Emerald

That's not really true. Maybe it's the case that 50%+ of lefty wish-list positions are not workable. But there's already plenty of lefty positions that have been codified into law. There are already lots of left-leaning policies on the books that are not harmful.... like environmental protections, social safety net policies, protections under the law for vulnerable groups, limits on corporate power, etc. But I can't think of very many problematic/harmful lefty positions on the books other than in authoritarian left governments and in negative side effects of positive lefty laws. So, I really want people to bring up specific problematic/harmful lefty laws. I can think of overall positive ones on the books. But I would really like for people to bring up specific lefty laws that are causing a lot of problems. Then, we can have a real discussion about them.

Nope! I'm more than happy to discuss problems with leftist philosophies. I just really like the idea of a thread that's about problematic leftist policies because I like to explore the issues with my own perspectives. But no one is talking about specific laws, and it's annoying to me.

Those are philosophies not policies. Name for me ACTUAL codified laws. That's what a policy is. It's a law.

Sure. I can agree with all that. Now, tell me some actual specific left-leaning policies on the books that have caused harm. Then, we will actually be on-prompt.

I'm not ignoring the potential harm of leftist policies. I'm actually the only one in this WHOLE ENTIRE thread that named off specific leftist policies that are harmful and problematic. And I'm a bit annoyed by that, because I would like to actually discuss the problems with specific left-leaning policies and their effects. Everyone else's posts have been around vague ideas about too-lenient immigration or other potential problems of leftists philosophical idea... but without any specific laws on the books to point to. In reality, everything else on this entire thread just belongs in the left-wing mega thread. Sure, there are potential problems that can come up from border policy that's too lenient. That's pretty obvious. But name for me an actual policy, and I can critique it more effectively in terms of its impacts. Also, with the Abolish ICE thing... I'm not saying that that's without its problems. I just mentioned it as a real leftist position. It could be neutral, negative, or positive in practice. But there's no such law on the books and not even a policy proposal around it. So, we really don't know if that policy would be harmful or not as it's not a law that's on the books.

My understanding of what leftists don't like is the way that ICE comports itself as an organization. But don't put a "you" into this. I'm not super invested in the idea of abolishing ICE. I'm just talking about leftist policy proposals... which includes abolishing ICE... and not vague things like "open borders". Though I can see why people would have an issue with the organization given its actions. I became aware of the "Abolish ICE" movement around 2017 or 2018 when they were instrumental in the situation around putting kids in cages. Perhaps it is just about leftists disliking the core elements of border security. I'm sure that's somewhat true. But I can see that, if ICE is a particularly brutal institution, why people would want it disbanded and subsumed into other agencies where there are more checks and balances.

You're really not understanding what I'm saying here. I'm saying that barbed wire is not an effective deterrent for illegal immigration. And no, it wouldn't reduce illegal entries by 1/3. And a wall wouldn't be effective either. All of these are a child's solutions to immigration. The most it will do is cause harm to some of the people who try to cross there. But someone who is willing to go through hill and high water to cross, will find a way across the barbed wire. I feel like you're focusing on the barbed wire because you like the idea of it and it feels like a simple solution to you or maybe even some sort of justice. But it's not actually going to address immigration issues. And with your last comment... immigrants (both documented and undocumented) have lower rates of crime per capita compared to American citizens. So, I don't feel particularly threatened by people crossing the border as most of them are just looking for a better life... and may be fleeing from negative circumstances. This is especially true if they are in the position to have to cross the barbed with with a child in tow.

Like I said before, MOST undocumented immigrants come into the country legally and overstay their visas. And only about 1/3 of undocumented immigrants come in through the Southern border. And I'm sure that of that 1/3 (though I haven't looked up the exact statistics) that most of those get smuggled in in vehicles crossing into America or just cross at a point that already has no barbed wire (as barbed wire doesn't line the entire Southern border). So, if you understand immigration at all... you'll understand that the barbed wire already isn't pulling a lot of the weight in terms of deterring illegal immigration. I bet it's not even making a 1% dent in the problem if it's having any effect at all. So, to say advocating for getting rid of the barbed wire is advocating for open borders is silly. I am against there being barbed wire at the border because children and adults alike may try to cross there. And I especially don't want children to get hurt on the barbed wire. It's just basic human decency to not subject people to that... especially because it's not going to meaningfully address problems with immigration.

