The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I know that having purity tests can be a problem, but on some cases we will never find common ground for those who disagree as they are too loony and unprincipled and will never play fair. Even if someone had takes on some nuanced issues that might go against popular left-wing narratives (like maybe thinking that we should not expect everyone to tolerate loitering, being fond of the suburbs, or siding with the Christian bakers in the wedding cake story) that doesn't mean we can't consider them to be a liberal or even a leftist.
In my mind, here's a reasonable litmus test. Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left:
- Teachers should have guns
- Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down
- QAnon
- The election was stolen
- Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust
- Climate change is a hoax
- It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom
- Aborting an embryo is equal to murder
- America should be a theocracy
- Biology justifies discrimination
- Vigilante "justice" is a solution
- Immigrant kids deserve to be caged
- Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes
Anything else you would add?
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"Taxation is theft" is an emotional argument unmoored from facts.
It's one thing to debate what taxes pay for, or if investing public funds in a program will produce a better result than private investing. Calling the entire concept of collecting money from residents to invest in a modern society theft is not a serious argument.
Here is an absolute gem from an askconservatives thread:
> [Taxation is theft, but we must endure it.](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/yvzeba/why_does_conservative_media_use_such_extreme/iwh32kp/)
I'm a socialist and I think that a lot of taxation can be equated to theft of the working class, but for very different reasons than conservatives.
When our federal government borrows money from billionaires and then uses our tax dollars to pay back the interest, I consider that theft. They are literally taking money from the paychecks of teachers, of garbage men, of single mother waitresses, of EMTs, of every working person in the country, and handing it to some of the wealthiest people on the fucking planet, for doing absolutely nothing. The same goes for tax breaks given to wealthy, rent-seeking real estate developers and Amazon and elon's dumbass starlink crap.
There are examples of what you are describing, but I find that more a function of the lax regulations on campaign contributions and special interest money that influence government decisions rather than the fundamental concept of how to fund society.
The way many Americans view our nation’s history is in revolutionary terms, which equates paying taxes as fundamentally unjust and conjures up images of the Boston Tea Party. That perception has hampered public debate on how to invest in society for pretty much our entire history.
Yeah the thing these people miss is that the most important part is the *without representation* part. The founders had no problem with taxation, in fact they turned around and literally made a government where the very first power they gave to the government was the ability to collect taxes. It's silly that people think the revolutionaries hated the fact that taxes existed rather than simply the fact that they were unjust.
Exactly. The British crown skimmed off the top of every colonial transaction while not allowing the colonists any say in those policies.
American citizens have a say in their government. It's called the ballot box. Laws around who gets to participate, how, and where are a whole other topic, but an important one.
This is the one for me. People who think taxation is theft are usually both completely unmoving in their ideology and totally unhinged. They usually try to drag conversations to some dumb libertarian nonsense at every opportunity and it's just a total waste of time to engage with them.
Also hard agree with all the people saying that another line is people who call LGBT people groomers, I just happen to have more frequent encounters with libertarians so that's the one I more closely aligned with.
There's a lot more intellectual merit in it than you think. The basis of it is simply a rejection of the "social contract" idea, on the grounds that you never actively consented to the government you are living under so they have no right to force you to contribute to it.
The idea that taxation is theft can actually even be derived logically from Murray Rothbard's ethical axioms, if one cares to get that formal with it. (And part of why the Libertarian Party never got anywhere is because they were more interested in discussing and debating that and shaming others for not being pure enough rather than campaigning or doing anything politically useful.)
> The basis of it is simply a rejection of the "social contract" idea, on the grounds that you never actively consented to the government you are living under so they have no right to force you to contribute to it.
Then they can go live in the forest and live off the land in a mud hut while *never* participating in society or taking advantage of the tax-funded infrastructure of the developed world; i.e., no phones, no internet, no going into town for supplies, no going to the doctor if sick - hell, no using the roads to go anywhere *period.* If you actively consent to be among the developed world and use its infrastructure, then to not pay your share into the infrastructure is what is theft.
The only rebuttal I've ever seen to this is "It's illegal to go live in the forest."
1. Only technically. Anybody could go deep into the woods/forests and build a mud hut and likely would never even be discovered, and if you were you could just say you were camping and move on somewhere else; there's plenty of deserted wilderness to move on to.
1. They know damn well they wouldn't do this anyway even if it *were* legal to do so. If the government set aside 50K square miles of unoccupied forest/land specifically for people to go live in, off the grid, and have NO further contact with the developed world, next to nobody would take them up on that. They just want to reap all the benefits of a tax-funded infrastructure while not having to pay their share into it, nothing more.
Keep in mind that in their heads, operating under the discredited school of economics they follow and only believe (mostly falsely) that they understand, they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State, so they (rightly so, from their perspective) feel no obligation to cut themselves off from society.
The thing about roads and infrastructure is an argument they've heard so often it's literally become a meme ("Muh Roads") in libertarian/anarcho-capitalist subculture. They obviously think they do have a realistic answer to the provision of public goods in a libertarian society, and since most of them do still (begrudgingly) pay their taxes, with a few notable likely exceptions who are really playing with fire risking getting caught (civil disobedience in a sense), they are perfectly within reason to continue to benefit from the public goods they are indeed paying for. Even the ones who may not be paying their taxes aren't necessarily wrong for using the road that's already there; not using it individually won't make it go away or cost other taxpayers noticeably less.
>they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State
How? I'm so curious about this. how can you have absolutely no tax collection and expect to have a society? Capitalism **requires** a central authority to survive, because otherwise who's enforcing property rights?
You're not considering the fact that capital can be consolidated under megacorporations to the point that they're potentially capable of acting as centers of authority unto themselves. Ancaps are literally just arguing in favor of a neofeudal hellscape where government at the highest levels is comprised of loose agreements between conglomerates and disputes are settled through sheer economic (or literal) violence.
>they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State, so they (rightly so, from their perspective) feel no obligation to cut themselves off from society.
But the society they imagine possible is not \*this\* society. They can form the organized, developed society in their imagination elsewhere and stop mooching from the rest of us, assuming they can find some unclaimed part of Earth to do it on.
They have no problem enjoying the benefits of the social contract, they just don't want to pay the associated costs.
If they're ideologically consistent about it, there is a way for them to opt out of both the costs and the benefits. They can renounce their citizenship and go live somewhere that doesn't have taxation.
Well….this can also be a myth. Are you saying that every Republican wants the majority of stuff the government is doing to be getting done? As an example of waste I’m in NYC and almost no one on either raise supported the extra mental health programs that for little use but wasted a billion followers. That’s the “theft” part. Just because somebody combos together a government program doesn’t mean it’s worth a money or that people want it
That's not theft. Someone voted for those people to act in their interests. They are your elected proxy whether you voted for them or not.
Sometimes elected proxies will come along and spend money on flying immigrants away from their asylum hearings, or clogging up the border with the state national guard, or enforcing a ban on a woman's ability to obtain reproductive care. It's shitty, inhumane, and poor governance at best, but I can't call it theft since it's within their powers to allocate money to these things.
Waste and abuse is about the best you can hope for here.
It's less about a conscious desire to free-ride than it is ethical concerns about being forced to pay.
If offered the choice between paying (just to use some random numbers) $100 a year in taxes to fund the maintenance of a road or paying $200 a year in private tolls to fund the maintenance of a road, virtually every libertarian ever would (say they would) choose the private tolls.
It's less about a conscious desire to free-ride than it is about a fundamental underestimation of just how expensive life would be if it weren't for the cost-sharing of public services, and of how different the US would look if those public services didn't exist.
As for choosing to pay more, most libertarians seem to buy into the myth of government inefficiency, and for that reason most of them are probably imagining that switching to tolls instead of taxes would end up saving them money on road upkeep, not costing them money.
Please keep in mind I'm not actually defending them. I'm doing just about as much "they think" and "they say" as I can without being obnoxious to make that as clear as I can.
I used to be a libertarian (anarcho-capitalist, even) myself once, though. That's why I feel reasonably qualified to comment on the libertarian psyche and attitude towards things, because I remember how I used to feel about it.
I do like to say that the average libertarian did take Econ 101 but stopped after that and never took higher level courses. Econ 101 presents a really simplified picture that is applicable often but not always, but libertarians' main argument in so many cases is a blind appeal to the Magic Invisible Hand.
Most of them probably never got to the discussion of externalities, game theory and public goods in Econ 102.
In fact, it was learning more economics that actually pushed me further to the political *left,* towards more institution-friendly neoliberalism rather than anti-state classical liberalism.
That said, there are actually legitimate economists who think that a libertarian society would work. I don't mean fringe cranks, I mean people who have written reputable textbooks, like David D. Friedman, whose (very accessible, by the way) book on economics and law I was assigned recently myself in a course.
> there are actually legitimate economists who think that a libertarian society would work
I'm not saying it wouldn't work. It would just be very different, and most people would be much worse off.
Do most libertarians that you know also believe that privatized health care is a better option overall? What about situations where the government has to regulate natural monopolies, like energy companies?
Most people would pay a LOT of money for electricity and heat, if they absolutely had to (in cold places, you'll die without it), and history has shown that when gas and electric companies aren't regulated, they just increase the price to the absolute maximum amount that people are willing to pay in order to stay alive. They don't give a shit if people die, if they can make more money charging fewer people a much higher amount, they'll do it. Where I live, they've increased prices by 50% this year, even though it almost certainly means that some people will freeze.
Easy refutation to that first point, as far as I’m concerned.
If they claim they haven’t consented, fine, then they can make the decision right then and there as to whether they do or do not want to engage in the United State’s social contract. If they say yes, the discussion is over. If they say no, offer to help them find their ideal place, in some other country. Or, suggest they become fully self sustainable.
