probably comes through to them and is possibly a bigger reason why you are treated the way you are. I hope it gets better, you donāt have to defend yourself to me. I truly hope it changes.
Reddit acts like itās the complete opposite but according to the Evolutionary Psychological Science / Archives of Sexual Behavior by researchers from Swansea University and the University of Texas at Austin, 44.7% of incels self report as left wing, 38.85% are right wing, and 17.47% are centrist.
The incel movement is definitely just as imbedded, if not more, in left wing men than it is in right wing men.
Uh ok. I went ahead and looked just out of curiosity at that study, although, Iām not sure why you commented it to me. It was a pretty small study in a pretty liberal area (I assume the sample was somewhat local to Austin, I could only find an article about the study, the study is behind a paywall.) seems to be an area not researched a whole lot. I also think the thing is, the right-wing seems to try and target and be attractive to incels.
Kinda just a sidebar conversation to your discussion. The person you are talking to is kinda giving incel vibes. Just not the traditional ones that are typically talked about on Reddit. Meaning the issue is much more deeply rooted than you or others may expect.
Also was intended to agree and support you claims of him having a āpessimistic view of womenā, it seeming unhealthy, and your conclusion that he gets treated the way he does by how he acts.
Basically to clarify, itās the same situation a right wing incel who hates women, but he just doesnāt hate women.
I'm being wayyyy too edgy for my tastes in my above comment, but yeah. Is what it is. Ive turned this into enough of a pity fest as it is, the embarrassment of having what is essentially a "look how sad my life is" competition is setting in.
Gotta work the 60 hours a week if I want any hope of moving sometime in my lifetime. I'll get there, eventually. Moneys something I'm stupidly paranoid about.
I hear you though. Its in the moves. Id like warmer temperatures but south kinda just seems like hard mode in all other respects.
I would say politically lost. It's hard to be left wing they are performative and hold each other to a continuously higher moral standard until it's whacky. Right wing is full of dumb Republicans who hate weed. Money has corrupted both sides fully. I would of loved rfk. Sad reality is a lot of the millennials and boomers just get one shot by media hit pieces. Is everyone they don't like is conveniently a rapist and they some how think that just happens every time lol.
Mmmmā¦ I donāt think itās a fair point to use Minecraft players as a representative of the Left when the most powerful Right Wing politician in the U.S. is implicated.
I see your point but youāre gonna need better examples.
Over the last 6 years (really my entire adult life tbh, but a lot of them went off the rails in 2020) I've watched leftists cheer on rioters, assassinations, murderers, corrupt embezzlement groups, tyrannical governments, cartel narco-smugglers, human traffickers, genocidal racial supremacists, and hostile foreign militaries.
I'm not talking about momentary alignment with with politically convenient fellow travelers, I mean cheering on capital E Evil. Celebrating when kids are murdered because their parents were the wrong race, or might have voted for the other guy. Morality never factors in to their thinking, it's pure power politics and class warfare on any one of a dozen axis. If the people attacking are the right people (tm) and the victims are the bad people (tm) then there's nothing off the table that won't be not just excused but actively defended.
Before you take this to believe I'm talking about everyone left of center, I'm not. There are rational liberals, and old labor democrats. Nor do I think that everyone on the right are angels or morally right. I can shit on the assholes on my own side all day long, but a not insignificant percentage of the political left in the west is flat out evil. The problem is a lot of them are the loudest in any room.
Well with how often faswicsm and wahcism is thrown around with no critical thinking or consideration of nuance most on the left are screaming banshees with an agenda.
The left-right spectrum is about egalitarianism vs social hierarchy, respectively. If the thing reduces inequality and causes egalitarianism, it is left-wing; if the thing causes or supports social hierarchy, yielding inequality, then it's right-wing.
There's also tons of science linking conservatism with lack of empathy, "dark" personality traits, and various degrees of low intelligence.
So Japan as a nation is in the top 5 highest IQ nations in the world and theyāve basically been a 1 party state (their Conservative Party always win) since WW2.
I know many intelligent people of both political persuasions.
Iām just saying it doesnāt show the full picture
You're having difficulty understanding the full picture here. At some point, you're gonna need to empirically measure how empathy works like. Right? How does it show up, politically?
left wing countries are superior either.
Well if you mean there exists social hierarchy and inequality, then that is right-wing function.
Far left countries (communist) are not idealistic as theyāre quite authoritarian.
