Most people are progressives.
The only disconnect is messaging and image.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
112 points (89.4% liked)
No Stupid Questions
40118 readers
911 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
When asked, I usually tell people that I vote Dem because it's as close to my anarchist ideals as I can get. I would consider myself a social-anarchist, in that I feel laws shouldn't be written around societal structures and ideals. Society and culture changes, and I shouldn't be punished because some dude generations ago decided that something was inappropriate back then. It isn't now, and shouldn't be codified that way,
Do you advocate seizing the means of production and are a worker? If not, then you are not a leftist.
You can be "left wing" without being a "leftist". I wouldn't classify them as the same, personally. Left wing really includes anyone left of center
load more comments
(1 replies)
Progressive who's been here for a bit. The fediverse has definitely swung more left-wing recently - when I first started up two years ago there was a fair amount of conservative bs, libertarian tech-bros and russian bots - it was about a 50/50 split depending on what instance you were on.
The bot problem seems to have been largely dealt with now, and conservative voices have been more or less drowned out by the new influx of users fleeing twitter and Reddit crackdowns. Many are agreeing that the current administration is bad for everyone. There are a number of hard auth-left moral purity testers that kind of a pain in the ass that pop up from time to time.
The actual left wing, the something socialists something are partly on hexbear.org and lemmygrad.ml. And they are called tankies and blocked on lemmy.world. So how left wing can most people here be? The thing is that "left" has become synonymous with (neo)liberal values. Like there doesn't have to be a free, independent press or social media and them being owned by capitalists is just fine.
Hexbear isn't socialist. It's a group of assholes defending China and Russia, denying the Uyghur genocide and the aggression of Ukraine
The problem is that over the last decade any nuanced opinions on those topics has become less and less "politically correct". And that is the correct term, anyone who isn't politically correct and in line with the liberal mainstream opinion (= imperialist propaganda by the US state department and think tanks) must by definition by a paid shills of Putin, China or Trump. There are those people of course, but the dynamic has become more and more polarized and steeped in conspiratorial thinking. And that is by "design". It's profitable and it serves the US imperial agenda and it's easier to avoids the frustration of talking to trolls and fascists - just paint everyone of a different opinion with the same brush.
I mean you can't even talk about talking about it, like not seeing those people as anything but "assholes". The range of allowable opinions has drastically narrowed. It's not even liberal in the modern sense of the word. People are too scared to be liberal any more.
...saying china is a democracy, or good, the kind of thing I hear these types saying is just as propagandized a take. That's the issue...
This comes a bit down to utilitarianism vs ethics based on principles. But that's a lie, it's really about who has power.
I'm just watching a video by Majority Report where he talks about the question "Why is democracy is good" which the Democrats sort of fucked up in the election. And he makes a pretty painful point that it's a "show me, don't tell me" question. If you live in a democracy and constantly exploited, overworked, fucked over, in terror of economic hardship or terror attacks, harassed by police, then what is the point? What is the benefit? I'm not making the point that democracy is bad, but that a shell of a democracy, a fake, is leading especially the "dirtbag left" to adopt a pretty hostile posture.
So what is the actual quality of life in China vs the USA? What are the actual material benefits looking at living in an apartment, working, raising children and living a peaceful life?
How do YOU know that life in China isn't actually better and people more happy than in the USA? I don't believe that is true but it's a valid question. Of course China has massive problems and corruption and abuses. But there are a billion people there that were on a medieval level after WWII. The CCP has massively invested in e.g. education and healthcare and infrastructure.
Or compare quality of life in China vs democratic India. Similar can be said about Iran, 55% of University graduates were women. But it's painted as black and white.
Sure you have freedom of speech with the means of communication owned and controlled by the oligarchs. And you can say whatever you want on reddit and get downvoted to hell - which goes to my previous point, that the propaganda is so internalized and polarized now that you don't need threats of state violence to keep the population in check.
So those opinions are not just for fun. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer is an aphorism that is leading the west inevitably towards fascism. So all the "posturing" about how superior our principles and freedums are is just... well it's a delusion. It's happening right now. They are stealing your future right now and there is nothing you can do because they control the media.
But still the socialists are completely rejected and banned from the largest lemmy instances.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm just hungry dude
Yes, this site is very left-leaning. I have seem plenty of moderate opinions downvoted because they are centrist or centre-right, and the anti-Trump, anti-Elon and anti-USA sentiment is deservedly heavy right now.
