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barrbaric [he/him] @ barrbaric @hexbear.net
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5 yr. ago

  • One issue with this type of system is, who defines what the truth is? If it's the government in power, then it'll flipflop immediately whenever the other side wins. Any sort of "independent bureaucracy" would also gradually be undermined.

    This is also ignoring that lying in the house of commons is likely not a major cause of political polarization, given that I imagine very few people actually watch the sessions of parliament. I would attribute the rise of political extremism mainly to decreasing quality of life, which arises from a combination of the housing crisis, heinous wealth inequality, and the looming specter of climate change. After all, if the status quo doesn't work for the average person, they will naturally look for alternatives (or get politically disengaged). The right wing has the edge here, as they have a multi-billion dollar propaganda complex that is very effective at getting their word out, and they have no end of scapegoats to blame. The left has no such network, but we do have the benefit that most people aren't massive racist assholes, and it doesn't hurt that the actual facts back us up.

    It is also worth noting that this type of polarization cannot be avoided under the system of capitalism, which broadly pits two groups against each other: the working class and the capitalist class. The working class broadly seek to live comfortably, to receive as much money as possible in pay, and to work no more than is necessary. The interests of the capitalist class run directly counter to this: they seek ever-increasing profits, and would like to pay the working class as little as possible and have them work as long as possible in exchange. This adversarial relationship can be overcome temporarily by a social contract that enacts high taxes on the capitalists to pay for a welfare state (note that even this arrangement does require exporting suffering to the global south through the mechanisms of imperialism, which I'm going to ignore for brevity), but eventually the drive for ever greater profits will drive the capitalists to destroy that social contract. Two relatively obvious examples of this are that wages have become stagnant for the last 50 years despite massive increases in productivity, and the movement to destroy public healthcare.

    In sum: if we are to eliminate polarization, we must first eliminate capitalism. 😊

  • The actual rich who control our society aren't paying out the ass, they're the ones being paid.

    Rank and file "working class" conservatives are deliberately poorly educated and fed endless propaganda to get them to vote against their interests and in favor of the rich.

    Conservatives of moderate wealth, the "middle class" of small business tyrants and boat salesmen, live in constant abject terror of losing what they have. They know that if wealth were distributed equally, their quality of life would go down. As a result, they fight against any change towards redistribution of wealth, even if it would be beneficial.

  • It's an edit. The original has one guy saying 6, the other saying 9, because the creator naively thought "oh the political divide is really just down to people not understanding each other". This is a fairly common opinion of dipshit american centrists.

    The edited version points out how this is incorrect, and that in reality different people have entirely different political views which cannot be reconciled. The example used is that rich people (the same ones that make up the US government and receive bribes from health insurance companies, for instance) want to keep making money from predatory health insurance and so oppose universal healthcare, while the average citizen supports universal healthcare.