What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
~ Paarthurnax
We talk a lot about left and right wing and what it means here. If you're destroying elite power structures you are to the left of the king. There is zero ambiguity there.
It's always been 99% vs 1%
The problem is that 49.5% think they are on the side of the 1%
Left wing, and right wing are a construct to divide us. The video below goes into the history of the term and how it's been used in modern reporting.
If anyone has a peertube or other non YouTube link I’ll edit my comment to that link
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MYoA1R38cuc&pp=ygUccG9saXRpY2FsIHNwZWN0cnVtIGlzIGEgbXl0aA%3D%3D
I saw that video the other day. While I think that it’s true that there are social reasons why people adopt their politics. You’re extending that fact a bit far to say that fact nullifies left/right understandings of politics.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t have class solidarity with right-wingers. But it is a delicate situation because you also must maintain class solidarity with the groups right-wingers have been taught to hate.
That's pretty simplistic and puts the cart before the horse. Political coalitions are not a new phenomenon, nor are picking up your politics from your social connections. That was exactly how politics worked in Rome. Hell in Constantinople their coalitions straight up sponsored chariot racing teams and ended up burning the city down https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots . Your membership in a coalition was dependent on who you received patronage from.
My point is, from the essence, from it's meaning to the days of the third estate, breaking down power structures is left wing.
yup. im as left as anyone but you know if a right wing neighbor is picking up garbage strewn around the local park. im not against it.
Are you comparing a healthcare CEO to garbage in the park?
If so, I'm completely OK with that.
Hey! Settle down! Some of that garbage can be useful.
“Let’s sort this stuff as either dangerous or reusable! Cardboard- reusable. Broken glass- dangerous. Spent shell casing with DDD written on it- reusable.”
CEOs can be composted
yeah but would you want to eat anything planted in it?
Fair. Incinerated? I could live with watching a CEO powered TV
He’s also 26, and was raised in the bubble of wealth and opportunity. For him to even have half of the radical ideas or to have read the Unabomber’s book is growth in of itself.
“What radicalized you?” dear reader, and more pertinently, at what age? Let’s not pretend we all were born as fully actualized and capable philosophical beings that were always right and never had to develop and grow.
Watching a holocaust movie on ABC as a 7 year old, then the next week witnessing a psychopathic cousin torture a starling to death.
Evil quickly moved from an abstract idea to a real and terrifying component of reality.
“What radicalized you?”
unironically it was just having one conversation after class with one of my professors when i was a freshman in college. i don't remember exactly what we talked about, but i vividly remember the feeling of it afterwards, and walking away much more aware of all the things i didn't know. radicalization was a slow and steady process after that, but that conversation was definitely an inflection point
Similar vibe-check that metastasized over time for me. Having an outright socialist friend who could argue plainly and calmly with conviction, set that mental brushfire that others can and do think radically differently, and they have a different lived experience that defined them and their path.
In seeking to understand a lot of theory of thought and politics, I found the political language and framework for the discontent and disillusionment I knew but couldn’t comprehend.
It also helped that I lived in an unabashed surveillance state, that the public at large actually wanted and defended from criticism or legal change…
Reading the Unibomber's manifesto is only evidence of growth if you roll your eyes halfway through and stop.
Which Luigi did. He liked the main thrust of the argument, but found the methods of the unibomber to be distasteful and lazy.
And I tend to agree.
Attacking the people at the bottom does nothing. Attacking the assholes at the top however... They are the real enemy making the world a worse place, so it just makes sense to target them specifically.
When I realized how politicians fake incompetence to avoid liability. It's not corruption if you fuck Up and break contracts with penalities in the Billions.
The media is trying to paint a picture of him as a right winger so they can better control the narrative. Read his actual social media posts and you can see that it's much more nuanced than that.
The media is also trying to paint a picture of him as a left winger. But his overall "wing" does not matter when we support him for his message
He didn't kill the CEO of Planned Parenthood or the dean of a liberal college. He killed the CEO of one of the most evil companies in an evil industry - something we can all get behind
Right. It's just yet another example of progressive ideas being popular with everybody, so long as it's pitched in a vacuum without any labels attached. Everybody wants better healthcare. Everybody wants cheaper groceries. Everybody wants privacy in their bedrooms. Everybody wants money out of politics. But most people aren't paying enough attention to realize that they're actually voting against these things when they vote for conservatives, no matter what those conservatives pretend to stand for.
They interviewed one of his friends from college who said that “Luigi tends to be on the left economically but not agree with the leftist identity politics”
That's kind of how humans work. Everyone has all sorts of disparate opinions not aligning directly to party lines. I mostly follow left wing politics except where it comes to guns because for some reason that's right wing. So many beliefs and opinions cannot be properly expressed by a political spectrum but by god we'll do it anyway.
It makes me remember that video of the guy putting every different shaped piece into the square. https://youtu.be/Nz8ssH7LiB0
Left leaning people do too good a job of shooting ourselves in the foot by alienating people who don't 100% prescribe to the same beliefs we have. The reality is people are all over the political spectrum and that's not always a bad thing. Finding common ground and working together is what governance is all about.
We need to end the bullshit culture war divisions and make the rich afraid.
No, we're supposed to be focusing on a made up migrant crime epidemic and pets being eaten. We can't look at wealth inequality until those issues are solved. /s
Seriously, though. I mean, if you see someone helping an elderly person cross the street, do you go up and ask them what their political alignments are before you decide it was a good deed?
Lol at the comparison. Our boy Luigi out there shooting CEOs and walking grandma's across the streets
I mean ... in a way he helped grandmas cross streets. After they now finally got that hip replacement or the walking aid or the physiotherapy or...
Aww the shooter is rightwing? I guess I'm a healthcare CEO stan now :( :( :(
US 3 letter agencies will start telling people left of center that he's a "right wing Qanon nutjob", and simultaneously tell people right of center that he's a "radical marxist".
Like IDGAF, even if he was right wing or even far right (which we don't even know if he is or not), that's still the fault of mainstream media propaganda that caused him to have those views, so he's still the victim of propaganda.
That the USA state and its willing mouthpieces has completely lost control of the narrative on this one is just icing on the cake.
I don't have to agree with right wingers on everything in order to agree that these rich parasites need to go.
Was he right wing?
Or, was he just right?
If that's the case, then he's my kind of right winger.
The divide and conquer strategy of the ruling class will work as long as the oppressed are kept busy focussing on their differences.
Luigi Mangione’s Anger Wasn’t Neatly Ideological: https://jacobin.com/2024/12/luigi-mangione-unitedhealthcare-thompson-ideological
Worth a read: you could point to various parts of his digital footprint to paint him as an 'activist' of many different stripes.
That's a solid article. Sounds to me like Luigi is generally on point, or at least intellectually curious and flexible. He sees beyond the tribal buffoonery that encapsulates many of our lives. He has my attention and support.
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