Mastodawn

StevenDBT Aug 18, 2018

@Haraea Hi. I'm a little left for an American (lol). Here I get called a far left fringe nutcase, but in Europe I'd probably be seem as fairly moderate. Good to see you.

Haraea Aug 18, 2018

@StevenDBT
Good to see you too !
I have always had trouble understanding american political views because of this. Everytime we talk about it in class I'm like "yeah... Where's the left ? Like the real one ?"
It's nice to finally find a leftist person from America.

@Haraea Basically leftism died in 1944 when FDR didn't back Henry Wallace for another term as his Vice President. Wallace was a socialist, and the Democratic Party, which at the time was prominent in the South and in New York (home of Wall Street) didn't want any damn socialists on the ticket. Then FDR died, we got Truman, and he dropped the A bomb on Japan, not so much to end the war, but to gain the upper hand on Stalin. After that's it's been all down hill for leftists in America.

Haraea

@StevenDBT
Kinda sad but interesting ! Do you feel like it seems to change, or...? Here in France I think it's a little better, but not that much either. The socialist party's dead, and I feel like a lot of people define themselves as "leftists" but can be at the end extremely sexists, ableists, racists and all the rest. It becomes very pernicious : it's all about image.

@Haraea Here, people pretend to be "leftist" when all they really do is support the Democratic Party. American politics is basically about voting for the clearly racist party (Republicans) which takes corporate money and does the corps bidding, or vote for Democrats, who pretend they aren't racist but also take corporate cash & do the corps' bidding. So nothing that beneficial to people ever gets passed. Like universal healthcare. Last year my family paid $38K for healthcare & we had insurance.

@StevenDBT
That's enormous. Sorry about that. >w<
The fact that there only are two partys seems to make things a little manichean, doesn't it ? So as the Democrats are one the "left" compared to the Republicans, they get all the credit and reputation of a "good left" while they don't actually act like it. Am I right ?

@Haraea We are stuck with just the two parties because they have made it very difficult for other parties to get on the ballot. And the parties for the most part choose who is their nominee based on who can get the most large money donors. Trump was an anomaly in that he ran on populist, racist less aggressive foreign policy platform and beat Clinton who actually was more pro-war than Trump and basically ran on - I'm not this clown.

@StevenDBT
Oh, I didn't know about that. In France people considered Clinton as perfect because of the comparison with Trump. So I would never have imagined that she was more pro-war than he is.

@Haraea These are my own opinions obviously. One other bad thing about our elections is the electoral college for President - popular vote doesn't matter, just who wins in each state. Each state is assigned x number of electoral votes (skewed to favor smaller states). Two of last five elections resulted in President who did not win popular vote.

@StevenDBT
It seems so unfair. I feel like even in France the elections already are, but in the US... I don't actually see the pros for such a system.

@Haraea What is going on in Europe?

From here it looks like you;re becoming more like us - controlled by wealthy interests at the expense of the interests of ordinary people.

@StevenDBT
I can't tell much about Europe in general - it's so diverse and complicated. But concerning France ? Yes, that's exactly what is happening. Everything's all about money. Macron presented himself as "not from the right nor the left", and people got lost with his image of a "young" charismatic man with a "new" vision.
At the end he's definitely on the right, literally giving money to the richest.

StevenDBT Aug 21, 2018

@Haraea I'm of the opinion there is no left or right anymore, only the rich and everyone else. Oh, the media (owned by the wealthy or controlled by governments under the control of the wealthy) will find ways to divide the non-wealthy class using race, religion, bigotry - all the old familiar ways to keep us from uniting. But I hope the people begin to understand, our earth is being destroyed so a few wealthy people and corporations can profit off its demise.