Those things are all well and good... but being more open to gay people and having more Vegans doesn't mean that the Israeli government isn't committing a genocide. Lots of imperialist nations have very socially progressive people within them (the US is one of them)... but it doesn't mean that their treatment of those in countries/cultures considered "other" will be fair or just or good.

That's definitely frustrating. Me and my (immigrant) husband were in Orlando with our kids a couple weeks back. And I forget what it was... like a billboard or a radio announcement... I think it was a billboard. But it was basically a message from "anti-immigration immigrants" or "immigrants against immigration". And this sparked a brief discussion where we were joking about hypocritical immigrants that come through the door and want to close it behind them.

Thank you!

The issue is that the term "open borders" is being used hyperbolically to fear-monger and mislead voters. And if we're talking about a specific policy about "open borders" there won't be any to be found. This is the main point I keep coming back to with this thread. If we're talking about legal policy, we have to be able to point to exact policies and critique the exact content of the policies and the outcomes of those policies. Otherwise, we might as well just go to the other mega threads around conservative ideas and liberal ideas and philosophies and put all these posts over there. So, if people are critiquing "open borders" policies, there are none because there are no policies that deal with opening the border. If someone points to a policy that says, "The US must accept at least 20% of the people who are seeking a green card." we can have a debate about that policy and talk about it on its merits. But the notion of "open borders" is vague, and if people are viewing it subjectively... someone could look at the policy and say "That's an open borders policy" and another person could say "that's a reasonable policy." But we have to actually look at a policy first rather than speaking of vague labels put on the status quo.

Open borders does literally mean open borders. Of course, Republican politicians know that it's not literal and they're just using hyperbole to scare their constituents. But when the Republican voter says they're concerned about open borders, they really do believe Democrats goal is to open the border. Also, Biden has been strict on the border and even offered Republicans many immigration reforms on their wish list (in exchange for their cooperation on other things). And Republican rejected it so they can keep the Biden border crisis narrative going. Here is a Pew Research poll on how many undocumented immigrants are coming in per year, and it's stayed pretty steady but on a slightly downward trajectory since 2005. So Obama, Trump, and Biden clearly haven't done things much differently as it comes to immigration policy. Here's the link... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/ It does reflect a growth in illegal immigration through the Clinton years and most of the Bush years. So, if there are liberalizations that happened to cause more illegal immigration, I would suspect it's Clinton-era policy that's to blame. But it could also come from a variety of different economic factors that aren't specifically coming from liberalizations... but instead come from dynamics that put the crunch on the economies of Mexico and other nations that people illegally immigrate from.

ICE was just established in 2003. So, we'd just go back to doing whatever we were doing before then. The Abolish ICE movement is about getting rid of that specific organization and have its duties re-absorbed back into the other immigration agencies as it was prior to 2003. The reason why leftists want to abolish ICE is because of the harshness of the crack downs from ICE in particular, as they were enacting all the family separations/kids in cages dynamics. It's also because ICE is meant to be a criminally-focused organization (like prosecuting people bringing drugs across the border) but back in the Obama era, they began simply focusing on the crime of having come into the country illegally. And it's treating the act of illegal immigration itself as though it is like drug trafficking. And it creates a dynamic of harsher treatment of undocumented immigrants.

