When I read your replies, I can't get past the first sentence without choking. I know youre intelligent so don't pretend like you have insight into my background. Reverse engineering my beliefs from what fragmented understanding you have of my worldview is shoddy at best, as you always impose parts of your views of leftists on me, who is an anti-leftist. You don't even know my name yet you find it essential to half-jokingly berate me on the one hand while demanding sensible debate, science, rationality on the other--LOL. If you could step outside of your perspective and see me, see everyone as humans instead of opponents, you wouldn't be able to dismiss real world struggles as opinions. There would be no other moral option then to actively oppose hunger insecurity, bad sanitation etc.
Instead, you cozily explain through historical materialist means (nice Marxist thought ya got there) the entire validity of someone's views. Ever thought about doing that to your politics (more like belittlement politics)? In fact, I have no attachment to leftist politics as they are understood in America nor anywhere. I am anti-left and anti-right. Neither offer a genuinely better alternative to current exploitative model in any sense of the Universal Human Rights Declaration that we supposedly adhere to--but we all know this is name only. Human rights are a "letter to Santa Claus" as one state official said decades ago. They are treated that way too. No one can deny it unless you deny reality and sadly many people simply don't look at reality.
We can agree that there must be caps on pollution IFF we care about ALL people. If we only care about our family, tribe and money then we throw out universal morality. Arsenic, PM2.5 and thousands of other pollutants need caps but these caps will be dismissed for those making profit as is the standard procedure. These loopholes cannot exist (like the EPA permit to pollute known as antipollution permits) if we wish to take this seriously before we determine what levels are acceptable. Some are not acceptable to any degree and we must keep that in mind. We cannot have everything the way it is and still make serious progress towards keeping air safe etc.
The system of profit has become so vile that profit has come to control politics. This throws a wrench in Democracy (that is if we care about Democracy). 70% of the population has virtually no voice and as you climb up the ladder of success, at the top you have people getting what they want on most issues. So why would we expect a reasonable discussion about setting limits when the same folks who get what they want also oppose such limits because it limits profits.
Our most fundamental divergence is where people should be able to pursue their private interests when it means other people do not have safe water and regular meals. In other words, are some people are intrinsically more valuable than others? No doubt people are extrinsically more valuable than others, but inherently, people are the same. Thus we should not justify our actions to exploit people based on extrinsic and conditional values that were placed on them at birth with no say of existence, let alone status. But we do it anyway because without doing so, we find it difficult to meet our needs (especially our ceaseless wants). And when we don't get what we want, we do what we can to change that. We find it advantageous to fully participate in this profit system that unabashedly exploits billions of people. Once we get our tiny share, we say "Good" and since we cannot faithfully address these issues without wrestling with introspection we simply give up universal morals and inherent dignity of human beings. So yeah, I'm not leftist by any stretch. I am anti-establishment. There needs to be discussions about how the establishment fails and is predicted to fail increasingly so. A Yale study recently came out like 2 days ago saying those unemployed now should expect to stay that way because they calculate only 11% of them will enter the workforce again, ever. So despite leftist rhetoric matching my hopes, they're almost entirely moderately republican in action. The left approving terror--check (drone is a form of terrorism); the left approving welfare cuts--check; the left approving no legal recourse against Wall Street damning millions of Americans--check; antipollution permits--check! Take a look! You're might be leftist without knowing!
