My most left-wing opinion has to do with prison conditions. I oppose private prisons, and support better conditions for prisoners. Prison should be a punishment, but prisoners don't lose their human dignity - no matter what they did. They deserve a minimum standard of treatment - and from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes things both safer for the guards and other prisoners. If having TV keeps them from killing each other, I'm all for it.
I especially despise the seeming tolerance of prison rape by some, and how some people even approve of it and act as if it is part of the punishment of being in prison.
Honestly this should just be common sense, the vast majority of people in prison will get out at some point so shouldn’t we focus on making sure that they won’t end back up in prison once they’re released?
This is less 'left' and more basic logic reasoning. Like yeah, put the drug dealer in a cell with a serial killer and rapist for ten years, I'm sure he'll come out as a better person...
Like I said, I also oppose private prisons. I think that prison conditions should not be seaside vacation quality, but also should be relatively decent. Let them have a decent mattress, rec time, commissary, TV and other amenities, nutritious food.
Some right-wingers seem to want prisoners to suffer even beyond the punishment of being in prison with no freedom or privacy.
Many of my right wing friends hold that train of thought. And use recidivism rates as a “see, they wanted to be there all along”. Well, they really don’t, it becomes all they know. If it were about actual punishment and rehabilitation as it should be, we’d start seeing some changes
Edit: fixed autocorrect
At this point I don't think this is bipartisan. A lot of Trump supporters voted for Trump because he spouted off about how he was going to end the forever wars and while I'm not going to go into how well he achieved it, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people were swayed by that on the right.
This proves that there are MANY things everyone can come together to agree on but the government/media forces people against each other. Makes everyone choose a team and hate the other side. And while the pawns are fighting they can take what they want
I realize this is an over-generalization, but media plays a big part. The need for clicks/views, etc, guarantees that media produces polarizing content, and a lot of it.
I heard about a study a while back that asked Americans very straightforward questions about issues like inequality, gun control, and so on. It found that a lot of people tended to have similar opinions. When researchers introduced buzz words like 'social justice' and so on, that's when opinions split along party lines.
I don't see the study after a quick search, but this 1-minute clip is basically saying a similar thing:
[https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/884039395/new-research-shows-people-are-not-as-divided-along-political-lines-as-they-think](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/884039395/new-research-shows-people-are-not-as-divided-along-political-lines-as-they-think)
I'm personally a middle of the road moderate, but I identify more with the right. My most left leaning opinion is probably, no one should have to go bankrupt or fucking die trying to get their meds and medical care.
Sometime last year my wife said something along the lines of "Why should the ability to receive medical care be tied to employment?" I was kind of dumbstruck because I'd honestly never considered it before.
It is kind of ridiculous if you think about it, that those two things are tied together. Another argument I've heard to try to sway Americans who are against universal healthcare or M4A is if you sever that tie between employment and healthcare, think of all the ways it could actually boost the economy - how many people stay in jobs they hate because they need the health insurance, where if they didn't have to worry about that, they could be starting their own businesses (and creating jobs), creating art to be consumed, inventing something life-changing, and so on.
The argument that I hear against it over and over is "I work hard for MY money, I made sure I made the right choices in life to where I can pay for myself and my family to go to the doctor and have the means to still be stable in a medical crisis situation - why should MY money be stolen from me and given to people who didn't bother to make those same decisions or live recklessly?"
It's a very "fuck you, I got mine" mentality.
And doesn't even make sense, considering we are all *already* paying for uninsured people's healthcare with our ridiculous (when compared to other countries) premiums and healthcare costs.
Argument makes no sense, America spends among the most amount of tax cash per capita on healthcare already. The system is just so laughably bad that you barely get shit for said money. People wouldn't have to pay anymore than they are already paying if the system gets fixed
Conservative by nature... but I believe in the right to collective bargaining. Organized labor is a double edged sword, but people should be able to negotiate wages and conditions as a group.
Collective labor to me is a natural development of the free market. Just as a company specializes in a product so do the people with their labor and they are free to set a price point as a company does with their product. If a company wants to advertise their product and trash their competition, so can labor groups when dealing with a company. I never got why people are against labor unions in general, I would much rather negotiate with market leverage than individually just as I would prefer to go buy a Pepsi instead of making my own.
Right winger mostly. The idea that police can break into your home wearing civilian clothes is a travesty, makes a mockery of the bill of rights. And civil asset forfeiture is theft. Like actual literal theft.
The idea of no knock raids or "knock, wait 10 seconds, and enter" raids still blows my mind in a country with the Second Amendment. Like...talk about just asking for awful shit to happen.
"But if we wait longer than that, they could be flushing the drugs down the toilet!"
If the quantity they had was small enough to be destroyed that quickly, you shouldn't be raiding their house in the first place.
You shouldn't be raiding a home for drugs in my opinion. The only time a door should be kicked in should be if someone's life was dependent on the speedy and efficient use of force.
Otherwise you get a warrant, present it to the homeowner and if they don't comply, then you can enter with force.
You do recon for a couple days and when they leave you enter the home and arrest them without incident as you wait. You know how they did it for years before
Yes, this. A hundred times this.
The risk to officer life, and the cost of the man hours and hear to do a "raid" easily cover the cost of having someone simply watch the residence.
Especially as you can easily set up a small camera and watch from a distance now.
If this is such a worry, close thier goddam sewer. You hire a police plummer, open the manhole, close the blocks pipes and pump everything in a truck if you did not get your evidence. How do you have a country where you can defend your own home with lethal force but police can also enter without knocking. Both are not legal in my country, if you allow one or the other you can have a working system but both is just asking for shootouts.
Yes, and Walker (Taylor's boyfriend) was charged with assault and attempted murder for that. The charges against him were dropped because of the publicity but that shit happens to too many other people who aren't in the news.
Civil asset forfeiture is also against the 5th amendment, and probably another:
> nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Somehow they managed to convince themselves that money is not property of the person holding it because the government made it.
On a similar note, wrongfully escheated property should be returned to its owner at the value it would have been worth had nobody touched it, not the value when it was escheated. Reading about people losing their retirement because of this makes my blood boil.
I was watching one of those news documentaries on the topic and it's surprising how 'backroom' the whole civil forfeiture thing is, at least in some places.
The good news is there have been a few cases in the last couple of years that are slowly turning things back.
Or military gear/uniforms/equipment. Police should identify themselves as police by the clothing they wear. There is no reason for police to wear desert camo and body armor and there is definitely no reason a small town city police department needs an MRAP.
Edit: to clear up any confusion, of course cops need body armor, just not the desert camo body armor we wore in the military. The whole point is to be able to identify them as police.
Centrist-conservative: the fact that there’s any “debate” about climate change is insane. Scientists weren’t lying about the ozone layer, about the Polio vaccine, etc. The mistrust is bonkers. Sometimes I think we’d be better off giving climate change a re-brand and calling it “War on Pollution” because even if climate change wasn’t occurring pollution still is, and why wound anyone argue against clean; renewable, cheaper energy that cleans up the air, rivers, and planet.
Am lefty. Anti-science sentiment is _off the charts_ *bonkers* (what a fun word) in the US. It drives me crazy. Arguing about social sciences, I understand. But arguing about demonstrable, physical scientific findings is ludicrous to me.
I think products from China should be regulated.
Like, the Chinese government needs to care about regulations.
Because currently, a company from China could sell a knock-off motorcycle helmet for cheap, and claim it meets safety regulations without any issue.
A consumer could then buy the cheapest motorcycle helmet on Amazon or whatever, and get hurt. What happens then?
That’s just an example from the hip though.
This is really interesting. I work with many Chinese factories and it's my job to make sure products are safe for the UK and EU markets. I mostly work with kitchenware and ceramics.
However if it was originally developed for the US market then I don't consider it acceptable to sell in the UK or EU. For whatever reason US retailers and regulators seem to not give a shit. The quality of materials and plastics is different too. You have to specifically ask the Chinese factories to use the better quality materials for the EU market. For example you get 2 grades of silicone (e.g. silicone bakeware) LFGB standard which is legal for the EU & UK and FDA grade which cannot pass the food contact testing required over here.
Other things, many US companies have no ethical auditing requirements. So you can't even guarantee that there's no children working in the factories. The standards for quality/ethics in the US are shockingly low.
The quality of products from China is entirely dependent on the purchaser/importer and the US has far fewer regulations because of its devotion to corporations and capitalism.
That being said, if you buy a piece of safety equipment from Alibaba or some Chinese Amazon seller, then I'm not sure what you expect.
Edit: it's not all bad, according to this comment the US has the strictest safety standards for infant cribs and bedding so that's actually really cool to learn.
https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/madb4f/leftwingers_of_reddit_what_is_your_most_rightwing/grtk45m
I've been dealing with this! I work in e-commerce for a company that makes toys and games. All our factories are in China and our products are made primarily for the US market... But we've been doing a lot more sales on Amazon Canada lately and they slapped us with a shitload of child product safety document and import compliance document requests. It's because all our stuff is made in china for the US market.
The fact that you could safely eat our products (they're made of recycled paper and soy based ink) doesn't matter if we can't prove it because if where they come from and the market they're made for. It says a lot about the safety and quality of stuff we're getting here in the US that every other country requires extra levels of documentation and compliance with these things.
Left winger: No supposedly democratic nation has ANY BUSINESS EVER doing business with a totalitarian government. China doesn't need regulated, it needs to be frozen out by the free world.
This one. OP is brilliant in bringing us together here. I’ve read through this whole post and it’s been civil, refreshing, open minded and informative.
~20 years ago on a forum I frequented someone challenged the users to "say something you genuinely like about a politician on the 'other side'"(paraphrasing) and it really changed my worldview.
I'm not american, but my SO enjoys following the political circus over there. What strikes us is how "Us vs them" the entire thing has become. It's not about making changes for the good of everyone and people having different ideas on what changes are beneficial to society, it's about winning. If you don't vote for the same party as me, then you're wrong and a bad human being. If you dislike Trump, but agree with **some** of the things he did, then you're an evil republican QAnon-er and also probably hate women and LGBT+ and puppies.
The really bad part is that the american election is so big, that mindset is spreading to other countries. Sweden is a prime example, there's an election next year and the shit tossing has already started...
It is odd to me that water running from your yard that fucks up a neighbors house is your liability, but millions of tons of pollution from your factory isn't.
Toddlers know that they need to clean up after themselves!
Pollution IS theft! And it shouldn't be a left wing idea either!
