God help them. The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining

  • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    The western world can't even agree on what liberals are

    Found the LIB

    What is it with liberals and not understanding that words have distinct meanings? Either they stretch the meaning of a term for a specific thing to make it cover everything they they don't like (e.g. fascism, genocide, nazi) or they pretend like the meaning of a word has no definite meaning because they are too lazy to actually go look it up.

    • teuniac_@lemm.ee
      ·
      9 months ago

      In political science definitions aren't prescribed, they are described. The meaning of liberalism is dependent on what actors who call themselves liberal say or do.

      There are different kinds of liberalism. There is social liberalism, classic liberalism, conservative liberalism, etc. Considering how broad liberalism is, for most people it doesn't make sense to "oppose" liberalism.

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
        ·
        9 months ago

        The meaning of liberalism is dependent on what actors who call themselves liberal say or do.

        Nope. If a monarchist calls themselves a liberal that doesn't mean that liberalism can also mean monarchism. Calling yourself a banana doesn't make monkeys want to eat you.

        Yes there are permutations and variations of liberalism but as you have pointed out they have their own names. They are defined to show the similarities and differences. All forms of liberalism have certain characteristics that make them liberal.

        Words have meanings. If you don't know you can look them up Words aren't just based on feefees. This assertion that words mean whatever the speaker wishes is hyper-liberalism. Its like you believe in individualism and egalitarianism, so hard that you delude yourself, into thinking what you feel subjectively in the moment, has more validity than material reality.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
        ·
        9 months ago

        In western liberal political science, sure, but western liberal political science doesn't even recognize capitalism as a totalitarian system, so it is pretty much worthless for actual, real world, political analysis. It works as a way to move your way through academia, or western electoral politics, but using it as a way to describe the world and the movement of economics and capitalism, it is worthless as a analytical tool, it's historical analysis skills ground to worthlessness from decades of internalized propoganda masquerading as acquired knowledge.

        The fact that you can't even recognize modern political science itself as a modern totalized liberal ideology is itself indicative of it's formations and power.