cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or "how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme".
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
I view it as a useful over simplification. We can simplify politics all the way down to "Left/Right" but that ignores so much of what motivates and drives people. In our current political environment, an ecofascist and an anarchosyndicalist might both be labeled as "left" even though the only thing they have in common is thinking "Maybe we shouldn't just destroy the planet?" so the political compass is an easy to print visual aid to help guide people to that political views exist along multiple spectrums. My personal view is that the current best "political quiz with information at the backend about who you fit with" is 9axes, and that's mostly because we've gotten to a point where we're ready to start labeling the political compass as "no longer a useful over simplification, and instead a gross oversimplification"
but one isn't left, because any sort of fascism is incompatible with the left no matter what they call themselves, which is a perfect example of why the PC is bullshit - authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism, but authoritarians and the right in general will, as it has done throughout history, co-opt leftist language and ideas to legitimise themselves and gain power.
The fact that the PC even exists, let alone how many people think it's reflective of reality, is just more evidence of the ignorance, both wilful and fostered (via state sanctioned education seeking to deny us an understanding of the system or the critical thinking skills to examine it, minimising any challenge to the status quo) that exists around politics, which the compass only serves to deepen.
Left and Right are far too ill defined in a complicated political system to say authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism. The very first left / right split was between two different groups of authoritarians with one side wanting to a government similar to the prior monarchy they had enjoyed, and the other side establishing a brutal dictatorship that killed 40,000 people for not hating the concept of monarchy enough. We need a more complicated metaphor than Left / Right because otherwise we get stuck in "no true Scotsman" debates about the many different spectrums of opinion someone can have. I agree the political compass sucks, I don't agree its a tool to coopt leftness by right wingers. I think, as I said, what we need is to start normalizing more complicated spectrum tools like 8values and 9axes