Shhh, you’re ruining my fun.

Who is more pitiable? Him or the woman who dated him?

Almost no one pays attention to the big-L Libertarian party. Ron and Rand Paul got some attention on the national level but they weren’t even members of the party (while in office) and the party itself has never been politically relevant.

I think these days the word is associated more with Silicon Valley techno-libertarians (a group I identify with). These guys favor the free market over government regulation (which isn’t really relevant to Reddit) but they’re also very sympathetic to free-as-in-speech open-source software.

Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.

My car. I bought a luxury car back when I was in grad school and it cost me a year’s salary used. I would tell anyone else not to do that, but over the years I have had so much fun driving that car. It’s a 2008 BMW 328i with a manual transmission and sports suspension (which makes it rather uncomfortable, but it corners so well). It has been breaking down a lot recently and I’ll probably have to get rid of it soon, which I’m not happy about. They don’t make cars like that anymore and even if they did, I can’t reasonably justify buying such an impractical car at this stage of my life. Maybe I’ll make another irresponsible purchase anyway…

“Comercial” is misspelled and therefore the magic spell fizzles.

In my experience, people here are nicer than the people in, for example, r/politics. However, that’s not saying much. I never commented in r/politics. I only commented in those niche communities that don’t exist here and Lemmy is a big step down compared to them in terms of the quality of the discourse. (It helped that the communities I participated in would ban people for being rude.)

When I was a kid, I had to go to the dentist and as I sat in the waiting room, I periodically heard horrible screams. I, uh, wasn’t enthusiastic when they finally called me in. Turns out it was a parrot.

WD, Seagate

Has Seagate improved? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.

“God fearing” is generally used in the context of Christianity and the New Testament God. If you believe in Hell, fear makes perfect sense.

Very important.

• I want to be with someone I enjoy talking to.

• I admit that I couldn’t bring much to the sort of relationship where intelligence isn’t particularly important.

• Intelligence is heritable to a significant extent, which is important in case children are produced.

One downside (in a sense) is that this approach will probably lead to two very career-oriented people being together, which causes some problems.

Edit: I’m saying this as someone who is significantly above average on the sort of intelligence measured by SATs.

Every time I see something like this, the couple is looking for another woman. Where are the bisexual couples which are looking for another man? Do they not exist or do they just immediately find such a man and go off the market?

I think you should give them more credit than that. There are, for example, real leftists (not trolls) who are extremely hostile to liberals due to disagreements about Middle East policy but still intend to vote for Harris.

the only thing that consistently unifies the democrats is what they don’t like

Opposition to Trump is currently the strongest force uniting the Democrats, but I think there’s more dividing the Democrats than just a disagreement about which issues to prioritize.

For example, someone who prioritizes abortion rights usually also supports protecting the environment and vice versa. Most abortion-rights people and environmentalists agree about what the ideal end state is (both goals accomplished). However, someone who supports affirmative action and someone who opposes affirmative action may currently vote for the same candidate but they’re clearly opposed to each other in a way that the abortion-rights person and the environmentalists aren’t. The distinction between liberals and leftists is useful for describing many disagreements of the second sort, and it’s an important distinction because the dividing line between Democrats and Republicans won’t always cut across the same issues it does now.

I think this is too perfect not to be a troll.

Silver’s descriptions of what I think and of what the people who disagree with me appear to be thinking seem correct to me, but of course I know myself better that I know people who disagree with me. I think it would be interesting to have a leftist post about the division from his side’s point of view.

I think that the idea of “liberal” as an insult is driven by the conflict between these two factions, but I’m not claiming that they are the entirety of the Democratic party. There are others, such as organized labor and religious socially conservative black people, who nonetheless reliably vote for the Democrats. I’m curious about what group you would say that you belong to.

I think that even the people who are just as bad as you say are also part of the Democratic coalition simply because both they and I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November, although they will be doing it while complaining a lot. I’ll be complaining a little because I’m never going to support any candidate 100% but my ideal candidate would still be a centrist Democrat.

With that said, I’m not sure how long this coalition will hold together because I would rather vote for a centrist Republican than for a leftist. Right now the Republican party is the one dominated by its extremists but if they return towards the center (Trump won’t live forever) and the Democrats shift left, a lot of liberals will be reconsidering their political alliances.

I think OP’s question is about why parts of the Democratic coalition are hostile to other parts of the Democratic coalition, not about why Republicans are hostile to Democrats.

Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds, written by a liberal. (Note that by “SJL” he means modern American “social justice leftism” as opposed to earlier leftist movements more focused on economic class.)

SJLs and liberals have some interests in common. Both are “culturally liberal” on questions like abortion and gay marriage. And both disdain Donald Trump and the modern, MAGA-fied version of the Republican Party. But I’d suggest we’ve reached a point where they disagree in at least as many ways as they agree. Here are a few dimensions of conflict:

SJL’s focus on group identity contrasts sharply with liberalism’s individualism.

SJL, like other critical theories that emerged from the Marxist tradition, tends to be totalizing. The whole idea of systemic racism, for instance, is that the entire system is rigged to oppress nonwhite people. Liberalism is less totalizing. This is in part because it is the entrenched status quo and so often is well-served by incremental changes. But it’s also because liberalism’s focus on democracy makes it intrinsically pluralistic.

SJL, with its academic roots, often makes appeals to authority and expertise as opposed to entrusting individuals to make their own decisions and take their own risks. This is a complicated axis of conflict because there are certainly technocratic strains of liberalism, whereas like Hayek I tend to see experts and central planners as error-prone and instead prefer more decentralized mechanisms (e.g. markets, votes, revealed preferences) for making decisions.

Finally, SJL has a radically more constrained view on free speech than liberalism, for which free speech is a sacred principle. The SJL intolerance for speech that could be harmful, hateful or which could spread “misinformation” has gained traction, however. It is the predominant view among college students and it is becoming more popular in certain corners of the media and even among many mainstream Democrats.

As a self-idenitied liberal, I think this is about right. He also talks about how and why the conflict in the Middle East has caused the recent increase in hostility but I’m not going to quote the whole article.

But does that mean I can name my kid Walt Disney Company?