this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
604 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
74247 readers
5413 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The real battle isn't left or right. It's up vs down.
Tax wealth not work!
sort of, except the right usually (fucking always) fights to protect the rich. while the left (no Democrats don't fucking count) fight for equality and improving everyone's lives.
so it is a left v right, you just renamed the categories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
Republicans push us in one direction, weak/complacent democrats don't fight back.
It's part of the two-pronged strategy, and why anyone who supports establishment democrats is tacitly supporting republican policies.
We really needed Bernie in 2016, but it shows where liberals' priorities lie. They become conservative as soon as their wealth is threatened.
While that truism might annoy lovers of !politicalcompassmemes@lemmy.world it isn’t invalid, historically-speaking.
Tell me more…
From their first use in 1789 (long-short: seating positions) the definitions for left and right were fluid, but generally referred to “change” versus “status quo.”In Stalin’s era, left referred mostly to pro-worker policies, the economic change of the communist revolution. That convention was solidified in the US during the red scare, where left-wing came to mean “commie heresy.”
After that period, the definition was gradually blurred again, perhaps by conservatives carrying forth the McCarthyist tradition of lumping any non-conformist view into “commie heresy.” Regardless, the resulting confusion in public political discourse is the reason Wayne Brittenden made the Political Compass website in 2001.
By canonizing the economic-policy definition used by the Bolsheviks/McCarthyists as an actual X-axis spectrum, and the social-policy definitions of most other contexts as a Y-axis spectrum, one could easily map both dimensions as a cartesian coordinate. Quite handy.
Still, as elegant and illuminating as that solution is, it remains a convention.
tbf. those terms have evolved a lot since the French Revolution coined them.
and given how fluid they are, in some conversations they might mean pure culture war issues like "THERE'S A TRANS FLAG IN COMIC BOOK MOVIE!!!!".
but we can agree that in the bigger picture, left v right is about a top v bottom in power structures.
Lol true. In fact, I guess always true for any historical use. At least, insofar as established power wants to keep playing the same game and under dog wants to play a different one. Shrug
I mean sort of but there are a lot of down folks on the side of the ups and that basically just brings us back to what left vs right always was
This is why more efforts should be spent on helping everyone see that billionaires are the real source of the problem. The rights handbook is just to say the leftist billionaires are the problem.
And there is like 2, but they aren't really on the left, but center right. Every other that labels them as a democratic billion is more right than thst