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Calling someone a liberal is not the same as accusing them of acting in bad faith, of misrepresenting what they believe. If someone comes around talking about gassing the Jews, I'm going to call them a fascist and write them off as such, even if they deny the label, and hopefully you would too. Likewise, if someone says stuff that I perceive as liberalism, I'm going to call them a lib - but I'm not going to assume that they're paid actors in some secret conspiracy who don't really believe a word of what they're saying. Those aren't the same thing at all.
"Oh another dumb liberal"
"Liberal opinion disregarded"
Juxtapose the term liberal with tankie for a moment in usage alone.
If being called liberal is interpreted as above, it is likely those are the same sentiments expressed when calling someone or something tankie, no?
Yes. I don't know where the notion that tankies don't do that sort of thing comes from when they do it all the time in their own way. Sure, they're not accusing anyone of being a Liberal bot sent by Soros because it's absurd, but they approximate with what they can to discredit who they don't like. They're only human.
I got called a lib for saying that we don't have the progressive foundation necessary to elect a third party candidate to President, and that while I don't agree with the Democrats, Kamala was less bad than Trump.
That's far from the only time I was called a liberal (derogatory) by an .ml user despite not being a liberal, and not promoting liberal policies.
Did you respond to the wrong comment? At no point have I ever claimed that people on .ml don't call people libs, so your comment seems like a complete non sequitor.
I am not a liberal and communicated that fact. I was called a liberal anyway. That is an accusation of acting in bad faith.
No it isn't. We believe that you believe the things you say, we just classify those beliefs as liberalism. Richard Spencer says he's not a fascist while expressing beliefs that I would classify as fascism, so I call him a fascist. Everybody does that, as well they should, and I have never denied anyone doing this.
What we don't do is claim that you don't actually believe your stated positions at all and secretly believe something completely different and are doing some kind of elaborate coordinated psyop where you pretend to hold beliefs you don't. That is what's pretty much unique to liberals.
I know liberalism from leftism. You know nothing of my political beliefs, and yet you confidently say that they are liberalism. How would you know? Someone on .ml said I was so you assume they know my beliefs better than I do? You're either calling me a liar or an idiot.
You're trying to equate disagreeing on the definition of terms to accusing someone of being entirely disingenuous about what they believe. I do not make a distinction between someone who believes in unconditionally and indefinitely supporting the democratic party as a lesser evil and someone who believes in doing the same because they agree with what it stands for (since they are, for all practical purposes, the same thing), so based on your expressed beliefs which I accept that you genuinely hold, I consider you a liberal. That doesn't make you "a liar or an idiot" for disagreeing with that classification, it makes you someone who defines certain terms differently from me.
In the same way, as I said and as you've completely failed to acknowledge or address, if Richard Spencer tries to tell me he's not a fascist based on some distinction that I consider completely arbitrary, them I'm going to call him a fascist anyway (since he is, for all practical purposes, a fascist), as any reasonable person would.
Don't pretend that you don't understand the difference between that and accusing us of all being involved in some convoluted psyop conspiracy where we don't believe anything we say at all.
I didn't say that though. I said to support the Democratic party in 2024 because there was, at that time, no other viable electoral alternative to Trump, and Trump is worse for more people. You extrapolated that "unconditionally and indefinitely" from your own preconceptions. You do realize that that exactly is the problem we're talking about right?
It's not about whether you say the exact string of words "you're acting in bad faith", it's the presupposition that the person you're talking to doesn't know the meaning of the words they're using (or that your personal definition is fundamentally more valid), and the extrapolation of their own stated beliefs into the most uncharitable possible interpretation.
Oh, so you don't believe in supporting the democratic party unconditionally? What would it take for you to not support them? Say, for example, they were actively arming a genocide, would that do it?
Or you don't believe in supporting them indefinitely? How long then, should we continue supporting them unconditionally before we're allowed to try something different? Let me guess, at some vague, indefinite point in the future when conditions have changed (not by anyone defecting from the democrats to build an alternative, ofc, but when somehow a powerful enough third party emerges despite nobody voting for it).