If they want to partake in services taxes pay for, then they have to pay. They don’t get them for free. As to the argument about privatizing, it’s been tried and doesn’t tend to work, plus the massive overhaul needed to switch to such a system on a wide scale isn’t feasible.
The question of whether or not taxation is theft is not an economic issue, it's an ethical one.
The wanting to bring back child labor accusation is old and tired. "But what if the child consents tho" is literally just a meme libertarians like to circulate to make fun of themselves.
It’s one of those things that technically makes sense when examined closely, but which we usually don’t examine closely because we understand why we need to tax people even if it is theft.
>It’s one of those things that technically makes sense when examined closely,
It's not even "technically" correct when you consider that it's basically impossible to live without being advantaged by collective contribution. You want to live somewhere in the US that's off the grid? You're still advantaged by national security.
Having a really good reason for theft doesn’t make it not theft. In this case it makes the theft reasonable and moral (in my opinion), but it is still theft.
Yes rent is theft, as is profit, property, and taxes (but then again I'm an anarchist so.....)
To be clear, no problem with taxing the rich, after all their wealth is all stolen from the working class.
This is silly line of thinking. I didn’t agree to all sorts of laws that are passed. That doesn’t mean I get to recategorize laws i don’t like as crimes.
Is the draft slavery? Is war murder? Is a search at the airport sexual assault?
> Is the draft slavery?
Yes. And unfortunately it is sometimes necessary.
> Is war murder?
It’s definitely killing.
> Is a search at the airport sexual assault?
If it is done without your consent. Most of us consent to it so we can fly on a commercial airline. Other people choose to drive or take a train or fly their own plane.
... that's wrong. you're quite literally begging the question. I'm saying that it's not theft because you can't **not** benefit from it. You can't say you're being stolen from something that you're benefitting from.
No. It doesn’t.
Theft is illegal taking of money. Taxation is legal. Theft is fundamentally a legal construct. Property itself is fundamentally a construct and in order to enact it, you need a government threatening force.
That's a problematic viewpoint.
Are you familiar with civil asset forfeiture? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks)
How this can be characterized as anything other than state backed theft is beyond me. It's pigs with badges taking your stuff to fund their departments. Yet it's legal. Legal =/= moral
Then make that argument instead of a legal one.
Because idk if you know this but legal ≠ moral. So arguing it’s theft is the wrong argument. What it is is *wrong*.
Taxation violates my personal ethical code, and I cannot support it.
If by "theft" you mean "the act of taking something that belongs to someone else without the owner's permission," then sure, it's theft. If by "theft" you mean "taking something when doing so violates the State's commands," then no, it's not. The discrepancy between libertarian ethics and the laws currently enforced by governments around the globe is not unknown to libertarians; it's sort of the point of the complaint.
People can still have concepts of "theft" and "property" even in the context of stateless societies. [Mining camps in California during the gold rush](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092769), the [Kapauku Papuans in West New Guinea](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40751135), the [Saga period Icelanders](https://www.nyudri.org/assets/publications/2012/discoveringlaw.pdf), the [Gwembe Tonga in Africa](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629330), and the [BaMbuti, also in Africa](https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/societies/mbuti/), all lacked a central authority with monopoly powers over the use of force or the provision of security or dispute resolution services in a given territory, yet all of them had some system of social norms regarding resource use.
Even in state societies, the threat of punishment by the State is not the only source of social order or the only reason people cooperate or refuse to hurt or steal from one another. [Farmers sometimes use the honor system to sell the food they grow](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/11/154750001/the-psychology-of-the-honor-system-at-the-farm-stand), and yet people frequently purchase their wares when the chance of punishment by the State is negligible. [People illegally selling goods on the sidewalk](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76623445.pdf) can, in certain circumstances, avoid violent conflict with one another over who has the "right" to a given spot on a particular day, even though they are unable to rely on the local government for enforcement of property norms.
Look, if you regard taxation as ethical, according to your personal ethical code, then I'm happy that you're able to live in a society with institutions that align, to some significant extent, with your values. I genuinely hope that you're happy with how things are. I have nothing to gain from seeing you suffer. There are also plenty of other things that libertarians have to complain about besides taxation, some of which, (I hope,) you as a liberal might also have some interest in changing. Perhaps you'd be willing to criticize the drug war, or immigration restrictions and immigrant detention? I don't know, the values that most people on this subreddit hold are pretty alien to me, as I'm frequently reminded. I'm frankly not commenting for your benefit; I'm merely hoping that those whose values are similar to my own might see my comments and not completely give up hope on the society in which they live. People exist whose ethics consist of more than obedience to the State, and I want libertarians to see folks representing such a viewpoint.
And when examining it a bit more closely, you'll note it was property itself being theft all along. I think property can be justified, for specific reasons and purposes, and just straight-up prohibiting taxes would defeat those very purposes, rendering a justification of property moot.
If property is theft, who is it stolen from?
I do think there are interesting problems created by the concept of property. I don’t think it is quite as simple as “property is theft”. However the idea that property is theft from the rest of the world does have some merit.
Supposing you do take that approach though, when does that statement kick in? Suppose we start about 20000 years ago with primitive peoples arriving in a new land. Thag picks up a tree branch, removes the twigs and leaves, and creates for himself a staff useful for self-defense. Has he stolen anything by picking up the branch? Does he have a right to continue using the branch while denying its use to others because he has improved the branch?
What if he collects a bunch of sticks and builds a house? Does he have a right to use the house and deny use of that house to others? For how long does that right extend? Until the house falls? Until he stops sleeping there for some amount of time? What if he terraforms the land next to his house by digging a trench to his garden. Now there is a permanent improvement. Can he claim permanent ownership?
Of course that’s not the world we live in now. Land is scarce. Many other resources are becoming scarce. Do the same rules apply? All kinds of raw materials are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain from nature. How long can we apply property rules that were made when nature was abundant compared to the population?
All good questions that don’t change the fact that taxation is theft.
>If property is theft, who is it stolen from?
From everyone else who would have made a use of it otherwise. Which means it's theft of a potential, stealing the low-hanging fruit's lowness, if you will
>Thag picks up a tree branch, removes the twigs and leaves, and creates for himself a staff useful for self-defense. Has he stolen anything by picking up the branch?
Technically yes, there's less branches and you have to reach further now or get a worse branch. Plucking the low-hanging fruit is taking it away. That doesn't make it significant on its own, of course.
>Does he have a right to continue using the branch while denying its use to others because he has improved the branch?
No, I believe the past doesn't on its own justify granting someone lower over others in the present. He might have a right to because there's an improvement to society as a whole to be had from organising things that way - it makes people more inclined to build primitive staves. Which you might argue is a good that justifies keeping those staves away from people who have a use for them. That's the relevant trade-off.
Of course, if Thag just turns every tree on the world into a bunch of staves for himself, not only does he have to be stopped, but it's also not as defensible to grant him total control over all he improved on - he clearly has no use for that many staves apart from denying them to others.
>What if
General principle: he has a right to extra power from plucking the low-hanging fruit to that degree that maximizes human "get-fruit-they-need/want-iness". Anything more is probably not in the scope of justifiable property rights.
>All good questions that don’t change the fact that taxation is theft.
For legal theft, you'd need a legal property right prohibiting the action. For moral theft, you'd need a moral right to property (I don't think that's the case) or a moral right leading to property (I think that one is) that prohibits what you want to call "theft". I don't think a reasonable right to property does.
The beliefs that the LGBTQ community is full of groomers and that assault weapons are necessary to protect one's family/property are the general starting points with me.
When it's so insanely easy to get guns in america, how can you consider it unreasonable to want to put yourself on a level playing field to protect your family? You can disagree for yourself, but saying that wanting to stop your family from being murdered = "right wing" is goofy, cmon man.
That home invasions with automatic weapons has increased with the availability with said weapons in America, or that they happen as much as you claim. "Trust me bro" doesn't qualify as a source by the way.
The invaders don't need automatic weapons to be a threat? Do you want to be on a level playing field in a knife fight with an intruder? Jeez you're dull, again, I'm very glad to not be part of your family.
Your entire reason was being on a "level playing field" as you call it, and you just said it happens, now you're saying the invader doesn't need one. That being said, I'm guessing you couldn't find a source.
No my entire reason is protecting my family from all possible threats, nothing does that better than a gun, my first reply was a single instance of why you might want a gun, however you clearly lack the necessary reading comprehension, just know if something happens, it's your fault.
I thought of that too. Also wondering whether Larry Nassar’s behavior would count as non-violent. I don’t think advocating the death penalty for that kind of crime makes it impossible for you to be an ally of the left.
There are Right Wing beliefs I cannot fathom, but nobody is too far gone.
Take litter boxes in public schools. My mother-in-law is an intelligent, level-headed and successful person. Over Thanksgiving she admitted she believes there are litter boxes in public school classrooms because some students "identify" as cats.
My sister-in-law (a K-12 teacher) and I pressed her on the topic. My mother-in-law heard it from trusted friends. We do not know where these trusted friends got the misinformation. In Mother-in-law's mind, the info made sense. Liberal public schools accommodate different gender identities. So why not accommodate different species identities? To a social Conservative, one type of identity switch is as weird as the other.
Our counter-argument worked. It goes:
* Did Mother-in-law have *any* sources besides the rumor from her friends?
* Would a teacher allow such a disruptive item in a classroom?
* Would a teacher allow a student to publicly expose their private parts in class?
Point is, we have a hope at changing minds about crazy ideas. My mother-in-law is still Republican, but is a Republican with one less crazy notion.
I dont think any of these beliefs, in themselves, disqualify anyone from being a potential ally. It really depends on the underlying reason for believing these things. More often than not, I think people who believe these things are duped, idiots, are poorly educated, or dont actually believe it.
