according to @Custoslibera’s post

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8 points
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Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.

Why would we play by their rules when they always change them?

Common misunderstanding is we’re playing the same game. The game they’re playing is “own the lib-tards”. At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it’s fucking embarrassing.

And as aforementioned, it’s the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.

The game the left is playing is “who has the best idea”, which doesn’t matter to the right, because they’re either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.

The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.

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14 points

Well then you shouldn’t use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.

Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don’t play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.

Do what is right. Simple.

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3 points

Yes, the game is rigged in their favour, absolutely. The problem is that their ideas will not change, they are conservative, they conserve their ideas.

It’s the responsibility of the ones who can change, to be smarter about it. If we sink to their level, we are no better than them.

Progressives are smarter, but we’re not acting like it. That’s why I’m saying we need to be better at policing our own, it’s all about mitigating needless stupidity.

Also, outside of America, liberal and leftist are essentially synonymous, so that’s why I used it. But it’s my fault for not remembering America makes a very different distinction.

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8 points

European here. They are absolutely not synonymous. Where I grew up liberals are the right wing, with socialists on the left and religious party on the center.

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6 points
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How are we not acting smart by saying “black lives matter” and “trans women are women”? These are great, simple and to the point slogans.

The only way they can be seen as controversial is of you don’t agree with these statements because you believe that black lives dont matter and that trans women aren’t “real women”. So that would make you a right-winger.

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10 points

Liberals are right-wingers all around the world, not only in america.

I know you probably mean well, but guess what? I do not care about how right-winger feels and I will not water down my opinions to please them.

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4 points

I don’t want to get into an argument about semantics, but liberal does not mean right wing.

It isn’t about pleasing them or playing by their rules. It’s about not giving them ammo to shoot your comrades.

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2 points

That’s not at all what they said. Also, FY. We pay cops WAY too fucking much.

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8 points

Liberalism is a pro-free market Capitalist idea centered on the ideas of individual liberty. This is right wing. It isn’t fascism, but it’s also not leftist.

The divide between left and right is who you think should own and control the Means of Production: the Workers, or Capitalists.

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5 points

Well, the said liberals have defunded schools, hospitals, trains, retirement and anyknd of welfare here in the name of “being opened to new ideas”, so it’s a bit more than semantics. Sorry, I don’t want to be associated with liberalism.

Liberal bourgeois are a significant political force since the French revolution - and always opposed people. It is and always was about the freedom of industry barrons and nothing else.

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2 points

That’s liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don’t have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It’s like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.

I don’t think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they’re invoked to address. We’ve seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.

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The neoliberal movement in the US is totally right wing, more so than the US or EU populations generally.

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2 points

And as aforementioned, it’s the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.

Evidence?

The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.

What’s insane about our ideas?

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1 point
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Nothing is insane about our ideas, it’s the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.

It puts us on the back foot as we stumble to make sense of ourselves, instead of structuring our arguments in a way which children could understand.

Once they start with the presupposition that we’ve lost it, it’s too late.

Evidence: “defund the police” the right immediately started replying with “if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy”

Evidence: “trans women are women” the right immediately started replying with “yeah but they arent ‘real women’”

Evidence: “black lives matter” the right immediately started replying with “all lives matter” and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to “blue lives matter”.

The left isn’t your favourite sports team. We need to accept that there are faults within our collective and try to fix them.

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2 points

Nothing is insane about our ideas, it’s the fact that the conservatives do not want to take the time to unpack provocative phrases, immediately misunderstand them, and then strawman us.

I don’t think the solution to that is “don’t use provocative phrases”, though. The left should provoke. Sure there are better and worse ways to do that, but giving up on provocation is giving up the battle, I think.

Evidence: “defund the police” the right immediately started replying with “if we defund them, then there will be no police, what the left is advocating for is anarchy”

Like I said, we tried to really around “reform”, and if didn’t work. Defunding the police frees up that funding to put it into police alternatives.

Evidence: “trans women are women” the right immediately started replying with “yeah but they arent ‘real women’”

But…they’re wrong. Like, obviously wrong. How could you make the statement “trans women are women” more obvious? That’s as straightforward as it gets.

Evidence: “black lives matter” the right immediately started replying with “all lives matter” and were trying to accuse blacks of being racist to other ethnicities for not including them, which lead to “blue lives matter”.

I really don’t think this convinces anybody who isn’t already racist. We have so much video evidence of police killing unarmed black men. You just have to be willfully ignorant at this point.

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