You can play coy all you want but my assumptions are entirely reasonable based on what you've said.
Except what liberals do is not only "extrapolate our stated beliefs into uncharitable interpretations" they completely reject that we hold our stated beliefs at all and assign us completely different beliefs based on whatever they make up. These things are very obviously and categorically different.
It was the lesser of evils. Not voting for them lets even more bad stuff happen.
Whether it's right or wrong to support the democrats unconditionally and indefinitely is a seperate question from whether that's the position being described (which it is).
Personally, I would argue that it's an incredibly short-sighted, ineffective, and illogical tactic. It sacrifices every ounce of bargaining power before negotiations have even begun.
The "logic" of lesser-evilism is easily disproven. We are given $100 to split, I make an offer, you choose whether to accept or refuse, if you refuse, neither of us get anything. What value should you accept? According to lesser-evilism, you should accept even if I offer a $99-$1 split, because $1 is the lesser evil to $0. But if I know that you'll accept $1, that's all I'll ever offer you. In reality, when this experiment has been tried in practice, most people reject offers below about $30, and few people do the $99-$1 split because they know it'll get rejected. The "optimal" strategy of lesser-evilism only makes sense if the game is not repeated, otherwise, it makes much more sense to set an absolute minimum condition and reject any offers below that number.
The position that y'all argue for is accepting the $99-$1 split in a political context, of having no conditions, no negotiations, nothing. It's absurd! If we can present a credible threat that a critical mass of voters won't go along with a certain policy (like genocide), then the party will have no choice but to give it to us if it wants to remain relevant. And if it refuses anyway, then, conveniently, the same action let's us build up a third party towards potentially replacing them with someone more cooperative.
Lesser-evilism is presented as if it were obviously correct and indisputable. In reality, it is a specific tactic and one that has proven itself completely ineffective, and also doesn't hold up under scrutiny. It is a choice to subscribe to lesser-evilism, and at least in my view, the wrong choice.
Well, I'm not american, but their politics touch the rest of the world.
I think people should have voted democrat because people were offered the 99-1 split, refused to choose, and got nothing.
Don't get me wrong, what the u.s is funding is abhorrent, but under trump its going to be worse.
If both sides are fundamentally unacceptable, then the only thing that matters is changing the fundamental situation. And the most effective means of doing that is demonstrating a credible threat that we won't just fall in line behind a 99-1 split. Building power in this way is more important than getting one genocidaire elected over the other, because it is only through building power that we have a chance of having an option that isn't a genocidaire.
The left (or what pitiful excuse for the left we have in the US) has been following this inane strategy of lesser-evilism for decades now, and it's a large part of the reason things have gotten this bad in the first place. Even if we could've elected a democrat, the underlying conditions that gave rise to Trump and that are feeding fascism will never be addressed by the democratic party, especially if people refuse to apply genuine pressure to them. As long as those conditions are not fixed, we will keep getting Trumps and people worse than Trump.
I really wish we had some way of getting Ranked Choice voting, or people who gave a shit about politics.
The system is the way it is by design. They want to force us into a position where we have to chose the lesser evil. The democrats have even funded far-right republican candidates in order to put voters into a position where they have no choice but to vote for them to stop them - the same "pied piper" strategy that Clinton used with Trump.
Ranked choice voting is kind of a catch-22. Neither major party supports it, so unless a third party candidate wins, then we can't get it (at least on a large scale) - but the fact that we don't have it makes it much more difficult for third party candidates to win. And even if we got it, there's still things like gerrymandering, the electoral college, and Citizen's United, which essentially allows unlimited spending on campaigns, that make our elections undemocratic.
That's why I consider simply accepting the choices we're presented with an unacceptable, losing proposition. There are certain demands that must be met, for the sake of the survival of the planet, the defeat of the far-right, and the end of the ongoing genocide. The framework we're presented with and told is the only way, tells us that these changes are impossible. It's an unstoppable force against an immovable object, except, the unstoppable force is actually unstoppable, because it is governed by the laws of nature, while the "immovable object" is just a system of arbitrary rules made up by human beings.