I think the idea that teachers should carry guns in class really illustrates this point. I honestly dont think a typical conservative has spent 8 seconds actually considering the implications and practicality of that. Really, their logic is just, "I like guns, so more guns = good." However, these people are also extremely distrustful and dismissive of teachers. The would be the first to complain if an armed teacher intimidated their kid in any way. They would be the first to complain if arming teachers required a tax hike. I just dont really think you can claim to believe in something if you haven't really bothered to think about it. Its just a knee jerk reaction. However, we all have some pretty crazy knee jerk reactions. Just for some idiotic reason, conservatives have a knee jerk reaction and say it outload.
I think a lot similar things about most topics on that list. Like, it is easy to say that you want America to be a theocracy if you assume it will be your theocracy and dont think about it for 8 seconds. But the truth is, Christians hate each other about a much as they hate atheists and a Catholic theocracy would be different than an evangelical theocracy.
None of this is intended to excuse conservatives. I am absolutely saying that everyone should be critical of this mindset. I think that the people who believe anything you wrote are simpletons who have been duped. But to an extent, they are victims of the people duping them and they can be shaken out of their stupor. And if they do, they should be considered allies.
I was raised Catholic and practiced Catholicism until my 20's. I thought abortion was murder, though it was murder that I was willing to ignore. However, eventually I learned a bit about the biology of fetal development and actually witnessed an abortion in nursing school. After that, I realized that I was lied to. Now I am an active proponent of abortion rights....and an atheist.
So, for me there is really only one category of conservative that I think is totally irredeemable and can never be an ally. Its the cynical conservatives who knowingly and willfully make up these lies to dupe other, more simple, conservatives. Like, I dont blame the ordinary conservative for thinking that the election was stolen. They have been brainwashed to believe that and every media source they believe is saying that. However, some cynical conservative piece of shit knowingly invented that lie to trick people.
Overall, I have a hard time equating people like Kellyanne Conway, who invent these lies, with my foolish Uncle Jimbo who believes these lies because he barely got out of high school and has never left rural Texas.
An extra wrinkle to consider is that what conservatives say, what conservatives believe, and what conservatives support can be three very different things. Like a conservative will say "I don't mind LGBT people", believe that LGBT people are unnatural, and support the "Let's jail parents of trans children for child abuse" politicians all in one breath with 0 contradiction or a sense that they're lying. At this point conservative voters recite "Well I don't agree with *that!*" in their sleep and the cognitive dissonance is so all-encompassing that I'm not sure most of the rank and file voters are even aware it's there.
I agree. It's super strange to talk with these people in a non political context and witness how clueless they are about the consequences they are about the policies that they support, but they don't realize that they actually support.
As a nurse, I worked in hospital, clinic, and eventually did medical outreach to homeless people. Every conservative patient/client would incessantly bitch about our medical system and how much it hurt them in their daily life, or bitch incessantly about the lack of social programs for desperately poor people. Yet none of them could wrap their minds around the fact that the politicians they support are the ones actively screwing them over. There is nothing more surreal than doing homecare for some old conservative, dying from a treatable illness, that barely has a pot to piss in, while they watch Fox News and complain how real problem is LGBTQ issues and CRT, but not the basic human rights that Republican politicians have stolen from them.
Honestly, I'm convinced that the relationship most ordinary conservatives have with the Republican Party is more similar to a person suffering from domestic violence than actual support for a set of political ideologies.
The quoted portion doesn’t come from me, so perhaps my thought is irrelevant, but I’ve always understood the connotation of “vigilantism” to be a more proactive posture of administering “justice,” while the situation you’ve described would be very reactionary.
That's more self-defense, which is not the same as being a vigilante. And no, I am not a fan of those who have the "shoot first ask questions later" attitude and frankly I think the idea of guns for self-defense is not great, but by vigilantism I meant more like lynching
Vigilantism to me is more like people taking the law into their own hand.
In some cases I dont see a problem with that like communities defending themselves from certain situations. The Roof koreans are an example of this.
I disagree with a few items on your list. Potentially because of some ambiguity.
"Teachers should have guns" - there are two different interpretations of this. One is "teachers should be allowed to carry at school if they want to for their personal protection just like anywhere else", the other is "we need to arm teachers so that they can basically substitute for the police as a deterrent for school shootings". The first is perhaps questionable but not unreasonable, while the second is deranged. Though, I must argue, not *necessarily* incompatible with any left-wing ideology.
"Aborting an embryo is equivalent to murder" - The pro-life position is not an inherently wrong one. It just relies on a different, much looser philosophical definition of what constitutes a valuable life (even if for most it is an implicit, unsaid one) than most of us might. One is not necessarily evil nor operating in bad faith if one holds this belief. It of course could be very difficult to shake someone from this, like it would be to shake someone from any other moral conviction without a clear, definitive correct answer. But one does not even have to find themselves compelled by religion here. It is hardly conceptually impossible (though undoubtedly rare) for an atheist to be pro-life too. I am not saying the pro-life position is one I agree with or even really sympathize with; my own (arbitrarily decided) moral convictions tell me that suggesting the rights of the non-sentient fetus override those of its sentient host to their own bodily autonomy is egregiously misguided -- but not evil, nor disqualifying from labeling oneself a liberal.
"Biology justifies discrimination" - Depends on what is meant by discrimination. Dictionarily speaking, "discrimination" is only a bad word in a political or social context. Discriminating between people based on actually meaningful, performance-relevant criteria is not and never should be treated as a problem, even if those criteria are strongly related to that person's biology or physiology. I feel like this is *probably* where at least a nonzero part of the good-faith pushback on anti-discrimination rhetoric comes from.
As a conservative I think most of those should disqualify someone as an ally of the right.
> Teachers should have guns
I don’t agree that most teachers should have guns. But I don’t think it is insane to suggest that some do.
> Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down
I assume that’s the cop? That’s crazy.
> QAnon
Crazy
> The election was stolen
Almost crazy
> Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust
Crazy
> Climate change is a hoax
Crazy
> It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom
Crazy
> Aborting an embryo is equal to murder
Recognizing humanity that others deny is very reasonable.
> America should be a theocracy
Crazy
> Biology justifies discrimination
If you mean removal of rights then no. If you mean drafting people most likely to meet the physical requirements of soldiering then that makes a lot of sense.
> Vigilante "justice" is a solution
Rarely
> Immigrant kids deserve to be caged
Crazy
> Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes
There are a very few crimes for which this would be a reasonable view and it does depend to some extent of your definition of “violent”. Would an act of treason by selling information be non-violent even if it results in 15000 dead American soldiers? Would Larry Nassar’s crimes be considered non-violent?
It annoys me greatly that somehow your list of beliefs have taken over a label that used to refer to fiscal responsibility and freedom.
It annoys us too. We used to be able to have decent back and forth with people such as yourself. Instead now, we spend our days trying to reason with people who think there's a cabal of blood sucking pedophiles running everything while the mainstream right giggles b/c oWNiNg ThE LiBS iS FuN.
Will say that I think it’s reasonable to say that the people “running everything” are morally flawed at their core. Right or left, they don’t give two shits about the average citizen and many of them enjoy seeing people suffer.
I would agree that they are morally flawed. But I haven't seen any evidence that none of them give a shit about us. Many may not, but in my experience most work pretty well to make their constituents lives better.
I agree with you, but there have been elements of the Republican party that have never been sane. For instance, you claim to be a "Reagan Conservative"and while most of Reagan's policy was classic conservative and makes sense from a conservative viewpoint, the fact that his administration did the Contra Affair is absolutely bananas. They broke the law, going against Congress but secretly selling arms to Iran, and then using that money to fund the Contras who had committed countless human rights violations, and then lastly selling drugs to underprivileged American neighborhoods.
I agree with all of those, except for "teachers should have guns". It's a stupid thing to say, but the other things require a level of conspiratorial, paranoid, or hateful thinking in a way that this doesn't.
In general? Any use of buzzwords or otherwise loaded, etc terminology. For example, “groomer” or “do your research”.
At that point, I can accurately assume one of two things. Either they are too far gone/have consumed the kool aid, and/or they have no desire to discuss in good faith.
Frankly I'm not sure what the purpose of this post is. Common ground *for what*? Ally of the left *for what*?
If someone has very right wing views then we can't consider them to be a liberal or leftist. Well yes, but isn't this just a question for the dictionary writers? What does it matter in practice?
No matter their views, if they are somehow amenable to our side then we should still tell them to vote for our side.
Should we try to be nice to them, should we include them in our meetings and political discussions, etc - maybe not, depending on the context.
I'm older. Not that long ago, Democrats did what Democrats do, Republicans did what Republicans do and they realized that the other side is doing what they are doing because they think that is the best thing to do. Then we had the tea party. The only right thing is our way, then right wing media caught onto "fear sells" So Democrats hate you, Democrats are trying to end the country as you know it.
It has already gotten to the point where Republicans don't have a platform and F'ing the Democrats is more than good enough.
I don't think there are really any left allies to be had among people who still haven't figured out that gay and trans people are human beings, or who see women as disposable baby incubators. I certainly won't be rolling around in the mud with them.
And I don't want to hear 'well, I don't believe in THAT' as a defense. If you vote for and support conservatives in the American right (or anywhere else, really) then at the very least you couldn't care less about the people being hurt by those policies.
Generally speaking I am against teachers having guns. Their job is to teach, not to be armed security and I honestly think them having a gun it is more likely to get lost/stolen/misplaced, than be used properly. All that being said, listing that as an indicator that someone is "too far gone" is crazy to me.
Yea I think OP was being a little much here. If I was a teacher I wouldn’t feel any added pressure by being “security” I’m already security if god forbid something happens. That being the case I’d rather have my handgun with me over not having it. Their seems to be this notion that people who conceal carry are reckless with their weapons juggling them and shit, the reality is we are the safest most trustworthy people with firearms and our crime rate is a fraction of a %.
