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
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1bauos4/biden_says_he_regrets_using_term_illegal_as_trump/?sort=controversial
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
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.
Yeah if those people had power, a political education and sustained control over the levers of knowledge production
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
This is very plainly drawing a difference between "liberals defending Biden" and "garden variety conservatives."
If you have examples of Biden supporters in that thread endorsing the racist term "illegals," citing those would have been infinitely more productive than pretending the common definition of "liberal" doesn't even exist.
I'm well aware what they tried to do, I'm saying they failed because they don't know what liberalism is because they have a bullshit mangled colloquial understanding of it that doesn't accurately describe reality
Nah bro these totally aren't Biden supporters, absolute "garden variety conservatives", lmao hey happened to the fuckin colloquial definition, I can't seem to find it?
I'm not arguing about this. I'm saying you should have brought up this actual substantive stuff right away rather than posting multiple paragraphs about the definition of a word
...the original post was a link to the content. You shouldnt have commented unless you clicked the link to see what we were even talking about.
You don't have to know shit about the underlying post to point out that dogpiling someone for using the most common definition of "liberal" is a poor way to communicate with them.
I read the underlying post, anyway.
Just take the L.
You can't break out "aren't we trying to learn here" on one hand and then drop reddit shit like this on the other
Everyone else already made my point for me, and you have at least dodeca-ed down
If the pattern I've noticed on hexbear persists, we are about three more back and forths away from your mask slipping and you getting banned, so I'm just gonna leave it at this comment and call it a day.
Lmao what kind of horseshit is this? "You did not submit to my obviously superior intellect, so you must be some secret reactionary whose mask is just a hair from slipping?"
Not even close, but go ahead and assume you know anything about me at all
Lol
Haha nice edit, too
Yeah, I didn't feel like being a jerk after letting it breathe
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.
I see the same thing happening -- it's a fast track to an ultraleftist dead end.
It's also worth noting that recognizing what non-leftists mean when they speak is not pandering, but a prerequisite to effective communication. We're abandoning talking to people out of eagerness to dunk on anything that moves.
This thread shows how we need more accessible, as in memes, political education for left-curious folks. This stuff has to meet people where they are if we ever hope to build a popular revolutionary movement.