Such systems have given way in the past. If they didn't we would still be living under monarchy. In the times of kings, we did not even have the incredibly flawed form of "democracy" we have now to exert influence over what happens, and yet, the people exerted the necessary influence to achieve change. In the same way, when our so-called "democratic" systems cannot address the many different crises we are facing, we must look to more fundamental ways of exerting force through collective action.
There is no one "magic bullet" solution, but if we can identify the things that absolutely must be done then we can start looking through the full toolbox for what means might be used to achieve them. However, if we set out goals and priorities based on what the system tells us is possible, then we are putting those human laws above natural, physical laws - which is insanity.
If there was a party that didn't want to arm that genocide poised to potentially get enough votes to win, I would vote for them. In reality, unfortunately there were only two parties poised to get enough votes to win, and both aimed to actively arm the same genocide. So, I voted for the one less likely to disappear critics of that genocide, or push to raze Gaza to put up a resort with their name on it. I wish that I had a better option, but we can only pay the hand we're dealt, so I promoted lesser evil.
Right up until the exact moment there's a better alternative with enough support to win. I thought I made that clear.
Again, this is exactly what people are talking about. You misinterpreted exactly one political stance and now you've justified your prejudices to yourself, and I can be tossed into the "lib" bin to be discarded.
The irony is palpable.
So you won't put a single concrete condition on your support and you won't give a time or plan of action that will ever lead to you not supporting them. "Until a third party (somehow) emerges as viable" you say while not giving them the support they would need to work towards that point and arguing against those who do. That is indefinite, unconditional support, objectively.
I see no reason to entertain your arbitrary distinction that if you had a magical genie at your disposal the things you would wish for would be different from the people you believe in supporting unconditionally and indefinitely. No more than I would entertain Richard Spencer's arbitrary distinction about how he's totally not a fascist.
At no point have I accused you of not believing the things you say. So no, there is no "irony." You think that just because you want different things from liberals, it makes you different from them; I think that because you act exactly like a liberal in practice, that makes you a liberal. It's a difference on how we define the term, whether it is based on ideas or on actions.
Did you not read what I wrote? I just did exactly that. As soon as there is a better viable alternative, I'm jumping ship immediately. The condition on my support is them being the least bad choice with enough support to win. When that condition is no longer satisfied, my support ends. The plan of action is promoting leftist candidates through local to state offices so they can generate the support to be a less bad choice that could actually win. I can't personally make that happen by myself, so I can't give you a timeframe.
You know nothing about me. I support them every single time their campaign is viable.
Because it's pointless and inflammatory. You seem to keep bringing up the fact that you can identify one specific closeted fascist in an attempt to either 1) extrapolate that ability to identify ideologues to justify your ideological speculation of me or 2) equate me with a fascist because... what exactly? Some people disagree with other people's interpretation of their beliefs, and one of those people is a fascist, so because I disagree with your interpretation of my beliefs I'm just like them? I didn't respond because it's rhetorically lazy and logically bankrupt.
This circular, dead end argumentation is, again, the reason the rest of us get annoyed with you all. You're claiming not to do the exact prejudiced, echo chamber, stereotypical behavior that you go on to precisely exemplify. Why would anyone take this laziness seriously? The "Russian bot" thing is a charitable interpretation. Surely, our staunchest champions of pure leftism can't possibly be this obtuse, this has to be some kind of psyop to plunge the West into authoritarianism by fracturing the left.
Just like Richard Spencer denies being a fascist, you may deny being an unwitting accessory to the deliberate disorganization of the left, but that is an arbitrary distinction. In practice, you are helping to undermine leftist unity with emotionally charged splintering. I'm not accusing you of not believing what you say, but what you believe fits the definition of "malicious psyop".
That's not a condition. A condition is a definite, red line, that if they cross it you won't support it. Saying, "As long as they're the lesser evil" means that there is literally no limit on how evil the could be and still win your support.
They don't reach the point of being viable unless people support them even when they aren't viable yet.
