Amanda Unvarnished

@gocu54 @vol4life8657 Are you asking about "when labels become boxes"?

@gocu54 @vol4life8657 Yeah I hate them too, but brains need a way to organize things and people and unfortunately the most efficient way to do that is to apply a label. I think the real problem is when labels become boxes.

@gocu54 @vol4life8657 So basically what you guys are saying is that none of us fit into anybody's boxes, which makes things awkward in a lot of spaces.

@vol4life8657 @Bruce_Toews OK so I think the rest of you in this threadlet are conservatives, (Bruce, Nick, and Darrell), and I'm a liberal who agrees with the left on some things but not everything, and yeah there's a whole lot of crazy that goes on on Mastodon specifically.

@gocu54 @Bruce_Toews Oh yes not disagreeing with his general point. I guess I just wanted to put in that it's not just conservatives and that there are a few reasons for it.

@Bruce_Toews So getting back to the original points in this thread, yeah there's a lot of throwing around of the "nazi" insult around here now, and I think that's because social media in general has sort of self-selected after the collapse of Twitter. And a lot of the people who ended up on Mastodon tend to be the left wing of the left. There are conservatives and liberals here, but both have kind of had to retreat to specific servers, and what you see also depends a lot on what your admin lets in. Sometimes this is a good thing. For example, the server I'm on heavily moderates because Mastodon/the fediverse has a rather significant antisemitism problem which it refuses to address. So yeah we moderate.

@Bruce_Toews One more thing to add to this. Liberals tend to agree with the broad ideas of diversity and inclusion, but replace "equity" with "equality" and are currently involved in a rather significant disagreement with the left over DEI and its attendant bureaucracy and cultural influence.

@Bruce_Toews I own my own business, so yeah I'm pretty capitalist, although that doesn't mean I think capitalism gets an automatic free pass.

@Bruce_Toews So to complicate this, the left also wants to do away with hierarchies, which results in situations like economics and social issues getting conflated. Liberals don't share this, but they're not as much into hierarchies as social conservatives typically are. I'm kind of generalizing here, and I don't mean to belittle anyone here.

@Bruce_Toews You're in the US, right? If so, using them interchangeably is sort of par for the course for a bunch of reasons, most of which aren't bad-faith ones.

@gocu54 If that's unhelpful let me know and I'll continue but I don't want to bore Nick or anyone else in this thread.

@gocu54 In simple terms, liberals tend to support capitalism and want to make changes within that system in order to ensure everyone has a level playing field. Leftists want to dismantle capitalism altogether, and capitalism ends up being a stand-in term for a whole lot of stuff. In the US, liberal and left are often interchanged because here, at least until fairly recently, liberal was the leftwing option. I think that's change over the last decade or so, or maybe it's that anticapitalism has become a lot more prominent. With all of the attendant consequences.