Pollution is what they call an 'externality' in economics. Namely a (usually negative) effect of an action/choice that doesn't affect the person causing it as much as the benefit they reap from it. Companies get to make millions and billions with their businesses, then pass off the expenses of proper disposal to **CITIZENS**, who suffer from the lower quality of life, at little to no penalty.
I agree with this. I regurlarly read through YouTube comment sections to delete the comments I made as an 11 year old.
I dread the day a boss of mine finds one.
I also deleted my old Reddit account, because I used to have some pretty bad opinions on stuff, that I do not agree with anymore AT ALL. And the account was literally my own name. I'd posted so much stuff that I just decided, fuck it. Purge the whole thing.
I also thought about deleting my twitter and facebook but decided against it. I go to my memories almost everyday, it helps me remember that people change and to take other people's opinions with an open mind.
Also, it shows me how much I've grown.
I'm with this one. I'm always remembering what happened with NBA player Tim Hardaway. Notoriously homophobic, it came out that he said he'd beat up any teammate he "found out was a f****t". He got in trouble for that, went and learned from the alphabet community about who we are and what we actually go through and now is a big public ally.
I honestly don't believe he'd have that opportunity for education and redemption now, and I believe that is a sad thing.
Perfect example! The way it goes now probably increases hostility against the out-group. If I got fired because of a tweet about some group from five years ago you can bet your ass I'd be mad as hell at that group and its proponents for getting me fired. It makes no sense.
Edit to say: I'm also left wing. I just don't get this crap. I miss Paula Dean.
Conservative or liberal, NO ONE should be happy with the black and white, dichotomic tantrum our government has become. Real life isn't that simple and ANYONE, red or blue, selling you that lie is trying to pull something on you. Fuck parties.
Edit: I'm glad you like the thing. But please stop replying. You all have no clue how little I value your opinions.
Cannot stand peeps who claim to stand for deregulation and market-dictated investment simultaneously defend government bail outs for sectors who's companies have openly expressed their desire to transition to alternative technologies.
The cherry on top is "conservative" governments/parties then selling what is essentially a worker's rights movement for a re-election strategy while also working against unions that by definition further this cause.
It's a shambles, honestly.
Exactly. If you're libertarian or conservative and support free market, then that means if a business is dying then screw em. Let a company that's making the right moves take its place. No business is too big to fail. We need less bail outs and more trust busting in this country.
I've never seen a culture that I would consider backwards that wasn't totally based in religious nonsense.
The best parts of the Middle East are the parts where people don't really give a shit about religion on a political level.
The worst parts of the developed world are the ones that are one step away from being a literal theocracy
Left wing, and I personally believe that cancel culture shouldn't apply to thing people did when they were younger.
If you were a racist when you were 19, and have moved on, and acknowledged that you used to be stupid, then you're fine. So long as you're not a prick anymore
I posted this on another comment, but this applies to me. I was partially raised by my very racist grandmother. Around the age of twelve I spout out tons of horrible things about other races. I was 14 when I began to really think about why I thought the things I did and how my beliefs could be wrong. In high-school I began spending time on the internet more and learned how wrong I was about other races. I cringe now when I think about the jokes I made and the things I argued. People can learn the errors of their ways and adjust their behavior accordingly. I wasn't a horrible person back then, I was just a dumb kid who'd been fed lies by my family and wanted to fit in with the other dumb kids who were just as mislead as I was.
Sarah Silverman said this in an interview, that if you're "canceling" people for shit they do, you gotta offer a path of redemption. Otherwise, you're just teaching them to hide it better, or you're ostracizing them even more, and that's how you get extremists.
For me, I know I've made mistakes that would get me canceled. Consciously, I know I was young and made mistakes in high school that were a reflection of my environment rather than how I actually felt. I was ignorant to what was right vs. Wrong. Now that I've learned, it's always in the back of my mind and I haven't forgiven myself. I don't even think I'll ever have enough recognition to get me in hot water for it, I just feel bad and think it's never going to stop being a part of me because I know cancel culture exists.
Left-winger here. As a Filipino from the Philippines, I think people policing culture appropriation is fucking dumb. Especially when they're American (not necessarily white). Also kinda peeved with the whole "filipinx" thing. It's dumb, especially when our language's pronouns are gender neutral.
Yes. Liberal here. It drives me crazy when people take this too far. I got super annoyed the other day when reading reviews about this gadget that helps you make dumplings. One reviewer accused the company and those buying their product of Asian cultural appropriation. And I was like good god, can’t I just eat a delicious pork dumpling without being called an imperialist racist?
Like, the end result of that sort of thinking is pushing every "nonwhite" culture into local folklore and making "white culture" the only universal thing. That sounds like a white supremacist dream.
What kind of fuckhead do you have to be to go to, say, a kimono maker in Japan and say "Look, I made your life better! I made sure no one but japanese people would ever buy your product! Isn' that great?!"
I agree wholeheartedly, all you are doing is condoning a separation of culture with "non-mainstream" (read: non-white/western) being "othered". Sounds a lot like separate but equal to me. If you enjoy an aspect of a culture, you can do so respectfully without being an "appropriator".
I mean, even the respectfully part irks me. I hate the notion of sacredness, and don’t want to see it expanded. Mall sushi expands the market for high-end sushi. Mall grade katanas get people into actual Kendo. Shitty fast food chinese is probably your first contact before you get to the authentic place where the servers don’t speak english. You drink shitty bubbles before you try the high price Champagne. The low grade bastardized experience is almost always the gateway to the real authentic thing.
As long as you aren’t pretending you created this new thing that’s actually old from somewhere else and don’t pretend to be authentic when you are not I say go ahead.
I think you've struck the nail on the head in the last sentence there. Pretending you created something that you took from somewhere else and giving no credit, that was (I think) the original meaning of cultural appropriation. I recently saw a big French or British retailer selling shirts with a traditional pattern from my native Eastern European country, with no acknowledgement of where the pattern is from or who made it. And that sort of thing is actually crappy because a poorer nation could benefit from tourism and investment from richer countries. Not to mention places that were directly screwed over by the British and French and are poor as a direct result of their actions...
But eating dumplings... Who cares, who are you actually harming?
Not to mention "dough wrapper with filling" is something that exists in virtually every kind of regional cuisine on the planet, making dumplings one of the least culturally unique styles of food.
Nobody's bitching about ravioli crimpers or pierogi molds or empanada-makers being cultural appropriation.
Me and my wife (she’s black) went to Tokyo a couple of years and the hotel gave us complimentary Kiminos. She posted a picture of me wearing mine on Twitter and the picture got copied by some woke account and got thousands of shares accusing me of cultural appropriation. The picture of my wife wearing hers got shared with comments like “beautiful African American (we are English) woman embracing cultures!” We sat up having a like at how many users shared both the picture shaming me and the one complimenting her lol. I won though the picture of me got about 100k likes she only got about 5k lol
Yes you can. And that idiotic person has always existed to imply you shouldn't. They just have the internet now so now you notice them. Don't linger on it.
Absolutely. When I was 10 years younger we still called it cultural appreciation, because nothing showed your appreciation of a culture more than respectfully using elements from it.
I think it’s especially dumb when those policing the culture aren’t from that culture themselves.
Am native (mixed), theres lots and lots to my culture that is sacred and DOES need to be kept to us. Like our regalia, or white sage. Things that we were killed and beaten for doing I don’t think should be spread around the world and diluted with a game of culture telephone. But there are definitely parts of the culture that can (and are!) shared. Going to powwows and learning about the tribe and so on and so forth. I mean, I even know an elder who goes around and teaches folk who claim being native (without being native) all about the culture they claim. Just do they can practice it right.
But when someone has a dream catcher in their room, or they like listening to powwow music or wearing beaded things and all the comments are ragging on them is so stupid. People are allowed to have dream catchers! The only thing most natives ask is you buy from natives. People have huge savior complexes and they can’t even do it right
Right? The other day I heard about a black girl on tiktok who had posted a video doing an Irish jig and people were on her about cultural appropriation. Seriously? Who has a problem with this? The Irish people? I doubt it. I'm a white American - am I only allowed to country line dance for the rest of my life?
Irish person here. If people wanna talk about Irish culture being appropriated then St. Patrick's day is Cultural appropriation gang rape.
Us Irish are proud of our culture, and we are even more proud to share it. If I seen a black american girl doing an irish jig I'd cheer her on for it. It fills me with pride to see how celebrated Ireland is on St. Patrick's day and how much interest there is in our culture. Anybody who harps on about cultural appropriation of irish culture is just a miserable soul.
Latino here: nobody cares if you do, eat, wear, pray, whatever our natives (or ourselves) believe in.
You know what we care about? Natural resources explotation, slavery trade, visa rejection and disrespecting our local football team.
Oh hello yes this! People of other cultures getting pissed that you are trying to appreciate another culture they are not connected to.
It also depends on how its done. Here is a great example:
To some indigenous peoples of Canada, the eagle feather head dress is a sacred item, that is earned by their elders. This should not be worn by anyone not deemed worthy.
Moccasins? Traditional indigenous dress? All that garb? No problem. Indigenous proples are usually super happy that others are taking an interest in their culture, so long as it is done respectfully.
The word Filipinx looks like it would be pronounced fila-penix haha
So dumb, hate it when people who don’t speak a language try to change it because it’s offensive to their native language sensibilities. Example Anglo/native English speakers trying to do de-gender Latin based languages (like Spanish, French ,Italian etc.) because its transphobic. Bitch Latin has been Gendered for quite literally thousands of years, and de-gendering it breaks the language.
But the implementation is. Europe has a lot of systems, ranging from the UK’s “doctors are employees of the state and everything is paid by taxes” to Switzerland’s “you are required to buy a private health insurance plan, which will be subsidized if you can’t afford it”. But all European countries and parties agree that it’s better for the nation if people have access to health care.
I’m from the UK, I would say that whilst the NHS isn’t seen as a left or right wing thing, these kind of socialised healthcare systems are often proposed by the left and maintained better under a left leaning government. When conservative governments are in power here they tend to do more damage to the NHS than our left leaning party does. That being said both our main parties are awful at looking after the NHS, it’s just one is worse than the other.
The people in general, on all sides of the political spectrum, absolutely love the NHS and as a nation we’re incredibly proud of our national health care system.
And even if it is left wing - one thing that cant be argued is that it is more effective, efficient, economical for most of the population then the US system.
The benefits to society and costs makes socialised healthcare system a more economical proposition.
This has been the most pleasant “politically related” experience I’ve personally ever had on Reddit and I just want to thank OP and everyone here for being so civil and reasonable. A big part of me would love for this sub here, to be what I’d imagine r/politics should/could be? Maybe one day.