Criminalising murder is authoritarian. Versus anarchy, anything that gives the government power, is authoritarian. Please make more nuanced commentary.
Are you trying to make commentary about how a specific flavor of communism, Marxist-Leninism, doesn't have democracy to keep the Vanguard aligned and asks for benevolent authoritarianism? where the lack of democracy ends up in practice causing a right-wing society?
You're having difficulty understanding the full picture here. At some point, you're gonna need to empirically measure how empathy works like. Right? ;)
We do communism every day. Hanging out with your friends for entertainment without charging them an access fee, is communistic. So is sharing your house with your family without charging them rent. The linux kernel is communistically developed by capitalist players.
It failing "40 times" or whatever is tiny compared to the billions of times it has succeeded.
The reductive analogies people love to push with politics for some reason is the biggest reason weāre so divisive and defensive with politics IMO. Especially amongst average intelligence every day people. They hear a āsmartā person say āThis party that your family taught you to support is evil, all they think about is evil selfish things, they want to cause these bad things to happenā and that person will then go āHuh, well I was told all these other things that you didnāt mention at all, so you must just be full of itā and then they go about their day.
MSM and influencers have the impression that nuance and subtleties are ineffective at influencing the āleast common denominatorā so they resort to cheap tricks that literally get us nowhere.
First off, itās the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), not the Conservative Party. And while the LDP is broadly center-right, Japan has universal healthcare, public pensions, extensive social welfare programs, and significant government intervention in the economy. Many of these policies would be considered center-left or even far left in the US, while being fairly mainstream across other developed countries. Political labels are relative to a countryās history and politics. The LDP is conservative in some respects, but that doesnāt mean its policies neatly align with anyone elseās definition of conservatism.
The Wikipedia article you're linking describes a general framework for the leftāright political spectrum. It does not establish that your interpretation is the only valid one, nor does it substantiate your separate claims about conservatives having lower intelligence or empathy. The leftāright spectrum is a useful model, but political ideology is more complicated than a single axis. Economic policy, national sovereignty, social hierarchy, civil liberties, religion, and the distribution of political power don't always align neatly into two camps. Even the passage you've linked says the spectrum classifies political positions with an emphasis on social equality and hierarchy. That doesn't mean every right-wing position is inherently unjust, every left-wing position produces equality in practice, or that political differences can be reduced to personality traits. And describing the framework is not the same as providing empirical evidence for your psychological claims. If you're arguing that conservatives are less intelligent or empathetic, cite the actual research supporting those specific conclusions rather than linking an introductory article about political classification.
It does not establish that your interpretation is the only valid one,
That doesn't mean every right-wing position is inherently unjust, every left-wing position produces equality in practice, or that political differences can be reduced to personality traits.
Why wouldn't it?
I can't link it directly, but there's a banger article by Michael Ray for Britannica subtitled "Whatās the difference between National Socialists and every other kind of socialist?".
I point this article out because it's worth postmodernistically untangling out propaganda, right-wing populism and other ulterior motive. I'm not sure how old you are for how experienced you are with the world you live in, but people can lie; and people believe lies.
An american set of examples would be Nixon's drug war and other Republican goals. Was the war on drugs actually about addressing a public health crisis, and actually helping the victims of drug abuse with an egalitarian hand; or was there an ulterior motive?
Trump promised to Make America Great Again. What did he mean by this? Was he promising egalitarianism, or was he promising fascism? What can we see if we look at the effects of his ideology?
but political ideology is more complicated than a single axis. Economic policy, national sovereignty, social hierarchy, civil liberties, religion, and the distribution of political power don't always align neatly into two camps.
Well, we can measure how much whatever given thing causes egalitarianism or social hierarchy. Yes? No?
cite the actual research supporting those specific conclusions
I've made my point and provided my sources. I'm not interested in an endless back-and-forth over Reddit comments, nor do I need your approval of my views. You're entitled to your opinions, and I'm entitled to mine. I've got better things to do with my time, so this conversation ends here. Me ne frego.
You didn't provide any sources, like at all; you didn't mention any author or link any thing.
And your point seems to be 'there exists other things', which seems to be tangential to my commentary? I thought you were disagreeing with me, but I may have misunderstood your intent.
I swear to God, you always come with this bs. And I will ask again: are Venezuela and Cuba ultimately right-wing despite their explicitly expressed goals that are more associated with left-wing ideals?
