Left wing civil war

[David]

[Tannin]

[David]

I guess our disagreement is whether they can really be classified as "left". These things are difficult to define, I concede, but in my books you've got to be at least somewhat interested in social progress to be truly left-wing.

[pietillidie]

[Wokko]

Murdoch is right and while he didn't site the study there was a decades long look at the impact of diversity on communities.

"[W]e hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_multiculturalism#Diversity_and_social_trust

I'm sure from there you can look deeper. Not sure what any of that has to do with this issue though.

I'd also appreciate you not putting words in my mouth, I was discussing an article, not 'repackaging' anything. If I'm pushing an agenda I'll happily shout it from the rooftops. I don't have a dog in this fight, and even among moderates of the left/left schism like Tannin and David you can see the differences.

[pietillidie]

[Wokko]

I don't see social cohesion as 'minor stuff', nor do I see multiculturalism as the driver behind any of the other things you mentioned. I would put global trade and interconnected symbiotic relationships between states as the main driver. Tolerance isn't built on creating a mush of cultures and races living together, it comes from experiencing those other cultures and understanding people, in a word, empathy rather than merely existing in the same space.

Learning from other cultures, appreciating the diverse peoples of Earth and their unique, individual and collective experiences and even utilizing unique philosophies and skillsets does not require mass immigration of alien cultures.

Props for not trotting out pop culture, food or dress in your defence of multiculturalism at least. Nice to see someone seriously considering the issue, even if I disagree with you completely.

[swoop42]

How I imagine any left wing civil war would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwLirQS2-o

[Wokko]

[Tannin]

[pietillidie]

[David]

[stui magpie]

Frigging lefties, bunch of monarch decapitators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics

[Tannin]

The left supports fairness and equality and opposes class privilege. Always has, always will. That defines it. Indeed, that's where the term itself comes from: the Estates General first met with the representatives supporting equality and liberty and justice on the left, the representatives trying to maintain the vast wealth and inherited rights of the aristocracy on the right. Thus the terms left wing and right wing.

So long as you have great wealth and power and privilege in the hands of a born-lucky few, and widespread poverty and powerlessness is the natural lot of the many, this conflict will continue. The right wing always has and always will always seek to increase the wealth and privilege of its patrons and seek to reduce the ability of ordinary people to have a say in government or enjoy the fruits of their own labour; the left wing will always try to improve the lot of the ordinary citizen who has neither wealth nor power.

[pietillidie]

Despite thinking Tannin is right on the traditional definition, I do think the best logical basis for making sense of the Left is hierarchy and power gap, of which the wealth gap is just one proxy measure. But politics is more glib than consistent, unfortunately. All power gaps should concern the Left just as much, or at worst almost as much, but the Left has plenty of its own backward thugs and bullies.

Now, if I understand David's view correctly, he and I probably see the oppression of classes, genders, sexualities, races, and so on, as equal concerns; simultaneous masks worn by power and hierarchy, even if that's hard to sell in a five second soundbite. Many old unionist types, among others, sadly, not so much.

If you were to run the Left through brain scans, my guess is we'd find a lot of that difference is due to novelty acceptance; progressives embrace novel stimuli in the bassinet, while others shy from it (among other variables, but this seems the most stable in the research). To show how this messes up neat categories, consider someone like Stui. Stui hates the unions partly because he's a big individualist. Unions are hierarchical, and that makes them conservative in many ways, pissing off individualists who have to comply with their "interference". At the same time, that individualism also enables Stui to be open to novelty and more empathetic to minority variation than most other conservatives.

Given this type of complexity, the conservative trick—conservatives don't have a policy platform aside from the ugly obvious, only a bag of tricks—is to exploit that asymmetry. Not caring if the violence they incite means grave suffering for a targeted minority, or increased stress and abuse for children of low-income families, the objective is to split the Left using the latest fearful novelty on hand (asylum seekers; terrorists; new-fangled druggies; low-wage foreign job takers; HIV spreaders; ebola carriers; Mabo land grabbers; etc.), taking as much electoral momentum and swing vote as they can in the fevered and violent process.

If you were a raping Neanderthal, of course, that would be a masterstroke. In contemporary Australia, however, where many inhabitants have enlarged forebrains, it means instead that you have to apologise a few decades later for destroying people's lives, and need to hire a PR team to claim you knew no better at the time, and that "everyone else was doing it back then". Thus, John Howard is looking smaller and slimier by the year, along with his handiwork in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his grotesque protege in Abbott; meanwhile, Paul Keating is looking more and more like a brilliant visionary and statesman, even though the former opposed, to substantial success, almost all of the good and decent things the latter was trying to achieve, and in time, did achieve.

But, the Curley Effect is real enough when the electorate loses its moral bearing under pressure. This is what Wokko was pointing out, albeit seven or eight decades too late to be deemed news.

Here's how Glaeser and Shleifer, who put together economic proofs for the Howard Racist Hate Vote (which they call the Curley Effect) summarised it: