6 ms·

Real politics is 1% versus everyone. Mortgage crisis, financial bailout, inflation, taxing of labor and not the assets and assets capture by tiny percent of the

• ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
  Right wing originally meant the people defending the divine right of Louis XVI and defending the ultra-rich has been a throughline ever since.
  • spwa4 3mo ago
    That's about as relevant to today as what the left orginally stood for (and what the right originally opposed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror Times change. Thankfully.
    • ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
      > Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Reign of Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government.[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract argues that each person was born with rights, and they would come together in forming a government that would then protect those rights. Under the social contract, the government was required to act for the general will, which represented the interests of everyone rather than a few factions. ... > Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration, saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792. So rich people forming cross national alliances to crush democracy? Have things really changed?
      • spwa4 3mo ago
        It is very much 2 competing ideologies, yes. But you're being very unfair. You're describing one aspect of what the left stood for (and only what matches with the modern democrats, because these leftists wanted extreme laissez-faire, to the point of giving direct government power to the rich. Why? Because the king's many monopolies and taxes gave jobs to tons of people, but sucked. Somehow that's missing from your description). AND you're totally disregarding what the leftists did. And on the right you're describing what they did, totally disregarding what they stand for. Both sides stood against democracy. That left stood for having "rational thinkers" (ie. capitalists, rich traders, bankers) control government. People who achieved things in society. The right stood for the same structure as had been there before: nobility and clergy guide society as a whole. The right, even at this point in time, was only rich in power, aside from the king and perhaps in land. Not in money and not in numbers of people under their direct control. In the cities, the king had only limited control and there were far more poeple in cities, even then. Both sides then went on to massacre each other for about a decade. All over France, spreading even to Egypt (that was the left by the way). Kidnapping tons of Belgians and Dutch citizens and shipping them to South America (that was the left too). Neither side comes out looking very good. But if you compare how many they killed, I'm sorry but the left is the absolute unchallenged champion. The left you're defending were (pretty extreme) capitalists who were fighting for money-should-control-the-government-directly against people who fought for having moral principles control the government. And yes, you'd be right in pointing out those were very self-serving moral principles. This fight then turned into a decade of massacres. Why are you defending them? Because 4 letters and one direction match your current favorite political party that has very little to do with either side.
      • ecshafer 3mo ago
        Pointing out what left and right mean in France in 1790 is useless. Its like pointing out the Republican party was established to oppose Slavery and Democrats were pro slavery. Or that Democrats were primarily land owners and agriculture in the late 1800s vs business owner republicans, or that 1930-1990 it was democrats for union and workers while republicans were capital and college educated. Things change drastically over time.
• boxed 3mo ago
  The real politics is between truth and delusion.
  • myko 3mo ago
    Definitely captures the US since the whole trump thing
    • boxed 3mo ago
      It was true on US campuses before that too. Wokeness really jumped the shark.
      • amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
        Depends what you consider "woke".
        • boxed 3mo ago
          Since no one has copyright on it, we have to consider all who say they are woke to be in that group. And there are some truly mad stuff going on there.
          • amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
            What kind of stuff are you thinking of?
            • boxed 3mo ago
              Supporting Hamas. Backing trans male->female athletes in womens sports. The NDP Canada victim card thing is a more fun display you might want to start with.
      • myko 2mo ago
        Nah, being woke was always good, since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes People would be embarrassed to say they were anti-woke 20 years ago, it's a shame what has happened to the US
• thrance 3mo ago
  Yeah, you're just describing class warfare. That's a left-wing idea.
  • zmgsabst 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • platevoltage 3mo ago
      What's a good example of a right wing belief that's being lied about right now?
  • neaden 3mo ago
    "Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another." - Plato The Republic.
• logicchains 3mo ago
  >assets capture by tiny percent of the population Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship comparatively quite difficult.
  • slg 3mo ago
    And is life in Europe actually worse than the US as a result? Capitalism has convinced people to think that the end goal of life is creating value. Maybe that isn't the thing society should be optimizing for.
    • avarun 3mo ago
      Yes. It is, significantly. More people die every year of heat waves in Europe than gun deaths in the US, and it's not even close. Youth unemployment in many European countries is egregiously high, leading to a sense of malaise and nihilism among the youth. The welfare state is collapsing in on itself and residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed. The EU is extremely close to entering its own Japan-like "lost decades" if nothing changes very soon.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
    • Alpha3031 3mo ago
      Income-wise difference is significantly less when adjusted for PPP, and (this is from a decade ago but I can't find anything much more recent that goes into comparing countries) Jones and Klenow (2016) says: > Average Western European living standards appear much closer to those in the United States (around 85 percent for welfare versus 67 percent for income) when we take into account Europe’s longer life expectancy, addi- tional leisure time, and lower inequality. Jones, Charles I.; Klenow, Peter J. (September 2016). "Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time". American Economic Review. *106* (9): 2426–2457. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 1352951.
• johnsimer 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ryandrake 3mo ago
    At your dinner table, that one person would have approximately 32% of the food at the table, and 50 people at that table would only have a half a stick of butter to share between them all.
  • civet_java 3mo ago
    I'm not sure I fully understand this "society as a dinner crowd" metaphor you're painting here - who is the govt here and what are taxes and most importantly what is the food everyone is eating? How does the wealthy paying 40% of the income/consumption tax collected by the govt translate to them feeding 40% of population (which they don't)?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lkey 3mo ago
    The top 1% hold 41% of all wealth on the planet, so they are still getting a discount in your contrived example. Meanwhile at that table, 68 people are sharing 3 meals between themselves. Would you want to eat at that table? Are you even a member of that class or are you just wish-casting?
  • outside1234 3mo ago
    Where the OP got this wrong is by stating the top 1% vs. top 0.01%. It is entirely true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax. There are a lot of us here that are in the top 1% and god knows we pay a lot of taxes. The top 0.01% however have access to vehicles that mean they can pay very little in taxes by taking low interest rate loans against huge amounts of capital. This 0.01% is the problem, not the 1%.
    • whodidntante 3mo ago
      I was at a dinner for the .01% the other night, and many of them said the problem is really with the .0001%, if they would just pay a fair tax, everything would be fine. btw, the dinner with the .01% was 800,000 people, the room was pretty packed.And the food was not as good as you would think, and the service was lousy. The .0001% is a lot smaller, maybe even 100x smaller, but it is still twice as large as the number of billionaires. A lot of the .0001%, in fact, about half, feel the real problem is with the billionaires.
• patrickmay 3mo ago
  "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -- George Orwell
• OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  Left vs. Right largely boils down to "are hierarchies good?". A quintessential far-right belief is the divine right of kings. The modern incarnation of that is that "The 1% earned their power and influence". Now, there are far right people who want to dethrone the current powers that be. But distinguishing between "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because no one should have that much power over others" (left) versus "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because he's a Jew" (right) is a useful distinction. One wants to eliminate the power structure, the other just wants different people in it.
• Fizz43 3mo ago
  Not really, there are people on the left and the right fighting against the 1% and for the 1%. The left right divid is a simplification yes but it is a very real divide in values and society structure.
• supertroop 3mo ago
  The 1% is responsible for white maga hating any non straight white Christian human?