frisbird
@frisbird@lemmy.ml
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 1 week ago:
Wait until you find out who developed the transatlantic slave trade…
It was the liberals.
You are using the word liberal to mean “moral”.
That’s not how it works.
Liberal can’t be the opposite of monarchic, fascist, communist, authoritarian, and protectionist all at the same time.
Protectionism is universal. Liberalism has nothing to say on it.
Use of authority is liberal. Have these gentlemen ever seen a liberal revolution?
You want liberal mean sugar and spice and all things nice. It doesn’t
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 1 week ago:
Musk funded
With profits gained from private property
a illiberal president
Who built his whole wealth on private property and is actively attacking Venezuela for the crime of nationalizing (deliberalizing) their natural resources.
that uses the power of the government to terrorize people with draconian anti-immigration policies and pushes highly destructive import tariffs
None of which are illiberal
How much does Musk receive every year from government subsidies and government contracts?
A lot. Because he owns the companies that receives them. Because the system is a liberal system of private ownership and everything else is illegitimate in their eyes.
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 1 week ago:
They don’t believe in hereditary monarchy, they don’t believe that private property should be abolished and that the crown should dole out land based on politics. They’re liberals who want a strong executive that can champion the private property foundations of liberalism against the democratic foundations of liberalism. Remember, liberalism didn’t start because people wanted the common peasants to control the county, it started because the merchants wanted their ill gotten wealth from their rapacious adventures to translate into political power and the crown was not willing to allow lowly merchants to usurp multiple generations of aristocratic family ties.
Musk is a liberal, not because he loves democracy but because he justifies his actions on the basis of free speech, freedom to profit, private property claims, free movement of capital, and the rights the employer. None of these things are compatible with monarchy.
Yes, there is actually a monarchist movement in the USA still, but it is very very small and very fringe and they hold that position in a way that seeks to take the current owning class, turn them into a formal aristocracy, and eliminate not merely democracy but also the liberal foundations of capitalism. It’s anachronistic and impossible, but there are some who think that way
Most conservatives just want to go back to the liberalism of our forefathers that genocides and enslaved millions, when the poor and the women and the brown couldn’t vote because they weren’t considered fully human, and where conquest was a valid legal foundation for a state.
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 1 week ago:
It’s because the default, globally, is now liberal. Liberalism was the movement away from monarchism. Conservatism was the movement to preserve monarchism in the face of liberalism. American liberals are liberal. American conservatives are also liberal. The alternatives are monarchist/conservative (generally only exist in countries with royalty still), communist/socialist, and anarchist (which has both right and left flavors, and even liberal flavors)
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 1 week ago:
American conservatives are liberals by definition, and liberals are right wing globally speaking
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Right here. It’s exactly where you are. You are inhabiting the greatest gift in the universe, if you can’t take care of it and love it for what it is, what makes you deserve something else?
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 1 month ago:
China has been eliminating poverty for quite some time. In fact, over the last 70 years, China accounts for 80% or more of the entire global poverty alleviation gains. The US has created more poverty in that same time.
But also, the US has been racist, violent, colonialist, jingoistic, misogynistic, and white supremacist since it’s founding. You know those propaganda images DHS posts on Twitter? Those are from the US’s time of westward expansion. This isn’t new. What’s new is that we have given up on trying to hide it, which is something we did for for the last 70 years. But even in the 40s we had concretation camps, we had open racism in all of politics, we had the second largest Nazi group in the world.
And after WW2? Operation Paperclip? Operation Gladio? The US openly staffed NATO with Nazi officers. The US openly advocated for Nazi politicians to lead West Germany. There were literal Nazis running West German after the war.
And then of course the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Irag wars. The Afghanistan war. The embargo against Cuba. The coup in Iran.
This is what the US is. Nixon banner heroin explicitly to imprison black people. We have slave labor producing billions of dollars in value annually. And we punish our prison slaves who don’t work by giving them solitary. All of that is massive gross human rights violations, things we’ve pretended to invade other countries for.
This is who we are. It’s not new.