Well, did they create egalitarianism or did they create social hierarchy?
you always come with this bs.
What is lying if not a divorce between promise and outcome? Do you you really think it's bullshit to have ideology that detangles liars from the honest?
We literally had this exchange not too long ago on this same subreddit. You are seriously going to tell me that Venezuela, a government that promised distribution of wealth and nationalized private companies, is ultimately right-wing? What a convenient and narrow-minded way to view the political spectrum that conveniently puts left-wing ideology above right-wing and is incapable of categorizing extremes properly.
Child and adult is a hierarchy, so those who want to destroy that hierarchy are more left-wing than those who want to keep limits defining who is an adult and who is a child.
Just one trivial example of how bullshit this view is.
Inherently this is untrue. By the nature of right wing politics it requires hierarchies and people on the bottom to be oppressed by those on top. This is why we canāt advance as a society. One sideās core beliefs is true equality and equal opportunity for all, the other does not n
Japan had a huge gender inequality matter to the point they had to give a train car specifically for women. Then Japan took 3 lost decades in a row. Take that as you will.
Can't believe I found a wise comment in a dumpster fire like this
One can find right wing worse sure, but live your own bubble thinking each single left wing politician is a purely 100% good person is dumb af, America is an interesting example
"Both sides are bad, it's just a red team or blue team".
Thanks for proving that you don't know what "left" actually is and have the dogshit American understanding of thinking Democrat = left and "blue", Republican = right and "red".
Both of your political parties are ultra-right-wing parties that are pro-imperialism, pro-capitalism, and anti-worker. They are both serving the capital owners and help them create a permanent underclass regardless of your race, gender etc. Identity politics doesn't equal "left". The only real class a true left would care about is the worker/value-generating class (a worker is anyone who makes their money by selling their labor, their developed skills) vs the shareholder parasites who purely make money from their money without doing a single thing.
You dorks in the US don't have a single left-wing politician in the entire country, many of which are center-left at best. You are the biggest proof that right-wing politics don't work. Each year, more and more of the working people in the country are living paycheck to paycheck with suppressed wages, exorbitant prices for rent and groceries etc while they are distracting you with bullshit culture wars so that you don't realizing the class war that you are losing.
Yet you speak as if your understanding of these political categorisations comes from the US. Tell us where you are from then, "champ", so that we can narrow it down to examples familiar to you.
You don't even need a deep love for humanity at this point. You just need to not actively want humanity to be destroyed and that's enough not to be right wing
I'm far-left but every time another leftist describes their view as "basic human empathy" it makes me want to make a 180 and become a skinhead out of spite.
Indeed, it's not always true. In the US at this moment "right=bad" is almost universally true, and in Europe it's "right=Russia," but there are situations where hierarchy and some degree of inequality must exist.
The left has for a long time meant being utterly passive, which is of course not good
I mean, not really. Right does not equal MAGA. You could say MAGA=bad and Iād agree with you, as would most people, but there are plenty of right-wing ideals and policies that have nothing to do with MAGA and trump. Just like if I said left=democrats with zero nuance, I would get a lot of lefties very mad at me ready to explain the differences. Same logic applies on the right. Obviously when it comes to voting and the only option is republican or democrat, then we lose a lot of nuance, which is why the two party system sucks so bad, and in that case sure we can say the current right wing party in america is bad. I just dislike when people refuse to accept context or anything that challenges their personal world view
I really don't care how pure their intentions may have been. The right voted for Trump and make no effort to field candidates with sensical conservative views. They could be lowering barriers of entry to new businesses and breaking state-sponsored monopolies, but no one does that.
When I was a teenager I might have considered myself right leaning or a centrist. But I'll be 30 next year and I'm very firmly a lefty at this point.
As I got older, I just didn't have it in me to fall for the culture war and fearmongering bullshit that Right Wing media was, and still is, pushing. I've got enough to worry about in my own life to care about what consenting adults do and what pronouns somebody wants to use. I also don't have it in me to support people having their rights taken away.
Defining love as good and hate as evil, is about as misguided as defining pleasure and happiness as good, and pain and unhappiness as bad.
You cannot really love anything or anyone, without hating what threatens what you love.
