They were just champing at the bit for an excuse to get more racist. I can’t believe the utter heel turn with their border rhetoric
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Dems: stop attacking your own guy what. The. Fuck???
These are the people who insist that the GOP are a cult because their members aren’t allowed to criticize the leadership.
I got banned from /r/politics for a week today because I said being a genocide denier is a bad look. I didn’t even call anyone a genocide denier. The user picked up the badge and pinned it to their own chest
the way redditors write is very annoying to read.
I don’t know what’s worse. The drive by glibness or the verbose “smarter than you” adult in the room shit
In any case they tend to be pretty condescending and incurious. There’s also a distinct bombastic writing style that I find pretty grating.
What, you don’t appreciate all of them commenting like smug Marvel characters that got ahold of a thesaurus beforehand?
:this:
how dare you state facts and logic, sir
It’s hilarious that these liberals are surprised that Cuban immigrants to the United States are right wing and support Trump. Are they so racist that they think that all Latinos are the same and automatically vote Democrat? Do they realise that many of the Cuban immigrants to the US were part of the land owning bourgeois class and were always very right wing, in the same way that many “immigrants/expats” from global south countries that had a revolution or change of government are? South African immigrants/expats after 1994 are another perfect example of this phenomenon.
Are they so racist that they think that all Latinos are the same and automatically vote Democrat?
Yes, and it’s quite funny too. When you get down to it there’s all sorts of latin american migrants in the US. And the ones likely to vote Democrat probably won’t get the right to do so.
I tried to make the point that the sort of person that has the money to migrate to the US in a way that they get to vote is likely a wealthy person whose only connection to the home country is exploiting its health care system. Not to mention that countries in Latin America are a) amongst the most religious conservative in the world; and b) becoming less catholic and more puritan because the pope is too woke for them. I was told I was racist against latinos.
I think there’s also a counterpart to this as a bet that Republican’s notion of whiteness can’t expand to include ‘mexicans and other latinos’. Which is only true in so far as it bars potentially democrat migrants from voting. Right wingers do not care that the right wing hates them on the grounds of race or culture. A gay man who’s a right winger will keep voting Republican because they know they are protected by their wealth and/or class. Likewise for the white passing Latino that moves from ‘Communist Homeland’ to Miami. They voted for the ‘Tropical Trump’ before, and they’ll vote for the real deal as soon as they are able.
Also to do with your last paragraph, Latino isn’t even a racial group as most US citizens understand it, quite a few Latinos are just straight up white, like most people from Uruguay and Argentina for example. And then obviously you get Afro-Latinos as well. But I guess that’s too complicated for US citizens, who just view all Latinos as impoverished Mexican immigrants.
“Do they realise that many of the Cuban immigrants to the US were part of the land owning bourgeois class and were always very right wing, in the same way that many “immigrants/expats” from global south countries that had a revolution or change of government are?”
Of course they don’t. Liberals don’t understand or even bother to learn history. That is precisely why they are liberals.
Didn’t you know? South America is a country, not a continent.
Liberals don’t consider things like class or material analysis
The people coming to the US are part of an ethnic minority group, so liberals believe that they ‘should be’ voting liberal because liberals are slightly less openly terrible to non white people. Then they become shocked when
A. The people coming in are not some homogenized mass of liberal voters and
B. Being ‘slightly less terrible’ isn’t really a selling point
I’m not seeing many liberals in these comments. When I look at their comment histories they seem to be garden variety conservatives. The liberals I do see defending Biden are more doing the standard “Trump is worse, stop attacking Biden” which is shitty but not mask-off racism imo
Unfortunately you just stepped into the Hexbear trap. Below you will find a hundred correct comments about how conservatives are neoliberals and that neoliberalism is just another arm of fascism anyway.
I hope you stick around and read and learn in good faith though it’ll be good for ya.
Below you will find a hundred correct comments
As proponents of (small r) republicanism, constitutionalism, rule of law (which they refer to as ‘law and order’), free markets, and private property, American ‘conservatives’ are indeed Liberals. They just advocate for shittier public policy. There is nothing inherently progressive about Liberalism. The United States was simultaneously a slave plantation oligarchy and a Liberal Democracy.
The presence of universal suffrage and civil liberties are concessions which took centuries to extract from the Liberals, by social movements with many Communist organizers at their core. And yet under Liberal Democracy, we still have legal slavery, lack universal sufferage (felony disenfranchisment along with a vast legally constructed underclass of undocumented workers), and civil liberties which only exist if you can afford a well connected Harvard-educated lawyer.
