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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?
Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.
Common misunderstanding is we're playing the same game. The game they're playing is "own the lib-tards". At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it's fucking embarrassing.
And as aforementioned, it's the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.
The game the left is playing is "who has the best idea", which doesn't matter to the right, because they're either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.
The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.
Well then you shouldn't use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.
Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don't play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.
Do what is right. Simple.
Yes, the game is rigged in their favour, absolutely. The problem is that their ideas will not change, they are conservative, they conserve their ideas.
It's the responsibility of the ones who can change, to be smarter about it. If we sink to their level, we are no better than them.
Progressives are smarter, but we're not acting like it. That's why I'm saying we need to be better at policing our own, it's all about mitigating needless stupidity.
Also, outside of America, liberal and leftist are essentially synonymous, so that's why I used it. But it's my fault for not remembering America makes a very different distinction.
European here. They are absolutely not synonymous. Where I grew up liberals are the right wing, with socialists on the left and religious party on the center.
That's the liberal party, same in Australia.
However, when I say liberal I mean it as an ideology, which is very much leftist:
You conveniently cut out the next definition in your page where it says that it is related to liberalism.
And the leftism ideologies isn't simply being open-minded. It is actively promoting new ideas and policies that benefits the citizens. This is why we use the term progressive.
Liberal is firmly center right on the political compass and even the definition you post ad nauseum is indicative of that.
I'm not trying to deceive anyone. As I mentioned a dozen or more times before, Liberal does have a different definition in America.
The definition says "promoting new ideas and policies" when it says "favouring reform".
The definition I'm referring to is inherently progressive. There are no mutually exclusive terms, they are in fact the same thing by this definition.
Liberal (adjective): given, used, or occurring in generous amounts.
Finally, someone who gets it.
I subscribe to the ideology of liberalism, ie. Whatever it is, make sure you give a lot.
I've noticed that it's generally a bad idea to discuss ideologies by label. If I talk about soviet communism, am I talking about what Lenin and Stalin practiced in the USSR, or the ideals from which they started and mixed with pragmatic realist policies, eventually allowing corruption to pervade?
Talking about liberalism or leftism as if it is a unified, monolithic ideology only confuses people. Even specific movements (say the Christian nationalist movement in the United States) there is still some ambiguity. They want the US to be a Christian nation, but don't agree on which denominations would be privileged (say, can serve office), are legal among citizens or are criminal.
When I talk about ideological principles and want to be clear, I talk about specifics. e.g. Everyone should be equal under law. Minors should have the same civil rights that adults do. Street drugs should be decriminalized, and drug epidemics should focus on treatment and mitigation. Force should be a last resort by law enforcement, not used just because a civilian has an unknown object in their hand.
Yeah I learned my lesson for sure. I won't be using the term again, even if the context is correct. It just isn't worth explaining myself a million times.
How are we not acting smart by saying "black lives matter" and "trans women are women"? These are great, simple and to the point slogans.
The only way they can be seen as controversial is of you don't agree with these statements because you believe that black lives dont matter and that trans women aren't "real women". So that would make you a right-winger.
Liberals are right-wingers all around the world, not only in america.
I know you probably mean well, but guess what? I do not care about how right-winger feels and I will not water down my opinions to please them.
I don't want to get into an argument about semantics, but liberal does not mean right wing.
It isn't about pleasing them or playing by their rules. It's about not giving them ammo to shoot your comrades.
Liberalism is a pro-free market Capitalist idea centered on the ideas of individual liberty. This is right wing. It isn't fascism, but it's also not leftist.
The divide between left and right is who you think should own and control the Means of Production: the Workers, or Capitalists.
I'm honestly shocked at how many times I've needed to explain this, it's quite a bother.
In America, liberal = Liberalism. I get it.
I never said Liberalism*, I said liberal. Outside of America, liberal colloquially means those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology). Refer to the dictionary definition above for what the liberal ideology is.
*(Nevermind I did say liberalism in a parallel post. Again, I'm not from America, but in context with the screenshot of the definition it's pretty clear I'm referring to liberal ideology)
No, liberalism means liberal, even outside America.
It doesn't
There is really no need to be this stubborn. Look it up yourself.
It does. The term liberal comes from liberalism, which was founded during the Enlightenment. It isn't an "American" thing to tie liberalism to liberals, it's the definition.
It's the definition when you're talking about liberalism for sure. But that's not what I'm referring to. The other definition is the one which, in context, I am obviously referring to.
With the previous definition, it is clear I am talking about leftists. Context is king.
But, lesson learned; don't use the phrase liberal outside of a philosophical/academic context.
Leftism isn't a vague, general synonym for "goodness," nor does it entitled you to use terminology for a right-wing ideology as a synonym for leftism. Even in a philosophical and academic concept, you'd get a bunch of confused looks.
Capitalists can be open-minded and go against tradition without being left-wing.
Left vs. Right isn't about open-mindedness or a sense of futurism, it's about collective vs. individual ownership of the Means of Production.
Using an Enlightenment term for a Capitalist ideology as a term to describe leftists is wrong.
That's why everyone has been pointing out that you've been using terms incorrectly. You can either accept that you misspoke, and everyone can move on, or we will be stuck here.
Honestly, let's be stuck here. I'm tired of repeating myself. There's nothing to be gained here, you understand what I was trying to say, even if you think my words were wrong, and that's good enough for me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not heated, I appreciate that you've helped me to understand that I can't say liberal on the internet because people will misunderstand my intention.
It's more that you shouldn't use right wing terms to refer to left wing ideas, it's generally bad practice to pretend people believe in the opposite of reality.
