[kristopolous]

Anyone who says the left is doing anything which requires power should not be taken seriously at all.

The left is people like Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Nader, Norman Finkelstein, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Michael Parenti, Cornel West.

The left has almost no organized political power in the US. Except for a few city councils and a couple state houses, it's zero.

When people use "the left" as a catch-all for "not us", some broad brushed painting of "outsiders" this isn't a serious conversation, they're just waving their arms around and making sounds.

[lazide]

‘The left’ held the presidency up until quite recently, among other things.

[Vilian]

Us-american left is considered right in the rest of the world

[lazide]

Which has nothing to do with the situation at all, does it?

[kristopolous]

Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits?

No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation...

Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things.

The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politics and the Republicans are the right wing party.

They did things like protect against junk fees and go after phone scammers but pursuing financial criminals is hardly leftism just because the right wing doesn't do it. Bush and Reagan would have done that.

Reagan and Bush did a bunch of prosecutions during S&L...

It's a conservative party and a right wing party.

There is no center, there is no liberal, there is no left.

There was no right until Trump. There was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan but they didn't go anywhere.

I can fully acknowledge this and not just look at things I don't like and say "bah! Right wing"

Once you can look at things that you don't like and not say "bah! Far left!" Then we can to have a meaningful conversation.

Until then you are acting in bad faith

[lazide]

Or we’re talking about the US, so what the US considers ‘left’ vs ‘right’ politically matters, not what some other arbitrary (generally european) criteria is. Or have you checked in with Africa and China too?

[kristopolous]

but it's not. it's dictated by the right. The democrats don't call themselves left. The liberals don't. The centrists don't call either of them "The left" - not even the soft republicans like liz cheney does. There is one group that calls all these people "The far left" ... just one.

It's the same one who believes in jewish space lasers, that there's secret tunnels under the getty, that hillary clinton is an actual child sacrificing witch, that there's a secret basement in a pizza parlor, that the holocaust was fake and simultaneously that 6 million wasn't enough.

Those people are not using reality and there's nothing we can talk about because they simply make things up based on fantasy and fiction

[lazide]

1) I never said ‘far left’. I just said left.

2) That’s just fantasy near as I can tell. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_Sta...] has many, many references of folks calling themselves and their own party ‘left’ or ‘center-left’.

It’s very common. As is ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.

3) I’ve never seen anyone on that side of the aisle calling themselves ‘right’, ‘conservative’, etc.

So who is just imagining things?

And the underlying problem is that - like is typical when dealing with effective narcissists - the reason this is the case is because of the reality distortion and manipulation being done by the guilty party.

They pre-poison the well, so in order to respond effectively the opposition has to be ‘the bad guy’, which exposes them to attack, because now the narcissist has ‘proof’ that the opposition is the actual bad guys. It’s evil genius really.

It’s why the only actually effective way to deal with narcissists is either 1) ignoring them (can’t do that and survive when the narcissist has power - which is why they tend to be power seeking), or 2) applied consequences, aka usually violence.