What’s LMBO?
I think “laughing my butt off.”
Spite-posting is cringe
Removed by mod
It’s annoying but I’m sure at least one liberal, that one bright and/or moral but misinformed one, has seen your memes and started rethinking their position. 🥲👍
this is funny because there’s no such thing; once you start to realize that your understanding of the world was molded out of deeply entrenched misinformation, you stop being a liberal just like maga does.
Yup, it does shift how you see things. And you are also weirdly more hopeful cause things make more sense and you learn how to spend your energies constructively.
It stopped me from doom scrolling social media all the time
Interesting, I did that first. I mean I was jaded with tech by then tbh and kinda worked my ass backwards watching tech getting enshittified.
for me, it came down to my liberal indoctrination that made it impossible to understand why there was so much violence and hatred being perpetrated upon the world and done by seemingly perpetually rotating casts of bad actors fueled by authoritarianism and hatred and all of it could only lead to climate change and wealth disparity.
since then, i’ve learned that the source of that evil is always the same dozen or so bad actors and their goal is always dominance for profit and the world became a lot easier to understand. it helped me realize that a just world not only possible, but has already been enacted in places that my liberal indoctrination had told me were dystopian, authoritarian hellholes.
Oh yes, was also indoctrinated into that lib shit too and the doomerism is so real. The focus on the individual is too damn high.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have my blind spots. But man it’s good when things make sense and know where I would like things to how and now to get there. Cause before I understood this if I had infinite power for a split second to reimage the world it would have reverted to this state before I blinked.
Looking at Wikipedia, Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
Those don’t seem like bad concepts. I can’t see how consent of the governed, political equality, equality before law, individual rights, and liberty are bad when applied to individuals.
I can definitely see it’s failings in the economic realms, but what do you see wrong with them as applied on a personal level?
rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
Sounds nice in complete void of ideal definition, but even in this sterile ideal you can immediately think that those values are gonna clash, and in capitalism, system which entire reason is maximising profit, naturally the one prevailing over all others is private property. From there we look at our reality and indeed, we see all others trampled, meaningless and being used as fig leaf.
The problem is that all of those “nicer parts” are used to justify and support the elephant in the room, the right to private property. Liberalism has been used historically to justify slavery, genocide, imperialism, and more. Liberalism cannot be removed from its economic basis, the economic basis is the driving force for the ideology. It’s individualism taken to an anti-social level.
lol well when you just google the Wikipedia definition of something it seems pretty dang cool now doesn’t it? Doesn’t change the fact that global US hegemony thru NEO LIBERAL capitalism is a destructive, exploitative and genocidal right wing white supremacist ideology that has caused untold suffering and relies on stealing the resources of other countries (violently, may I add) to maintain US supremacy. And this is usually, not always, done against non white people. Hence the white supremacist part… Since ww2 alone we’ve invaded like 50 countries.
Those don’t seem like bad concepts. I can’t see how consent of the governed, political equality, equality before law, individual rights, and liberty are bad when applied to individuals.
because they are not inherently “bad ideas”. The world isn’t drawn in black and white, good vs evil. Under US electoral laws American Citizens do not have real democracy. We have a false sense of democracy that is controlled by lobbying (money) corporate/private power (money) and agenda based nepotism (money)
This is the problem inherent in capitalism. Sure we have great freedoms of speech and information at our fingertips but you can’t just hand wave away the destruction brought upon the world by right wing capitalist Neo liberalism by saying “well Wikipedia says it’s actually cool and based, so what’s the problem?!”
I’m certainly not trying to dismiss or hand wave away anything. I just don’t understand the hate of liberalism when the defined characteristics seem desirable. I fully recognize that the US no longer embodies those ideals despite the desire of many to see them in place. It seems through the comments on here that the issue is less with the ideals of liberalism and more to do with neo liberalism and the run away capitalism and unchecked wealth built on the backs of others. Am I following that correctly? Thanks for your reply, I appreciate your perspective on this.
Can we get a year when the US did embody those ideals?
the US no longer embodies those ideals
Yeah? “No longer”? When did it? When it practiced chattel slavery?
There have always been problems, I will never deny that.
Along with that bad and awful shit, there have also been good things too. We live in a world filled with nuance, very few things in it get to be all good or all bad. Pretending otherwise is what breeds the kind of mindsets behind our worst failings as humans. And I hold the opinion that online social media tends to balloon this issue but that’s a drawn out discussion I don’t feel like diving into at the moment.
I will never blindly defend something as we can always learn something new. Case in point, I’m here trying to understand the positions that have a disgust for liberalism and I’m finding great points. Those conversations require some back and forth, but even in that back and forth an open mind can learn new things and change their opinion. My opinion is certainly changing through these conversations at least.
