“Banning being discussed at schools” is not what anyone is doing.

Yes, that seems to be the goal of the politicians pushing the anti-CRT narrative.

It’s being banned from being taught at schools.

Because of the incredibly vague definition of “CRT”, it often leads to teachers just staying away from any topic that could in any way be seen as “CRT”. Discussing “controversial” topics can leave a teacher vulnerable for accusations by students and most teachers don’t want to get in trouble, so they play it safe and stay away from the topic altogether.

Banning schools from using their position of authority over children to indoctrinate them on garbage philosophy is a reasonable position.

Isn’t that a bit naive? Of course politicians always claim that their language and thought policing is reasonable and use justifications such as “we just want to protect the children” or “it’s a matter of national security”…

So I take this to mean you’re for smaller government?

Depends on what you mean with “smaller government”. In practice, “smaller government” often just means that big corporations get to do whatever they want. But yes, certainly in terms of language/thought policing, censorship and how much power politicians should have, I am on the side of “smaller government”.

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634373403/d-c-couple-killed-in-tajikistan-attack-were-biking-around-the-world-together

Right but tourists getting killed because they cycled through regions where ISIS was active does not represent the middle east as a whole… That’s as if tourists were killed in America by a drug cartel and you took that as a representation of all of America.

As for the CRT stuff, I know there are some crazies and overreactions.

Those “crazies” are generally politicians who are trying to use the fear of “CRT” to create laws banning the topic from being discussed at schools.

I think this is actually what some of these “bannings” are; not that you can’t think it or read about it, just that government paid educators are forbidden for presenting it as some kind of truth.

That’s how the politicians try to present it as of course. But the problem is that the way they use and classify “CRT”, it can mean virtually anything connected to race, which makes such laws dangerous.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2021/09/29/critical-race-theory-bans-are-expanding-to-cover-broad-collection-of-issues/

Lol, most people don’t “just trust the government”… But the thing is, simply hoping that government will just disappear will not in fact make it disappear… And simply voting for the Libertarian party will also not make it disappear either.

What we can somewhat influence though is who has the most control/influence over the government. And I would rather have us, the people, having influence over government than just leaving corporations to do whatever they want with it while we pay their bills…

But we oppress some people. Criminals for one are people I would say are oppressed.

That’s exactly right. Crime, punishment vs rehabilitation and the prison industrial complex are big topics on the left. Nowadays, it’s popular even for people on the right to criticize the “prison industrial complex”, but the left has been criticizing it since at least the 70s. The most radical leftists even argue for the abolishment of prisons and pretty much every leftist advocates at least for prison reform and focusing more on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.

You presented oppression as a bad thing.

Yes, I would say oppression is generally a bad thing. To explain further, I would also say that people shooting people is generally a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that in some special situations, people shooting people is a “necessary evil”, for example when there is no other option and you need to defend yourself. I still don’t think you shooting someone in self defence is “good”, I think it’s a situation that sucks for everyone involved, but you had no other choice, it was necessary and the best possible option.

I look at prisons in a similar way. I don’t think people should be locked up for non-violent crimes or in cases where they are clearly not a danger to anyone, I don’t think people should be tortured in prison as punishment, but I do think that in order to protect the lives (and personal freedom) of other people, we need to sometimes separate dangerous people from society.

Oh so you acknowledge that the “honest question” in this meme is completely nonsensical and should not be taken seriously in any way? Great, we agree then.

I can only speak for myself, not for “the left” overall, because again, a Marxist for example would not say that “oppression is bad”, they have a more materialist and anti-moralist view.

I would say that oppression is generally bad because it violates people’s autonomy/personal liberty. So why is that bad? Or rather, why is personal liberty/autonomy good?

Well in my view, personal liberty is one of the few things virtually every human wants for themselves, it’s one of the few things we can “agree on”. Nobody likes to be a slave, nobody likes to not be in control of their lives. There are some people, for example some people who are into S&M, that do like to give up their autonomy and “be a slave”, but at the end of the day, they are still the ones who make that decision on their terms.

