• @sugar_in_your_tea
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    5 months ago

    left out left/socdem/socialist

    Feel free to provide them. I’m not familiar with which sources are high quality to post them confidently.

    Most I’ve seen are poorly cited opinion pieces, at least on the socialist camp. Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders do a decent job, but that’s a very different thing, and usually larger media orgs do a decent job of covering their positions.

    Tim Pool

    Not a fan. I think I’ve watched a few videos of his, but I honestly don’t see the appeal. Shapiro is at least kind of entertaining, so I occasionally tune in to see what rhetoric the right is using.

    Usually anyone who uses liberal as the opposing viewpoint to modern conservatism fits cleanly into this box.

    That’s a pretty broad brush you have there.

    I consider myself a left-leaning libertarian, which means I see myself as the opposite of both conservatives and progressives, at least in terms of authority of government to control peoples’ lives.

    I think the political compass is useful, and when I take the test, I’m usually about halfway down the bottom half of the chart, and I drift around the middle of the left/right spectrum (most recently, I was a little to the right).

    I do periodically listen to socialists, but they usually support aggressive governments, so I rarely agree with much they have to say. I’m okay with libertarian socialism (e.g. Noam Chomsky), but I don’t think it’s practical and it’s certainly not popular. Instead, I promote co-ops, private unions, and similar business structures.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

      The humanist report on Youtube is a reliable leftist source of news that I’ve never caught in a lie. As leftists go he’s also pretty nonreactionary by including things inconvenient for socialist messaging which I appreciate.Vaush is a more reactionary but still rarely wrong source with nuance that most creators across the board miss. Of these two Humanist report is very hard to critique as anything other than genuine so I’d start there.

      Government control and avoiding it is a common call in on the majority report and you may benefit from watching just how quickly those views fall apart with some scrunity from Sam Sedar.

      The socdem viewpoint is that there are some government functions that shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies because they’re too important, such as healthcare, the millitary, and elections.

      I don’t often find libertarians who disagree that some things should be wholly under regulatory agencies because it’s so apparent that corruption in privately owned fields is just as if not more rampant than public and objectively people who want government to fail leading government into the ground by leeching off of it isn’t really the proof that government is bad that they think it is. Personally if one side wants to control healthcare the way other nations do and lower cost to patients and taxpayers and the other wants to control the police and repress protests and the right to vote I don’t see them as equivalent violators, so libertarians voting republican in every election is a bit unconvincing of their objectivity to me.

      • @sugar_in_your_tea
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        25 months ago

        Thanks for the recs, I’ll check them out! I’m not a fan of Sam Seder, but I’ll certainly check the others out.

        there are some government functions that shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies because they’re too important

        My view isn’t about importance, but whether something can reasonably be competed over. Monopolies should be state run IMO, but pretty much everything else should be privately run.

        healthcare

        This can actually be competed over, but some parts cannot.

        I believe the government should provide emergency care (e.g. ambulances and ER), whereas private orgs can and should provide routine and longer term care. So if you get in a car accident, the government would cover everything until you’re stabilized enough to make decisions about longer term care yourself.

        military

        Agreed, though I’d like to restructure the military to prevent abuse by the commander in chief. I think private groups have a place here, but only with a formal declaration of war and to avoid the draft.

        elections

        Agreed. I think it’s just insane that we’re okay with private orgs making voting machines. I’m not saying there was any form of tampering with our elections so far with these machines, but election officials should have full control of the source code and hardware.

        I honestly don’t like the idea of voting machines anyway, just process paper ballots with counting machines and random human audits so there’s at least a clear audit trail.

        corruption in privately owned fields is just as if not more rampant than public

        Eh, debatable, it’s usually a mix of both.

        Companies will do whatever they think they can get away with, and that includes getting favors from politicians. The more you mix the public and private sectors, the more corruption you get, as a general rule of thumb. A corrupt company w/o assistance from the government will likely just fail to competition, whereas with assistance it can drive out competition and thrive.

        libertarians voting republican in every election is a bit unconvincing of their objectivity to me.

        Why would a libertarian vote Republican consistently?

        I typically vote Libertarian, unless there’s a good reason to vote for a major party. I did just that in 2020 when I voted for Biden, and the last time I voted Republican for President was in 2008 when I voted for McCain (not libertarian, just he seemed reasonable). I didn’t vote in 2012 because I just moved to a new state and didn’t feel comfortable voting for local offices (and Romney flipping from a reasonable moderate to a conservative in the general didn’t inspire me to vote for him, and I didn’t know about the Libertarian Party).

        My state ballots (I’m in a very red state) are usually about 25% R, 25% D, and 50% L. I’ll only support a major party candidate if they’re particularly well suited for the role, or if the other candidate is especially dangerous (e.g. Trump).

        I used to consider myself Republican, but that’s when I thought Republicans actually cared about small government, but that hasn’t been true for a very long time, if ever. Democrats certainly don’t, so I can’t consistently vote for them either.