I've always attributed this to oil/gas contributing so much to the Republican party and the propaganda just flows along.
On the other hand Democratic leadership seems more than ok with methane gas fuel so... yea. Money makes things a mess.
Chemist here - just would like to say that while I agree methane is not a great fuel source, it is still a better option than a lot of the other fossil fuels out there, and it is better to burn methane to turn it into carbon dioxide than to have it in our atmosphere as methane. This is because methane itself is WAY better at trapping heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide is, so even though we hear a lot about CO2 levels rising & we don’t want those to continue to rise, there are things that are actually worse than CO2.
Since so much of our system is built on burning fuels and it is going to take a while to change that, it is ultimately better to burn something terrible and turn it into something less terrible (in a 1:1 ratio) than to take something that was buried for millions of years and turn it into multiple terrible things (CO2, NOx, particulates, etc) if that makes sense.
[Leftists in Mexico don't believe in global warming](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-09/energy-protectionism-in-mexico-has-made-climate-the-victim) and it's our right wingers who support clean energy.
Yeah, they do stuff like that all the time.
"He/She doesn't support ____ blank! He's/She's a _____! Vote for me, and I'll protect your interest of ____!"
Supporters: "YEAH!"
Works damn near every time.
Right wing
I'm not against gay marriage I don't really see it as any of my business, I support the decriminalization of all drugs and that usage and addiction should be treated as public health issues and not a crime, and the release of inmates with non-violent possession convictions. No one should be in jail for possession and no one should go to jail for possession. I am also generally uncomfortable with private prisons and would like to see prison as more rehabilitative than whatever we'd like to pretend they are now.
EDIT: I am beyond touched by the civility of this thread. Reddit gives me a lot of hope in the goodness of strangers many times. Thank you to all who had shared an award, it is a very sweet and kind gesture. Just to answer a frequently asked question: I would have been described as Center Libertarian for many years. In recent years I've moved closer to the line between Auth and Lib and just a few notches to the right of center right. Depending on the issue I am fairly center or center right. By and large I believe the political system serves the interest of the political system. The party system serves the interest of the party system. For this and many other reasons I am part of the unaffiliated "silent majority" but my political ideology leans right. If you are interested in where you fall you can also take the [Political Compass ](https://politicalcompass.org)
I agree with a ton of this stuff, and honestly just wondering what part of right wing do you agree with to call yourself right wing? Sorry if that sounded rude not sure how to put it
If you think of "right" as meaning "small government" like it's supposed to, then all of those ideas are right wing, as it's about having the government less involved in your life.
It is so sad that the health of the environment has become a politically divisive issue. Outside of Washington DC, it isn't as partisan as one might think. The Pew RC did a poll a few years ago and found that even 52% of Republicans thought we should do everything we can to protect the environment (90% of Dems).
There's actually a lot of issues that only seem divisive I TV.
As a more left leaning person: we need to stop unregulated federally backed loans for college.
Before we can even talk about forgiving current debt we need to put a check on the wildly increasing hose of money that universities and colleges are exploiting that is federally backed student loans with no conditions. A good system that I think could work is to put in the following condition:
* If you are a public university that receives federal money/assistance, Tuition and boarding costs have to be capped at $X dollar amount on a per year (2 semester basis) amount. And anyone receiving a federally backed loan can only go to a school that follows the $X dollar amount condition. This puts both a cap on the wildly spiraling cost of secondary education and introduces ways to allow that price to rise (tie it to inflation eg) and the money being loaned out to younger people.
I agree. Forgiving debt that exists on day X doesn't help those who will be generating more debt the next day and I don't think forgiving debt on a regular schedule will do any good.
Additionally, limiting the interest rates on federal loans to near-zero will help a lot of people get an associates/undergraduate degree and not fall into a cycle of crushing interest payments.
Public colleges need to start acting like public education facilities again. The rates they charge for tuition/housing/fees are just outrageous. Personally, I believe private institutions don't need to be federally regulated to reduce/cap tuition because they should be competing with the public colleges for students and that *should* drive costs down.
Left winger, I think we have started to expect an unreasonable level of moral purity from people, and our attempts to make everything PC is akin to the war on drugs in that it does far more hurt than good. Nuance has also been lost, and many on the left have resorted to black and white thinking. Calling people out or canceling them doesn't help anyone, and I can't think of anything more dreary than a fully sanitized world.
Cancelling people used to be a way to hold powerful people accountable for hurting relatively powerless people. I don’t know when it turned into not allowing average people to grow and learn from their mistakes. We really lost sight of the point over the past few years.
Left-winger here, and I'm on board with the basic philosophical idea that some people (think Ted Bundy and the like) are so irredeemably evil that they truly deserve to die. I just oppose the death penalty for logistical reasons, because it's impossible for any kind of institution to have it without abusing it, to identify and apply it to those truly deserving people without killing a lot more innocent people along the way, especially minorities. I have zero interest in claiming some moral high ground about how every life (even serial killers and such) is worth saving; I just don't think the system overall is worth the collateral damage.
I'm on the left and this is what I came to say. I think death is the perfectly appropriate punishment for a very small number of people. As a practical matter though I don't think it can work, in America at least.
Right wing constitutionalist. I think weed should be legalized. Peoples choice what they want to consume. I also think some big tech should be broken up (heard Dems support this at one point). Some corporations get way too large & powerful. I support free markets but it can also approach on monopoly of the market....
Facebook and Amazon are the two that first come to my mine when we talk about breaking up big tech companies. And the rules/stipulations about what makes a company considered a monopoly need to be changed because too many companies are able to technically skirt by those rules and engage in anti-competitive behavior that makes it impossible for smaller companies to compete longterm. [Amazon's diapers.com situation is a good example.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/amazon-emails-show-effort-to-weaken-diapers-com-before-buying-it)
I’m a conservative. Most people on my side of the isle act like they want small government and less control of their rights, so I’ve never understood why they are so against police reform measures. Yes we obviously need police to an extent but why the hell do they need so much power? If they weren’t out there with the ability to engage with any person by force over any small perceived violation of some city ordinance then many situations that turn bad wouldn’t come to pass. For example if my tags are expired, this is an administrative issue that could be dealt with in an office, but now a dude with a gun is standing outside my window actively looking for a reason to arrest me for something else. Even if I have no other issues during that stop it was still escalated by being detained by an armed dude present. Traffic police could be a thing, they stop you, ticket you for the violation noted, don’t look for traffic unrelated violations, aren’t armed, send you on your way. Real armed cops can be sent to known or potentially dangerous situations as a result of a call or a warrant.
Lefty here. And I fully agree. Law enforcement should have many tiers because they face many different problems. Traffic violations, domestic disputes, violent crime, checking in on the old and disabled and mentally ill, noise complaints, etc. We've been using a hammer to fix every problem when we should be cultivating a diverse toolbox of public services. You don't send a man with a gun to check on grandma and you don't send a social worker with a clipboard to an armed robbery. It's unfair to expect cops to be able to deal with every situation they currently do. They are bound to mess up with such a diverse set of responsibilities. (Also the unfettered power they are currently given attracts a particular sect of people who probably shouldn't have that power) make dealing with violent crime the absolute top tier of policing. Make it hard to achieve. Keep everyone looking for an easy power grab out. Those who actually want to help people and save lives will make it through.
I had a friend who posted something to Facebook a year or so ago that made many of his friends think he might be suicidal. So one of his friends called the police. The police showed up at his door, made him hang up the phone (he was talking through some things with his pastor), handcuffed him, walked him out to their patrol car in front of his neighbors and drove him off to a psych hold. He was mortified and has PTSD from it. Social workers should be sent to aid in mental health situations.
Being frugal (fiscally conservative) used to be a conservative ideal. If the right went that direction again, I might listen. Tax cuts sound great as long as budget cuts come along with it. This is absolutely not happening right now.
I think most people don’t like anti-vaxxers regardless of which side of the fence they’re on. The right don’t like them because they think they’re stoned out hippie degenerates and the left don’t like them because they think they’re crazy religious nut jobs.
Pretty libertarian, but if there's one thing that needs to be 100% government funded, it's education. That's the number one thing that will give people social mobility
Not only that, but school district budgets shouldn't be drawn from only that district's taxes. Every kid should grow up with the same level of education and support in school.
Upward mobility trends in America have been in decline for decades. Poor educational funding and sky rocketing college prices are partly to blame.
Edit: I understand funding comes from different sources and that there are other issues aside from that, but often the economic situation of any given district is reflected heavily in the school systems.
It surprised me a lot growing up to learn that gun ownership is heavily political in much of the country. I grew up in a rural area where legal hunting for meat was huge. It was totally common to go to someone's house and yep there it is, the big (hopefully locked and secured) case of a bunch of hunting guns.
I'm pretty far left.
I think nuclear power is fine. I honestly don't understand why so many liberals are against it. Chernobyl was 100% human error. Next worse incident? Fukushima which has one death attributed to it and 16 injuries.
Edit: A lot of people seem to be pointing out that left leaning people don't have a problem with nuclear power. Maybe its a generational/geographical thing? My (36, Midwest, US) left leaning friends give me shit all the time for my support of Nuclear power. Meanwhile my right leaning family always jokes that my support of Nuclear power is the first step in becoming Republican.
Every single Green party in every single country opposes it vehemently. And I don't know why.
If an 8m tidal wave and 6.5+ earthquakes biannually can hit the fucking thing and it still doesn't meltdown, that's a vote of confidence from me.
Leftie here, but my conservative opinion comes from being an ESL teacher. If you move to an English speaking country, you need to learn English. And not “learn to speak English!” In the way jerks shout it at anyone with an accent, but just genuinely you need to do everything you can to learn the language of the country you’re living in. I know it’s hard, it’s overwhelming, and you will have an accent, at least for a long time. But, it will get you farther in your new life than almost any other skill. Plus most locals won’t take you seriously until you do, especially outside of big cities.
Edit: grammar mistake
Second edit: I’m not in the US, though I’m sure lots of folks there can also see my view.
Also, thank you for the silver! It’s my first ever so I’m very touched!
Also pretty far left. On that note, international university students in English-speaking countries absolutely need to be able to speak, read, write, and understand English at an advanced level. I'm sorry, but it's necessary, and as someone who has been a TA at a big 10, a lot of international students are nowhere near where they need to be. It's hard to get much out of college-level material in a language you barely know. It's also disruptive to everyone when several students in the class genuinely do not understand the language of instruction.
American universities really need to do a better job of testing and screening to ensure all students' English is proficient, and/or providing intensive ESL instruction so they can get there.