Even the dictator or king or whatever wants autonomy, at least for themselves. The reason why they don’t want autonomy and freedom for others is often because they believe that restricting other’s freedom gives them even more personal freedom to do whatever they want to do.

But the thing with personal liberty/autonomy is that from a leftist perspective, it has to be “equally distributed” to people, otherwise it’s not really freedom. If you give people not only the freedom to control their own lives, but the “freedom to control other people’s lives”, we aren’t talking about freedom anymore, we are talking about oppression or even tyranny.

To use an extreme example, if there is a country where there is only 1 person with complete autonomy/personal liberty, we wouldn’t call that region “free”, we would probably call it a tyranny. It means that one person is calling all the shots and does whatever they think is correct without having to consider anyone’s opinions.

That person could argue that they are “the most free person ever” because that person has more “freedom” than anyone in a society where freedom is distributed equally. For example, that person could have “the freedom to just have someone executed” randomly in the streets, but again, we wouldn’t call that freedom, we would call that oppression or tyranny. So in order to have a free society, everyone has to be equally free, so to speak.

To come back to your question, why is oppression bad?

On a personal level, because I, like pretty much all people, want to be in control of my own life and I don’t want my life to be determined by somebody else against my will.

On a more societal level, I would say that oppression is bad because it leads to tensions and conflicts between “oppressor and oppressed”, which leads to instability and violence. Because of that, it’s bad for everyone, even for the oppressor, because in many many cases, the oppressor will end up either receiving retaliation for his oppression or spend the rest of his life being paranoid about retaliation by the people he oppresses.

I think I am right for one segment of the society, and you are right for another.

Yeah, there are always many many variables and of course there are always exceptions and nuances, but speaking overall, there is a huge difference in how homosexuality is viewed and treated by society overall if you compare the 80s/90s and the 2020s. I don’t see how anyone alive during this time can deny that, even when you just look at popular media, you will notice that “gay” or “homo” was a mainstream insult that was universally accepted until quite recently.

Which is another reason to prefer decentralization, IMO: let each area address its own issues, and to have a standard be one of largely tolerance.

Completely agreed. And maybe we should focus on the stuff we agree and the really core important stuff instead of having arguments that are never concluded.

The problem in my view is that most politicians use wedge issues to divide people. For example, they used to scapegoat gay men by claiming they are all pedos who want to rape and groom children and tried to pass/keep anti-gay laws. This basically forces the left to defend against this kind of legislation.

Lol, so you say developing countries don’t have the same modern outlook on sex and gender identity? Homosexuality is still illegal in Morocco, so of course they don’t support rights for LGBT people in any way… I wouldn’t call that “not being programmed” or “more normal”, but I guess that’s just me…

Additionally, the word “gender” is quite confusing for most non-english speakers. Traditionally, the word gender is not related to biology or people, but grammar. And as far as I know, in the Moroccan languages (both French and arabic), there are two genders, masculine and feminine.

I think it was far more widespread than you think.

Widespread is relative. Compared to before, it was very much widespread. But overall, it was still not popular or mainstream at all.

But it is also the case that people in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, etc. were all listening to what was being released from the coasts.

Sure, but this was during a time where even within the left or left leaning spaces, homosexuality was seen as a controversial and often negative thing. Even if somebody was sympathetic to some aspects of the “hippie movement”, that doesn’t automatically mean that they were accepting of homosexuality.

widespread experimentation with marijuana

Yes, experimentation with recreational drugs definitely exploded, but I don’t think that just because people tried pot doesn’t mean they were all ultra-leftist pro-LGBT activists.

In the days when pre-marital sex was taboo, many couples had at least one powerful incentive to marry.

Yeah it was the norm that pre-marital sex was taboo, that doesn’t suprise me at all. But as is often the case, many people still engaged in pre-martial sex, they just did it in secret. And the same was sort of true for the LGBT community because homosexuals and transsexuals have existed before the 1960s, they just existed on the edge of society.