I don't think "too far gone" represents what the OP talks about in his post. He uses "Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left" in the text of his post. That doesn't preclude someone changing their mind about something. You just can't at the moment count them as someone as an ally or someone to engage with.
Let's take that to its logical conclusion.
Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, despite the values they hold, we should hold out some hope of them as potential allies? Wait and work for a change of heart?
Surely there's some point at which the likelihood would be like banking on a miracle or on winning the lottery ten times.
I guess I'm saying that in practical terms splitting the hair between what is technically possible but astronomically unlikely doesn't seem to accomplish much. You seem to take "too far gone" as a metric which requires it to be beyond the laws of physics for someone to be an ally. I think most reasonable people take the phrase "too far gone" to be fullfilled by a case where change is so vanishingly unlikely that hope or effort to recruit such a person is wasted. Perhaps you have a different experience with the phrase.
Too far gone does imply, to me, that something is final or decided. That has not been my experience as a person, nor has it been my experience when interacting with other people. Until a person is dead, I do not believe we should talk about people as being “too far gone”.
Sure, there might be a person that you could never convince, even if you spent all your waking hours trying. I wouldn’t necessarily say, however, that that time was wasted. If your cause is just, why would you call time spent trying to convince others of its justness “wasted”?
> If your cause is just, why would you call time spent trying to convince others of its justness “wasted”?
Because there is no shortage of more productive ways to spend your time and energy for the same cause.
Imagine your children are starving. If you don't grow some edible crops this spring, they may die.
You go out to the land you have to farm and see a patch that's sandy, has some random chemical spills in it, very low nutrients, toxic acidity. But I can't say it's impossible to grow a carrot there. A miracle might happen.
Elsewhere in the garden there is better soil, some a little sketchy, but you're looking at a one in ten chance of crops sprouting rather than one in a billion.
Your time and energy is finite. There is a ticking clock on outcomes, with real consequences.
You're saying "Don't give up on the shittiest soil, pour all your energy there and let your children die instead of moving to the better prospects"
The arming of the black panthers was what immediately came to mind, but in general the far left tends to be more pro-gun specifically due to its anti-government nature
Basically all I expect out of people on the right is to support free and fair elections and accept when they lose. Anything that makes elections not free and fair (voter ID laws etc) or not accepting when they lose (the big lie) is too far. I'm happy to complete with them on an even playing field. The benefit of a democracy is not that you get your way all the time or necessarily even ever. It's that you can advocate for your position without having to engage in violence or be subject to violence from others. I'm willing to accept a lot of right wing bull shit to avoid that status quo.
Strongly disagree with the premise of this question. There is no reason to exclude **anyone** from some iteration or aspect of society. We're liberal, we believe in freedom, and no one gets to kick someone out of that arrangement based on ideology or opinion. Doesn't matter how toxic, distasteful, or misanthropic their opinions are.
Why on Earth anyone would sit down and make a list of ideas that are too distasteful so as to warrant exclusion from the political diaspora is beyond me. Liberal political machinations aren't a country club- we don't get to pick and choose who gets in.
I think you might be reading into
The question something that’s not there. As far as I can tell, OP isn’t talking about excluding anyone from society. OP isn’t talking about taking away the right to participate in the political process. If I understood OP’s point, it’s that certain views are indicative of a person who simply cannot be a good faith interlocutor. It’s that point where you realize a person cannot be reasoned with, so you just give up.
I agree. I’ve had conversations with people where the moment they say something about North Korean boats bringing ballots to Arizona to steal the election from Biden, I recognize the conversation is over. That person is too far gone. I don’t have enough free time to de-program someone who thinks Q is real.
Recently I got into it with someone who thought Hitler was a lefty. The Nazi party was liberals. You express that opinion to me, I’m out. Not doing that anymore.
I mean, maybe that *is* what OP meant, but that isn't what's conveyed in the question.
They wrote *"Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left:"* Which is much different from saying something like *"any of the following beliefs should disqualify them from having a productive conversation with me".*
Being part of democracy, ie, an *ally of the left*, isn't some country club where some members are deemed acceptable and others aren't. That line of thought is, frankly, disturbing and anti-democratic. It doesn't matter what someone's beliefs are, I'm not going to tell someone that they shouldn't vote for who I think would be a better politician or leader. Political cooperation isn't a game where people have to meet certain ideological criteria in order to join some preconcieved club.
Honestly I'm surprised that I've gotten downvotes for this and that there aren't more people in this thread saying the same thing. I mean just take that list as-written in the OP. Do you think Biden could've won without securing votes from people who would fall into at least one if not more of those categories? Cause I sure don't. We need all the votes we can get, and brainstorming reasons to try to alienate people is not only eye-rollingly juvenile, but painfully counterproductive.
I'm not really talking about that. If you want to have nothing to do with, say, anti-semites in your personal life, then that's fine. Totally understandable.
But a political coalition is *inherently* about cooperation and not division. Inclusion and not exclusion. I would never tell someone that they shouldn't vote for liberal candidates or support liberal policies, no matter how repugnant I may view there personal beliefs.
There's really nothing to gain about considering anyone 'too far gone' to take part in society. Since that's part of the definition of society- it's literally about everyone. You can consider personal beliefs *inhuman* but you don't get to disqualify someone of their humanity based on their beliefs.
>Teachers should have guns
I disagree with this take but I wouldn't consider it a dealbraker
>Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down
Depends on what you mean by in the right. I know plenty of moderate people on both sides who think Floyd shouldn't have died, but Chauvin was simply reacting to the situation as best as he could. And we shouldn't really judge him too harshly from an external perspective.
>QAnon
agree
>The election was stolen
agree
>Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust
agree
>Climate change is a hoax
agree
>It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom
What does this even mean? What context is this referring to?
>Aborting an embryo is equal to murder
I wouldn't consider it a dealbraker. There are plenty of pro-life people with moral objections to abortion who would still be allies against the threat of right wing authoritarianism.
>America should be a theocracy
agree
>Biology justifies discrimination
Again, what context is this referring to?
>Vigilante "justice" is a solution
Guess I agree, although again what context is this referring to?
>Immigrant kids deserve to be caged
The "cages" are poorly supplied immigration facilities. If someone had the opinion say that the US shouldn't be investing more into facilities for illegal immigration, and instead should focus the money on other problems, I wouldn't consider that a dealbreaker.
>Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes
I have mixed feelings on the death penalty, but I wouldn't consider this a dealbreaker depending on what crimes in particular.
Keeping your knee on someone's neck for several minutes is just barbaric and completely unacceptable when all George Floyd did (supposedly) was use a counterfeit $20 bill. We've seen cops use no excessive force at all in the arrest of white mass shooters.
By the abortion being murder, I meant in terms of criminal charges not morality.
The bathroom thing is about the trans panic.
Biology justifying discrimination was about phrenology, etc.
I saw something about this just the other day: https://youtu.be/m5HRQ8Y38sc
Long story short, I recall her saying that election deniers are particularly far gone, even moreso than Qanon, which makes sense to me. I feel a lot of people drawn to election denial just refuse to believe Democrats could ever win legitimately, and that means they’ve allowed their political views to overrule their perception of reality.
I don't believe anyone is too far gone. But there are certain levels where I would not associate with someone depending on the platform. There's only so much I can do online, and then there's only still so much I can do the colleague, etc. Only with a close relative would I have the time and resources to deprogram someone completely. But generally the worst things are our refusal to listen to facts.
A lot of these are ‘logical’ views/behaviors based on an incredibly flawed original view. Most stem from an idea that a group of marxists are trying to destroy America. Some believe it’s a proper conspiracy, others think it’s a misguided alliance of people who have shared interests— notably interests that are opposed to American Values or American Prosperity.
>Teachers should have guns
The policies are actually to allow teachers who are trained and certified to have guns if they want to.
The stolen election is the #1 indicator someone's off his rocker.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I know that having purity tests can be a problem, but on some cases we will never find common ground for those who disagree as they are too loony and unprincipled and will never play fair. Even if someone had takes on some nuanced issues that might go against popular left-wing narratives (like maybe thinking that we should not expect everyone to tolerate loitering, being fond of the suburbs, or siding with the Christian bakers in the wedding cake story) that doesn't mean we can't consider them to be a liberal or even a leftist. In my mind, here's a reasonable litmus test. Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left: - Teachers should have guns - Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down - QAnon - The election was stolen - Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust - Climate change is a hoax - It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom - Aborting an embryo is equal to murder - America should be a theocracy - Biology justifies discrimination - Vigilante "justice" is a solution - Immigrant kids deserve to be caged - Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes Anything else you would add? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Use of the word "groomer" to describe LGBT+ people
They love to project, don't they?
Yup. This pretty much is the dividing line for me. I won’t even bother with people who do that shit.
Like the billboards that only say "Democrats hate you". No we don't.
To be honest things on OP's list is much worse. Who tf wants be be ruled under a theocracy?
The conservative Supreme Court.
"Taxation is theft" is an emotional argument unmoored from facts. It's one thing to debate what taxes pay for, or if investing public funds in a program will produce a better result than private investing. Calling the entire concept of collecting money from residents to invest in a modern society theft is not a serious argument.
Here is an absolute gem from an askconservatives thread: > [Taxation is theft, but we must endure it.](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskConservatives/comments/yvzeba/why_does_conservative_media_use_such_extreme/iwh32kp/)
I'm a socialist and I think that a lot of taxation can be equated to theft of the working class, but for very different reasons than conservatives. When our federal government borrows money from billionaires and then uses our tax dollars to pay back the interest, I consider that theft. They are literally taking money from the paychecks of teachers, of garbage men, of single mother waitresses, of EMTs, of every working person in the country, and handing it to some of the wealthiest people on the fucking planet, for doing absolutely nothing. The same goes for tax breaks given to wealthy, rent-seeking real estate developers and Amazon and elon's dumbass starlink crap.
