I think exposure to others does work, what doesn’t work is attacking someone’s views. It triggers fight or flight responses and tribalism, which is counterproductive to attempts to persuade someone.
Sometimes I think it’d be cool to become a leftist gun guy 🤷
First entry in the dictionary would be Stalinists, but authoritarian-left generally. Lenin sent tanks. Lenin too imo. But I would say anyone who wants strong centralized leftist control. I use it even more broadly and disparagingly to pretty much all not right wing statists. E.g., borders are for tankies.
It’s kind of expanded to include any apologist for an ostensibly left-wing, but demonstrably authoritarian and repressive regime.
I disagree with supporting every war, the troops (blindly), and especially the Patriot Act. And droning. That should be a war crime.
People who think stalin was a bit too soft on rebels and traitors.
I’m somewhere to the right of the orthodox left on abortion, but the majority of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in some but not all situations, so I’m not alone.
I don’t think there’s one “a left” any more. I seriously doubt most people on this board agree with most of the “positions” held by the democratic establishment. There is the demE, progressives, and a far right death squad cult, that’s about it.
Is the “orthodox left” mean groupings like the US donkeys? Is the “orthodox left” groupings like the euro-Commies in power more than a generation ago?
I got problems with both these kinds of the “orthodox left”… much more so than they have with each other.
This is why any non-ironic use of “the left” is almost always gibberish. Is reformism what is meant ITT by the “orthodox left”?
Honestly there isn’t a single issue that “I disagree with the left” insofar as I “agree with the right”.
If you want to the pretend the political spectrum isn’t what it is, and that the fascists encouraging police brutality and throwing kids in cages are the same as milquetoast democrats afraid to commit to MFA, then sure, maybe we can find some differences.
I generally think that people have a responsibility to try to control their emotions. I think it’s other people’s responsibility to try to be accepting of the way I talk or behave just as much as it’s my responsibility to avoid being upsetting or offensive. I view it as generally a matter of politeness on both sides rather than as a matter of anyone being obliged to change their behaviour.
I think a lot of the mind-palace issues that the left concerns itself with (whether we’re allowed to say “retarded”, whether our movements are intersectional enough, etc) take on vastly outsize importance and we would be better off focusing almost entirely on concrete issues. I view people who are obsessed with that sort of ephemera to the exclusion of concrete issues as political enemies.
I don’t think free college is a good idea, at least not without a bunch of caveats, because I think that college is an outmoded way of getting an education that tends to function largely as a gatekeeper to polite middle class society. People go to Ivy League colleges to network, not because the education is that much better. A lot of students have recently discovered that the amount that college cost them wasn’t worth the benefits it brought them; I’m not sure how making the government pay too much money for a dinosaur product instead will improve matters.
In terms of effect or what? This is quite the hot taek especially on this forum.
The vast majority of the Democratic establishment. Though one could argue that they’re only left compared to the GOP
I disagree with the Czech Communist Party if that’s what you meant.
Horseshoe theory is complete bullshit.
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For me it’s housing policy for sure. There’s clearly a shortage of housing where people want to live and it’s causing lots of ancillary problems like longer commutes and lower disposable incomes. The ideas that we can get where we need to be by giving priority to the people who already live in a place (like tenants organizations) or that we don’t need more housing while city populations explode seems ridiculous.
Are you saying NIMBY resistance to building affordable housing is leftist just because it happens in places like San Francisco? It’s not.
Every time I’ve heard lefties talk about housing it’s in the form of “we need to listen to tenant organizations and not do anything they’re opposed to.” It’s mostly in response to gentrification and similar situations. And I’m not saying I have the answers, because I don’t, but “we can’t build more housing in desirable areas because the people that live there don’t want it” isn’t tenable long term.
Ah, anti-gentrification rather than anti-affordable housing. That’s different and I’d call that leftist.
I don’t think that’s really a problem as far as new construction goes. I get the argument that disallowing gentrification can disincentivize builders, but it disincentivizes luxury builders of lower density housing. It lowers or keeps land value from rising, which makes building smaller, more affordable housing the highest and best use for land. At the most extreme, we’re talking about building luxury apartments in places like The Tenderloin in SF where they displace single-room residential hotels.
But, anyway, it’s complicated and I don’t entirely disagree with you.
Grammar nerds 
, should the phrase ‘exposure to the other’ be hyphenated in this context?
I don’t like the cheerleading of shallow and confused behavior. Lotta that going on in this forum and by the left in general.