1/3 people saying it is acceptable probably indicates a far greater amount of people thinking it is somehow cool - like how being in a biker gang is cool, or like how being a drugged out disco burnout or hippie was also cool.

But those people were not seen as “cool” by most people. Yes, there was a certain fascination with both the hippies and biker gangs as they were seen as outlaw rebels in a sense, which has some coolness factor, especially in America where the “rooting for the underdog” narrative is baked into the culture. Homosexuals were not seen as cool just as trans-people or non-binary people today are not really seen as cool in the same sense because they don’t really fit the rebel image.

Bikers and hippies were opposed by conservatives because they believed them to be revolutionaries who are threatening the system and causing instability and lack of order. Homosexuals and the LGBT community are/were opposed by conservatives because they are seen as degenerate, perverted, unnatural and weak.

I really don’t argue in bad faith for starters.

You as an individual human being maybe don’t. But online, that’s irrelevant. People don’t see you as a human individual, for better or worse, people see you as part of a group/community. And by most people on lemmy, the community on this server is seen as rude and unpleasant.

And not only “the left” places individuals into groups, everyone does that… You do it in this post when you say “They argue in bad faith, they are rude and generally unpleasant.”.

the left and the right operate in two completely different paradigms. That is why communication is next to impossible.

It is possible when people actually try, but in order to reach a point where people want to try to understand the other side, you need a tiny portion of faith that the other side is willing to engage in good faith and make a step towards the other side to signal that they are actually interested in good faith.

One big reason (from the leftist perspective) why many online leftists have completely abandoned any hope to engage in good faith with right wingers is because online right wingers seem to go out of their way to be obnoxious, provocative, unapologetic, uncompromising and disrespectful in every possible way towards “the left” and seem to have the main objective to “trigger the left”. And even when they themselves don’t engage in this way, they tend to protect and defend those actions. At the same time, they also claim that “the left does not want a good faith argument” or “we just want rational debate” or “we just exercising our free speech”.

As a leftie who has tried to engage in good faith with right wingers online in various forums, I have experienced a lot of hypocricy where people will say “this is a free speech zone, all views are welcome”, but after a while, the admin would just have some bullshit excuse to ban me for simply voicing my opinion.

But as I mentioned, there are many reasons, it’s not just all “the right’s fault”. Online people of all sides, instead of arguing and discussing with people they disagree with, tend to just kinda argue with themselves by essentially imagining the position of the opponents and then arguing against them.

The obvious problem with that is that due to the lack of interaction and the obvious bias, the view that one side has of the other does not represent reality or at least differs a lot from the view one side has of itself.

As a leftist, I appreciate the good faith effort, but as you probably expect, I don’t agree with your interpretation.

So to me, the first issue is that “the left” does not have a universal worldview. You have people on the left who have a very materialist view and generally reject concepts like good and evil, you have idealists who focus on autonomy/personal freedom and you have moralists who have more religious and moralist roots and more connected to the idea of “protecting the weak”. The last group is probably the group that comes closest to your interpretation. I personally fit more into the second and first group, but obviously at the end of the day, I can only speak for myself.

I would also make a distinction between liberals and the left. Liberals have adopted leftist talking points where they think it helps them, but they don’t really believe in them.

Undeserved suffering is evil. Undeserved suffering is the only evil there is.

Here I already completely disagree. Suffering isn’t evil, suffering isn’t even bad, suffering is an fundamental part of the human condition, arguably a fundamental part of life itself, it’s kinda beyond being strictly good and evil. A human who has never suffered is unimaginable, a world without suffering sounds like a distopia to me.

Deserved suffering is fine, so you can torture Nazis - they deserve it.

99% of leftists are against torturing anyone, not because it causes suffering, but because it violates people’s autonomy. Many leftists tolerate violence against fascists/nazis, but they see it as self-defense.

Since undeserved suffering is the ultimate evil and the only evil there is, we must rearrange government and society to eliminate all unwanted suffering.

If you replace “suffering” with “oppression”, you get closer to the real picture. So again, this does not apply to all leftists, but many leftists are focused on “oppression” (which is essentially restricting people’s autonomy/personal freedom).

