@nooneinparticular Said
So you get all huffy at me when I choose implications from your statements, but you're free to do so against me?
Reread the statement you asked me to agree to again. I said that not all government actions are
EQUALLY authoritarian. That is not the same as saying 'not all government action is authoritarian'.
If you want to go down this route, you have to make a judgement call on what government action is and isn't authoritarian. The problem is that YOU have decided to completely do away with the traditional definitions of such concepts. You attempt to argue that stricter borders are, in fact, policies that promote freedom. That it is a libertarian policy. If this is the way you want to go, then I need to be able to identify what is and isn't an authoritarian and libertarian policy under this framework. That becomes rather difficult when you won't tell me how you are defining these two concepts.
As an aside, these tangents that you accuse me of creating are a product of your own posts here, not mine. You said that Hitler was Far Left, just like Ghandi. I asked why would someone on the Far Left promote private ownership, union busting, and a romanticization of a bygone age. You sidestepped that by saying that that the definitions for the right and left were ineffectual and that the new paradigm is freedom vs. anti-freedom. Now, I'm trying to understand how that works. Every tangent we've been through has been because of something you said, not me.
I accepted that you changed the definitions of the political Right, Left, authoritarian, and libertarian, all for the sake of argument. I accepted that you completely discarded the political compass for a 'freedom vs. anti-freedom' scale, all for the sake of argument. I have done these things simply to move the argument forward, but I'm the one who is making this debate spin in circles, am I?
I started reading back through our discussion, then was reminded why I got annoyed in the first place so stopped
the way you take everything to the absurd conclusion and attack that when I never said anything like that...
I'll state this very simply for you.
I do not believe that in the current state of the western world the ideas of right and left (when used to describe an individual), are good indicators of where someone stands on economic issues or the role of the state in the economy etc. In fact, if you look at the definitions these ideologies have, people often seem to be the opposite of what they are called.
Now to the why of it:
First, right and left are not absolutes, they are somewhat arbitrary and can be used by different people to mean different things. It's not like they have some objective, inarguable definition. They are theories.
Also, people are not theories, nor do they represent a theory absolutely, even if they claim to. Individual people or nations do not run along the train lines of any ideology, and even if they did not all people would agree that they are anyway, because they would say they're doing it wrong and I am the only true representation of "x" and so on.
I shouldn't need to qualify these things, but these days it does seem necessary.
Now, Tommy Robinson - is he right wing in any meaningful sense, let alone "far right"?
That depends on who is telling the story and how they define these terms. But I would say no.
He might be a nationalist, but he's absolutely not an ethnonationalist. However, nationalism is not exclusively a right wing thing. China is nationalistic. Other communist nations have been nationalistic, and unions were notoriously nationalistic up until not so long ago right across the west. Therefore, being nationalist is not simply a right wing practice.
Also, the heads of major tech companies are the opposite of nationalists, but they want enormous quantities of wealth and power residing in the hands of private individuals (themselves), who can use that power to manipulate whole nations. It is hard to call this left wing, but many of our globalist frens are
called left wing (like ANTIFACT), even though they openly support global, private power overriding the state. Even if that power is used to silence someone like Tommy who speaks on behalf of the working class against private capital and state power (in fact, they especially want to silence the working class it seems to me).
Tommy, on the other hand, supports the British working class (no matter their color or country of origin), not just in terms of protecting children but also in the sense that he wants working class communities to have hope, jobs, security and a future for them and their children. He opposes global corporations and globalism generally. In the class struggle, Tommy fights for the working class against the chattering class, globalists and elitists.
This is far more left wing than right. Marx, to choose a name at random, would probably doff his hat to Tommy and recognise him as someone near to his own heart regarding class, then spit at those calling Tommy a Nazi for being bourgeois scum that need to be overthrown. I just can't see the right wing bit in there.
Aside from that;
Tommy opposes a dictatorial state.
He opposes the abuse of power by the state.
He supports Israel.
None of these stances by Tommy are traditionally considered far right positions. As a result Nazis dislike him (he calls himself a Zionist). Nazis do not like TR.
Despite this, the media and others call him things like far right, a Nazi and/or a fascist, and some, like our British friend here, act like one of Pavlov's dogs, but instead of drool at the sound of a bell, she goes into hysterics and engages in the mandatory, Orwellian 'two minutes of hate' to assuage her feelings of something or other when she hears his name.
People like me are likewise called these same things, yet economically I am far more left wing than right. Can I be on the left yet "far right" at the same time? Can Tommy? Of course not.
So, what is the thing motivating the absurd accusation that people like me and Tommy are far right (apart from blind ignorance and hate for the working class by the important people)? It is things like wanting borders, an end to global corporatism, and supporting free speech that are the issue.
The economic stuff barely rates a mention in discussions of why Tommy or me are "far right."