Comment on Anon judges Karl

• hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Indeed, its why Australia’s main conservative party (middle right) are called The Liberals

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• chuckleslord@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don’t acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can’t follow what you’re saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.

  Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.

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  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Nah. We don’t need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.

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    • chuckleslord@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes… by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you’re going to reach way less people, my man.

      I’m gonna quote scripture, not cause I’m Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her “church” had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.

      Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don’t know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul’s teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren’t religions great? /s)

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      • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.

        To me it comes off as a bit manufactured, it’s far too abundant on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.

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  • ddplf@szmer.info ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Americans sure love making everything miserably fucking stupid for their own convenience and ignorance.

    No, liberals are not leftist ANYWHERE outside the US. And we don’t want that. That’s because that doesn’t make any fucking sense.

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    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No one except a few communists calls extreme rightwing chuds “liberal” anywhere outside of the US, either.

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      • ddplf@szmer.info ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Who’s calling them that? No, that would be libertarians.

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    • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It really depends on how you define things; a black and white definition doesn’t account for scenarios where one could logically be both leftist and liberal. So it’s not exactly nonsense.

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      • ddplf@szmer.info ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Okay then, surprise me, what beliefs would a man posses that would lead him to calling himself a liberal leftist?

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    • chuckleslord@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes, and as I already said elsewhere, speak to be understood. In the US, I have to account for semantic drift. You don’t, which is great, but 4chan is an American institution.

      So, when the comment we’re all replying under drew the comparison between liberal and 4chan, the underlying context was that this was from an American perspective. So I talked about that, instead of talking about all possible contexts. Isn’t language neat?

      Yes, Americans are ignorant, but it’s because of our incredibly loud propaganda. I would ask for kindness, but I’m certainly not gonna force it. I get being frustrated by the American-centric-ness that we all sort of drag around with us. I try to be humble, but it’s really hard to know the shit you don’t know, ya know?

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• wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  No, that’s neoliberalism. Which is a misnomer, because actual liberalism emerged from the humanist tradition and was a political philosophy, not an economic one. It’s where we got ideas like human rights, and rules that restrict governments’ abilities to oppress their citizens.

  Neoliberalism misapplies the idea of “freedom” the same way anarcho-capitalists do. But I don’t think anyone here would argue that all anarchists are anarcho-capitalists.

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  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    annas-archive.is/books/289061-289061-liberalism

    Heres a book going through all the major liberal philosophers and how they dealt with the conflicts inherent to liberalism.

    Tldr, core, overriding freedom of liberalism is and has always been for the dominant class to economically exploit the working class.

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    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.

      If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.

      The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.

      Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.

      Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.

      People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.

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      • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail.

        You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.

        History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.

        Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.

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  • justaman123@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Actually jokes on you, none of the words mean anything and they are all word games used to keep the masses in their places.

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