I've noticed a peculiar phenomenon prevalent with the liberals. They have an inclination to diminish the complexity of those they perceive as adversaries by reducing them to caricatures or dehumanizing representations.
For instance, they liken Xi to Winnie the Pooh, depicting him in a manner that belittles his position and influence. Similarly, Putin is portrayed as a mad king, exaggerating his power and malevolence for dramatic effect. They characterize Russians as orcs, implying that they are inherently evil and lacking in humanity's essential qualities of compassion and reason.
This trend seems to suggest a reluctance among liberals to engage with opposing viewpoints on their own merits, instead choosing to dismiss them outright or diminish their significance through caricatured representations. This approach may serve as a form of psychological defense mechanism, allowing individuals to avoid the discomfort and cognitive dissonance that can arise from confronting unfamiliar or challenging ideas.
A group, claiming to champion values such as empathy, inclusivity, and respect for diversity, appears to be engaging in a peculiar behavior: dehumanizing their opponents by reducing them to caricatures or diminishing their complexity. This trend is as a form of naked hypocrisy.
Liberals don't believe there are opposing view points. There's the correct liberal facts and then there's everyone else who isn't as smart as them.
A lot of their arguments make a lot more sense when you come at them from this angle. They are the "correct" ones in all things, even something they didn't know about 5 minutes ago, which means any attempts to educate are actually just attempts to win a debate and knowledge is irrelevant to how correct someone is on an issue. Which is why they so often dismiss a source that disagrees with them out of hand, even "trusted" liberal sources. Their position is already the correct one, which means any evidence to the contrary is just trying to trick them and they'll use everything from dehumanisation to emotional manipulation to vague threats and insults to give themselves the mental wiggle room needed to continue ignoring it.
Pretty much, libs are like the Borg IRL. Other cultures must be either absorbed or destroyed. Any alternative to liberalism is seen as being an aberration and a threat to be countered.
They claim inclusivity and empathy because they are the "good guy team" and the good guys support those things. Being a good guy is an inherent trait to them, like being tall. You're either on the good guy team and all your actions are good (or justifiable) or you're not, and your every action is an evil one by default. Which is how they can see things like China's poverty alleviation program or Cuba's massive success in medicine and conclude that these universal goods are actually evil, because the bad guy team is the one doing them.
Being a good guy is an inherent trait to them, like being tall.
This is pretty funny to me as I recently had a lib refuse to acknowledge that the height of the Chinese population has greatly increased over the past 40 years and is now equivalent to or slightly greater than the height of the average hog... libs love their racialized stereotypes.
Actually yeah, even "being tall" has a lot more to it than just being an inherent thing, like a healthy diet and environment growing up.
Not to mention homophobia or sexism. Bigotry is fine if its against someone who deserves it.
Oh, I'm wrong about the number of political parties in the People's Republic of China am I? Well have you considered that you are gay with Xi Xinping?
"I'm, only saying it because Xi Xingping would have a problem, with it, not me. If you're offended by my causal homophobia it's because you're the real homophobe!"
TBF I’ve seen people here and on Hexbear do a bit of that, myself included. De
ing myself is a process.Yeah, most of us grew up in a liberal society and still have some liberal brainworms. The problem isn't making the mistake, it's refusing to correct it. Lib thought patterns are easy and intellectually lazy, so its easy to slip into them without realising.
Similarly I notice a lot of liberals resort to ableism/misogyny/racism in an attempt to belittle their opposition. I think that a lot of liberals just care about upholding an image rather than actually care about the groups they claim to fight for.
Yes! I have notices that this extends to what they believe, they almost never will tell you what they truly belive in plain english, they will say a nice sounding thing next to it, or similar to it, and when you counter they get upset and at some point will give up and rage and say "you dont understand" or they will say the original policy they meant.
Like I have had a lib tell me "You should always pay people what they are worth... but it is ok to make a profit." or when they where describing "Time Theft" it took multiple minutes for me to get them to say they where not stealing anything but taking "too many breaks" and "not working hard enough"
You should always pay people what they are worth… but it is ok to make a profit
Bruh, Marx Tore into a near exact phrasing in "Critique of the Gotha program". That was near 150 years ago!
If a lib ever tells you liberalism is about the people, or human needs - start pressing on who they consider "people"
Anyone who has money and has all their needs met by the status quo
Totally agree.