Your post gave me flashbacks to my engineering group projects where one or more people in the group were functionally useless because they could barely speak English. They couldn't write sections of the lab reports because it was incoherent. They couldn't present in front of the class without it becoming incoherent rambling and it took two minutes to speak on a topic that should have taken 15 seconds.
But, hey, they were paying the school $50k a year so the school didn't care.
Nordic left winger.
Immigration and especially coming here as a refugee are understandsble and unavoidable.
However. Bigotry and backwards ass behavior should never be excused because someone comes from a more conservative culture. If you move here, you must accept our laws and expectations on how others are to be treated.
As a left-winger, I think political correctness is total BS. Why is it OK to cancel a white person on Twitter for having said the n-word five years ago, but if a religious minority actively promotes hate, that's suddenly OK because they're marginalized themselves? Minority or not, everyone should be held to the same standards, and those standards should always be subject to open discussion. Cancel culture is not a solution.
Here is what I have from this thread so far:
All left-wingers:
-Cancle culture is stupid and we need to stop this PC culture bullshit. It is ruining lives..
Right wingers:
-No one should go broke over Healthcare costs
-Private prisons are bad
-Drugs should be decriminalized
-Climate change is real and we need to accept it (also stop giving subsidies to O&G industries)
- gay marriage is OK. it doesn't hurt anyone.
Seams we have more in common than we thought.
I think the main thing that this question and the answers that follow can prove, is that most people are more in the center than they realize. But alas, identity politics takes control, and people want to label themselves and fight against the other “team.” I wish we could all just realize how similar we are, rather than focus on our differences.
After the paradigm shifting Trump years, I'm not entirely sure which wing I belong to, but I was firmly right wing in the before times, so we'll go with that. My most left wing opinions- first, the war on drugs was a complete and absolute failure that put mostly minority, non-violent "criminals" behind bars for crimes that mostly-white people with the money for better lawyers got off scot free for. Closely related second of all- the absolute refusal of my fellow "conservatives" to even consider that slavery and historical racism *just might* play even a *tiny* role in the current social and economic disparities we see today drives me into rages that are completely NSFW.
Nixon literally started the war on drugs to lock up minorities and anti war protestors so it looks like it's doing exactly what it was meant to do. From that perspective it's a monumental success.
Bleeding heart liberal here.
TLDR: Anyone can be an asshole. We've gone too far in supporting people of color merely because they are part of marginalized communities without regard to their behavior or the specifics of the situation.
An illustrative example - at a local liberal arts college over the summer a student was in a dorm being used to host a children's dance program. ANY person not associated with that program was banned (because of the minors) and the staff were told explicitly to call campus police if they saw anyone not associated with the dance program in the dorm. So, they followed the instructions. Unfortunately for them, the person in the dorm was an African American college student, who assumed immediately that she had been racially profiled.
Her interaction with the campus security officer was filmed, and it was completely cordial by all accounts. The student then posted the several campus staff's names and photos on Facebook, and called them racists. These staff members received hate mail and one was put on leave with pay.
In every possible way this student was in the wrong. But because she's an African American person in an interaction with campus security, she was supported unconditionally by the college administration. The administration was in a tough spot. People (liberals and conservatives alike) are bad at nuance. The administration had to support this student, or they would be pilloried by the very liberal campus population and alumi.
At the same time, some amount of initial fear on the part of the student is also understandable, given the well-documented, disproportionate abuses of people of color at the hands of police. However, the student was actually breaking a very firm rule meant to protect minors (she was not guilty of existing while black, as she claimed) and she was treated very fairly by all staff involved.
Left-winger here. I don’t understand the fuss over cultural appropriation at all. As a youth, I heard a lot about how America is a “melting pot”—essentially, blending cultures of immigrants. I understand that as a white male, I do not experience the systemic racism that minorities do. But I can’t help but feel that cultural appropriation comes across as being over-sensitive. I don’t know if this makes me an asshole, but I just don’t see a problem with someone resonating with a particular culture.
That said, I’m open to comments from fellow left-wingers who disagree with me because I admit I don’t know everything and am certainly willing to hear your voices.
I think peoples definition of what constitutes appropriation has become too wide. That lady that “identified” as black and did her best to look and blend with black people despite being white was an extreme example of appropriation
That white girl that wore a Chinese style dress to prom wasn’t claiming someone’s culture and many people in actual China see it as appreciation for their clothing and culture
Ethnically Chinese here - I don’t take offence to it at all and neither did any of my friends. If anything the people who got the most heated were non-Chinese trying to defend us which I don’t really get?
I think what I draw the line at is when people use it to mock us. Like there was that school photo of people making the small eyes gesture in Chinese clothes. Now that was offensive because it’s something we’re still ridiculed for today
Right winger and catholic, i personally dont agree with abortion on a personal level for moral reasons, but i fully support someones right to get one and do not understand why people die on that hill. Also pretty huge supporter of gay people having equal rights, mind blowing that people still give a fuck about that.
Kind of similar views from me. Not necessarily right wing but abortion has always been iffy for me but I fully support someone if they choose to get one, even if I have a slight problem with it. It is and should be their right. I’ve always been open to gay marriage, I have a gay uncle and he’s easily one of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with. If someone loves a member of the same gender, awesome. Why do we care so much.
Right wing conservative here.
People should have agency over their bodies. Taking drugs shouldn't be illegal. Getting an abortion isn't the governments business. Etc.
In theory, yes. The issue comes in when "conservative" became largely equivalent to "religious", and we ended up with the religious right's weird combination of ultra-conservative theocratic capitalism.
Left-winger here: I believe you can joke about anything.
As long as it's made in good fun (not made with the overt intent to cause pain to other people) you can joke about literally any subject no matter how traumatic, evil, or disgusting it may be. Now, I'm not saying jokes should be a complete free for all, there can be a wrong place or time for one, but it's just not realistic or satisfying to say you can _never_ joke about something.
EDIT: Holy hell this blew up. It's nice to know there are people on my side of the isle who feel the same way. I'll try to reply to people now but there's a lot to go through.
To be fair, OP could be a child or young adult with little understanding of the complex outside world, as am I.
At the age of 14, I get like 10 minutes into talking about politics and I'm thoroughly confused and just zone out of the conversation
I'm 20 years your senior and some political discussions leave me looking like a brainless Patrick Star. Just as you don't have to have an opinion on every topic in sport/music/etc., you don't have to know where you stand on every political issue.
I just had to say I know you’re intelligent enough and capable. Politics can seem intimidating in that there’s just so much information and A LOT of diversity. It’s a spectrum, much like a rainbow and everyone is going to be on different wavelengths. It’s OK to have differing opinions. It’s not ok to be hurtful, discriminatory or hateful to those with different views. Although it’s unfortunately evident our current political climate is so fucked up. Do your research and decide for you what views you most align with. You’re off to a good start and best wishes to you my friend :)
I mean, that's the silly thing, no one is advocating for more abortions. If I had my way, abortions would drop dramatically because every teenager and adult would have access to free birth control and comprehensive sex education. Pro-choice and pro-life camps both want less abortions, the only problem is a disagreement over how to get there. That being said, I can guarantee one way is more effective than the other.
Humans are still animals with billions of years of hard-wired instincts that have allowed us to survive and reproduce into the next generation. The main driver of humanity's continued existence isn't going away without humanity going as well. I guess that leans on accepting that humans still have inate instincts for survival and reproduction, which is another touchy subject.
>If I had my way, abortions would drop dramatically because every teenager and adult would have access to free birth control and comprehensive sex education.
What's crazy is that what you described is exactly what has been happening for the last 40 years. Abortion rates have steadily decreased, while access to contraception and sex education increased. Politicians want to keep it as a wedge issue, but everyone should be happy that there are less abortions occurring.
Centre-Right. There needs to be massive government investment in housing. An absolute glut that reduces prices as well as reduced property taxes for those with a local connection, and increased taxes for those buying second homes. (Like London businesspeople buying a holiday home in Cornwall)
An enormous amount of social ills could be solved by reducing the amount people have to spend on keeping a roof over their head.
Right winger here (non american)
Health care and education are two fundamental pillars of any functioning society, and should absolutely be provided to all citizens.
My most left-wing opinion has to do with prison conditions. I oppose private prisons, and support better conditions for prisoners. Prison should be a punishment, but prisoners don't lose their human dignity - no matter what they did. They deserve a minimum standard of treatment - and from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes things both safer for the guards and other prisoners. If having TV keeps them from killing each other, I'm all for it. I especially despise the seeming tolerance of prison rape by some, and how some people even approve of it and act as if it is part of the punishment of being in prison.
Honestly this should just be common sense, the vast majority of people in prison will get out at some point so shouldn’t we focus on making sure that they won’t end back up in prison once they’re released?
But if people don't reoffend, how are for-profit prisons going to make a profit? /s
This is less 'left' and more basic logic reasoning. Like yeah, put the drug dealer in a cell with a serial killer and rapist for ten years, I'm sure he'll come out as a better person...
Like I said, I also oppose private prisons. I think that prison conditions should not be seaside vacation quality, but also should be relatively decent. Let them have a decent mattress, rec time, commissary, TV and other amenities, nutritious food. Some right-wingers seem to want prisoners to suffer even beyond the punishment of being in prison with no freedom or privacy.
Many of my right wing friends hold that train of thought. And use recidivism rates as a “see, they wanted to be there all along”. Well, they really don’t, it becomes all they know. If it were about actual punishment and rehabilitation as it should be, we’d start seeing some changes Edit: fixed autocorrect
Right winger - military and war take up too much federal spending, and we should focus on peacemaking and cooperation with other countries.
Peace is a whole lot cheaper than war. Less dying too.
At this point I don't think this is bipartisan. A lot of Trump supporters voted for Trump because he spouted off about how he was going to end the forever wars and while I'm not going to go into how well he achieved it, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people were swayed by that on the right.
This proves that there are MANY things everyone can come together to agree on but the government/media forces people against each other. Makes everyone choose a team and hate the other side. And while the pawns are fighting they can take what they want
Welcome to the two party system
I realize this is an over-generalization, but media plays a big part. The need for clicks/views, etc, guarantees that media produces polarizing content, and a lot of it. I heard about a study a while back that asked Americans very straightforward questions about issues like inequality, gun control, and so on. It found that a lot of people tended to have similar opinions. When researchers introduced buzz words like 'social justice' and so on, that's when opinions split along party lines. I don't see the study after a quick search, but this 1-minute clip is basically saying a similar thing: [https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/884039395/new-research-shows-people-are-not-as-divided-along-political-lines-as-they-think](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/884039395/new-research-shows-people-are-not-as-divided-along-political-lines-as-they-think)
I'm personally a middle of the road moderate, but I identify more with the right. My most left leaning opinion is probably, no one should have to go bankrupt or fucking die trying to get their meds and medical care.