Abortion is seen as a heroic act

Abortion is not seen as a heroic act, it’s seen as a morally grey/complicated act, which is why most leftists want this complicated choice to be made by the person most directly affected by the moral dilemma instead of having the state forcing it’s morality onto people by force…

Even if it is murder they don’t care.

Abortion is seen as different from murder because a fetus is not considered to be an independent person. A human fetus is indeed human, it is indeed alive, but a person only becomes a person once it is born and is able to exist as a seperate entity. That’s why we celebrate birthday’s as the start of a person’s life, that’s why we have a birth certificate to document a person’s life and give them a name. It’s impossible for a fetus to be removed from it’s mother without dying, which means a fetus cannot posess any form of autonomy, so in function, it is part of the mother’s body.

This doesn’t mean that abortion is morally clear or unproblematic, but leftists do believe that the state should not make that decision for the mother.

They will deny this, but the rampant nihilism on the left all but proves my point.

Nihilists do exist and they do indeed tend to be lefists. But nihilism doesn’t argue that “existance is evil”, nihilism rejects labels such as “good, evil, rightous, …” and in a radical form rejects a “higher purpose/higher meaning” in a religious and/or spirital sense. So no, the left or even leftist nihilists don’t believe that existence is evil.

Need a carbon tax to save the planet but it will kill a billion people?

This argument does not seem to be written in good faith. People who support a carbon tax don’t do so “to save the planet” and they certainly don’t do so to “kill a billion people”… Also, carbon tax is not a leftist idea, it’s is supported by a wide part of the population accross the political spectrum. 73 of all Americans support a carbon tax, this includes more than half of Republicans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/ps_20-06-11_climate_featured/

And the idea behind carbon tax is a pretty moderate one, it has nothing to do with “saving the planet”, it’s about who pays the cost that is generated by emissing carbon. Without a carbon tax, the cost is covered by everyone, irregardless who produced the carbon emissions. This means that even if you don’t produce a lot of carbon, you have to cover the cost.

Most people think this is obviously unfair and believe that the cost generated by carbon emissions should be paid proportionally by those who created the carbon emissions and generated the cost in the first place.

Just imagine you are going out to eat with a couple of people. You just take a water and a salad, most just take an average meal and some just take the most expensive meal on the menu. Do you believe it’s fair if the bill is split by everyone equally so that everyone pays the same? Most would say no because it means that those who ordered cheap food have to pay more than they ordered and the people who ordered expensive food have to pay less than they ordered.

I’m not saying carbon taxes are the solution for everything or that they could not have negative impacts, especially depending on how it is put into practice, but implying that “people who support carbon taxes” do so because they think people existing is bad and they want to murder everyone does not seem at all like an attempt to make a good faith argument…

I don’t understand why they can’t just chill out and turn off the politics.

When you go to other lemmy servers, most of the posts are not about politics. On this server, every other post is about “how dumb everyone on the left is” or about “how trans people are pedophiles”. Of course there will be people who will react to that and of course people will assume that you aren’t interested in “civil conversations” when you have that attitude…

If conservatives can navigate reddit and come out alive, I don’t see what the problem is.

Most people just don’t want to be in an online space that they see as toxic… It’s not that they will get traumatized or anything, they just aren’t particularly interested in a forum that feels like a teenage boy’s locker room. That stuff is interesting when you are 14, but after that, it gets old pretty fast.

From what I’ve seen so far, especially on lemmy and some of the leftist psychopaths from beehaw, they want everyone who disagrees with them to just die basically.

It’s funny, the only place where I have seen people calling for the execution of people is this server. And then you wonder why most people don’t want to have anything to do with it…

You’re not having civil debates with them because they don’t want that in the first place. Their goal is to ‘prove’ that anyone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, is evil It’s really fucking annoying

And it’s exactly those kind of blanket statements that make people not want to engage with you…

Nope, I’m still here.

They argue in bad faith, they are rude and generally unpleasant.

