Making fun of something is not trolling. I'm sorry I didn't take your definition "left = anti status quo" that you yourself called pointless with more gravitas. I browse /tv/ exclusively.
2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing
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Then quit FOX, OAN and Newsmax.
So many fewer lies to unlearn.
Interestingly enough, the hard leftists object the most to the "hard left" label.
They usually simply say "no, you are right-wing" because:
- everyone wants to see themselves as reasonable centrist and not some extremist
- hard-leftists typically live in their own bubbles where they quarel over purity of their ideology and taking moral stands as if it's a competition. Once they emerge from this bubble, everyone else looks like an immoral right-wing fascist.
Edit:
Of course I don't think hard leftists are just useless idealists.
Their role on the left wing is traditionally to act as a conscience to the more moderate and mainstream left wing (who might at moments be too willing to compromise leftist principles). They might even be a catalyst to societal change in favor of acceptance of fringe groups.
But other than that,
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Are you describing Jeremy Corbyn still or depressed gay people on twitter?
It's my online experience with hard-leftists (mostly Corbynites, I presume).
If you want to give a message you kill people like Soleimani that say all the time "Usa had an agreement with us, that means they are weak, we must destroy them!". This is the Obama style too, not just Trump: surgical attacks against hostile leaders.
Instead neocons cried when Soleimaini was killed and now is randomly bombing so iranian people will rally for their regime.
That doesn't surprise me: Democratic Party voted against Iraq invasion in 2003 BUT there were few George Walker Bush cheerleaders that infiltrated the party and Biden was one of them.
That was not a random attack. The people that were bombed were responsible for an attack against American forces in Iraq.
Here's some random unrequested mildly interesting math fact. If you take a small dimensional space, there's a good chance a random point in it will lay it far away from the edges. If however you take a high dimensional space, a random point in it has a very high chance of laying close to one of the edges.
This means that we are all extremists in some regard, once you consider enough aspects. It could be political beliefs, it could be how much sugar we put in coffee or our disdain for the combat system in Bannerlord. Extremists, all of us!
Therefore, we live in a low dimensional space, namely a left-right/populist-technocracist 2D space.
Dream on. The wording of a few Tweets on Jan. 6 mean nothing, and he wasn't even there.
I also doubt he'll get caught for tax fraud. When New York Times wrote extensively about his tax avoidance in the 90's it was all legal.
It's so easy to avoid paying taxes legally that there's no need to actually cheat. If he gets convicted it's on minor technicalities.
Hell, when he admitted to using funds from his charity foundation in New York to pay debts, he just had to pay back $2 million and nothing more.
It was barely talked about. So even when he committed fraud no one cared.
beyond satire
Agreed on this. The evidence is not foolproof. Giulianni is more likely to be prosecuted there for his "trial by combat" exhortation.
He and his family got to attend ethics class or something. Maybe this time he would do community service, jerking off Mexican rapists?
You could go to jail for massive fraud though, look at Manafort - Trump's is going to be orders of magnitude higher and he's not that smart.
Have faith in the justice system. Sarkozy almost went to jail for bribery!
*cringe*
See, I can post meaningless reactions too. It doesn't add to the debate.
Genuine question: don't you feel that just using "left" and "right" kind of implies that the respective political standpoint is compliant with fundamental assumptions of society (not sure where this comes from btw), ie. with its core values and traditions, in the first place? Unless accompanied by a very clear disclaimer word along the lines of radical or, to a lesser degree, far. Ie. the usual left right spectrum debates, as long as people do not attach fifty pages of academic memoranda beforehand, pressupose a limitation to compliance with modern democratic state?
I don't spend much time reading politological academic articles and I spend no time whatsoever watching political videos on the internet, yet my intrinstic reaction to seeing hard left / hard right is something about someone not that thrilled with the idea of e.g. the right to property / e.g. social and economic rights and wanting to adjust the balance accordingly. It would not occur to me that left, right, hard left, hard right implies anything changing anything fundamental about the society (unless fundamental is interpreted very very broadly) from the wording alone.