This explain why they dismiss not only our talking points but even our very presence on the site with literal flat-earther worthy conspiracy theory based on thought terminating cliche like "you are clearly paid by this or that country" or "the majority of you are bots". They are trying to gaslight themselves into thinking that the big faction of openly leftists, pro-lgbt, anti-racist peoples they can clearly see on here isn't real because it break their narrative that they are the good guys, that their position is THE correct one and that anyone who disagree is is just a minority of bad and not very smart peoples. Until now, when radlibs were on mainstream platforms like reddit and twitter, we leftist were a small minority group broken up into smaller groups still that all disagreed with one another and so the only political opposition they could see, or rather couldn't ignore, were the liberal right, MAGA, GOP, Republicans, etc, which wasn't a problem to them since the bigotry and stupidity of the liberal right fit well into the aforementioned narrative, but now they are on lemmy where communists are too numerous and organized for anyone on the site to ignore, and the whole left in general who has been growing for a while is reaching a stage where they start to get noticed by a larger audience, a recent evidence of it being the number of liberals on twitter and reddit who have been complaining about far left peoples telling them that they shouldn't vote for Biden, and so now that they can't ignore us anymore they are confronted explicitly with a breach of their narrative they have no way to solve and so they resort to trying to patch it up with whatever they can, including the same type of deranged conspiracy theories they make fun of the liberal right for believing in.
Very much agree with all that. The most amusing part for me is that libs have been forced to expose themselves as being utterly intellectually bankrupt now. Anybody outside the lib sphere can see that they have no consistent beliefs, and all the values they champion are paper thin. When push comes to shove they discard their values like a used toilet paper.
I think we all knew that, Their first criticism of any group that has values is that it does not matter, and they are just written on paper and no one will follow them. They cannot even conserve of someone having values strong enough that they would follow them, and not discard them at the first time it becomes inconvenient.
Pretty similar to how one could attempt to understand that a country of +20 million people such as the DPRK probably works through a somewhat complex and elaborate system that involves the participation of hundreds of thousands of people only to form the state apparatus but on the other side it's much easier to just say that Kim Jong-Un is a crrrrraaaazzzyyyy madman and he takes all the decisions of the country by himself and millions of people just obey him because lol. Liberalism needs to caricaturize its enemies in order to rally the people against them.
In addition, in another thread, a couple of users and I expanded on the dehumanization of the adversaries of liberalism by resorting to bigotry and slurs by making exceptions on racial, sexual or gender-based discrimination against those individuals who are deemed to be "deserving" of it. Here it is in case you're interested.
Exactly, lib world view is reductionist to the extreme. They create these infantile caricatures that let them collapse complex geopolitical issues into us good them bad narratives.
Because it's all sports to liberals. They have no stake in anything they believe in. Foreign presidents might as well be polytheistic trickster gods to them. They call Xi Jinping a cartoon bear in the same way someone in medieval Iceland would spit three times to keep dwarves away. Liberals believe their criticisms of Putin and Xi are heard by the respective parties and somehow weaken them.
They dehumanize their enemies because their enemies aren't real, tangible opponents for them. All their battles are in the realms of their own imagination. There's a good quote I've always liked from the German Ideology where Marx is dunking on Max Stirner.
Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth, freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.
Liberals believe their politics are over abstract concepts like truth, freedom, and mankind, not tangible things like people and capital.
That's a good insight, liberals often have to resort to creating straw man caricatures precisely because they can't produce convincing critiques of the ideas they disagree with. Likewise, focusing on abstract concepts moves conversation away from tangible things whose merits can be evaluated in a meaningful way. They're not interested in having an honest debate about the merits of their ideology, they take it as axiomatic that it's inherently correct.
Contempt for the enemy had been generated by the demonisation of the Ethiopians through the state‐controlled media; the dapper, dignified and highly acclaimed Ethiopian Regent who had charmed the crowds and been given a royal welcome by King Victor Emmanuel and Mussolini on his official state visit to Rome in 1924—the Emperor to whose imperial court Italian diplomats had long been proud to be accredited—was transformed by Mussolini’s propaganda machine into a caricature.
Haile Selassie was now a hideous, subhuman creature with an enormous beaked nose and gigantic deformed feet—a monstrous potentate ruling with revolting brutality over a horde of ignorant savages, who for their own good needed to be forcibly subjected to what Rome called ‘Italian civilisation’.
Many of the Blackshirt volunteers swallowed the propaganda, and against such a background the [Regio Esercito] commanders’ numerous written instructions for suppression of the local population through the spreading of terror, and demands for ‘merciless rigour’ and ‘the destruction of everything’, rapidly created a culture of brutality and impunity. It is not surprising that Italians who might not have been predisposed to abuse the Ethiopians often did so with enthusiasm, as can be seen from some of the photographs in this volume.