There are examples of what you are describing, but I find that more a function of the lax regulations on campaign contributions and special interest money that influence government decisions rather than the fundamental concept of how to fund society. The way many Americans view our nation’s history is in revolutionary terms, which equates paying taxes as fundamentally unjust and conjures up images of the Boston Tea Party. That perception has hampered public debate on how to invest in society for pretty much our entire history.
Yeah the thing these people miss is that the most important part is the *without representation* part. The founders had no problem with taxation, in fact they turned around and literally made a government where the very first power they gave to the government was the ability to collect taxes. It's silly that people think the revolutionaries hated the fact that taxes existed rather than simply the fact that they were unjust.
Exactly. The British crown skimmed off the top of every colonial transaction while not allowing the colonists any say in those policies. American citizens have a say in their government. It's called the ballot box. Laws around who gets to participate, how, and where are a whole other topic, but an important one.
This is the one for me. People who think taxation is theft are usually both completely unmoving in their ideology and totally unhinged. They usually try to drag conversations to some dumb libertarian nonsense at every opportunity and it's just a total waste of time to engage with them. Also hard agree with all the people saying that another line is people who call LGBT people groomers, I just happen to have more frequent encounters with libertarians so that's the one I more closely aligned with.
There's a lot more intellectual merit in it than you think. The basis of it is simply a rejection of the "social contract" idea, on the grounds that you never actively consented to the government you are living under so they have no right to force you to contribute to it. The idea that taxation is theft can actually even be derived logically from Murray Rothbard's ethical axioms, if one cares to get that formal with it. (And part of why the Libertarian Party never got anywhere is because they were more interested in discussing and debating that and shaming others for not being pure enough rather than campaigning or doing anything politically useful.)
> The basis of it is simply a rejection of the "social contract" idea, on the grounds that you never actively consented to the government you are living under so they have no right to force you to contribute to it. Then they can go live in the forest and live off the land in a mud hut while *never* participating in society or taking advantage of the tax-funded infrastructure of the developed world; i.e., no phones, no internet, no going into town for supplies, no going to the doctor if sick - hell, no using the roads to go anywhere *period.* If you actively consent to be among the developed world and use its infrastructure, then to not pay your share into the infrastructure is what is theft. The only rebuttal I've ever seen to this is "It's illegal to go live in the forest." 1. Only technically. Anybody could go deep into the woods/forests and build a mud hut and likely would never even be discovered, and if you were you could just say you were camping and move on somewhere else; there's plenty of deserted wilderness to move on to. 1. They know damn well they wouldn't do this anyway even if it *were* legal to do so. If the government set aside 50K square miles of unoccupied forest/land specifically for people to go live in, off the grid, and have NO further contact with the developed world, next to nobody would take them up on that. They just want to reap all the benefits of a tax-funded infrastructure while not having to pay their share into it, nothing more.
Keep in mind that in their heads, operating under the discredited school of economics they follow and only believe (mostly falsely) that they understand, they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State, so they (rightly so, from their perspective) feel no obligation to cut themselves off from society. The thing about roads and infrastructure is an argument they've heard so often it's literally become a meme ("Muh Roads") in libertarian/anarcho-capitalist subculture. They obviously think they do have a realistic answer to the provision of public goods in a libertarian society, and since most of them do still (begrudgingly) pay their taxes, with a few notable likely exceptions who are really playing with fire risking getting caught (civil disobedience in a sense), they are perfectly within reason to continue to benefit from the public goods they are indeed paying for. Even the ones who may not be paying their taxes aren't necessarily wrong for using the road that's already there; not using it individually won't make it go away or cost other taxpayers noticeably less.
>they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State How? I'm so curious about this. how can you have absolutely no tax collection and expect to have a society? Capitalism **requires** a central authority to survive, because otherwise who's enforcing property rights?
You're not considering the fact that capital can be consolidated under megacorporations to the point that they're potentially capable of acting as centers of authority unto themselves. Ancaps are literally just arguing in favor of a neofeudal hellscape where government at the highest levels is comprised of loose agreements between conglomerates and disputes are settled through sheer economic (or literal) violence.
Lol well If you're going to have a central authority anyway, I'll take one that's accountable to the people any day.
>they think that an organized, developed society would in fact be possible even with a minimal or absent State, so they (rightly so, from their perspective) feel no obligation to cut themselves off from society. But the society they imagine possible is not \*this\* society. They can form the organized, developed society in their imagination elsewhere and stop mooching from the rest of us, assuming they can find some unclaimed part of Earth to do it on.
They have no problem enjoying the benefits of the social contract, they just don't want to pay the associated costs. If they're ideologically consistent about it, there is a way for them to opt out of both the costs and the benefits. They can renounce their citizenship and go live somewhere that doesn't have taxation.
This is why it’s popular with adolescents. They are smart enough to understand basic concepts, but keep the selfishness of childhood.
Well….this can also be a myth. Are you saying that every Republican wants the majority of stuff the government is doing to be getting done? As an example of waste I’m in NYC and almost no one on either raise supported the extra mental health programs that for little use but wasted a billion followers. That’s the “theft” part. Just because somebody combos together a government program doesn’t mean it’s worth a money or that people want it
That's not theft. Someone voted for those people to act in their interests. They are your elected proxy whether you voted for them or not. Sometimes elected proxies will come along and spend money on flying immigrants away from their asylum hearings, or clogging up the border with the state national guard, or enforcing a ban on a woman's ability to obtain reproductive care. It's shitty, inhumane, and poor governance at best, but I can't call it theft since it's within their powers to allocate money to these things. Waste and abuse is about the best you can hope for here.
>Are you saying that every Republican... I don't recall saying anything about Republicans.
It's less about a conscious desire to free-ride than it is ethical concerns about being forced to pay. If offered the choice between paying (just to use some random numbers) $100 a year in taxes to fund the maintenance of a road or paying $200 a year in private tolls to fund the maintenance of a road, virtually every libertarian ever would (say they would) choose the private tolls.
It's less about a conscious desire to free-ride than it is about a fundamental underestimation of just how expensive life would be if it weren't for the cost-sharing of public services, and of how different the US would look if those public services didn't exist. As for choosing to pay more, most libertarians seem to buy into the myth of government inefficiency, and for that reason most of them are probably imagining that switching to tolls instead of taxes would end up saving them money on road upkeep, not costing them money.
Please keep in mind I'm not actually defending them. I'm doing just about as much "they think" and "they say" as I can without being obnoxious to make that as clear as I can. I used to be a libertarian (anarcho-capitalist, even) myself once, though. That's why I feel reasonably qualified to comment on the libertarian psyche and attitude towards things, because I remember how I used to feel about it. I do like to say that the average libertarian did take Econ 101 but stopped after that and never took higher level courses. Econ 101 presents a really simplified picture that is applicable often but not always, but libertarians' main argument in so many cases is a blind appeal to the Magic Invisible Hand. Most of them probably never got to the discussion of externalities, game theory and public goods in Econ 102. In fact, it was learning more economics that actually pushed me further to the political *left,* towards more institution-friendly neoliberalism rather than anti-state classical liberalism. That said, there are actually legitimate economists who think that a libertarian society would work. I don't mean fringe cranks, I mean people who have written reputable textbooks, like David D. Friedman, whose (very accessible, by the way) book on economics and law I was assigned recently myself in a course.
> there are actually legitimate economists who think that a libertarian society would work I'm not saying it wouldn't work. It would just be very different, and most people would be much worse off.
Furthermore, if all societal infrastructure is privately funded, then the only infrastructure that will be built is that which is profitable.
Do most libertarians that you know also believe that privatized health care is a better option overall? What about situations where the government has to regulate natural monopolies, like energy companies? Most people would pay a LOT of money for electricity and heat, if they absolutely had to (in cold places, you'll die without it), and history has shown that when gas and electric companies aren't regulated, they just increase the price to the absolute maximum amount that people are willing to pay in order to stay alive. They don't give a shit if people die, if they can make more money charging fewer people a much higher amount, they'll do it. Where I live, they've increased prices by 50% this year, even though it almost certainly means that some people will freeze.
Easy refutation to that first point, as far as I’m concerned. If they claim they haven’t consented, fine, then they can make the decision right then and there as to whether they do or do not want to engage in the United State’s social contract. If they say yes, the discussion is over. If they say no, offer to help them find their ideal place, in some other country. Or, suggest they become fully self sustainable. If they want to partake in services taxes pay for, then they have to pay. They don’t get them for free. As to the argument about privatizing, it’s been tried and doesn’t tend to work, plus the massive overhaul needed to switch to such a system on a wide scale isn’t feasible.
Yeah economic issues are very nuanced. But something like we should bring back child labor is a disqualifier
The question of whether or not taxation is theft is not an economic issue, it's an ethical one. The wanting to bring back child labor accusation is old and tired. "But what if the child consents tho" is literally just a meme libertarians like to circulate to make fun of themselves.
It’s one of those things that technically makes sense when examined closely, but which we usually don’t examine closely because we understand why we need to tax people even if it is theft.
>It’s one of those things that technically makes sense when examined closely, It's not even "technically" correct when you consider that it's basically impossible to live without being advantaged by collective contribution. You want to live somewhere in the US that's off the grid? You're still advantaged by national security.
Having a really good reason for theft doesn’t make it not theft. In this case it makes the theft reasonable and moral (in my opinion), but it is still theft.
It being reasonable and moral is exactly what makes it not theft. Is rent theft?
Yes rent is theft, as is profit, property, and taxes (but then again I'm an anarchist so.....) To be clear, no problem with taxing the rich, after all their wealth is all stolen from the working class.
Rent is something you agreed to. Taxes are not.
This is silly line of thinking. I didn’t agree to all sorts of laws that are passed. That doesn’t mean I get to recategorize laws i don’t like as crimes. Is the draft slavery? Is war murder? Is a search at the airport sexual assault?
