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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

Seems you’ve applied values of your own. I didn’t frame one as selfish and the other as altruistic. I framed one as spreading wealth and one as consolidating it. I gave “selfish” examples for both.

If you care about preserving wealth with elites that is right wing… whatever weird political label you give it.

If you care about distributing it to non elites that is left wing.

Stalinists are not “left” they were about wealth and power consolidation.

This is why right and left are useful measures because it sees passes all the bullshit names/political measures and provides a simple scale: are you redistributing wealth (left)? Are you consolidating wealth (right)? Are you doing something in between (centrist)

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Ok, so how do the national socialist fit into your metric?

They are left, because they want to redistribute wealth, from the few rich (jewish) bankers, to the poor (aryan) german masses?

No, they wanted to move wealth, and consolidate it. So you could be fooled into initially thinking it was a leftist agenda when it was “take wealth away from rich bankers”. But it quite quickly deteriorated to something else.

It’s important distinction that at the extremes both left and right don’t look that different. It is essentially use extreme violence to achieve wealth distribution/consolidation. Typically once someone is in control of such power even if they set out/pretended to distribute they pivot to consolidation. I guess this is what is meant by “power corrupts”

So 17 levels below a comment I made about the news just making everyone angry and addicted to it, people are still commenting about whether Nazis are economically left or right. I guess that tracks.

Oh, people can always fight about and against nazis.

But I am not angry, just mildly annoyed, that my point does not get through.

(my point was the left right metric is not helpful - but when applied, you will find not a homogenous group, but right leaning nazis, as well as left leaning nazis, when defining right or left with distributing or conserving wealth. Another common definition would be racist, or not.

But I am out of this semantic debate)

Perhaps we were talking past each other. You were saying left and right is useless because you can have left and right nazi's or left and right socialists. I was saying left and right is useful: Nazi and Socialist are the meaningless label.

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