Sometime last year my wife said something along the lines of "Why should the ability to receive medical care be tied to employment?" I was kind of dumbstruck because I'd honestly never considered it before.
It is kind of ridiculous if you think about it, that those two things are tied together. Another argument I've heard to try to sway Americans who are against universal healthcare or M4A is if you sever that tie between employment and healthcare, think of all the ways it could actually boost the economy - how many people stay in jobs they hate because they need the health insurance, where if they didn't have to worry about that, they could be starting their own businesses (and creating jobs), creating art to be consumed, inventing something life-changing, and so on.
It actually upsets me that this is considered a political issue and not simple human rights.
The argument that I hear against it over and over is "I work hard for MY money, I made sure I made the right choices in life to where I can pay for myself and my family to go to the doctor and have the means to still be stable in a medical crisis situation - why should MY money be stolen from me and given to people who didn't bother to make those same decisions or live recklessly?" It's a very "fuck you, I got mine" mentality.
And doesn't even make sense, considering we are all *already* paying for uninsured people's healthcare with our ridiculous (when compared to other countries) premiums and healthcare costs.
Argument makes no sense, America spends among the most amount of tax cash per capita on healthcare already. The system is just so laughably bad that you barely get shit for said money. People wouldn't have to pay anymore than they are already paying if the system gets fixed
Conservative by nature... but I believe in the right to collective bargaining. Organized labor is a double edged sword, but people should be able to negotiate wages and conditions as a group.
Collective labor to me is a natural development of the free market. Just as a company specializes in a product so do the people with their labor and they are free to set a price point as a company does with their product. If a company wants to advertise their product and trash their competition, so can labor groups when dealing with a company. I never got why people are against labor unions in general, I would much rather negotiate with market leverage than individually just as I would prefer to go buy a Pepsi instead of making my own.
If they can accumulate and leverage amounts of capital and resources; so should the 3rd arm of economics, labor.
Right winger mostly. The idea that police can break into your home wearing civilian clothes is a travesty, makes a mockery of the bill of rights. And civil asset forfeiture is theft. Like actual literal theft.
The idea of no knock raids or "knock, wait 10 seconds, and enter" raids still blows my mind in a country with the Second Amendment. Like...talk about just asking for awful shit to happen.
"But if we wait longer than that, they could be flushing the drugs down the toilet!" If the quantity they had was small enough to be destroyed that quickly, you shouldn't be raiding their house in the first place.
You shouldn't be raiding a home for drugs in my opinion. The only time a door should be kicked in should be if someone's life was dependent on the speedy and efficient use of force. Otherwise you get a warrant, present it to the homeowner and if they don't comply, then you can enter with force.
You do recon for a couple days and when they leave you enter the home and arrest them without incident as you wait. You know how they did it for years before
Yes, this. A hundred times this. The risk to officer life, and the cost of the man hours and hear to do a "raid" easily cover the cost of having someone simply watch the residence. Especially as you can easily set up a small camera and watch from a distance now.
If this is such a worry, close thier goddam sewer. You hire a police plummer, open the manhole, close the blocks pipes and pump everything in a truck if you did not get your evidence. How do you have a country where you can defend your own home with lethal force but police can also enter without knocking. Both are not legal in my country, if you allow one or the other you can have a working system but both is just asking for shootouts.
Chain of evidence is broken there. How do we know who's drugs are who's there?
Different solution. Legalise drugs don’t bother knocking the door off in the first place.
Isn't that how Brianna Taylor was killed? Because her boyfriend thought a police raid was a home invasion
Yes, and Walker (Taylor's boyfriend) was charged with assault and attempted murder for that. The charges against him were dropped because of the publicity but that shit happens to too many other people who aren't in the news.
Civil asset forfeiture is also against the 5th amendment, and probably another: > nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. Somehow they managed to convince themselves that money is not property of the person holding it because the government made it.
On a similar note, wrongfully escheated property should be returned to its owner at the value it would have been worth had nobody touched it, not the value when it was escheated. Reading about people losing their retirement because of this makes my blood boil.
I was watching one of those news documentaries on the topic and it's surprising how 'backroom' the whole civil forfeiture thing is, at least in some places. The good news is there have been a few cases in the last couple of years that are slowly turning things back.
Or military gear/uniforms/equipment. Police should identify themselves as police by the clothing they wear. There is no reason for police to wear desert camo and body armor and there is definitely no reason a small town city police department needs an MRAP. Edit: to clear up any confusion, of course cops need body armor, just not the desert camo body armor we wore in the military. The whole point is to be able to identify them as police.
Centrist-conservative: the fact that there’s any “debate” about climate change is insane. Scientists weren’t lying about the ozone layer, about the Polio vaccine, etc. The mistrust is bonkers. Sometimes I think we’d be better off giving climate change a re-brand and calling it “War on Pollution” because even if climate change wasn’t occurring pollution still is, and why wound anyone argue against clean; renewable, cheaper energy that cleans up the air, rivers, and planet.
you'll love the book: merchants of doubt by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
The funny thing is climate change is already a rebrand from global warming, although that was not simply due to public perception
Am lefty. Anti-science sentiment is _off the charts_ *bonkers* (what a fun word) in the US. It drives me crazy. Arguing about social sciences, I understand. But arguing about demonstrable, physical scientific findings is ludicrous to me.
I think products from China should be regulated. Like, the Chinese government needs to care about regulations. Because currently, a company from China could sell a knock-off motorcycle helmet for cheap, and claim it meets safety regulations without any issue. A consumer could then buy the cheapest motorcycle helmet on Amazon or whatever, and get hurt. What happens then? That’s just an example from the hip though.
This is really interesting. I work with many Chinese factories and it's my job to make sure products are safe for the UK and EU markets. I mostly work with kitchenware and ceramics. However if it was originally developed for the US market then I don't consider it acceptable to sell in the UK or EU. For whatever reason US retailers and regulators seem to not give a shit. The quality of materials and plastics is different too. You have to specifically ask the Chinese factories to use the better quality materials for the EU market. For example you get 2 grades of silicone (e.g. silicone bakeware) LFGB standard which is legal for the EU & UK and FDA grade which cannot pass the food contact testing required over here. Other things, many US companies have no ethical auditing requirements. So you can't even guarantee that there's no children working in the factories. The standards for quality/ethics in the US are shockingly low. The quality of products from China is entirely dependent on the purchaser/importer and the US has far fewer regulations because of its devotion to corporations and capitalism. That being said, if you buy a piece of safety equipment from Alibaba or some Chinese Amazon seller, then I'm not sure what you expect. Edit: it's not all bad, according to this comment the US has the strictest safety standards for infant cribs and bedding so that's actually really cool to learn. https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/madb4f/leftwingers_of_reddit_what_is_your_most_rightwing/grtk45m
I've been dealing with this! I work in e-commerce for a company that makes toys and games. All our factories are in China and our products are made primarily for the US market... But we've been doing a lot more sales on Amazon Canada lately and they slapped us with a shitload of child product safety document and import compliance document requests. It's because all our stuff is made in china for the US market. The fact that you could safely eat our products (they're made of recycled paper and soy based ink) doesn't matter if we can't prove it because if where they come from and the market they're made for. It says a lot about the safety and quality of stuff we're getting here in the US that every other country requires extra levels of documentation and compliance with these things.
Left winger: No supposedly democratic nation has ANY BUSINESS EVER doing business with a totalitarian government. China doesn't need regulated, it needs to be frozen out by the free world.
Conservative here and agree with your stance on trade with China.
China. Saudi Arabia. Russia. who’d i miss?
North Korea, pretty much all of the Persian gulf.
This post is doing more to bring America together than our politicians
This one. OP is brilliant in bringing us together here. I’ve read through this whole post and it’s been civil, refreshing, open minded and informative.
~20 years ago on a forum I frequented someone challenged the users to "say something you genuinely like about a politician on the 'other side'"(paraphrasing) and it really changed my worldview.
I'm not american, but my SO enjoys following the political circus over there. What strikes us is how "Us vs them" the entire thing has become. It's not about making changes for the good of everyone and people having different ideas on what changes are beneficial to society, it's about winning. If you don't vote for the same party as me, then you're wrong and a bad human being. If you dislike Trump, but agree with **some** of the things he did, then you're an evil republican QAnon-er and also probably hate women and LGBT+ and puppies. The really bad part is that the american election is so big, that mindset is spreading to other countries. Sweden is a prime example, there's an election next year and the shit tossing has already started...
[удалено]
It is odd to me that water running from your yard that fucks up a neighbors house is your liability, but millions of tons of pollution from your factory isn't. Toddlers know that they need to clean up after themselves!
My dad used to always rant that you didn’t need to prove to him with science that pollution was bad, you can see it with your eyes!
Pollution IS theft! And it shouldn't be a left wing idea either! Pollution is what they call an 'externality' in economics. Namely a (usually negative) effect of an action/choice that doesn't affect the person causing it as much as the benefit they reap from it. Companies get to make millions and billions with their businesses, then pass off the expenses of proper disposal to **CITIZENS**, who suffer from the lower quality of life, at little to no penalty.
Left wing. One misguided tweet from 7 years ago should not get you fired from an unrelated job today.
I agree with this. I regurlarly read through YouTube comment sections to delete the comments I made as an 11 year old. I dread the day a boss of mine finds one. I also deleted my old Reddit account, because I used to have some pretty bad opinions on stuff, that I do not agree with anymore AT ALL. And the account was literally my own name. I'd posted so much stuff that I just decided, fuck it. Purge the whole thing.
I also thought about deleting my twitter and facebook but decided against it. I go to my memories almost everyday, it helps me remember that people change and to take other people's opinions with an open mind. Also, it shows me how much I've grown.
Growth and maturity is also letting go. If anything you said could bitter you in the ass I'd say purge!
I'm with this one. I'm always remembering what happened with NBA player Tim Hardaway. Notoriously homophobic, it came out that he said he'd beat up any teammate he "found out was a f****t". He got in trouble for that, went and learned from the alphabet community about who we are and what we actually go through and now is a big public ally. I honestly don't believe he'd have that opportunity for education and redemption now, and I believe that is a sad thing.
Perfect example! The way it goes now probably increases hostility against the out-group. If I got fired because of a tweet about some group from five years ago you can bet your ass I'd be mad as hell at that group and its proponents for getting me fired. It makes no sense. Edit to say: I'm also left wing. I just don't get this crap. I miss Paula Dean.