I’m sure they say the exact same thing about you. After all, about 80% of the posts on this server are about how “stupid and dumb everyone on the left is” and seem to have the only purpose of “triggering lefties”, so most of the “pleasant” lefties don’t think it’s worthwhile to engage in good faith, which means it’s mostly trolls who visit…

As I had heard it described by a few people, it was considered cool in the 70s to have gay friends.

By a very very very small amount of people maybe, those who were considered to be radicals. Not only did a majority of people believe that homosexuality should not be accepted or tolerated, this was a time where at least half of the population believed that homosexual relations should be illegal… And this didn’t change until quite recently.

people were still living in the wake of the hippie revolution.

The “hippie revolution” was pretty much dead at that point. And of course, “normies” always hated the hippies. They were considered to be radicals, they were probably seen in a less favourable way than people see “antifa” today. And at that time, the hippies were associated with murderers and cults (Jim Jones, Charles Manson).

Recreational drugs were very widely used, as was all sorts of things like swinging…

Compared to how things were before the 60s, yes. But that’s just because before the 60s, “free love” was unthinkable and recreational drugs simply did not exist in the eyes of the general public (outside of alcohol and tabacco). But we also shouldn’t forget that those things happened in very specific metropolian areas.

So, having gay friends was considered normal

Again, by a very very specific subsection of people. It’s as if you said that today, it’s considered normal to have a “gender-fluid pan-sexual furry who identifies as a fox” as a friend. But for 99% of people, it just isn’t.

by the 1990s, the mainstreaming of gay actors and gay themes in TV began to take off.

And it’s not until the 90s that views on homosexuality slowly started to change. In 1997, it was still more people who believed that homosexuality should be illegal compared to those who believed it should be legal. Views on homosexuality only really started to radically change in the 2000s and 2010s. In 2008, while most people believed that homosexuality should not be punished by a law, it was still half of the population that believed that homosexuality is immoral and should be discouraged. In 2023, 64% believe that homosexuality is morally acceptable while 33% belive it’s not. So there has definitely been a radical change of attitude towards homosexuality that is still going on, but this only happened relatively recently.

And of course people who are still opposed to homosexuality have noticed this shift too, which is why politicians have shifted focus away from scapegoating homosexual men towards scapegoating trans people (who are still a lot less tolerated today than gay men). The same talking points which are today used against trans people (“they are crazy and mentally unstable”, “they are pedophiles”) were traditionally used against homosexual men.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4045/Some-Change-Over-Time-American-Attitudes-towards-Homosexuality.aspx

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx

I’d also like you to know that, if I had my way, we would have not made any provocative posts at all and pot a moratorium on such content in order to establish trust

In my admittedly biased view, to a majority of people on the right, provocation is an elemental part of their behaviour. It seems that some people orient their entire identity based on “triggering the libs/triggering the left” and then complain when they actually succeed…

I had a discussion the other day with a user here who had the username “Ihatretroons” who was complaining that people would unfairly accuse him of, well, “hating troons”. To me, this is absurd. Everyone should know by now that people on the internet form their opinions based on the smallest amount of information, when you choose the username “ihatetroons”, most people will obviously think you hate trans people…

and that violence can only be done if it is defensive and meant to protect the innocent.

Right but every possible group that advocates for violence of course claims that their violence is defensive and meant to protect the innocent. The violent far-right neo-nazi white supremacist claims they only want to use violence to “protect their white children and their people from white genocide”. Far-left antifascist militants claim they only want to use violence to “defend their community from fascists using violence against them”. Anti-trans militants claim they only want to use violence against trans people to “protect children from getting abused and child trafficked”. And my guess is that pretty soon, we will start to see violent environmental activists who claim they only use violence to protect the environment from destruction. And the state/police/military of course claims it’s using violence “to maintain peace, order and stability”.

Nobody claims that they want to use violence just because, they always claim it’s defensive.

I’m gonna have to maintain that if you come from some small European shit hole and you travel a short distance to a neighboring country you are not more traveled than a new yorker who has visited south Carolina and Texas.