(Source.)
The reaction of Liberals to the question "did you watch the Putin interview?" is telling.
It's a severe degree of groupthink. Everyone knows Putin is a power hungry egomaniac with limited capacity for rational thought, so there's no point in wasting an hour consuming obvious propaganda.
Once something has been established as 'what the good guys think', a Liberal doesn't dare question it because it would diminish their reputation in the minds of other liberals.
It also keeps them safe from having to confront their core contradictions. For example, there's a huge proportion of libs supporting Palestine now, but wind the clock back a few years and they were sagely approving the condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-semite. Ask them about Corbyn now, and they'll stand by their condemnation, or wind it back to 'he was problematic', and they'll get angry and defensive if you continue to press at that inconsistency.
Exactly, liberalism is a highly insular cult that encourages adherents to have as little contact with the outside world as possible lest people get infected by wrong ideas. It's pretty clever in a way because it's much easier to get people to simply self censor than to actually engage with other points of view and articulate coherent arguments in favor of your ideology.
I think this is the consequence of Liberalism both being seriously unchallenged in the mainstream, and there being a complete lack of quality political education in the west. Without a proper framework to deal with issues people will simply resort to lizard brain thinking. Liberals also tend to develop an overconfidence because the only ones who oppose them most of the time are ultra reactionaries who are obviously stupid and malicious.
I dunno, politics in "liberal democracies" seems to be a whole lot of spectacle and aesthetics and if any good policy manages to happen its almost an afterthought. So I can't view what a liberal does as hypocrisy as what they're doing tends to be in support of "attracting attention to themselves and their pet causes" and "appearing to care about something".
I agree, politics in the west being largely a circus likely does play a big role here.
I don’t recommend dehumanizing anybody, not even our oppressors, but my interest in that is not so much for engaging their viewpoints as it is for seeing our oppressors realistically. The very same Axis personnel who committed horrific atrocities against thousands of innocents could also still give the impression of being well adjusted, polite, neighbourly people, at least when they were off‐duty. I remember reading somewhere about psychologists who tested surviving Axis war criminals but failed to find signs of insanity.
Dehumanization serves a purpose for anticommunists because it encourages them to shoot first and ask questions later (if ever). They’re less likely to feel pangs of conscience as long as they see their targets as inhuman, thereby continuing to do their jobs. There have been some exceptions in history, like Milovan Popović, but generally speaking anticommunists find it easier, faster, and less expensive to simply imprison or massacre us than address the root causes of our grievances.
This guy's a liberal, but I like this quote from a book:
Granny Weatherwax and a priest are in an argument.
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
You don't argue with Granny Weatherwax, if I'm remembering her correctly.
I don't think this has much to do with liberalism. howmany leftists, might be more politically correct for me to use neo-nazis as the example but whatever, have you talked to who say things like navalny is a nazi, all ukrainian troops are nazis, the free syrian army are isis, also isis is isis, israelis are nazis, kulaks were parasites, or the most classical one germans were nazis. just seems like people in general prefer to be against caricatures and comically evil people rather than humans
Tribalism isn't exclusive to liberals of course. However, my main point was that liberals love to collapse complex geopolitical issues into oversimplified tales of "us" versus "them" by creating infantile caricatures that are devoid of any meaningful analysis. Communists will consider ideas on their actual merits, and when we reject ideas we can give detailed explanation of why we consider a particular idea to be harmful.
from my personal experience the need to collapse as you describe it stems moreso from the geopolitical position the societies of these liberal countries find themselves in moreso than the nature of their political ideology. it is in order to convince themselves of the need to continually take actions to protect their own interests and preferential position. I imagine it was probably pretty similar within nazi germany toward their opponents or within the soviet union against nazi germany. this is something I feel a lot of americans don't exactly realize. anti-americanism is not as pervasive across the world as you may be led to believe and is definitely not at the same level of hate you'll see with americans regarding china or other examples. this was especially weird to me when I first heard the song Eve of Destruction with the lyric "And think of all the hate there is in Red China" because the chinese really do not hate americans they just want to work together with them for mutual benefit. same sentiment was heard when putin gave his now famous interview with tucker carlson
But do not forget liberals think Putin was lieing with every word of his interview
people who scare me "Not people*
people who don't scare me "People"