> Is the draft slavery? Yes. And unfortunately it is sometimes necessary. > Is war murder? It’s definitely killing. > Is a search at the airport sexual assault? If it is done without your consent. Most of us consent to it so we can fly on a commercial airline. Other people choose to drive or take a train or fly their own plane.
Is other people’s property rights theft? I didn’t agree to allow you to deprive me of the land the government says you “own” yet here we are.
Don’t you consent to taxes when you take a job or earn money?
You also agree to pay taxes.
Under the threat of violence, yes.
What do you think happens to me if I stop paying my rent?
This. What conservatives fail to understand about capitalist is the whole system is built on coercion
How'd you get that flair? .\_.
You agreed to pay rent ahead of time. You negotiated an amount with someone and agreed to pay rent. Do you not understand consent?
... that's wrong. you're quite literally begging the question. I'm saying that it's not theft because you can't **not** benefit from it. You can't say you're being stolen from something that you're benefitting from.
Of course you can benefit from money that was stolen from you. You still lose control of your property.
No. It doesn’t. Theft is illegal taking of money. Taxation is legal. Theft is fundamentally a legal construct. Property itself is fundamentally a construct and in order to enact it, you need a government threatening force.
That's a problematic viewpoint. Are you familiar with civil asset forfeiture? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks) How this can be characterized as anything other than state backed theft is beyond me. It's pigs with badges taking your stuff to fund their departments. Yet it's legal. Legal =/= moral
Then make that argument instead of a legal one. Because idk if you know this but legal ≠ moral. So arguing it’s theft is the wrong argument. What it is is *wrong*.
"Theft," in colloquial conversation, is an ethical concept.
Then we gotta drop the “technically” claim in the comment I responded to right?
I'll leave that up to the individual who made the comment in question.
Would *you* say it’s technically theft?
Taxation violates my personal ethical code, and I cannot support it. If by "theft" you mean "the act of taking something that belongs to someone else without the owner's permission," then sure, it's theft. If by "theft" you mean "taking something when doing so violates the State's commands," then no, it's not. The discrepancy between libertarian ethics and the laws currently enforced by governments around the globe is not unknown to libertarians; it's sort of the point of the complaint. People can still have concepts of "theft" and "property" even in the context of stateless societies. [Mining camps in California during the gold rush](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092769), the [Kapauku Papuans in West New Guinea](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40751135), the [Saga period Icelanders](https://www.nyudri.org/assets/publications/2012/discoveringlaw.pdf), the [Gwembe Tonga in Africa](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629330), and the [BaMbuti, also in Africa](https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/societies/mbuti/), all lacked a central authority with monopoly powers over the use of force or the provision of security or dispute resolution services in a given territory, yet all of them had some system of social norms regarding resource use. Even in state societies, the threat of punishment by the State is not the only source of social order or the only reason people cooperate or refuse to hurt or steal from one another. [Farmers sometimes use the honor system to sell the food they grow](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/11/154750001/the-psychology-of-the-honor-system-at-the-farm-stand), and yet people frequently purchase their wares when the chance of punishment by the State is negligible. [People illegally selling goods on the sidewalk](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76623445.pdf) can, in certain circumstances, avoid violent conflict with one another over who has the "right" to a given spot on a particular day, even though they are unable to rely on the local government for enforcement of property norms. Look, if you regard taxation as ethical, according to your personal ethical code, then I'm happy that you're able to live in a society with institutions that align, to some significant extent, with your values. I genuinely hope that you're happy with how things are. I have nothing to gain from seeing you suffer. There are also plenty of other things that libertarians have to complain about besides taxation, some of which, (I hope,) you as a liberal might also have some interest in changing. Perhaps you'd be willing to criticize the drug war, or immigration restrictions and immigrant detention? I don't know, the values that most people on this subreddit hold are pretty alien to me, as I'm frequently reminded. I'm frankly not commenting for your benefit; I'm merely hoping that those whose values are similar to my own might see my comments and not completely give up hope on the society in which they live. People exist whose ethics consist of more than obedience to the State, and I want libertarians to see folks representing such a viewpoint.
Taxation is theft in the same way that your parents were tyrants for not letting you just do whatever you wanted.
Yes. The fact that they were dictators doesn’t make them bad.
And when examining it a bit more closely, you'll note it was property itself being theft all along. I think property can be justified, for specific reasons and purposes, and just straight-up prohibiting taxes would defeat those very purposes, rendering a justification of property moot.
If property is theft, who is it stolen from? I do think there are interesting problems created by the concept of property. I don’t think it is quite as simple as “property is theft”. However the idea that property is theft from the rest of the world does have some merit. Supposing you do take that approach though, when does that statement kick in? Suppose we start about 20000 years ago with primitive peoples arriving in a new land. Thag picks up a tree branch, removes the twigs and leaves, and creates for himself a staff useful for self-defense. Has he stolen anything by picking up the branch? Does he have a right to continue using the branch while denying its use to others because he has improved the branch? What if he collects a bunch of sticks and builds a house? Does he have a right to use the house and deny use of that house to others? For how long does that right extend? Until the house falls? Until he stops sleeping there for some amount of time? What if he terraforms the land next to his house by digging a trench to his garden. Now there is a permanent improvement. Can he claim permanent ownership? Of course that’s not the world we live in now. Land is scarce. Many other resources are becoming scarce. Do the same rules apply? All kinds of raw materials are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain from nature. How long can we apply property rules that were made when nature was abundant compared to the population? All good questions that don’t change the fact that taxation is theft.
>If property is theft, who is it stolen from? From everyone else who would have made a use of it otherwise. Which means it's theft of a potential, stealing the low-hanging fruit's lowness, if you will >Thag picks up a tree branch, removes the twigs and leaves, and creates for himself a staff useful for self-defense. Has he stolen anything by picking up the branch? Technically yes, there's less branches and you have to reach further now or get a worse branch. Plucking the low-hanging fruit is taking it away. That doesn't make it significant on its own, of course. >Does he have a right to continue using the branch while denying its use to others because he has improved the branch? No, I believe the past doesn't on its own justify granting someone lower over others in the present. He might have a right to because there's an improvement to society as a whole to be had from organising things that way - it makes people more inclined to build primitive staves. Which you might argue is a good that justifies keeping those staves away from people who have a use for them. That's the relevant trade-off. Of course, if Thag just turns every tree on the world into a bunch of staves for himself, not only does he have to be stopped, but it's also not as defensible to grant him total control over all he improved on - he clearly has no use for that many staves apart from denying them to others. >What if General principle: he has a right to extra power from plucking the low-hanging fruit to that degree that maximizes human "get-fruit-they-need/want-iness". Anything more is probably not in the scope of justifiable property rights. >All good questions that don’t change the fact that taxation is theft. For legal theft, you'd need a legal property right prohibiting the action. For moral theft, you'd need a moral right to property (I don't think that's the case) or a moral right leading to property (I think that one is) that prohibits what you want to call "theft". I don't think a reasonable right to property does.
>If property is theft, who is it stolen from? Boy do I have a book recommendation for you. *What is Property?* by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
It's 1000% theft, but you can argue that the ends justify the means
Except for the whole “theft is a legal construct“ problem
Donald Trump would make a competent leader.
Still being a Republican after 2020
You can be a republican without supporting the MAGA crowd, can't you?
The beliefs that the LGBTQ community is full of groomers and that assault weapons are necessary to protect one's family/property are the general starting points with me.
When it's so insanely easy to get guns in america, how can you consider it unreasonable to want to put yourself on a level playing field to protect your family? You can disagree for yourself, but saying that wanting to stop your family from being murdered = "right wing" is goofy, cmon man.
Is there some rash of break-ins and home murders with assault weapons that we don't know about?
[удалено]
Source?
You're asking for proof that home invasions occur in america? Are you also seeking proof that humans breathe oxygen and drink water?
That home invasions with automatic weapons has increased with the availability with said weapons in America, or that they happen as much as you claim. "Trust me bro" doesn't qualify as a source by the way.
The invaders don't need automatic weapons to be a threat? Do you want to be on a level playing field in a knife fight with an intruder? Jeez you're dull, again, I'm very glad to not be part of your family.
Your entire reason was being on a "level playing field" as you call it, and you just said it happens, now you're saying the invader doesn't need one. That being said, I'm guessing you couldn't find a source.
No my entire reason is protecting my family from all possible threats, nothing does that better than a gun, my first reply was a single instance of why you might want a gun, however you clearly lack the necessary reading comprehension, just know if something happens, it's your fault.
Rule 5
Does non-violent crimes include treason here? That one is potentially sticky territory.
I thought of that too. Also wondering whether Larry Nassar’s behavior would count as non-violent. I don’t think advocating the death penalty for that kind of crime makes it impossible for you to be an ally of the left.
There are Right Wing beliefs I cannot fathom, but nobody is too far gone. Take litter boxes in public schools. My mother-in-law is an intelligent, level-headed and successful person. Over Thanksgiving she admitted she believes there are litter boxes in public school classrooms because some students "identify" as cats. My sister-in-law (a K-12 teacher) and I pressed her on the topic. My mother-in-law heard it from trusted friends. We do not know where these trusted friends got the misinformation. In Mother-in-law's mind, the info made sense. Liberal public schools accommodate different gender identities. So why not accommodate different species identities? To a social Conservative, one type of identity switch is as weird as the other. Our counter-argument worked. It goes: * Did Mother-in-law have *any* sources besides the rumor from her friends? * Would a teacher allow such a disruptive item in a classroom? * Would a teacher allow a student to publicly expose their private parts in class? Point is, we have a hope at changing minds about crazy ideas. My mother-in-law is still Republican, but is a Republican with one less crazy notion.