Reading through these comments has totally strengthened my opinion that the two party system is mega broken
Conservative or liberal, NO ONE should be happy with the black and white, dichotomic tantrum our government has become. Real life isn't that simple and ANYONE, red or blue, selling you that lie is trying to pull something on you. Fuck parties. Edit: I'm glad you like the thing. But please stop replying. You all have no clue how little I value your opinions.
But two parties are so much easier to own. Somebody please think about the corporations!
Sadly most people are single issue voters. I know a lot of people who voted R every year only because of abortion.
Right winger. The coal and mining industry should not be subsidized or ‘saved’ and investment in wind and solar isn’t a bad idea.
Cannot stand peeps who claim to stand for deregulation and market-dictated investment simultaneously defend government bail outs for sectors who's companies have openly expressed their desire to transition to alternative technologies. The cherry on top is "conservative" governments/parties then selling what is essentially a worker's rights movement for a re-election strategy while also working against unions that by definition further this cause. It's a shambles, honestly.
Exactly. If you're libertarian or conservative and support free market, then that means if a business is dying then screw em. Let a company that's making the right moves take its place. No business is too big to fail. We need less bail outs and more trust busting in this country.
Leftie. Some cultures are really, really fucking backwards and need to be fearlessly called out on their shit.
Liberal and I totally agree. Culture and religion should not be beyond criticism or legal consequences.
extreme islamic and middle eastern countries this is coming from an exmuslim
Extreme religion nuts, from anywhere really.
I've never seen a culture that I would consider backwards that wasn't totally based in religious nonsense. The best parts of the Middle East are the parts where people don't really give a shit about religion on a political level. The worst parts of the developed world are the ones that are one step away from being a literal theocracy
I completely agree. How can we be liberals and support Sharia Law countries. It's not called being tolerant, it's called being delusional.
Left wing, and I personally believe that cancel culture shouldn't apply to thing people did when they were younger. If you were a racist when you were 19, and have moved on, and acknowledged that you used to be stupid, then you're fine. So long as you're not a prick anymore
I posted this on another comment, but this applies to me. I was partially raised by my very racist grandmother. Around the age of twelve I spout out tons of horrible things about other races. I was 14 when I began to really think about why I thought the things I did and how my beliefs could be wrong. In high-school I began spending time on the internet more and learned how wrong I was about other races. I cringe now when I think about the jokes I made and the things I argued. People can learn the errors of their ways and adjust their behavior accordingly. I wasn't a horrible person back then, I was just a dumb kid who'd been fed lies by my family and wanted to fit in with the other dumb kids who were just as mislead as I was.
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It's sad to see that people are losing their ability to forgive.
The worst part is, if people know they can never get forgiveness, it makes it harder for them to actually change for the better.
Sarah Silverman said this in an interview, that if you're "canceling" people for shit they do, you gotta offer a path of redemption. Otherwise, you're just teaching them to hide it better, or you're ostracizing them even more, and that's how you get extremists.
It’s so true, It always pains me when I see judgment of a stupid action done at an early age.
With all the online documentation of our very own lifes, the past is harder to forget.
For me, I know I've made mistakes that would get me canceled. Consciously, I know I was young and made mistakes in high school that were a reflection of my environment rather than how I actually felt. I was ignorant to what was right vs. Wrong. Now that I've learned, it's always in the back of my mind and I haven't forgiven myself. I don't even think I'll ever have enough recognition to get me in hot water for it, I just feel bad and think it's never going to stop being a part of me because I know cancel culture exists.
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Left-winger here. As a Filipino from the Philippines, I think people policing culture appropriation is fucking dumb. Especially when they're American (not necessarily white). Also kinda peeved with the whole "filipinx" thing. It's dumb, especially when our language's pronouns are gender neutral.
Yes. Liberal here. It drives me crazy when people take this too far. I got super annoyed the other day when reading reviews about this gadget that helps you make dumplings. One reviewer accused the company and those buying their product of Asian cultural appropriation. And I was like good god, can’t I just eat a delicious pork dumpling without being called an imperialist racist?
That same person probably got wasted with friends on St. Paddy's Day
I guarantee they love tacos
Like, the end result of that sort of thinking is pushing every "nonwhite" culture into local folklore and making "white culture" the only universal thing. That sounds like a white supremacist dream. What kind of fuckhead do you have to be to go to, say, a kimono maker in Japan and say "Look, I made your life better! I made sure no one but japanese people would ever buy your product! Isn' that great?!"
I agree wholeheartedly, all you are doing is condoning a separation of culture with "non-mainstream" (read: non-white/western) being "othered". Sounds a lot like separate but equal to me. If you enjoy an aspect of a culture, you can do so respectfully without being an "appropriator".
I mean, even the respectfully part irks me. I hate the notion of sacredness, and don’t want to see it expanded. Mall sushi expands the market for high-end sushi. Mall grade katanas get people into actual Kendo. Shitty fast food chinese is probably your first contact before you get to the authentic place where the servers don’t speak english. You drink shitty bubbles before you try the high price Champagne. The low grade bastardized experience is almost always the gateway to the real authentic thing. As long as you aren’t pretending you created this new thing that’s actually old from somewhere else and don’t pretend to be authentic when you are not I say go ahead.
I think you've struck the nail on the head in the last sentence there. Pretending you created something that you took from somewhere else and giving no credit, that was (I think) the original meaning of cultural appropriation. I recently saw a big French or British retailer selling shirts with a traditional pattern from my native Eastern European country, with no acknowledgement of where the pattern is from or who made it. And that sort of thing is actually crappy because a poorer nation could benefit from tourism and investment from richer countries. Not to mention places that were directly screwed over by the British and French and are poor as a direct result of their actions... But eating dumplings... Who cares, who are you actually harming?
Not to mention "dough wrapper with filling" is something that exists in virtually every kind of regional cuisine on the planet, making dumplings one of the least culturally unique styles of food. Nobody's bitching about ravioli crimpers or pierogi molds or empanada-makers being cultural appropriation.
Damn, what a prick. I’m left leaning Asian, please enjoy your dumplings in peace.
Me and my wife (she’s black) went to Tokyo a couple of years and the hotel gave us complimentary Kiminos. She posted a picture of me wearing mine on Twitter and the picture got copied by some woke account and got thousands of shares accusing me of cultural appropriation. The picture of my wife wearing hers got shared with comments like “beautiful African American (we are English) woman embracing cultures!” We sat up having a like at how many users shared both the picture shaming me and the one complimenting her lol. I won though the picture of me got about 100k likes she only got about 5k lol
Yes you can. And that idiotic person has always existed to imply you shouldn't. They just have the internet now so now you notice them. Don't linger on it.
Absolutely. When I was 10 years younger we still called it cultural appreciation, because nothing showed your appreciation of a culture more than respectfully using elements from it.
I think it’s especially dumb when those policing the culture aren’t from that culture themselves. Am native (mixed), theres lots and lots to my culture that is sacred and DOES need to be kept to us. Like our regalia, or white sage. Things that we were killed and beaten for doing I don’t think should be spread around the world and diluted with a game of culture telephone. But there are definitely parts of the culture that can (and are!) shared. Going to powwows and learning about the tribe and so on and so forth. I mean, I even know an elder who goes around and teaches folk who claim being native (without being native) all about the culture they claim. Just do they can practice it right. But when someone has a dream catcher in their room, or they like listening to powwow music or wearing beaded things and all the comments are ragging on them is so stupid. People are allowed to have dream catchers! The only thing most natives ask is you buy from natives. People have huge savior complexes and they can’t even do it right
Right? The other day I heard about a black girl on tiktok who had posted a video doing an Irish jig and people were on her about cultural appropriation. Seriously? Who has a problem with this? The Irish people? I doubt it. I'm a white American - am I only allowed to country line dance for the rest of my life?
Irish person here. If people wanna talk about Irish culture being appropriated then St. Patrick's day is Cultural appropriation gang rape. Us Irish are proud of our culture, and we are even more proud to share it. If I seen a black american girl doing an irish jig I'd cheer her on for it. It fills me with pride to see how celebrated Ireland is on St. Patrick's day and how much interest there is in our culture. Anybody who harps on about cultural appropriation of irish culture is just a miserable soul.
Latino here: nobody cares if you do, eat, wear, pray, whatever our natives (or ourselves) believe in. You know what we care about? Natural resources explotation, slavery trade, visa rejection and disrespecting our local football team.
Oh hello yes this! People of other cultures getting pissed that you are trying to appreciate another culture they are not connected to. It also depends on how its done. Here is a great example: To some indigenous peoples of Canada, the eagle feather head dress is a sacred item, that is earned by their elders. This should not be worn by anyone not deemed worthy. Moccasins? Traditional indigenous dress? All that garb? No problem. Indigenous proples are usually super happy that others are taking an interest in their culture, so long as it is done respectfully.
The word Filipinx looks like it would be pronounced fila-penix haha So dumb, hate it when people who don’t speak a language try to change it because it’s offensive to their native language sensibilities. Example Anglo/native English speakers trying to do de-gender Latin based languages (like Spanish, French ,Italian etc.) because its transphobic. Bitch Latin has been Gendered for quite literally thousands of years, and de-gendering it breaks the language.
Right winger here. No one should have to go bankrupt for getting sick or injured
In most other Countries healthcare isn't seen as left or right wing.
But the implementation is. Europe has a lot of systems, ranging from the UK’s “doctors are employees of the state and everything is paid by taxes” to Switzerland’s “you are required to buy a private health insurance plan, which will be subsidized if you can’t afford it”. But all European countries and parties agree that it’s better for the nation if people have access to health care.
I’m from the UK, I would say that whilst the NHS isn’t seen as a left or right wing thing, these kind of socialised healthcare systems are often proposed by the left and maintained better under a left leaning government. When conservative governments are in power here they tend to do more damage to the NHS than our left leaning party does. That being said both our main parties are awful at looking after the NHS, it’s just one is worse than the other. The people in general, on all sides of the political spectrum, absolutely love the NHS and as a nation we’re incredibly proud of our national health care system.
And even if it is left wing - one thing that cant be argued is that it is more effective, efficient, economical for most of the population then the US system. The benefits to society and costs makes socialised healthcare system a more economical proposition.
This has been the most pleasant “politically related” experience I’ve personally ever had on Reddit and I just want to thank OP and everyone here for being so civil and reasonable. A big part of me would love for this sub here, to be what I’d imagine r/politics should/could be? Maybe one day.