It’ll be awhile before we get to 100. Some of us are working our dog walking jobs and others are waiting for our xibux to clear. Give us a minute
With China being on the edge of collapse, you’re damn right I’m waiting for my xibucks to clear.
theres are plenty of sane commenters, they just seem to be downvoted every time.
Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes. The difference in votes is just from the massive weight of your shitty opinions.
Liberalism, the primary political ideology of capitalism, includes conservatives and “moderates” and “progressives” in the United States’ alleged political discourse. It can include conservatives because liberalism has been around long enough that every family member a person can remember has been some kind of liberal and they want to keep things “their” way going forward. To be conservative is to resist change.
However, plenty of self-described progressives do all the things you describe. They’re pretty damn racist, for example, they just use their own “acceptable” language to describe it. Their opposition to Palestinians, for example, is frequently predicated on:
- Calling them terrorists
- Calling them Arabs
- Reducing their identity to Muslim and their struggle to the person’s islamophobia
- White supremacist rhetoric like “Israelis made the desert bloom” and “a people without a land for a land without a people”
- Recycled settler-colonial rhetoric that was used (and still is) against indigenous Americans
Progressive and “moderate” liberals call themselves non-racist and a foil to the style of racism that those to their right explicitly spell out and embrace, but they still harbor racism for the exact same reasons: to justify violence done to people they should otherwise sympathize and have solidarity with.
Also some of them aren’t even subtle and are basically klan members.
I am aware of the different meanings of liberalism; it just makes no sense to me (in this context) to interpret “libs” in that way. Who cares if conservatives are doing mask-off racism in a political thread? They always do that. And of course I agree that progressives are racist in “acceptable” ways, but that would be another way of saying mask-on racism. And while progressives sometimes do straight up mask-off racism, that’s not something I saw in the comment thread. In any case, just because someone identifies as progressive or espouses progressive beliefs in one area does not mean all of their beliefs are progressive or hold in line with what most other progressives think.
I also just think it’s misguided — except in specific circumstances — to use the term “liberal” to mean something different than it is commonly understood to mean. But I should have been more aware that on hexbear people are more likely to mean it in the academic sense.
Friend the definition we use is not simply an “academic meaning” IT IS THE DEFINITION
Anything else is political illiteracy, no doubt reinforced through pop culture or Internet memery. Do you see how you’ve twisted yourself into knots trying to divide and catalog the mindsets between those so-called conservatives, “liberals”, and progressives? It’s pointless they’re all subspecies of the same ideology, the liberals in that thread are not violating some sacred progressive liberal value with their racism, nor are they tapping into some inherent conservatism that invalidates their liberalism, it’s all tactical differences not fundamental ones
They are simply liberals doing what liberals have always done, dividing and demoralizing the working class in defense of a pro-capitalist status quo and racism has always been a favored tool; of course many of them are also politically illiterate and are simply doing it out of a sort of social muscle memory, but end of the day they’re still liberals
Friend the definition we use is not simply an “academic meaning” IT IS THE DEFINITION
Words almost always have multiple definitions and are context dependent. “Liberal” fits the bill on both counts.
Clarifying what definition you’re using is fine, but it’s silly to claim that’s the only definition, especially when the vast majority of U.S. political discourse uses a different one.
What you’re arguing is “I know there is an actual meaning used in political discussions, but I have chosen to ignore that in favour of the alternate colloquial meaning that doesn’t make sense contextually”. Just shut up.
Pedantic redditbrain bullshit
The OP links to r/politics, which like the rest of U.S. mainstream political discussion takes “liberal” to mean “aligned with the Democratic Party.” Someone from midwest.social drops in to say “these look like conservatives, not liberals,” referencing the same context.
Then a bunch of Hexbear posters trip over themselves to say
“uhh ackshually these are all liberals in the classic sense,” a point that adds nothing and that the midwest.social user already knows. Even after that user clarifies they already get this, and are referring to the partisan split in the U.S., people here still have to show how smart and correct they are instead of a simple “ah I see we’re on the same page.”This is the way normal people interact with others and will bring the revolution any day now
I guess I don’t get what we’re doing here if we aren’t going to discuss politics the way this site was meant to. If you want to use the pop culture definitions to defend the status quo, I recommend clicking the link, signing up for reddit and turning off your brain.
We’re trying to learn and make a difference here.
What’s your argument here then? That they were being willfully ignorant? You’re accusing me of redditbrain, but your comment is incoherent holier than thou “but technically” whinging. Just shut up.