1. I would have to look at the sample size and sampling method that they used for that survey to see if it's something that most Canadians actually believe... or if they happened to sample in a way that might slant things in an anti-immigration direction. It's possible they could have simply found people who are more biased against immigrants due to bigotry. Or they could have sampled towards people whose job prospects are specifically troubled by immigration because the people who could hire them instead want to hire immigrants for much cheaper. And either way, this would be a bias that most may feel neutral about or not hold. So, I'd have to look at the sampling process to really understand in lieu of seeing the actual policies. My view is that there should be a merit-based path to citizenship that requires a couple years of commitment. But beyond that, there are many things in U.S. foreign policy (perhaps other countries' foreign policy too), that deliberately puts Mexico and other nations South of the border in precarious financial positions. And this causes many people from those countries to want to immigrate here for a better life or to send the more valuable U.S. dollar back to their families. And this is all very deliberate because under-paid foreign labor is essential to the U.S. economy. And it makes working class Americans have to undervalue their work to compete with exploited undocumented immigrants. So, it's important to recognize that illegal immigration is a feature and not a bug of the U.S. system. And if we really want to solve the issue of illegal immigration, then we have to change the foreign policies that put Mexico and other nations in a compromised financial position. Powerful nations have always done this to less powerful nations to exploit them for cheap labor. 2. You'd definitely need more structures and systems in place to handle the issue. But I don't suppose that drug use would increase in these circumstances around legalization or decriminalization. People who are addicted to drugs will find ways to do them regardless of whether they're legal or not. This just brings the situation out more into the light of the public consciousness... which is uncomfortable but helpful. I'd have to see some reliable and clear statistics around drug use rates increasing upon legalization or decriminalization to get me to consider changing my viewpoint. I get that those statistics would be difficult to obtain, but I'm just not convinced that decriminalization/legalization would worsen drug problems. 3. The issue with crime is that the justice system only addresses it one the level of the symptom and not at the root. Certainly, we need a justice system that functions to deter crime by creating negative incentives around it. But crime comes from a myriad of root causes... and most of those root causes are nurture-based. The reality is that reforms to the criminal justice system can only ever tweak the problem of crime around the edges because it is only handing the symptoms... which is the crime itself. The roots have to be addressed through building strong communities, getting rid of poverty, healing collective traumas, having an effective mental healthcare system, teaching better parenting skills, teaching skills for maintaining relationships, having equal access to education, making sure children are properly resourced with minimal amounts of trauma, etc. It's only then that we can really address problems with crime. There would still be some crime here and there, of course. But if we could address these problems from the bottom up, it would really turn the dial on the crime problem. But it's very bottom up work... and not top down.

You're welcome

This rationale is not very well thought through. That's like saying 'Because the U.S. Constitution bans cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th amendment in the Bill of Rights, it is pro-crime." Cutting barbed wire on the border just means you're trying to keep people from hurting themselves at the border and not that you're opening up the border. And undocumented immigrants should not be subjected to physical harm for crossing the border illegally. And I feel like this should be pretty obvious. It's not like barbed wire is an effective defense at stopping illegal immigration anyway. So, removing the barbed wire isn't going to do much other than keeping from people getting injured. Most undocumented immigrants actually fly into the country legally and overstay their visa. So, the border policies that are pulling the most weight at preventing illegal immigration don't have to do with the actual crossing of the Southern border. And since you don't even have a physical border in most areas across the border, there are already plenty of places without barbed wire anyway. The way you seem to be thinking about it is like "Oh no! Now that the Democrats removed the barbed wire, the border is now totally open to anyone who wants to immigrate to the US on a whim."

I addressed that in an earlier post. You can find very politically naive people here and there who believe in open borders. But in my experience, it's not a widely held leftist policy proposal. You never see lefties rallying together and pushing proposals to abolish/open the border. Most active progressives are aware that that's not possible. Instead, the immigration-related policy proposals progressives rally around would be more around pathways to citizenship, abolishing ICE, not putting kids in cages, and better treatment of undocumented immigrants at the border. And there is nothing policy-wise that's gotten anywhere close to suggesting open borders. Open borders is just a phrase that Republican politician use to straw man the Democrats and scare their constituents into voting for them. The name of the thread is "harmful leftist policies", so I would be coming to this thread for critiques on things like laws (and bills that have nearly passed) and a critique of the outcomes (or potential outcomes) of those policies. I would expect the same from a thread called "harmful right-wing policies". So, an equivalent situation would be if someone went on the "harmful right-wing policies" thread and suggested they were against the policy of deporting all immigrants. Sure, you can find some fringe group of right-wingers that are pushing that as a policy proposal and you might have a sizable minority of right-wingers that even dream of that as an ideal... in the same way that a sizable minority of left-wingers might dream of a world without borders as an ideal. But there's no such policy or policy proposal... at least not in the US or anywhere that I know of. My main point is... if we're talking about policy... let's talk about policy and policy-proposals and not just whims, philosophies, and ideas.