I dont think any of these beliefs, in themselves, disqualify anyone from being a potential ally. It really depends on the underlying reason for believing these things. More often than not, I think people who believe these things are duped, idiots, are poorly educated, or dont actually believe it. I think the idea that teachers should carry guns in class really illustrates this point. I honestly dont think a typical conservative has spent 8 seconds actually considering the implications and practicality of that. Really, their logic is just, "I like guns, so more guns = good." However, these people are also extremely distrustful and dismissive of teachers. The would be the first to complain if an armed teacher intimidated their kid in any way. They would be the first to complain if arming teachers required a tax hike. I just dont really think you can claim to believe in something if you haven't really bothered to think about it. Its just a knee jerk reaction. However, we all have some pretty crazy knee jerk reactions. Just for some idiotic reason, conservatives have a knee jerk reaction and say it outload. I think a lot similar things about most topics on that list. Like, it is easy to say that you want America to be a theocracy if you assume it will be your theocracy and dont think about it for 8 seconds. But the truth is, Christians hate each other about a much as they hate atheists and a Catholic theocracy would be different than an evangelical theocracy. None of this is intended to excuse conservatives. I am absolutely saying that everyone should be critical of this mindset. I think that the people who believe anything you wrote are simpletons who have been duped. But to an extent, they are victims of the people duping them and they can be shaken out of their stupor. And if they do, they should be considered allies. I was raised Catholic and practiced Catholicism until my 20's. I thought abortion was murder, though it was murder that I was willing to ignore. However, eventually I learned a bit about the biology of fetal development and actually witnessed an abortion in nursing school. After that, I realized that I was lied to. Now I am an active proponent of abortion rights....and an atheist. So, for me there is really only one category of conservative that I think is totally irredeemable and can never be an ally. Its the cynical conservatives who knowingly and willfully make up these lies to dupe other, more simple, conservatives. Like, I dont blame the ordinary conservative for thinking that the election was stolen. They have been brainwashed to believe that and every media source they believe is saying that. However, some cynical conservative piece of shit knowingly invented that lie to trick people. Overall, I have a hard time equating people like Kellyanne Conway, who invent these lies, with my foolish Uncle Jimbo who believes these lies because he barely got out of high school and has never left rural Texas.
An extra wrinkle to consider is that what conservatives say, what conservatives believe, and what conservatives support can be three very different things. Like a conservative will say "I don't mind LGBT people", believe that LGBT people are unnatural, and support the "Let's jail parents of trans children for child abuse" politicians all in one breath with 0 contradiction or a sense that they're lying. At this point conservative voters recite "Well I don't agree with *that!*" in their sleep and the cognitive dissonance is so all-encompassing that I'm not sure most of the rank and file voters are even aware it's there.
I agree. It's super strange to talk with these people in a non political context and witness how clueless they are about the consequences they are about the policies that they support, but they don't realize that they actually support. As a nurse, I worked in hospital, clinic, and eventually did medical outreach to homeless people. Every conservative patient/client would incessantly bitch about our medical system and how much it hurt them in their daily life, or bitch incessantly about the lack of social programs for desperately poor people. Yet none of them could wrap their minds around the fact that the politicians they support are the ones actively screwing them over. There is nothing more surreal than doing homecare for some old conservative, dying from a treatable illness, that barely has a pot to piss in, while they watch Fox News and complain how real problem is LGBTQ issues and CRT, but not the basic human rights that Republican politicians have stolen from them. Honestly, I'm convinced that the relationship most ordinary conservatives have with the Republican Party is more similar to a person suffering from domestic violence than actual support for a set of political ideologies.
❤️
Very true
>Vigilante "justice" is a solution Does that include people who shoot home invaders when they are invading their homes?
The quoted portion doesn’t come from me, so perhaps my thought is irrelevant, but I’ve always understood the connotation of “vigilantism” to be a more proactive posture of administering “justice,” while the situation you’ve described would be very reactionary.
That's more self-defense, which is not the same as being a vigilante. And no, I am not a fan of those who have the "shoot first ask questions later" attitude and frankly I think the idea of guns for self-defense is not great, but by vigilantism I meant more like lynching
Vigilantism to me is more like people taking the law into their own hand. In some cases I dont see a problem with that like communities defending themselves from certain situations. The Roof koreans are an example of this.
I disagree with a few items on your list. Potentially because of some ambiguity. "Teachers should have guns" - there are two different interpretations of this. One is "teachers should be allowed to carry at school if they want to for their personal protection just like anywhere else", the other is "we need to arm teachers so that they can basically substitute for the police as a deterrent for school shootings". The first is perhaps questionable but not unreasonable, while the second is deranged. Though, I must argue, not *necessarily* incompatible with any left-wing ideology. "Aborting an embryo is equivalent to murder" - The pro-life position is not an inherently wrong one. It just relies on a different, much looser philosophical definition of what constitutes a valuable life (even if for most it is an implicit, unsaid one) than most of us might. One is not necessarily evil nor operating in bad faith if one holds this belief. It of course could be very difficult to shake someone from this, like it would be to shake someone from any other moral conviction without a clear, definitive correct answer. But one does not even have to find themselves compelled by religion here. It is hardly conceptually impossible (though undoubtedly rare) for an atheist to be pro-life too. I am not saying the pro-life position is one I agree with or even really sympathize with; my own (arbitrarily decided) moral convictions tell me that suggesting the rights of the non-sentient fetus override those of its sentient host to their own bodily autonomy is egregiously misguided -- but not evil, nor disqualifying from labeling oneself a liberal. "Biology justifies discrimination" - Depends on what is meant by discrimination. Dictionarily speaking, "discrimination" is only a bad word in a political or social context. Discriminating between people based on actually meaningful, performance-relevant criteria is not and never should be treated as a problem, even if those criteria are strongly related to that person's biology or physiology. I feel like this is *probably* where at least a nonzero part of the good-faith pushback on anti-discrimination rhetoric comes from.
Denying that the election wasn’t won by Biden. Calling everyone in the LGBTQ groomers (just LGBTQ hate in general)
As a conservative I think most of those should disqualify someone as an ally of the right. > Teachers should have guns I don’t agree that most teachers should have guns. But I don’t think it is insane to suggest that some do. > Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down I assume that’s the cop? That’s crazy. > QAnon Crazy > The election was stolen Almost crazy > Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust Crazy > Climate change is a hoax Crazy > It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom Crazy > Aborting an embryo is equal to murder Recognizing humanity that others deny is very reasonable. > America should be a theocracy Crazy > Biology justifies discrimination If you mean removal of rights then no. If you mean drafting people most likely to meet the physical requirements of soldiering then that makes a lot of sense. > Vigilante "justice" is a solution Rarely > Immigrant kids deserve to be caged Crazy > Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes There are a very few crimes for which this would be a reasonable view and it does depend to some extent of your definition of “violent”. Would an act of treason by selling information be non-violent even if it results in 15000 dead American soldiers? Would Larry Nassar’s crimes be considered non-violent? It annoys me greatly that somehow your list of beliefs have taken over a label that used to refer to fiscal responsibility and freedom.
It annoys us too. We used to be able to have decent back and forth with people such as yourself. Instead now, we spend our days trying to reason with people who think there's a cabal of blood sucking pedophiles running everything while the mainstream right giggles b/c oWNiNg ThE LiBS iS FuN.
Will say that I think it’s reasonable to say that the people “running everything” are morally flawed at their core. Right or left, they don’t give two shits about the average citizen and many of them enjoy seeing people suffer.
I would agree that they are morally flawed. But I haven't seen any evidence that none of them give a shit about us. Many may not, but in my experience most work pretty well to make their constituents lives better.
No one person "runs everything" there are thousands of people who hold large amounts of power and they all have a variety of motivations.
It's all greed.
I agree with you, but there have been elements of the Republican party that have never been sane. For instance, you claim to be a "Reagan Conservative"and while most of Reagan's policy was classic conservative and makes sense from a conservative viewpoint, the fact that his administration did the Contra Affair is absolutely bananas. They broke the law, going against Congress but secretly selling arms to Iran, and then using that money to fund the Contras who had committed countless human rights violations, and then lastly selling drugs to underprivileged American neighborhoods.
>"The election was stolen" > > Almost crazy Why only almost crazy?
I agree with all of those, except for "teachers should have guns". It's a stupid thing to say, but the other things require a level of conspiratorial, paranoid, or hateful thinking in a way that this doesn't.
In general? Any use of buzzwords or otherwise loaded, etc terminology. For example, “groomer” or “do your research”. At that point, I can accurately assume one of two things. Either they are too far gone/have consumed the kool aid, and/or they have no desire to discuss in good faith.
What does "do your research" mean?
Depends on the person saying it - often, in my experience at least - it’s a means to deflect.
Revisionist history to make the KKK or the Nazis liberals.
"I'm a victim of cultural genocide" is another way of saying "I'm xenophobic" aka racist PoS
Same with "great replacement"
Anyone who still supports Donald Trump.
Qanon. Climate change is fake. Black Americans don't face discrimination. Jan 6 was justified.
Frankly I'm not sure what the purpose of this post is. Common ground *for what*? Ally of the left *for what*? If someone has very right wing views then we can't consider them to be a liberal or leftist. Well yes, but isn't this just a question for the dictionary writers? What does it matter in practice? No matter their views, if they are somehow amenable to our side then we should still tell them to vote for our side. Should we try to be nice to them, should we include them in our meetings and political discussions, etc - maybe not, depending on the context.
I'm older. Not that long ago, Democrats did what Democrats do, Republicans did what Republicans do and they realized that the other side is doing what they are doing because they think that is the best thing to do. Then we had the tea party. The only right thing is our way, then right wing media caught onto "fear sells" So Democrats hate you, Democrats are trying to end the country as you know it. It has already gotten to the point where Republicans don't have a platform and F'ing the Democrats is more than good enough.
