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by luffapi 1798 days ago
There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism.

I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly likely that your ideology is influencing your logic (which does exist for all ideologies even if we don’t agree with it).

1 comments

I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets.

You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far southwest myself). The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day. What I'm saying is that to run the machine you actually have to be post-political, and the third group in modern culture are the people who can switch tabs as necessary, or just don't care because they're more concerned with making things function.

I'd be excoriated as being "privileged" by most progressive ideological friends for even suggesting that there exists a neutral position free from racial or historical advantage; and maybe it's not free of those things. But it exists and it attempts to be neutral to the extent that the biggest debate in the country right now is about what some website should or shouldn't censor, while the government itself can barely function, and the people who work for that website only care about making it more responsive and profitable. There is clearly a third group of people to whom most of the left/right debate is just unserious noise. As far as their day-to-day reality, we probably don't disagree that much on what that consists of.

> The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day.

This isn’t true though. The very platforms you’re talking about have many employees that are keeping the systems running and also steeped in politics. There are tons of very overt and loud neo-liberals in tech. Same goes for leftists and libertarians.

You seem to dislike social media activism. Fair enough, but like I said it’s orthogonal to one’s politics and technical competence.