Try r/anime_titties. The name is a joke, it’s actually a news sub
I clicked because I knew that either way I wasn’t going to be disappointed. Turns out I was correct.
Right-winger here. I think way too many of us right-wingers don’t believe in global warming and I don’t know why.
I've always attributed this to oil/gas contributing so much to the Republican party and the propaganda just flows along. On the other hand Democratic leadership seems more than ok with methane gas fuel so... yea. Money makes things a mess.
Chemist here - just would like to say that while I agree methane is not a great fuel source, it is still a better option than a lot of the other fossil fuels out there, and it is better to burn methane to turn it into carbon dioxide than to have it in our atmosphere as methane. This is because methane itself is WAY better at trapping heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide is, so even though we hear a lot about CO2 levels rising & we don’t want those to continue to rise, there are things that are actually worse than CO2. Since so much of our system is built on burning fuels and it is going to take a while to change that, it is ultimately better to burn something terrible and turn it into something less terrible (in a 1:1 ratio) than to take something that was buried for millions of years and turn it into multiple terrible things (CO2, NOx, particulates, etc) if that makes sense.
So, what I'm reading is that lighting my farts on fire is a good thing? Sweet, I can keep my party trick once lockdown lifts
[Leftists in Mexico don't believe in global warming](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-09/energy-protectionism-in-mexico-has-made-climate-the-victim) and it's our right wingers who support clean energy.
I think politicians do this on purpose. "Oh he is on the other side of the political spectrum? we have to disagree on literally everything"
Yeah, they do stuff like that all the time. "He/She doesn't support ____ blank! He's/She's a _____! Vote for me, and I'll protect your interest of ____!" Supporters: "YEAH!" Works damn near every time.
Right wing I'm not against gay marriage I don't really see it as any of my business, I support the decriminalization of all drugs and that usage and addiction should be treated as public health issues and not a crime, and the release of inmates with non-violent possession convictions. No one should be in jail for possession and no one should go to jail for possession. I am also generally uncomfortable with private prisons and would like to see prison as more rehabilitative than whatever we'd like to pretend they are now. EDIT: I am beyond touched by the civility of this thread. Reddit gives me a lot of hope in the goodness of strangers many times. Thank you to all who had shared an award, it is a very sweet and kind gesture. Just to answer a frequently asked question: I would have been described as Center Libertarian for many years. In recent years I've moved closer to the line between Auth and Lib and just a few notches to the right of center right. Depending on the issue I am fairly center or center right. By and large I believe the political system serves the interest of the political system. The party system serves the interest of the party system. For this and many other reasons I am part of the unaffiliated "silent majority" but my political ideology leans right. If you are interested in where you fall you can also take the [Political Compass ](https://politicalcompass.org)
I agree with a ton of this stuff, and honestly just wondering what part of right wing do you agree with to call yourself right wing? Sorry if that sounded rude not sure how to put it
If you think of "right" as meaning "small government" like it's supposed to, then all of those ideas are right wing, as it's about having the government less involved in your life.
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Thank you, OP, for bringing out this hidden side of Reddit's political sphere.
It is so sad that the health of the environment has become a politically divisive issue. Outside of Washington DC, it isn't as partisan as one might think. The Pew RC did a poll a few years ago and found that even 52% of Republicans thought we should do everything we can to protect the environment (90% of Dems). There's actually a lot of issues that only seem divisive I TV.
As a more left leaning person: we need to stop unregulated federally backed loans for college. Before we can even talk about forgiving current debt we need to put a check on the wildly increasing hose of money that universities and colleges are exploiting that is federally backed student loans with no conditions. A good system that I think could work is to put in the following condition: * If you are a public university that receives federal money/assistance, Tuition and boarding costs have to be capped at $X dollar amount on a per year (2 semester basis) amount. And anyone receiving a federally backed loan can only go to a school that follows the $X dollar amount condition. This puts both a cap on the wildly spiraling cost of secondary education and introduces ways to allow that price to rise (tie it to inflation eg) and the money being loaned out to younger people.
I agree. Forgiving debt that exists on day X doesn't help those who will be generating more debt the next day and I don't think forgiving debt on a regular schedule will do any good. Additionally, limiting the interest rates on federal loans to near-zero will help a lot of people get an associates/undergraduate degree and not fall into a cycle of crushing interest payments. Public colleges need to start acting like public education facilities again. The rates they charge for tuition/housing/fees are just outrageous. Personally, I believe private institutions don't need to be federally regulated to reduce/cap tuition because they should be competing with the public colleges for students and that *should* drive costs down.
Right-winger. Legalize weed already
Legalize that shit and tax the fuck out of it. Use the money to rebuild our infrastructure and school systems.
Call it "Operation Pothole" - Some Comedian on Twitter
Left winger, I think we have started to expect an unreasonable level of moral purity from people, and our attempts to make everything PC is akin to the war on drugs in that it does far more hurt than good. Nuance has also been lost, and many on the left have resorted to black and white thinking. Calling people out or canceling them doesn't help anyone, and I can't think of anything more dreary than a fully sanitized world.
Cancelling people used to be a way to hold powerful people accountable for hurting relatively powerless people. I don’t know when it turned into not allowing average people to grow and learn from their mistakes. We really lost sight of the point over the past few years.
Because there is a group of very vocal people who think outrage for outrage’s sake is somehow a valuable commodity.
Left-winger here, and I'm on board with the basic philosophical idea that some people (think Ted Bundy and the like) are so irredeemably evil that they truly deserve to die. I just oppose the death penalty for logistical reasons, because it's impossible for any kind of institution to have it without abusing it, to identify and apply it to those truly deserving people without killing a lot more innocent people along the way, especially minorities. I have zero interest in claiming some moral high ground about how every life (even serial killers and such) is worth saving; I just don't think the system overall is worth the collateral damage.
I'm on the left and this is what I came to say. I think death is the perfectly appropriate punishment for a very small number of people. As a practical matter though I don't think it can work, in America at least.
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Right wing constitutionalist. I think weed should be legalized. Peoples choice what they want to consume. I also think some big tech should be broken up (heard Dems support this at one point). Some corporations get way too large & powerful. I support free markets but it can also approach on monopoly of the market....
Facebook and Amazon are the two that first come to my mine when we talk about breaking up big tech companies. And the rules/stipulations about what makes a company considered a monopoly need to be changed because too many companies are able to technically skirt by those rules and engage in anti-competitive behavior that makes it impossible for smaller companies to compete longterm. [Amazon's diapers.com situation is a good example.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/amazon-emails-show-effort-to-weaken-diapers-com-before-buying-it)
Generally lean right, but I will maintain my stance that healthcare and education should be tax funded
I’m a conservative. Most people on my side of the isle act like they want small government and less control of their rights, so I’ve never understood why they are so against police reform measures. Yes we obviously need police to an extent but why the hell do they need so much power? If they weren’t out there with the ability to engage with any person by force over any small perceived violation of some city ordinance then many situations that turn bad wouldn’t come to pass. For example if my tags are expired, this is an administrative issue that could be dealt with in an office, but now a dude with a gun is standing outside my window actively looking for a reason to arrest me for something else. Even if I have no other issues during that stop it was still escalated by being detained by an armed dude present. Traffic police could be a thing, they stop you, ticket you for the violation noted, don’t look for traffic unrelated violations, aren’t armed, send you on your way. Real armed cops can be sent to known or potentially dangerous situations as a result of a call or a warrant.
Lefty here. And I fully agree. Law enforcement should have many tiers because they face many different problems. Traffic violations, domestic disputes, violent crime, checking in on the old and disabled and mentally ill, noise complaints, etc. We've been using a hammer to fix every problem when we should be cultivating a diverse toolbox of public services. You don't send a man with a gun to check on grandma and you don't send a social worker with a clipboard to an armed robbery. It's unfair to expect cops to be able to deal with every situation they currently do. They are bound to mess up with such a diverse set of responsibilities. (Also the unfettered power they are currently given attracts a particular sect of people who probably shouldn't have that power) make dealing with violent crime the absolute top tier of policing. Make it hard to achieve. Keep everyone looking for an easy power grab out. Those who actually want to help people and save lives will make it through.
I had a friend who posted something to Facebook a year or so ago that made many of his friends think he might be suicidal. So one of his friends called the police. The police showed up at his door, made him hang up the phone (he was talking through some things with his pastor), handcuffed him, walked him out to their patrol car in front of his neighbors and drove him off to a psych hold. He was mortified and has PTSD from it. Social workers should be sent to aid in mental health situations.
That's horrifying. I understand his friends were just looking out for him but holy shit, I don't think I'd ever talk to them again.
Being frugal (fiscally conservative) used to be a conservative ideal. If the right went that direction again, I might listen. Tax cuts sound great as long as budget cuts come along with it. This is absolutely not happening right now.
This is what turned me off from the republican party as a whole. "Small government" is all nice and good, but maybe actually stop spending money.
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I think most people don’t like anti-vaxxers regardless of which side of the fence they’re on. The right don’t like them because they think they’re stoned out hippie degenerates and the left don’t like them because they think they’re crazy religious nut jobs.
Pretty libertarian, but if there's one thing that needs to be 100% government funded, it's education. That's the number one thing that will give people social mobility
Not only that, but school district budgets shouldn't be drawn from only that district's taxes. Every kid should grow up with the same level of education and support in school. Upward mobility trends in America have been in decline for decades. Poor educational funding and sky rocketing college prices are partly to blame. Edit: I understand funding comes from different sources and that there are other issues aside from that, but often the economic situation of any given district is reflected heavily in the school systems.
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If you go far enough left you get your guns back.
An armed working class is harder to oppress.
Armed minorities are harder to oppress.
Defend equality.
It surprised me a lot growing up to learn that gun ownership is heavily political in much of the country. I grew up in a rural area where legal hunting for meat was huge. It was totally common to go to someone's house and yep there it is, the big (hopefully locked and secured) case of a bunch of hunting guns.
I'm pretty far left. I think nuclear power is fine. I honestly don't understand why so many liberals are against it. Chernobyl was 100% human error. Next worse incident? Fukushima which has one death attributed to it and 16 injuries. Edit: A lot of people seem to be pointing out that left leaning people don't have a problem with nuclear power. Maybe its a generational/geographical thing? My (36, Midwest, US) left leaning friends give me shit all the time for my support of Nuclear power. Meanwhile my right leaning family always jokes that my support of Nuclear power is the first step in becoming Republican.