I'll come back later and check these out and see what the policies are like.

Like I said, this post is about actual policies (codified laws) and not philosophical positions. You could even list policy proposals that got even remotely close to becoming law and I would consider it within the realm of policy. The issue with philosophical positions is that there are uninformed and politically naive people everywhere that don't have any real political power. You could find a person who believes in open borders because they know nothing about how the systems work. I believed in open borders when I was a kid because I had a naive sense that divisions of any kind should go away. I just listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" and like the idea. But I didn't have the capability or desire to get that codified into law. And I certainly wasn't a leftist back then. I was just politically naive. So, you might have read a book from a politically naive person who believed in open borders and you could find small enclaves of people that might agree. But it's not a commonly held leftist position and there aren't any "open borders" policy positions going through congress or coming across the president's desk.

There is a difference between policies and philosophical positions. A policy is an actually codified law, while a philosophical position is just what someone believes. And there are no such policies around open borders. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a leftist that actually believes that open borders is feasible and holds it as a policy position. It's more of a right wing straw man of what lefties believe. And it's certainly not reflected in any policies anywhere. With defunding police.... that is a common philosophical position among lefties. But you won't find many codified policies around defunding the police. Butthere are positive ways to do this by re-allocating funds to other types of interventions in non-criminal cases (like someone with a mental illness that the police might be ill-equipped to understand and intervene with). With allowing in too many immigrants, that's a subjective judgment and you'd have to give me specific policies to evaluate. But bear in mind that the U.S government allows the level of immigration that they currently do simply because our economic system requires a cheap immigrant labor force. And when DeSantis put into policy something that really impacted immigration to Florida, it led to a huge labor shortage. So, the U.S. system (whether Republicans or Democrats are in power) allow only the level of immigration that they need. And Obama was accused of being soft on the border whilst also having the nickname "deporter in chief" because he had very strict policies. Biden has similarly strict immigration policies. So, I haven't seen any of these 'too lenient' border policies in the U.S. at least. With legalizing all drugs... this is one that I agree with as a philosophical position but there aren't many of these policies in effect yet. I think it's important to decriminalize, tax, and regulate all drugs. The reason why is that, when you criminalize drug use, it just pushes everything under ground and you get all these illegal cartels with all sorts of awful business practices. And you get just as many people doing the drugs who are then (on top of dealing with addiction) put in jail/prison which can further push them into a downward spiral. Name me the actual policies around going easy on criminals, and I will judge them individually. The issue here is that these are more vague philosophical ideas and not ACTUAL codified policies. So, I can't critique them on the policy level. With allowing parole of violent offenders, let me see the policy and show me that leftists are promoting it. Then, I can judge it. I haven't heard many lefties specifically holding parole of violent offenders as a common philosophical position... though rehabilitation-focused justice is a lefty thing. But I would have to see the actual policy to judge it. Also, the last time I checked policy-wise, children under 16 aren't allowed to have a gender affirming surgical interventions. Under specific circumstances, you have to be 16+ to get top surgery and 18+ to get bottom surgery. And there are many protocols that gender affirming care specialists have to go through to give the okay to someone (adults and children) who wants to surgically transition. With not funding the military enough... this one just isn't true... in the US at least. In America, we have the biggest military budget in the world by far. And we increase the military budget every single year. There are no such policies around reducing funding for the military. with UBI, there are no such policies that I'm aware of. And I am not familiar with Canada's carbon tax policy.

I was just trying to find some problematic leftist policies. It's problematic and overall ineffectual. But it doesn't bother me too much as a policy for the reasons you mentioned. I'm pretty indifferent about banning/not banning plastic straws because the real problem is single-use plastic in general. And if you ban plastic straws without banning other forms of single-use plastic, it's not going to do anything substantial. The thing is, policy-wise, it's hard to track down harmful leftist policies because it's hard to track down leftist policies in Capitalist nations period. And when there are leftist policies in Capitalist nations, they tend to just be piddly and ineffectual... and never too strong to the point of corruption. So, you would mostly find ineffectual leftist policies with mildly problematic side-effects. So, it's much easier to make lists of harmful right-wing policies because the majority of American policies are center-right. You really have to go to authoritarian left countries to find truly harmful leftist policies.