The "left can mean Stalin, hence college leftits are not that left, or - better - not left at all" is a very strange point. It is not that far to the supermarket - just look at Voyager 1! I know ancap libertarians make similar one with "whoever does not have the same understanding of liberty and non-aggression as we do is a (radical) leftist" quite often on the internet. But like Stalin, libertarian ancap wishes are excluded from what is possible in a western democracy which makes this point more little more than unmature sobbing. Like, what is the point of referring to something out of the permitted spectrum when clearly talking about the permitted?
You make it seem like left is a synonymum for revolutionary which seems really really off.
This is not a good argument, as long as there are differences in two ideologies they will be somewhat contradictory. If you want a word to refer to a family of ideas it will encompass plenty contradictory views.
IMO even asking people "consider 1 farthest to the left, 10 farthest to the right, from a scale of 1-10, how would you politically define yourself?" allows you to predict whom they will vote, what policies they like pretty good. And this is widely used in researches, and I think even that is sufficient evidence that Left/Right distinction is useful.
I can see that being a good use, bear in mind that I spent most of my school statistics class flicking rubber bands and never really think about it enough.
I don't necessarily think so, because:
I think this is more or less what I meant. The right to private property for example is something that's basically infallible in mainstream American culture and the root of much of the rest of their politics, so I wouldn't get annoyed if someone wanting to fundamentally change private property was called a hard leftist. On the other hand, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have done nothing like this. Maybe deep down they want to see the world burn, but looking at their fairly tame public rhetoric and deciding to call them hard leftist just reeks of the Daily Mail to me.
My main issue with left/right is that it just devolves into a slur. "Useless" was probably the wrong word, I think more that it's just extremely unhelpful unless the definitions are clear. As Bilgesi said you can use these broad definitions in statistics, but to some extent I think left / right have been reified by their very existence as terms, and that is going to be reflected in surveys.
I don't think for example you could have something as strange and uncohesive as the Reagan social consensus without drumming it into people's heads that X group of policies is Left and Y group is Right. It makes no real ideological sense for someone who wants to nationalise rail to also be a gay rights activist, or for a CoE congregation member to also be a Brexit nationalist, but so often these things are treated in public discourse as basically the same thing. When something like the BNP or Le Pen comes along and offers a mixture of "left" and "right", media outlets are almost incredulous and don't know whether to throw the baby out with the bathwater or not. I don't think the words left and right are purely to blame for this, but they make the dichotomy far easier to draw.
One way to deal with the similarities of the hard left and right is to lump them together on another axis, populism.
When you look at the media landscape and make a graph with left-right and truthfulness axes, it's easy to see how extremist media lies the most (=populism), while the centrist media is most credible.
I'm surprised that Bloomberg is in the middle and pure 'fact reporting'. Also, NYT just 'skewing left' + 'fact reporting' is quite an understatement, considering the recent scandals regarding reports on the Middle East done by a journalist. And why is CNN so high on the chart...on par with Sputnik News? 
That's my perspective as an outsider, but I understand the difficulty of making such a chart. With that said, if I ever need to check world news or pieces on US politics, I go to Reuters or AP.
That's my perspective as an outsider, but I understand the difficulty of making such a chart. With that said, if I ever need to check world news or pieces on US politics, I go to Reuters or AP.
NYT has two recent scandals, both very minor. The one you mention is about an Arab fantasist that claimed he was in ISIS and was believed without corroboration in a series of podcasts (the journo was fired/quit) and the other about one of their senior journos saying the n word at some workshop where it was actually used to discuss racists. The last one was also forced to apologize and maybe even quit.
That's how serious media protect their hard-earned integrity. If Fox News did something like this, they wouldn't go so far with their measures, nor will many commentators expect much better from them. That you mention a NYT scandal at all looks like someone's propaganda. The right loves going after CNN, but also NYT.