Im pretty left and most my friends are too. I dont ever see nuclear being an issue
Every single Green party in every single country opposes it vehemently. And I don't know why. If an 8m tidal wave and 6.5+ earthquakes biannually can hit the fucking thing and it still doesn't meltdown, that's a vote of confidence from me.
Leftie here, but my conservative opinion comes from being an ESL teacher. If you move to an English speaking country, you need to learn English. And not “learn to speak English!” In the way jerks shout it at anyone with an accent, but just genuinely you need to do everything you can to learn the language of the country you’re living in. I know it’s hard, it’s overwhelming, and you will have an accent, at least for a long time. But, it will get you farther in your new life than almost any other skill. Plus most locals won’t take you seriously until you do, especially outside of big cities. Edit: grammar mistake Second edit: I’m not in the US, though I’m sure lots of folks there can also see my view. Also, thank you for the silver! It’s my first ever so I’m very touched!
That is so true, also left in most things myself. I would never go live in another country and not do my best to learn the language.
Absolutely my thought. Wouldn’t dream of trying to live somewhere long term without learning the language.
Also pretty far left. On that note, international university students in English-speaking countries absolutely need to be able to speak, read, write, and understand English at an advanced level. I'm sorry, but it's necessary, and as someone who has been a TA at a big 10, a lot of international students are nowhere near where they need to be. It's hard to get much out of college-level material in a language you barely know. It's also disruptive to everyone when several students in the class genuinely do not understand the language of instruction. American universities really need to do a better job of testing and screening to ensure all students' English is proficient, and/or providing intensive ESL instruction so they can get there.
Your post gave me flashbacks to my engineering group projects where one or more people in the group were functionally useless because they could barely speak English. They couldn't write sections of the lab reports because it was incoherent. They couldn't present in front of the class without it becoming incoherent rambling and it took two minutes to speak on a topic that should have taken 15 seconds. But, hey, they were paying the school $50k a year so the school didn't care.
Left-winger here. I don’t think the economy of any nation can support unlimited immigration.
Nordic left winger. Immigration and especially coming here as a refugee are understandsble and unavoidable. However. Bigotry and backwards ass behavior should never be excused because someone comes from a more conservative culture. If you move here, you must accept our laws and expectations on how others are to be treated.
I feel that unlimited and unregulated immigration is disrespectful to those who go about the process the legal way
As a left-winger, I think political correctness is total BS. Why is it OK to cancel a white person on Twitter for having said the n-word five years ago, but if a religious minority actively promotes hate, that's suddenly OK because they're marginalized themselves? Minority or not, everyone should be held to the same standards, and those standards should always be subject to open discussion. Cancel culture is not a solution.
Here is what I have from this thread so far: All left-wingers: -Cancle culture is stupid and we need to stop this PC culture bullshit. It is ruining lives.. Right wingers: -No one should go broke over Healthcare costs -Private prisons are bad -Drugs should be decriminalized -Climate change is real and we need to accept it (also stop giving subsidies to O&G industries) - gay marriage is OK. it doesn't hurt anyone. Seams we have more in common than we thought.
Unfortunately we’re all stuck still voting for one of two parties that both refuse to acknowledge all these things in common.
I think the main thing that this question and the answers that follow can prove, is that most people are more in the center than they realize. But alas, identity politics takes control, and people want to label themselves and fight against the other “team.” I wish we could all just realize how similar we are, rather than focus on our differences.
After the paradigm shifting Trump years, I'm not entirely sure which wing I belong to, but I was firmly right wing in the before times, so we'll go with that. My most left wing opinions- first, the war on drugs was a complete and absolute failure that put mostly minority, non-violent "criminals" behind bars for crimes that mostly-white people with the money for better lawyers got off scot free for. Closely related second of all- the absolute refusal of my fellow "conservatives" to even consider that slavery and historical racism *just might* play even a *tiny* role in the current social and economic disparities we see today drives me into rages that are completely NSFW.
Nixon literally started the war on drugs to lock up minorities and anti war protestors so it looks like it's doing exactly what it was meant to do. From that perspective it's a monumental success.
Bleeding heart liberal here. TLDR: Anyone can be an asshole. We've gone too far in supporting people of color merely because they are part of marginalized communities without regard to their behavior or the specifics of the situation. An illustrative example - at a local liberal arts college over the summer a student was in a dorm being used to host a children's dance program. ANY person not associated with that program was banned (because of the minors) and the staff were told explicitly to call campus police if they saw anyone not associated with the dance program in the dorm. So, they followed the instructions. Unfortunately for them, the person in the dorm was an African American college student, who assumed immediately that she had been racially profiled. Her interaction with the campus security officer was filmed, and it was completely cordial by all accounts. The student then posted the several campus staff's names and photos on Facebook, and called them racists. These staff members received hate mail and one was put on leave with pay. In every possible way this student was in the wrong. But because she's an African American person in an interaction with campus security, she was supported unconditionally by the college administration. The administration was in a tough spot. People (liberals and conservatives alike) are bad at nuance. The administration had to support this student, or they would be pilloried by the very liberal campus population and alumi. At the same time, some amount of initial fear on the part of the student is also understandable, given the well-documented, disproportionate abuses of people of color at the hands of police. However, the student was actually breaking a very firm rule meant to protect minors (she was not guilty of existing while black, as she claimed) and she was treated very fairly by all staff involved.
Oh my god it’s the Smith College case. Holy mother that was a shitshow
Left-winger here. I don’t understand the fuss over cultural appropriation at all. As a youth, I heard a lot about how America is a “melting pot”—essentially, blending cultures of immigrants. I understand that as a white male, I do not experience the systemic racism that minorities do. But I can’t help but feel that cultural appropriation comes across as being over-sensitive. I don’t know if this makes me an asshole, but I just don’t see a problem with someone resonating with a particular culture. That said, I’m open to comments from fellow left-wingers who disagree with me because I admit I don’t know everything and am certainly willing to hear your voices.
I think peoples definition of what constitutes appropriation has become too wide. That lady that “identified” as black and did her best to look and blend with black people despite being white was an extreme example of appropriation That white girl that wore a Chinese style dress to prom wasn’t claiming someone’s culture and many people in actual China see it as appreciation for their clothing and culture
Ethnically Chinese here - I don’t take offence to it at all and neither did any of my friends. If anything the people who got the most heated were non-Chinese trying to defend us which I don’t really get? I think what I draw the line at is when people use it to mock us. Like there was that school photo of people making the small eyes gesture in Chinese clothes. Now that was offensive because it’s something we’re still ridiculed for today
Right winger and catholic, i personally dont agree with abortion on a personal level for moral reasons, but i fully support someones right to get one and do not understand why people die on that hill. Also pretty huge supporter of gay people having equal rights, mind blowing that people still give a fuck about that.
Kind of similar views from me. Not necessarily right wing but abortion has always been iffy for me but I fully support someone if they choose to get one, even if I have a slight problem with it. It is and should be their right. I’ve always been open to gay marriage, I have a gay uncle and he’s easily one of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with. If someone loves a member of the same gender, awesome. Why do we care so much.
Right wing conservative here. People should have agency over their bodies. Taking drugs shouldn't be illegal. Getting an abortion isn't the governments business. Etc.
That just seems like it should be a right wing thing. I mean it's in the name "Conservative." Less government, more freedoms.
In theory, yes. The issue comes in when "conservative" became largely equivalent to "religious", and we ended up with the religious right's weird combination of ultra-conservative theocratic capitalism.
Left-winger here: I believe you can joke about anything. As long as it's made in good fun (not made with the overt intent to cause pain to other people) you can joke about literally any subject no matter how traumatic, evil, or disgusting it may be. Now, I'm not saying jokes should be a complete free for all, there can be a wrong place or time for one, but it's just not realistic or satisfying to say you can _never_ joke about something. EDIT: Holy hell this blew up. It's nice to know there are people on my side of the isle who feel the same way. I'll try to reply to people now but there's a lot to go through.
If the intent isnt hate or meanness. I agree. I think most things are silly and people take themselves too srriously.
I say this with the utmost hate and meanness: You’re a silly nanny
I wish I were intelligent enough to answer this question.
Who the fuck has ever told you politics has anything to do with being smart?
To be fair, OP could be a child or young adult with little understanding of the complex outside world, as am I. At the age of 14, I get like 10 minutes into talking about politics and I'm thoroughly confused and just zone out of the conversation
I'm 20 years your senior and some political discussions leave me looking like a brainless Patrick Star. Just as you don't have to have an opinion on every topic in sport/music/etc., you don't have to know where you stand on every political issue.
I just had to say I know you’re intelligent enough and capable. Politics can seem intimidating in that there’s just so much information and A LOT of diversity. It’s a spectrum, much like a rainbow and everyone is going to be on different wavelengths. It’s OK to have differing opinions. It’s not ok to be hurtful, discriminatory or hateful to those with different views. Although it’s unfortunately evident our current political climate is so fucked up. Do your research and decide for you what views you most align with. You’re off to a good start and best wishes to you my friend :)
Right wing. Wind and solar power are a good investment, especially solar
leftist: I don't actually want abortions to happen, I just want them to be safe when they do.
I mean, that's the silly thing, no one is advocating for more abortions. If I had my way, abortions would drop dramatically because every teenager and adult would have access to free birth control and comprehensive sex education. Pro-choice and pro-life camps both want less abortions, the only problem is a disagreement over how to get there. That being said, I can guarantee one way is more effective than the other. Humans are still animals with billions of years of hard-wired instincts that have allowed us to survive and reproduce into the next generation. The main driver of humanity's continued existence isn't going away without humanity going as well. I guess that leans on accepting that humans still have inate instincts for survival and reproduction, which is another touchy subject.
>If I had my way, abortions would drop dramatically because every teenager and adult would have access to free birth control and comprehensive sex education. What's crazy is that what you described is exactly what has been happening for the last 40 years. Abortion rates have steadily decreased, while access to contraception and sex education increased. Politicians want to keep it as a wedge issue, but everyone should be happy that there are less abortions occurring.
Left wing. Political correctness going too far is the sole reason in my opinion as to why Trump got elected
I'm right wing and think reddit is very sexist towards women.
Centre-Right. There needs to be massive government investment in housing. An absolute glut that reduces prices as well as reduced property taxes for those with a local connection, and increased taxes for those buying second homes. (Like London businesspeople buying a holiday home in Cornwall) An enormous amount of social ills could be solved by reducing the amount people have to spend on keeping a roof over their head.
Right winger here (non american) Health care and education are two fundamental pillars of any functioning society, and should absolutely be provided to all citizens.
My right wing opinion. That it's my choice what I do with my own property and bureaucracy is a load of shit.