This comment is psuedointellectual brain-death. The only country it includes that isn't literally at war with the rest of Europe is 80% of Poland... who have health insurance.
Nope. The Oder starts (barely) in the Czech Republic and the other 99.999% flows through Poland, ending in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic states are north of it (and also not the fascist paradises OP wishes they were) while the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania are south of it. Geography fail.
There are two points I was getting at with my heuristic.
I primarily wanted to highlight that the people quipping about "there's no far left in the US" or "the far left in the US is the mainstream left in Europe" are far left hence why they don't see much to the left of them in the US. Left-right, tall-short, skinny-fat, if you find yourself on a spectrum and one side of you is sparsely populated you are the extreme by definition.
Second, these people are generally ignorant of how far right some of the "other half" of Europe leans on social issues. Sure, they have lots of government services and safety nets, healthcare included. But they don't lean as far left on many social subjects as the US does. Identity politics, sexual orientation and abortions are three good examples of topics on which the left half of the bell curve of opinions on these subjects has more of it's meat to the right than the US equivalent. (Arguably a lot of this is a function of the US's history of reactionary politics but that's outside of the scope of this discussion, the positions today are what they are.) So even in a context that includes "nations who literally tried communism and kept the stuff they liked when they were done" the opinions of the "far" left in the US is decently out there.
> I primarily wanted to highlight that the people quipping about "there's no far left in the US" or "the far left in the US is the mainstream left in Europe" are far left hence why they don't see much to the left of them in the US.
I mean that's literally a fact, so...
Even Orban is just a racist "far leftist"... Give me a break.
> Sure, they have lots of government services and safety nets, healthcare included.
Sure, they're 100000% far-left wing, but they're not far-left at all. Okay dude, gtfo.
> Identity politics, sexual orientation and abortions are three good examples of topics on which the left half of the bell curve of opinions on these subjects has more of it's meat to the right than the US equivalent.
Except most of the 3/4 of a billion people do. It's not a bell curve at all. Did you even bother to look into this or just go with your gut? Even in the east where it's the lowest, for example, gay marriage support is still 43%... higher than in the US in 2009 (Gallup)!
They mentioned a country with more welfare than the US and then you mentioned a handful of countries you must not know anything about in order to list them together with the others... shrug As racist as Polish and Hungarian politicians are, they still do more from their people than any Americans do and would be called "socialists" by FOX news if they knew anything about them. And the Baltics, I mean, come on, what are you even talking about.