Fair.

This is like an American going to the Bahamas. Like everyone does that. Most American do visit mexico.

Yeah but those are actually different countries. An American travelling to Mexico is different than a Californian travelling to Texas.

its just like a 13 hour plus flight and hard with kids.

Yeah I completely understand why Americans don’t travel as much overseas, all I’m saying is that it’s kinda funny sometimes when Americans talk about other countries with a lot of confidence even though they have never even visited that country.

And I also think it’s pretty funny when Europeans think they are basically a native just because they visited a country a couple of times.

Its just like a Romanian almost never goes to see Texas.

Sure, but again, you claimed that the US is “more Like the EU in form and function”. That’s just not true, the EU doesn’t really have a federal government at all, it doesn’t even have law enforcement or a common cultural identity. I would say that a Romanian has about as much in common with an Irishman as he does with an American. And I’m not saying that someone from Texas is exactly the same as someone from California, but the cultural differences are smaller.

That sucks, I had this happening once on lemmy as well.

Most US states are larger than most European countries.

In terms of geographical area maybe. In terms of population, no.

They also vary in culture nearly as much. Its more Like the EU in form and function.

No, absolutely not, you underestimate the impact that different languages and a history full of international conflict has. Until WWII, Europe was constantly and brutally fighting each-other. Until very recently, you had a large array of different political entities and systems, from small republics to empires.

All the regional differences that exist in America exist within European countries too, they just have a longer history.

The main point I make is often many Europeans look down on Americans for never visiting another “country”.

I wouldn’t say I “look down on Americans” for that, it’s just a stereotype that Americans always think of the US as this magical, special and unique place in terms of diversity and regional differences while at the same time, they believe that everyone in Europe basically has the same views and opinions on everything because “Europe is a homogeneous place”, all without ever having visited Europe.

It was a common meme for a “typical american” to say something like “Yeah, an European country providing healthcare for people is nice and all, but that wouldn’t be possible in the US. It works in Europe because they are so small and homogeneous and America has so many differences and is so large, it would never work.”. Meanwhile, half of all US states have a population of 5 million or lower.

Because some English ass hole visited Ireland and Romania once

Most people from Europe tend to travel more than Americans, it’s not just a once in a lifetime thing. Even poorer people will go to a neighbouring country or something for vacation occasionally.

hardly different than a Texan visiting California and new York.

Of course it’s different. The difference between the average Texan and the average Californian is a slight accent and some specific differences of opinion about very specific topics. The biggest thing will probably be that the average Texan sees himself as more of a countryside/rural person and the average Californian sees himself as more of a city person, but again, you will have those kind of differences in the smallest of countries.

The average Irish person and the average Romanian person will barely be able to effectively communicate. They have a completely different language, a completely different history, a completely different identity and completely different values. So much so that they will be completely unfamiliar with traditions, customs, etc of the other outside of some stereotypes.

A Texan and a Californian will not have any issues interacting with eachother at all, their biggest difference will probably be rural vs urban thinking. Every Texan knows at least one person from California, probably they know a Californian personally or they are familiar with at least 1 Californian due to TV, radio, etc, same thing the other way around.

I will take whatever I want as hard as I want it.

Completely off topic, but it seems then that you can actually change the username, or at least the display name in lemmy. That’s pretty cool.

I honestly doubt Europeans know all the us states, the Canadian provinces and the various south and central American countries.

Do you know all central American countries by heart? Also most countries in Europe also have many different regions, provinces, states, cantons, etc. I think it’s very common for Europeans to know the different regions in their countries and for the rest to know the country and capital city, at least for European countries.

Like yeah I don’t know the names of all the eastern European countries

As an European who is pretty bad at geography, eastern Europe is very hard for me as well.

what language Albanians speak

Well that one is easy, Albanian ;).

Afghanistan is the middle east

Your country basically fucked Afghanistan for decades, but you don’t even know which general region it is located at? But to be fair, I’m not sure if I could point to it on a map either.