There is no content or coherence to the “colloquial” definition, the ideology we call liberalism has a history, a set of a priori assumptions of the world, a roster of multiple internal schools of thought (none of which mesh with the colloquial understanding), and most important an actually existing record of real world policies that define it’s true function and scope in the world
You can claim a million billion people think liberalism is sunshine and roses, that still wouldn’t make it true
You can claim a million billion people think liberalism is sunshine and roses, that still wouldn’t make it true
Words mean what people think they mean. The vast majority of Americans use “liberal” and “conservative” interchangeably with Democratic and Republican policies, so in that context (which is the context of the r/politics thread) “liberal” is fairly read as “aligned with Democrats.” That’s a valid definition because it’s how most people actually use the word.
Claiming that your preferred definition is the only real definition, and the hundreds of millions of people who use the most common definition are all wrong, is nonsensical and will get you nothing but endless semantic slapfights.
Words mean what people think they mean.
Yeah if those people had power, a political education and sustained control over the levers of knowledge production
so in that context (which is the context of the r/politics thread) “liberal” is fairly read as “aligned with Democrats.” That’s a valid definition because it’s how most people actually use the word.
Except our non-hexbear friend asserted those liberals in that thread aren’t liberals because they sound like “garden variety conservatives” but they’re not (according to the colloquial definition), they’re “democrat aligned” Biden supporters pissing and moaning about people upset over Biden’s anti-immigration stance (oh look anti-immigration from the liberal dems, another violation of the vaunted colloquial definition)
So that tells us not only were you not paying attention to what op was saying, but that the definition that you’re holding up as the gold standard (because millions of American don’t have a political education) can’t even hold up in the thread you gave as an example
Which is why political education is important and colloquial understanding that isn’t even colloquial is not
Look, you’re not going to find any support here with this take.
I once made a thread asking Hexbears to tone down their rhetoric so it’s more welcoming to the vast majority of the outside people, and 99% of the responses were a firm no.
People here aren’t going to give up using the materialist definition of liberalism just to pander to the libs.
Prescriptivism is bullshit, the definition of a word is how it is used and how the word is used is its definition. Even if it isn’t, the dictionaries I’ve looked at give multiple definitions for the word.
you’ve twisted yourself into knots trying to divide and catalog the mindsets… It’s pointless they’re all subspecies of the same ideology
Maybe I’m just so indoctrinated that the knots and twists don’t feel all that knotty or twisty. I just disagree that it’s pointless to make note of these divisions. Some people are trying to make the world a better place, and some people are trying to make it worse.
Some people are trying to make the world a better place,
Communists
and some people are trying to make it worse.
Liberals
Some people are trying to make the world a better place, and some people are trying to make it worse.
Both types of liberals fall into the latter category.
“The most progressive president since FDR” is adopting Trump border policies, calling undocumented immigrants “illegals” that are dangerous to you and yours, and abetting a genocide of Palestinians. Dems are happily falling in line and are already gearing up for their attempt to shame each other into holding the line despite it obviously meaning nothing every four years.
No twists and turns?
It’s not prescriptivism, you’re misusing that word, what’s actually happened here is that you’ve fallen for a political misnomer or a series of political misnomers
Liberalism has a basis in historical socio-economic practice that runs into the present day, its multiple schools of thought from; social liberalism, ordoliberalism, neoclassical econ, Keynesianism, the Austrian school etc. define and shape not only the contours of higher learning, but the whole political matrix of the entire earth, and all those schools make a mockery of the common “colloquial” understanding
The so-called “presciptivist” definition is the one that accurately describes the liberalism in the heads of the powerful, the wealthy, the influential, their mentors, their brokers, their guard dogs, their scientists, their theorists, their planners…basically it’s the liberalism that has actual power and acts as the software for capitalism’s hardware; and I’m telling you now friend, you won’t find that info in a dictionary
Maybe I’m just so indoctrinated that the knots and twists don’t feel all that knotty or twisty.
Really? You think it’s worthwhile to play No True Scotsman with a half-dozen different flavors of liberalism? It doesn’t matter what you or those people claim to be or believe; it’s the ideas, values, epistemology, and actually existing political structures that they defend that truly define who they are
It’s what liberal means everywhere except the incoherent myopia of American political illiteracy where people like to pretend that Reagan and Obama had different political ideologies.
Re: racism and liberals, every example I gave is mask-off racism and you’ll find they’re very common among liberals, including “progressives”. They just normalize it to each other and tell themselves they aren’t racist, happily living with the contradiction. Mask-on vs mask-off racism is about hiding racism that someone acknowledges, which is a different thing.
I bet if you revisit the thread with a critical lens you’ll find some lib racism.