To be clear, when I did a few university classes on philosophy, the term liberal was used to mean how I was using it. It was not once used to mean anything other than that (except during the first time the concept was introduced to us, when the lecturer said the Australian Liberal Party isn't liberal).
So for me, liberal is not a right wing term, it is inherently leftist.
It cannot be.
Leftism is not synonymous with forward thinking, nor synonymous with being open minded. Leftism is about worker ownership of the Means of Production.
Liberal, again, is focused on the Enlightenment philosophy Liberalism, which is characterized by espousing individual liberty and private property rights. It focuses on things like being open-minded and forward-thinking, like you've said, but you're misattributing that to leftism.
You've also been incorrectly saying Americans miscategorize the term into a right-wing term. It's the opposite, conservative fascists see liberals, who are still right-wingers, as leftists, due to the Overton Window. Liberals are still right-wing, and still espouse support for Capitalism.
Yep, my bad. Yes, left-right is about means of production and economical sharing. Though, I would argue, leftism is inherently progressive, because communism naturally succeeds capitalism.
I suppose one day leftism and progressivism will part ways, but it's unlikely to occur in our lifetime.
So for now, I hope my intent was inferred, when my words were wrong.
This is confusing, you seem to be using colloquial definitions of liberal with political ones interchangeably, but in the context of the political right denouncing liberal political projects as "woke" suggests you mean political liberals in the US.
When I see liberal parties in other countries, namely Europe, they are classed as center-right. Here in Canada they're a little more spread out but economic right for sure. For just a quick example, I support strong affirmative action, but for political liberals that has become watered down to "equality of opportunity" and disparity frameworks.
Well, the said liberals have defunded schools, hospitals, trains, retirement and anyknd of welfare here in the name of "being opened to new ideas", so it's a bit more than semantics. Sorry, I don't want to be associated with liberalism.
Liberal bourgeois are a significant political force since the French revolution - and always opposed people. It is and always was about the freedom of industry barrons and nothing else.
Liberal ≠ liberalism. I've had to explain this so many damn times in this thread it's beginning to make me nutty.
Look at the definition above. Those are leftist ideals, very different from those who are American Liberalism fanatics.
For someone who's chief complaint is "leftists are really bad at communicating our ideas", you might want to sit back and really think about what you're doing right now.
It's because you're using liberal as in, "wow that was a really liberal amount of gravy," synonymously with liberal as in, "a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."
Hey man, I don't fuck with gravy, I'm vegan. That's how leftist and liberal I am.
You know you can make gravy from vegetable stock, right?
That's liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don't have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It's like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.
I don't think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they're invoked to address. We've seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.
From the definition I provided, how do you think those ideas have contributed to perpetuating inequality?
On paper, I don't see anything wrong with reform, tolerance and open-mindedness (obviously the paradox of tolerance is inferred, I don't mean tolerance of intolerance)
On paper I don't know what those things really mean, "reform, tolerance, open-mindedness." They sound like good things but are contingent, open-mindedness to what, tolerance to what, reform to what? They function as euphemisms for something I'm supposed to imply on my own. I don't really have a use for this kind of thing.
It's just another way of saying progressive.
That's not at all what they said. Also, FY. We pay cops WAY too fucking much.
I don't know why people are assuming that I'm in disagreement with them about most aspects of what I said.
I am not implying that cops should not be reformed, or have their funds recalculated (on this point I have no opinion because I don't live in America).
I'm confused to what I missed in responding to the post above. What did I misunderstand?
You implied that "defund the police" is some kind of bad "catch-phrase' and it's exactly what needs to happen. It's literally the function of "Dystopian" overpayind them while defunding schools and everything else is DYSTOPIAN & TYRRANY.
Evidence?
What's insane about our ideas?
Nothing is insane about our ideas, it's the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.
It puts us on the back foot as we stumble to make sense of ourselves, instead of structuring our arguments in a way which children could understand.
Once they start with the presupposition that we've lost it, it's too late.
Evidence: "defund the police" the right immediately started replying with "if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy"
Evidence: "trans women are women" the right immediately started replying with "yeah but they arent 'real women'"
Evidence: "black lives matter" the right immediately started replying with "all lives matter" and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to "blue lives matter".
The left isn't your favourite sports team. We need to accept that there are faults within our collective and try to fix them.
I don't think the solution to that is "don't use provocative phrases", though. The left should provoke. Sure there are better and worse ways to do that, but giving up on provocation is giving up the battle, I think.
Like I said, we tried to really around "reform", and if didn't work. Defunding the police frees up that funding to put it into police alternatives.
But...they're wrong. Like, obviously wrong. How could you make the statement "trans women are women" more obvious? That's as straightforward as it gets.
I really don't think this convinces anybody who isn't already racist. We have so much video evidence of police killing unarmed black men. You just have to be willfully ignorant at this point.
Why should we provoke though? What does it get us?
Defund means to cancel funds, not reduce. The outcome of eliminating funding is anarchy, which is a non-starter for the right.
"Trans women are women" yeah, I know, but they don't. They wont hear that and accept the claim by itself. It boils down to courtesy, which isn't implied. The right HATE being dictated to, so to simply tell them what to say is going to piss them off and drive them further away.
"Black lives matter" - unfortunately a lot of people who aren't conservative did not actually understand. My parents both vote for the progressive parties here in Australia, but because of the shit they've seen on Facebook, they parroted the phrase "All Lives Matter". That's how easy that phrase was to misunderstand.
It gets people talking about the issues.
It isn't about courtesy. It's about recognizing that trans women are women.
I also think that trying to convince the right is a waste of time. The majority already agrees with us. Instead of arguing with extremists, we should be organizing.