LibertyLizard

Too bad Bookchin was such a terrible writer. I think his ideas were an important contribution to leftist theory.

Sure why not?

There are certain types of problems they are better at solving. Basically if we already have all of the needed information, but you need to synthesize a huge amount of it into the final answer, they'll be excellent at that kind of issue.

Maybe a bizarre suicide attempt by someone with some chemistry knowledge?

Honestly that hasn't been my experience but either way there's always room for improvement.

Also, I hope we can all make a concerted effort to be nicer to each other. It's the internet so that's not always easy but I do think that's one of the things holding us back.

Well your labels are inaccurate in that case. And those axes are not particularly independent from one another.

While I personally agree that the traditional political compass is a flawed and subjective view of the diversity of political views, it does a fairly good job of quantifying some differences that exist within the left and right that often confuse people otherwise. And it does seem to adequately categorize the vast majority of people in the west, even if imperfectly. So I don't really get all the hate.

But you've got people who are normally in the auth-left quadrant in the lib-left one. This confuses me.

What happened to the other two quadrants?

The hierarchies present in the USSR didn't take the form of income inequality. You're taking a metric that is very useful for analyzing capitalist countries and using it in a context where it doesn't make much sense.

Anyway, the comparison with the west isn't really relevant to the comparison I would make in that case, which would be between the initial revolutionary movement and where it ended up.

Maybe I didn't explain it very well. I wasn't saying progress was impossible. But the individual organizations, nations, leaders, etc. often end up getting caught up in this trajectory. Once this happens, there will usually be a new movement to try to fight against the new dominant hegemony. Sometimes the old power wins, sometimes the new one does, but inevitably, whoever wins will keep regressing. But there can still be a big change as the old guard is replaced (or sometimes bullied into submission).

So, it's probably not universally true, but it's a pattern that I've started noticing again and again as I study history.