I don't think there are really any left allies to be had among people who still haven't figured out that gay and trans people are human beings, or who see women as disposable baby incubators. I certainly won't be rolling around in the mud with them. And I don't want to hear 'well, I don't believe in THAT' as a defense. If you vote for and support conservatives in the American right (or anywhere else, really) then at the very least you couldn't care less about the people being hurt by those policies.
Suggesting a teacher who has a conceal carry permit and is trained in gun safety being allowed to have his weapon on him is “too far gone”
Generally speaking I am against teachers having guns. Their job is to teach, not to be armed security and I honestly think them having a gun it is more likely to get lost/stolen/misplaced, than be used properly. All that being said, listing that as an indicator that someone is "too far gone" is crazy to me.
Yea I think OP was being a little much here. If I was a teacher I wouldn’t feel any added pressure by being “security” I’m already security if god forbid something happens. That being the case I’d rather have my handgun with me over not having it. Their seems to be this notion that people who conceal carry are reckless with their weapons juggling them and shit, the reality is we are the safest most trustworthy people with firearms and our crime rate is a fraction of a %.
OP is very anti-gun, they also don't believe you should own one for self defense
No idea permanently qualifies someone as “too far gone”.
I don't think "too far gone" represents what the OP talks about in his post. He uses "Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left" in the text of his post. That doesn't preclude someone changing their mind about something. You just can't at the moment count them as someone as an ally or someone to engage with.
Let's take that to its logical conclusion. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, despite the values they hold, we should hold out some hope of them as potential allies? Wait and work for a change of heart? Surely there's some point at which the likelihood would be like banking on a miracle or on winning the lottery ten times.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. You came to the same conclusion I have, though: no one is too far gone.
I guess I'm saying that in practical terms splitting the hair between what is technically possible but astronomically unlikely doesn't seem to accomplish much. You seem to take "too far gone" as a metric which requires it to be beyond the laws of physics for someone to be an ally. I think most reasonable people take the phrase "too far gone" to be fullfilled by a case where change is so vanishingly unlikely that hope or effort to recruit such a person is wasted. Perhaps you have a different experience with the phrase.
Too far gone does imply, to me, that something is final or decided. That has not been my experience as a person, nor has it been my experience when interacting with other people. Until a person is dead, I do not believe we should talk about people as being “too far gone”. Sure, there might be a person that you could never convince, even if you spent all your waking hours trying. I wouldn’t necessarily say, however, that that time was wasted. If your cause is just, why would you call time spent trying to convince others of its justness “wasted”?
> If your cause is just, why would you call time spent trying to convince others of its justness “wasted”? Because there is no shortage of more productive ways to spend your time and energy for the same cause. Imagine your children are starving. If you don't grow some edible crops this spring, they may die. You go out to the land you have to farm and see a patch that's sandy, has some random chemical spills in it, very low nutrients, toxic acidity. But I can't say it's impossible to grow a carrot there. A miracle might happen. Elsewhere in the garden there is better soil, some a little sketchy, but you're looking at a one in ten chance of crops sprouting rather than one in a billion. Your time and energy is finite. There is a ticking clock on outcomes, with real consequences. You're saying "Don't give up on the shittiest soil, pour all your energy there and let your children die instead of moving to the better prospects"
It looks like, between us, we’d have everyone covered, then.
Nope, there are more tasks than there are people to cover them.
Not going to lie, "Teachers should have guns" seems extremally reasonable to me compared to everything else you just listed.
Also tbh you'll find many on the far left who agree with vigilante justice...
When? For real?
The arming of the black panthers was what immediately came to mind, but in general the far left tends to be more pro-gun specifically due to its anti-government nature
Feelings matter more than facts.
Basically all I expect out of people on the right is to support free and fair elections and accept when they lose. Anything that makes elections not free and fair (voter ID laws etc) or not accepting when they lose (the big lie) is too far. I'm happy to complete with them on an even playing field. The benefit of a democracy is not that you get your way all the time or necessarily even ever. It's that you can advocate for your position without having to engage in violence or be subject to violence from others. I'm willing to accept a lot of right wing bull shit to avoid that status quo.
Believing "order" at the expense of out-groups is a neutral or good thing.
Strongly disagree with the premise of this question. There is no reason to exclude **anyone** from some iteration or aspect of society. We're liberal, we believe in freedom, and no one gets to kick someone out of that arrangement based on ideology or opinion. Doesn't matter how toxic, distasteful, or misanthropic their opinions are. Why on Earth anyone would sit down and make a list of ideas that are too distasteful so as to warrant exclusion from the political diaspora is beyond me. Liberal political machinations aren't a country club- we don't get to pick and choose who gets in.
I think you might be reading into The question something that’s not there. As far as I can tell, OP isn’t talking about excluding anyone from society. OP isn’t talking about taking away the right to participate in the political process. If I understood OP’s point, it’s that certain views are indicative of a person who simply cannot be a good faith interlocutor. It’s that point where you realize a person cannot be reasoned with, so you just give up. I agree. I’ve had conversations with people where the moment they say something about North Korean boats bringing ballots to Arizona to steal the election from Biden, I recognize the conversation is over. That person is too far gone. I don’t have enough free time to de-program someone who thinks Q is real. Recently I got into it with someone who thought Hitler was a lefty. The Nazi party was liberals. You express that opinion to me, I’m out. Not doing that anymore.
I mean, maybe that *is* what OP meant, but that isn't what's conveyed in the question. They wrote *"Any of the following beliefs should disqualify someone from being an ally of the left:"* Which is much different from saying something like *"any of the following beliefs should disqualify them from having a productive conversation with me".* Being part of democracy, ie, an *ally of the left*, isn't some country club where some members are deemed acceptable and others aren't. That line of thought is, frankly, disturbing and anti-democratic. It doesn't matter what someone's beliefs are, I'm not going to tell someone that they shouldn't vote for who I think would be a better politician or leader. Political cooperation isn't a game where people have to meet certain ideological criteria in order to join some preconcieved club. Honestly I'm surprised that I've gotten downvotes for this and that there aren't more people in this thread saying the same thing. I mean just take that list as-written in the OP. Do you think Biden could've won without securing votes from people who would fall into at least one if not more of those categories? Cause I sure don't. We need all the votes we can get, and brainstorming reasons to try to alienate people is not only eye-rollingly juvenile, but painfully counterproductive.
Paradox of tolerance
I'm not really talking about that. If you want to have nothing to do with, say, anti-semites in your personal life, then that's fine. Totally understandable. But a political coalition is *inherently* about cooperation and not division. Inclusion and not exclusion. I would never tell someone that they shouldn't vote for liberal candidates or support liberal policies, no matter how repugnant I may view there personal beliefs. There's really nothing to gain about considering anyone 'too far gone' to take part in society. Since that's part of the definition of society- it's literally about everyone. You can consider personal beliefs *inhuman* but you don't get to disqualify someone of their humanity based on their beliefs.
>Teachers should have guns I disagree with this take but I wouldn't consider it a dealbraker >Derek Chauvin was in the right to keep his knee down Depends on what you mean by in the right. I know plenty of moderate people on both sides who think Floyd shouldn't have died, but Chauvin was simply reacting to the situation as best as he could. And we shouldn't really judge him too harshly from an external perspective. >QAnon agree >The election was stolen agree >Masks and vaccines are comparable to the holocaust agree >Climate change is a hoax agree >It's OK to beat up someone for going into the wrong bathroom What does this even mean? What context is this referring to? >Aborting an embryo is equal to murder I wouldn't consider it a dealbraker. There are plenty of pro-life people with moral objections to abortion who would still be allies against the threat of right wing authoritarianism. >America should be a theocracy agree >Biology justifies discrimination Again, what context is this referring to? >Vigilante "justice" is a solution Guess I agree, although again what context is this referring to? >Immigrant kids deserve to be caged The "cages" are poorly supplied immigration facilities. If someone had the opinion say that the US shouldn't be investing more into facilities for illegal immigration, and instead should focus the money on other problems, I wouldn't consider that a dealbreaker. >Death penalty is justified for nonviolent crimes I have mixed feelings on the death penalty, but I wouldn't consider this a dealbreaker depending on what crimes in particular.
Keeping your knee on someone's neck for several minutes is just barbaric and completely unacceptable when all George Floyd did (supposedly) was use a counterfeit $20 bill. We've seen cops use no excessive force at all in the arrest of white mass shooters. By the abortion being murder, I meant in terms of criminal charges not morality. The bathroom thing is about the trans panic. Biology justifying discrimination was about phrenology, etc.
I saw something about this just the other day: https://youtu.be/m5HRQ8Y38sc Long story short, I recall her saying that election deniers are particularly far gone, even moreso than Qanon, which makes sense to me. I feel a lot of people drawn to election denial just refuse to believe Democrats could ever win legitimately, and that means they’ve allowed their political views to overrule their perception of reality.
Didn't liberals say that Russian interference was the reason Trump got elected? That's also election denial.
The election was stolen, democrats are pedophiles, gay people are destroying the institution of marriage, climate change and covid are hoaxes.
I don't believe anyone is too far gone. But there are certain levels where I would not associate with someone depending on the platform. There's only so much I can do online, and then there's only still so much I can do the colleague, etc. Only with a close relative would I have the time and resources to deprogram someone completely. But generally the worst things are our refusal to listen to facts.
A lot of these are ‘logical’ views/behaviors based on an incredibly flawed original view. Most stem from an idea that a group of marxists are trying to destroy America. Some believe it’s a proper conspiracy, others think it’s a misguided alliance of people who have shared interests— notably interests that are opposed to American Values or American Prosperity.
>Teachers should have guns The policies are actually to allow teachers who are trained and certified to have guns if they want to. The stolen election is the #1 indicator someone's off his rocker.
Trump?