Many just straight up don’t believe you when you tell or even show them. They think you’re brainwashed so they don’t take you seriously. They just believe Big Brother loves them and would never lie to them.

Also, they won’t be cheaper.

Now that I absolutely agree with. All try to emulate left principles to market their stuff, by which I mean they say “we get it and we care about you”.

Lol at “stethoscope theory” :)

I’m not a fan of Horseshoe Theory. It’s very handwavey and kind of implies centrism is the way to go, and I don’t agree with that at all. I think the status quo is crap and needs to be changed… quite a lot actually.

Anyway, I think there’s a brand of what’s generally called leftism that’s correct, and I think it’s somewhere in the libleft quadrant, if we’re to go by the political compass. And the further from that you go, the more “wrong” you start to get by giving more power to either the state (authleft), corporations (libright) or an unholy alliance of both (authright). Really, all of these to me are ways of being wrong by bestowing extreme unaccountable power to some institution or institutions, when the key should be accountability and avoiding the concentration of power (which includes wealth) into a few unelected unaccountable hands. Either of the three extremes, apart from the lower left, gives you some form of fascism, by which I mean things like: cult of personality, cult of work, making people’s well-being secondary to some abstract goals/principles like the state or meritocracy, that sort of stuff.

I don’t think that’s Horseshoe Theory though… is it?

Truth be told, I don’t even know what an actual far left is. I always saw the left-right spectrum as woefully asymmetrical, because there’s a handful of ways of getting things right (as in being correct factually + morally) and a million ways of getting them wrong. The former generally aligns with “left”, and the latter with “right”.

I’ve seen some vile opinions from people supposedly on the left which were indistinguishable from the far right, and it starts like you said with this irrational need to avoid agreeing with liberals at all costs, which in time leads them down delusion avenue.

I didn’t think I’d see the day Mike admitted a mistake like that. Times are dire, folks…

“MAKE A DEAL MELONI, MAKE A DEAL”

I’m stealing that analogy, thank you very much.

I’d generalize it a bit to say, fascism is the immune system of any system built on bad principles that’s collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The obvious decay then creates a space psychos and grifters to pose as faux saviors and gain power by scamming people into something they pretend is a solution but is actually a death cult.

It is. That’s why the corporate fascists are trying to demonize and dismantle it. There’s a reason Musk started with the ones that were investigating his companies.

Although keeping it in check will likely require the authorities to obey the findings of these agencies. They’ll be getting conflicting orders from the MAGA admin. That’s the constitutional crisis in a nutshell — if authorities side with MAGA, then it becomes a coup.

Why are they so rare, I wonder… I’m sure it had nothing to do with any recent pandemics.