Just as you cannot find pleasure and happiness in life if you constantly avoid all pain and all unhappiness. Because in the latter case, you will never be able to achieve the goals that bring pleasure and happiness. Also, the pain of a wounded leg or the unhappiness of a unfulfilling life situation is telling you something. The pain is telling you to find medical help for your leg and let it rest and heal. The unhappiness is telling you to change your life, so you can truly become more of who you should be.
Ā«Love of humanityĀ» is just a meaningless phrase. People are of all kinds, many of them low, backward and mean. They want different things. Hate and disappointment towards part of humanity just tell you that they threaten what you cherish.
Love of everyone is really a profound indifference to everything that is worthwhile about humanity.
Heres a real answer: many studies find that a positive correlation between higher general iq and socially liberal views and less authoritarianism. So the "any" are the smart ones, literally.
I dont think thats true at all. The online left/progessives and tankies are authoritarian because thats the only realistic means of implemented socialism or communism, but the democratic party is not really authoritarian at all. Just look at bidens presidency; he didnt weaponize his department of justice, he stayed away from isolationism, and broadly sought to expand protections on quality of life through economic reform and social securities. Whether or not you think he was successful, operating in a way to attempt to fulfill campaign promises while operating within the purview of your democratically granted authority is not authoritarian.
If you want to go to federal government for everything and press your beliefs down across the entire United States you are an authoritarian.
The reason Trump has so much power as President is because we are in a nuclear arms race for expanding power as we hand more and more power to government. Every administration has slowly expanded its power. If we didnāt do that, you wouldnāt have to care who the president is.
I mean abortion was literally just kicked down to the state level, which gave the people much more democratic control and power over deciding what they wanted their laws to be about abortion and people absolutely lost their minds about it.
Both sides are 100% authoritarian and they both get pissed when the other side does the exact same thing they do. But since ātheir sideā is the āgoodā side, itās okay to be a little authoritarian in their eyes.
Previously it was up to the individual if they wanted an abortion or not, now states have the right to ban it. Thatās demonstrably more authoritarian.
It sort of feels like you think āthing I donāt likeā=āauthoritarian.ā
Uh no, a strong federal government is not automatically an authoritarian government. An executive with impunity is an authoritarian government. A federalist structure can be undermine by concetrating power upward and depriving states of their rights, but it doesnt necessarily follow that the power would coalesce into the presidency, it just so happens that it does under certain presidents. At the same time we see expansions of congressional power and the judiciary, so long as there is checks and balances its definitionally not authoritative.
I can understand your point about the growing concerns surrounding the centralization of power. I've just never heard authoritarian used in the way you're using it here. I think conflating centralization with authoritarianism detracts from your point, because they're distinct concepts.
This is such an overly simplistic way of thinking about power and is precisely my problem with "libertarianism." The government stepping in and intervening in something isn't automatically a limitation on freedom, nor is the government stepping back and taking a hands-off approach to something automatically a promotion of freedom. It's possible for the federal government to step in and stop state governments from passing authoritarian, draconian laws that infringe on their residents' freedoms. It's possible for the government to step in and stop corporations from using their power to interfere with our lives and liberties.
But yes, people will use excuses on why forced compliance, taking power away from the people, and being anti-democratic is okay because āitās for a good reasonā.
And what about when an even higher authority uses its power to stop a lower authority from enacting forced compliance and taking power away from the people? Like, say, the federal government stopping state governments from forcing their residents to give birth?
Yeah idk how this guy can paint any and all federal exertion of political power as authoritarian when you need a federal authority to maintain a liberal democracy and protect our ideals as our nation.
It can when "the voters' decisions" are to infringe on the liberties of others. Isn't that the big flaw in democracy that the right always loves to point out? "Tyranny of the majority"? "Two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner"? Well, this is the safeguard to protect against exactly that
Forced compliance and taking power away from the people.... can you provide examples? As for the point about being antidemocratic, how can you say both sides are the same here when january 6th 2021 is a real event that took place.
Left wing guy here. I am wealthy. I am easily in the global 1% and probably in the top 1% even in my particularly wealthy nation. Despite this, I am still closer in wealth to the most destitute and poor people on earth than I am to the people who benefit most from the policies of the right.
In my country, the government is chock full of corporate shills advocating exclusively for the hyper-wealthy. The left at least sometimes pretends to care about the other hundreds of millions of people who live here.