Keep that in mind when reading comments, this place is a bit of an echo chamber at the moment.
I'm all for the better man (or woman, or whatever). If we see eye to eye on all the important stuff then I'll vote for you if I'm legally allowed. I don't care about your affiliations as much as your history and your record as a public servant. Hence, why I always vote Dem because there's absolutely NOTHING but pussy ass nazi bitches in the GOP.
I think most people feel this way, right? Like you are left-leaning if you like the policies in left-wing platforms put forth by left-wing parties, so you vote for the left-wing candidates who advocate for them. Likewise, candidates are left-wing because they are members of such parties and advocate for such policies. So saying 'I only vote for people on the basis of their policies and voting record' is like saying 'I only drink water when it's wet'—technically true, but it misses the point that you chose it because it was wet.
The mainstream conservatives (i.e. those within the Overton window of what’s acceptable in mainstream society, or not open Nazis/KKK) have the big corporate networks. Those Nazis who are too Nazi for Elon Musk have their own instances which everybody else fediblocks from orbit just to be sure, where they can run around, sieg-heil and shout racial slurs all day to their hearts’ content. Which leaves those to the left of the centre-right, who are divided between the tankie-triad instances (full of people who think that Stalin did nothing wrong and Putin’s OK too) and the rest (which ranges from liberals to ancoms).
I don’t adopt views wholesale - I evaluate each issue on an individual basis, so my views tend to be a mixed bag. From a political standpoint, most people would probably see me as an unreliable ally as my views can be hard to predict. While I agree with many, if not most, “left-wing” ideas, there are still plenty of others that would get me labeled as a Nazi MAGA Republican.
That said, on Lemmy I’m definitely in the minority when it comes to holding certain beliefs that many would label “right-wing,” even though on other issues I can out–left-wing even most leftists.
I've been on Lemmy for about two months and there is a good amount of left-leaning folks here. I definitely consider myself in the left-wing category. I hover somewhere between a bit liberal, a bit socialist, and a bit of a commie, but absolutely no authoritarianism.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Last time I took the political compass test, I was center-right, firmly in the libertarian quadrant, exactly in the sub-section labeled "libertarian".
That means my political stances align 100% against the Republican party and authoritarianism in general.
For sure, left wing are most of what I see here, except for trolls and bots
If I needed a label, probably Progressive. I liked Biden’s platform and agreed we needed to try a centrist like him to see if it was possible to start working together again. I also believed he did at least as well as anyone could, and if his legacy hadn’t been torn to bits by turnip would have positioned the US well for decades to come. He could have shifted that Overton window, sowed the seeds that a more Progressive candidate could reap.
But if I try to articulate a common theme for my current beliefs, it is to invest in the future. I’m a strong believer in a good education for all as the foundation of our future. I’m inspired by the possibilities of science and technology. We need people to have the opportunity to strive, improve, and to dare, knowing we will catch them if they fall
Earlier in life I thought I was much more Conservative but the twisted thing is I now say the same things from a very different perspective.
- I’m a strong believer in family values: every family member deserves equal respect and human rights, every new parent deserves quality time with a new child without regard for work, every child deserves the best healthcare without regard for their parents income, every child deserves a top notch education and the resources to succeed at it, every elderly or disabled person deserves to have their needs met and continue a decent life.
- I believe in innovation and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. A solid education for all allows each person the opportunity to achieve their potential. A comprehensive safety net lets each person reach for the stars without fear, lets them dare to fail without perishing, allows them to learn from a failure and try again.
- I believe in self-sufficiency and independence. Every person deserves a basic income to survive without burdening anyone else. Every person needs healthcare sufficient to recover without losing their independence, their savings, or their loved ones. People who choose city life should be able to walk out their door with only what they carry, and get anywhere. Comprehensive well maintained infrastructure is the ultimate independence
- I believe in fiscal responsibility. Every investment to look toward the future, build a better society, a better environment, a better humanity
- I believe in capitalism. Competition is enabled by a legal framework facilitating fairness, equal opportunity, transparency. Capitalism maximizes potential in a free market regulated by politics for the long term benefit of the voter/consumer
I am extremely left-wing, so probably skew the average all by myself. :P
People that cry they are being silenced will say yes.
Is there a difference? Chicken is chicken. But I do like flats more than drums.
load more comments
(1 replies)