• boonhet@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    Liberal in modern western political discourse has little to do with capitalism anymore and more about your stance on social issues like LGBT rights, racial equality or healthcare. Half of lemmy pretends not to understand it for some reason but it’s been like that for a few decades.

    It’s the result of conservatives using “libtard” and “communist” interchangeably for everyone to the left of Reagan while by the old definition they’re actually liberals.

    Languages evolve. Prescriptivism is useless.

    • Cris_Citrus (he/him <3)@piefed.zip
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      3 days ago

      While I usually find myself agreeing that linguistic prescriptivism is useless (it is), that generally applies less to terms that have technical or academic meaning, and just lumping progressive and liberal into meaning the same thing completely takes away our ability to discuss one of two dominant political ideologies in the united states

      People regularly conflating things doesnt mean we should all just conflate things because thats what they now mean, thats a horrible way to apply the idea of linguistic descriptivism 😅

      People on lemmy use the term liberal to mean liberal and not progressive because half the conversations here are completely impossible sans language for the dominant “progressive” political ideology in the US that embraces capitalism and superficially supports minority interests.

      • boonhet@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        This whole liberal vs conservative discussion IS an American issue and one they’ve exported to Europe unfortunately. Liberal hasn’t meant what you think it means in over 10 years except in circlejerks and academia

        • 挂路灯人@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          A quick hop and a skip from US-centrism to Euro-centrism doesn’t really salvage the fact that liberal is still widely used around the world to describe those who adhere to liberalism, the hegemonic political-economic ideology of the west.

      • boonhet@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        And when your kind says the things your kind often says, I think you can see why more moderate people consider you about equivalent with the nazis. What to most people means “doesn’t hate minorities and wants everyone to have healthcare” is what tankies seem to hate much more than they hate actual fascists.

        Horseshoe seems pretty real tbh.

        • Tomorrow_Farewell@lemmy.ml
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          18 hours ago

          Let’s get this straight: because communists use the term “libera” l correctly and offend the sensibilities of those for whom the word means “somebody who doesn’t hate minorities”, communists are somehow as bad as fascists?

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      Positions do matter, the fact that both conservatives and liberals are economically liberal does not mean liberalism has ceased to exist as a philosophy in the US.