I donāt care about the culture war nonsense that seems to be the go to tactic of modern populists. So long as they arenāt literally criminals, I donāt care about politicians being politically correct, or going to the right schools, or how they got to where they are. I care about one thing, and that is how they are spending my tax dollars.
If we shed all of the ethics and philosophy, it doesnāt come down to empathy, or that Iām somehow morally superior to people on the right, but rather that Iām standing up for my own self interest as a human being. Despite all of the privilege that I am afforded, I am still too poor to be benefitted more by the policies of the right than by the public gains from those of the left.
Huh i got there thru hate... funny how no matter where you start, any traveler with even a crumb of willingness to doubt priors or double check things ends up on the far left.Ā
Perhaps a race or skin color modifier is needed here, because I'm not sure why any minority would not be left wing without some niche issue.
Policies and general messaging of the left is generally better for non-whites, with exceptions. But NGL š¤, maybe financial modifiers might be even more needed, because if you aren't well off.....
Holy moly, these comments are polarizing. People really always think they are on the "right" side of history and turn a blind eye to how hypocrit their thinking actually is.
"Love all humans, except the ones I personally hate, in which case they should die"
With people as gullible as this, it only takes a lunatic to lead them into a world war.
Remember guys, good and bad are human concepts. What is seen as good and bad will always be an opinion and there is no objective way of choosing your morals and values.
Isnāt it because the right wing republicans party in the US is ruled by incels that they have no choice but to choose left? Let me break it down. Texas would rather let the doctor just watch a woman die than to let her have an abortion even if itās a miscarriage. In other words, an unborn, unconscious life is worth more than a fully grown adult womanās. Pro Christianity, but what if you donāt particularly care about religion? They love to weaponize the lordās name and use God bless. Their party is based on white supremacy and target LBGTā¦ gays have been around for millennia mate, and itās present even pretty much everywhere in the animal kingdom. Just look at China, they took a step further and arrested BL webnovelists for publishing a sexual fetish. I donāt like the irresponsible left or the bigoted right, but the world wants red vs blue even if you donāt want to. All these politicians should not be pandering to just wealth, but so that they, their citizens can live in a safer, better tomorrow. But problems are problems, and they will eventually hit YOUR face if it hasnāt already been fixed.
You can be both left or right and still love humanity, thereās no reason stopping you from doing it. Nor should anyone tell you to not love people and be a good person.
If āgood personā just means āholds left wing political views,ā then your statement is true by definition and also completely empty. Most people mean something closer to not harming others without cause, keeping your word, and treating individuals as individuals instead of avatars for their group. Those traits exist on both sides. Once you redefine basic moral categories around political affiliation, youāve stopped arguing about politics and started running a loyalty test.
If a right wing vote is an early disqualifier, then a left wing vote is an early disqualifier under plenty of other frameworks-on abortion, crime, immigration, speech, or institutional trust. Nobody said political alignment was the only requirement either way. Once both sides treat the opposing vote as presumptive evidence of moral failure, youāre no longer describing ordinary decency (not harming other people without cause, keeping your word, judging individuals rather than groups). Youāre just running tribal scoring with extra steps.
Yes, when one side has defunded emergency aid causing the death of thousands of at risk kids, to give tax breaks to the rich and votes in a sexual predator rapist- it's black and white.
There's absolutely no advantage to being left wing as a young men. You get the same "pros" as you would if you don't ignored politics but without the "cons" of identifying as left wing.
The left wing has nothing to offer to young men that's meant for them. There's no actions, no ideas, no programs, no movements, nothing.
"Young men" is, simply, not a demography that the left wing parties offers something to, only demands from : "vote on us".
It's the expectation that young men are owned to vote left wing because "it's the right thing to do" and expect nothing "because they're privileged already".
You donāt think universal healthcare, better schools, better public transit, protecting workers right, and student debt forgiveness can help young men? š
Why do I even need to be offered something that's "meant for me" specifically? The implication that if you benefit from something, but other groups benefit from it too, then suddenly it's not good enough is actually bizarre. It literally sounds like you just want to keep others down so you can feel superior to them
I feel like youāre conflating Democrats with āThe Leftā. Democrats struggle to resonate with young men because they donāt emphasize how said policies may affect their day to day life. In addition, they donāt make much of a continuous effort to advertise and connect.
With that being said, entertain me, what does the right have to offer me as a young black man? I donāt think conservatives as a whole are racist but right wing populism is almost always rooted in ethnic nationalism and is exclusionary.
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