It seems like people on this thread who are talking about harmful leftist policies aren't actually referring to specific policies... but more general philosophies or even straw men of general philosophies. For example, the people who are saying "open borders" as a harmful leftist policy... I challenge you to find literally ANY policies in any nation on Earth that actually reflect open borders. You won't find any. And in America, the term "open borders" is just a Republican straw man to characterize their Democrat opposition as weak on the border in the eyes of their constituents so that they can position themselves as "the party that cares about the border" and fear-monger about criminals flooding in if the Democrats get in office. Republicans have really been leaning into the notion of Biden being weak on the border... which isn't true at all. In fact, he's kept many of the Trump-era border policies in place. And he even had an immigration reform proposal some months ago that gave Republicans most of the things they wanted (if memory serves, there was something non-immigration related that Biden was hoping to get in return by compromising so much with Republicans regarding immigration). But the Republican politicians outright rejected his proposal... because they wanted to be able to maintain the optics of being displeased with Biden being weak on the border and to continue to claim that he's pro "open borders". Now, back to the prompt... Truthfully, the challenge here is that you won't find many truly leftist policies because most of the current power structures in the US function mostly off of a center-right framework. And whenever there is an actual left-wing policy, it's usually ineffectual or doesn't go far enough. So, you don't get to see the excesses of the left in US politics. But here are a few harmful/problematic leftist POLICIES worldwide (I'm sure there are more. This is just as far as I felt like researching)... No private land ownership in China. All land is public and the Chinese government owns it. (This is true for some other Communist countries too) Censorship laws against criticism of Socialist/Communist leaders (like in North Korea) Plastic Straw bans in some U.S. states - This doesn't address the real issue and makes it harder for some disabled people who need plastic straws to drink to go out to restaurants Basically, harmful leftist policies are ones that either come out of authoritarian Communist countries where the government is given all the power without checks and balances... OR there are ineffectual leftist policies in Capitalist countries that don't address the problems they're trying to address and instead just create annoying negative side consequences for people in those countries.

In the past, I had been contemplating about if there are any other forms of economic system that falls outside of the Capitalism vs Socialism umbrellas. And it was previously difficult for me to fathom of something totally new economically. But given the recent rise in A.I. technology, I can see some writing on the wall that will likely be rife with problems but also has the potential to bringing humanity more into alignment with the underlying principle of unconditional validity. Take this as food for thought, because I (of course) don't know if this will happen. But I suspect that A.I. will likely replace 60%+ of human jobs... and in fairly short order. And if this happens, this will create a dynamic where large swaths of the population are unemployed. This will come rife with problems like a widening gap between rich and poor. And there would likely be a rise of eugenics campaigns, genocides, and other deliberate forms of population control. But if we are able to rise to the challenge, I believe we will begin asking ourselves the question, "What is the true function of an economic system?" Currently, (whether we're talking about Capitalism or Socialism), the way we think about economics is that it's a way of disseminating value based off of the labor a worker puts in. So, Capitalism is where the owners of a business owns the means of production and gives the worker of portion of the value that they bring in. And the ideal within Socialism is where the workers own the means of production and keeps the entirety of the value of their labors. Both of these philosophies inextricably tie together the concept of labor in exchange for value. But, the reality is that an economic system is a tool. It's a complex tool... but a tool nonetheless. And the function of that tool isn't to disseminate value based on labor across the human populace. It's a tool to disseminate value across the human populace, period. And with the rise in AI and the loss of human labor, the best possible outcome that I can see happening (though it would also be a huge collective existential crisis at best because we equate the value of our being with our doing) is that we start fathoming of how a post-labor economy functions. And instead of thinking about people getting what they want and need based off of how much their labor value earns them... we instead start thinking about people getting what they want and need simply because they exist. If these things come to fruition, I see this collective paradigm shift away from the notion of earning/deserving based off of labor value... and towards unconditional bestowment based off of the inherent validity of one's being as 100% necessary to avoid the looming problems of A.I. Just some food for thought. What do you think?