It’s easy to hate the US if you only look at the bad. There are many unforgivable atrocities. Slavery arguably topping that list.
the problem is that today’s western systems – particularly the american one – claim to embody them while systematically doing the opposite and each individual liberal who enables it.
take consent of the governed and political equality for example. there’s overwhelming public support for healthcare, housing, and education as rights, yet those things are commodified for the rich to varying degrees and electoral systems are captured by an epstein oligarchy that keeps driving us into wars, so “consent” becomes choosing between pre-approved options.
also take equality before the law. the us prison industrial complex – aka mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, racial disparities – proves that the law applies very differently depending on your wealth and skin color; no one will doubt this, yet liberal societies accept it nonetheless as a “necessary evil”. there’s also examples outside the united states: france presents itself as a liberal society governed by the rule of law, yet its colonial system uses that very law to enforce low living standards on africans while denying them french citizenship – laying bare the contradiction between its universalist ideals and its unjust, unequal reality.
and that’s all before we consider the fact that international, western-backed genocides and ethnic cleansing continue despite widespread public opposition. That’s not consent of the governed; that’s ignoring it.
decades of propaganda from the epstein oligarchy and a culture that once rooted itself in those liberal policies have normalized these contradictions. So the issue isn’t with liberty or equality as personal ideals – it’s with a political system that uses those words to shield illiberal outcomes; none of which is possible without liberals who still believe that those words are true despite reality being the opposite.
this one is a way better answer than mine, I’m taking notes. Bravo, wordsmith 🫡
i wish i could take credit, but my spell checker now has ai grammer checker and it makes really excellent recommendations sometimes like it did here.
What I’m gathering from the comments on here is less that liberalism as a concept or ideal is the issue, it’s that it’s been used as a label of ideals that are it’s exact antithesis in support of the rich fucks driving the world into the ground. And as you said, the people supporting them thinking those things are liberalism when they are not. Am I following you correctly? Thanks for the reply. I’m still early in understanding some of this. Wasn’t long ago I found that “liberal” and “leftist” as used by right wing people in the US was co-opted into a whole different meaning than their actual definitions
Wasn’t long ago I found that “liberal” and “leftist” as used by right wing people in the US was co-opted into a whole different meaning than their actual definitions
i’m also new to understand what leftism is and one thing about liberalism that has become crystal clear to me so far is that its sole material purpose in the modern day is a co-option vehicle for the epstein class in a similar way that religion – especially christianity – has been repeatedly co-opted in the past to foster bigotry and violence; especially holy wars like the crusades and justifying the global african slave trade.
and a lot like how christians refuse to accept that their faith has done significantly more evil than good; liberals will refuse to believe that their principals only serve capitalism and will fight just as hard as any christian to draw a distinction between their faith and the horrors that their faith has inflicted upon the world as if they were not one-in-the-same thing.
Thanks for your reply, all the comments here have been helpful in understanding this a little better, but I appreciate that clear analogy. That’ll help me explain to others as well.
I’m not married to any one philosophy of politics or economic theory, I can see the things that don’t work so I like seeing and pressing on some things I’m less familiar with so I can understand them better. I think the ideas in many ideologies are well intentioned, and each style has a potential benefit. Just trying to better see where and how precisely what have today went off the rails. Thanks again. 🙂
I doubt that there’s any analogy that will inform you sufficiently, so I feel it’s important to share something else w you that I’ve learned in my own journey in understanding leftism.
Christians have centuries worth of retrospection that makes them more patient w individuals who reject their ideology; liberals do not. Liberals well blame you for the failures of thier ideology and will accuse you of behavior that they feel diminishes it; a lot like Christians of the past would persecute and punish atheists (or humanists, or diets, or believers of different faiths, etc.). You should expect vitriol to come from every avenue for being willing to question your reality as well as take intentional efforts to ensure that it doesn’t embitter you to the world.
Intentional is the key word here, you can’t leave it to chance like you’ve likely done in the past as I have because the vitriol will come from surprising sources and take surprising forms.
It’s not quite that.
Liberalism is in support of capitalism. And capital does not care for any of those nice sounding ideals. So it doesn’t make any actual sense since supporting capitalism necessarily invalidates the lovely sounding ideas.
Liberalism necessarily leads to the rich fucks driving the world into the ground.
I don’t quite understand how it’s supporting capitalism. It seems like you could have one without the other no? I can see how it’s been abused here in the US but not sure why that means it will necessarily follow that pattern.
Looking at reality, liberalism is a political philosophy based on self-deception, the justification of profit above life, and genocide.
Those issues don’t really align with the concepts I’m reading about it though. It seems more that the term has been co-opted to try to cover more insidious ideologies. There’s a problem either way, it just seems that it’s whatever this new thing is called and not the liberalism as defined on paper that’s being used as a mask.
I mean what sounds more likely, that there’s been a long-game attempt to coopt the label of liberalism while doing horrible shit (which, to what end?) or that the people loudly proclaiming themselves liberals while doing horrible shit are in fact liberals
But if they aren’t even following the principles of the ideology can we still say that’s what they are? Not trying to refute anything you are saying, just trying to understand it better.
In that case liberalism is an ideology that has only ever managed to exist on paper and does not even have the bare minimum merit of being able to manifest itself in reality without being immediately turned into a program of justifying empire, slavery and genocide.
The wikipedia article was written by liberals and they did the whole self-deception regiment. What they say they are is irrelevant, only what they do is real.
