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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

Do you remember where this was? I'm interested because it feels like the exact opposite to me. We've got weakened labor unions and strengthened centralized control over resources, we've got stronger centralized government power over individuals (PATRIOT act et al), basically no world powers with an even nominally leftist government, yadda yadda.

In the wake of the financial crisis, a lot of Golden Dawn-esque nationalist parties have crept up and are finding more success than I'd initially expected.

It feels like we're moving more authoritarian right to me.

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I think this is actually totalitarian left - the right is more about personal liberties etc.

Not trolling – I might be wrong –people more knowledgeable about the left/right dichotomy are welcome to shed some light onto this.

at the extremes, both left and right are totalitarian and are nightmarish w.r.t personal liberties. this is sometimes called the "horsheshoe political spectrum" [0] but personally I think that's a misunderstanding of political belief systems. left vs. right is meaningless. the real axis runs between liberation and domination. extreme domination parties (whether nominally capitalist, communist, fascist, or theocratic) are the scary ones that have that bloody track record of holocausts and genocides.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

>I think this is actually totalitarian left

You're absolutely right. There is only one side organizing at grassroots level (indicating that these are not isolated occurrences, but rather are coming from the groups shared ideals) across the country to shut down the political speech of the other, violently in many cases, and that is the left.

Sure thing buddy.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/05/15/white-supremacist-ric...

Thanks for posting, as this one event by the far, far right with a couple dozen people stands in sharp contrast to dozens and dozens of examples involving as many as hundreds of people from the left, and really shows how unequatable they are.

This is just the most high profile example in recent memory.

Which doesn't change the reality of what I've said.

I even linked to an left-wing incident that happened over the weekend, with an order of magnitude more people.

http://college.usatoday.com/2017/05/30/protests-erupt-over-r...

Sorry, I was wrong. The stabbing on the bus in Oregon is probably the most high profile example of a xenophobia-motivated killing:

http://ktla.com/2017/05/30/portland-man-accused-of-stabbing-...

censorship is favored by any kind of authoritarian extremist group and is independent of left/right (which I perceive as an increasingly meaningless distinction).

organized censorship is practiced, historically, by organizations as diverse as the Ayatollah of Iran, the Chinese Communist Party, the NAZI party, and by some microscopic evangelical Church in Arkansas that you've never heard of. Now a certain kind of deranged college professor (and the students they influence) are doing it too.

So what is the left and what is the right? the categories we're accustomed to reading about have broken down. it's something else now and its time to acknowledge it.

It's economic versus social issues. The "left" is more authoritarian on economic issues. The "right" is more authoritarian on social issues.

Maybe in the past, the left has grown increasingly authoritarian on social issues over the last few years.

Just yesterday a mob of left-wing students tried to assault a professor over a social issue.

http://college.usatoday.com/2017/05/30/protests-erupt-over-r...

The alt-left I guess.

> I think this is actually totalitarian left - the right is more about personal liberties etc.

Both the left anf the right talk a lot about personal liberties (though they focus on different specific liberties). Both the left and the right have domains where they generally favor government control. And both the left and the right have factions which are more libertarian (focussing more on the areas of personal liberty favored by their respective side) and factions that are more authoritarian (focussing more on the areas of central control favored by their respective side.)

Historically, the left is generally the side favoring, on balance, democratization of power and greater liberty, but that's focussed on breaking power down from wherever it is centralized which isn't always formal government.

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