After threats, Reddit finally quarantines Trump forum The_Donald

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I like trying to break these with honest answers.

The first question

Oppression by corporations is more of a concern than oppression by governments.

Does disagreeing mean that you think that oppression by governments is a bigger concern, or is my view that oppression is oppression and it doesn’t matter if it is by government, corporation, religion or an individual also in there?

A few more questions in and it is clear that they are working on a scale from state run economy to ayn-cap. I’ve broken another one!

I’ll see what I end up with by picking the least worst options.

I’ve been there for the last fifteen years. I’ve been in the bottom left quadrant for even longer.

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It’s almost like you can’t get wholly accurate answers from answering short questions on a simple “strongly agree -> strongly disagree” spectrum, isn’t it?

Doesn’t stop me amusing myself with it though.

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this has been a problem that has gone unaddressed until it threatened the police state. it will continue to be a problem so long as the operators of the site turn a blind eye to what they seem to feel are more “civilized” ways of making non-white non-males feel afraid and unwelcome.

My answer at the end was Socialist, Internationalist, Libertarian, Revolutionary with a closest match of Libertarian Socialist. I have to agree with it on that.

Still, some of those questions didn’t work well for me at all. There were a few that felt like I was outside their assumptions and that all the answers were bad. Maybe one day they will get a quiz that works for everyone.

It wasn’t as bad as the Nolan Chart though. Six questions and I break it to the point where I can’t answer half of them.

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I answered that one by quietly inserting the words “at present” to it.

I got that too, and I understand why, but I’m not libertarian. One thing I’ve found helps to unbreak these kinds of discussions is to open up four options for each axis. Instead of just libertarian or authoritarian you can also be counter-libertarian or counter-authoritarian.

A libertarian is someone who really values or promotes liberty, which I basically don’t. I fundamentally want to be told what to do. But I’m constantly disappointed by the people who end up telling me what to do. So I’m not positive for libertarianism, I’m just in opposition to authority. I’m counter-authoritarian so I read as libertarian on this test. I’m also probably counter-nationalist rather than internationalist. I really am a socialist and a revolutionary, though.

It’s sort of like how Myers-Briggs never made any sense to me and gave me all these weird results that were totally different for differently worded tests. If I took their personality type descriptions seriously I’d be counter-extroverted, counter-thinking, intuitive, counter-judging.

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I think we’ve had this discussion before, but the core of my belief is this quote

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Mikhail Bakunin - Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism, 1867

Trying to understand libertarian socialism when you have only experienced ayn-caps and state socialism will always be difficult. Personally I am at the anarchist end of communalism.

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one of us one of us

THIS THIS A THOUSAND TIMES THIS

Reddit had to step in because the mods had tried to game the system. If a user can’t report a post or downvote it, it can only be upvoted, and thus the real impact of the comment is not measurable.

There are other subreddits that have removed those features. I think my beloved /sixers forum removes them. But that’s about basketball, not politics. Joel Embiid (the team’s best player) is advocating The Process, not fascism.

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Yes, I think you are right. I’m pretty sure the takeaway was that we essentially nearly perfectly politically aligned but that I have a alienating, aggressive tendency to try to argue that I have radically different reasons for thinking the same thing.

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A day later and there have been a few subreddits that were quickly banned, but most of the T_D trolls have been attempting to turn r/conservative into the new T_D. r/conservative was already a sewer (it’s less conservative and more openly fascist) so it isn’t really making things worse.

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Right, I should have been more coherent: I’m really just talking about it as a political identity comprised of “centrist” issues (and why it’s essentially pretentious at an individual level), but it’s still useful to talk about it in terms of groups.

So it seems.

Yeah, but no. First, that chart doesn’t establish any justification for a centrist identity (which is where my argument should have proceeded from).

Second, even the two-dimensional maps simplify their utility away to irrelevance. Maybe I’m not looking at it right, but even a little introspection makes them de-cohere.

Finally, I have issues with the abstraction since it implies the existence of something which logically must proceeds from two extremes. But does it? What if no such thing is possible? Some issues are really black and white in the sense of oil and water and not colors of paint.

Putting either oil and water at the ends of a spectrum would reveal a dearth of representation at the center because oil and water rarely mix well to begin with, not because they mix perfectly well and even suggests a mixture should out-mass the ends.

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Yeah, I don’t really get your point. You tried, it’s probably just me. I don’t see the world in absolutes and I see it filled with dichotomies.

Which is probably why you’re here and not over at The_Donald…

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In such political quizzes I tend towards some kind of Bookchin-like anarchism and it’s funny too since I’ve never really read anything by him.

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I avoided reading him for a long time because I wrongly assumed he was a Deep Green (he was actually opposed to them) and, while I see myself as green, I have a strong aversion to primitivism (being disabled tends to do that, I am not giving up the healthcare that helps keep me alive).

When I did read his work, I found that he had come to the same conclusions as I had.

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Same here. I just believe in some kind of union between human habitation and ‘nature’. Making everything an industrial hellscape doesn’t appeal to me. I think we can merge the city with the rural without much changes beyond ditching the centralism of modern capitalism.

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No, that would not be evidence of a center, it would be evidence of being a racist asshat. We don’t (or at least should not) recognize human rights only for those who are quietly subservient and untroubling. We recognize human rights for those who are human. Debating about which black people (in your hypothetical, not accusing you) qualify as human is pretty much the textbook definition of racist. So, no, not centrist, racist.

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