What the hell are you talking about? That is extremely not the point and nothing I said suggested that at all.
No, it has nothing to do with "my" ability to identify ideologues, it's about the validity of assigning labels to people even if the person rejects the label. You're acting as if that's somehow "bad faith" but obviously, everyone does it and it can be good to do it, at the very least when it comes to an example like Spencer.
There's no "circular, dead end argumentation" other than your ridiculous and completely ungrounded and unhinged interpretation of my argument.
Ah yes, true "left" unity is when you accuse anyone who won't fall in line behind liberalism (or attempts to impose a single condition on that support, including "don't do genocide") of being a malicious psyop. That's cool and all, but wouldn't "liberal unity" be more accurate, since that's the defining aspect?
With no alternative? Uh, yeah. Republicans are literal fascists now. Being less bad is better than nothing until a leftist is polling 70-80 million votes. This "red line" nonsense is strategically stupid and, in practice, identical to someone intentionally trying to fracture the left.
They reach the point of being viable by running for city council, using that experience to fuel a run for mayor, state senator, governor, congressperson, and then go for president. I vote the most progressive person on every ballot I get; until I get to close races between liberals and fascists, in which case I will ignore any third parties and vote lib over fasc
If you and the person you're assigning labels to disagree, and you determine your assignments to be more valid than theirs, that is definitively based on your ability to identify ideologues.
It's strategically the only approach that makes any logical sense whatsoever. The ideology of lesser-evilism is completely incoherent and illogical, it sacrifices every ounce of bargaining power you might have yielded completely unnecessarily.
Completely insane perspective. "Anyone who advocates actually effective tactics is intentionally trying to fracture the left." No wonder the left is so powerless.
"Unity" around ineffective tactics, I really think you should consider calling that "liberal unity."
That's not the point of the example. I didn't bring up Richard Spencer for some dumbass nonsense like, "see how good I am at identifying ideologues, this proves how smart I am," I presented the example because he is someone who anyone should obviously be able to, and more importantly, willing to assign the label fascist to regardless of the fact that he rejects it. Therefore, you cannot oppose the idea of assigning labels to people that they reject on principle, though you may argue that it's only valid in certain situations.
Yeah no, you've got that 100% exactly wrong. Red line makes zero strategic sense, it's childish and simple minded. It's statements like that which make you look like you're trying to make leftists look bad and ensure that they lose. You're living in a bizarro world echo chamber.
Ftfy
Correct. The fact that you can identify one fascist does not validate all your label assignments. Your conclusions are not valid.
I explain the logic here. But like most things that are true, there are many different ways to demonstrate it's true, so here's another:
Notice how the Republicans don't do that shit and keep winning? How decades of unconditional "lesser evilism" has resulted in more and more rightward shift, until we've arrived at the point where doing literally any good thing is "woke?"
Democratic voters are so fucking stupid in terms of strategy. It's the only thing Republicans have figured out. It turns out, pushing for the things you actually want and throwing a fit whenever you don't get your way makes them more likely to happen. Somehow, the libs have convinced themselves that the way to get what they want is to support things they don't want and then have the people who don't listen to them compromise away any semblance of progressivism in the name of cooperating with people who hate them. And the repeated, obvious failure of this strategy does absolutely nothing to persuade them, because they believe so strongly that it's just an inherent absolute truth to them. No amount of failure, no amount of time, no matter how bad it gets, they just fundamentally refuse to learn any lesson - even when it reaches the point of supporting literal genocide!
The Republican party falls in line behind their voters because they know that they're "unreasonable," that if they get pissed off and don't get their way, they'll vote third party. But the left has virtually no power over the democratic party, because they're all so fucking "reasonable" that they know that at the end of the day, they'll just fall in line. It's so idiotic it's difficult to understand how anyone could genuinely think this unconditional, indefinite support of a shit party that isn't in line with what we want is somehow an effective strategy - let alone such and effective strategy that nobody reasonable could ever question it and that anyone who does is "just trying to make the left lose."
You are fully cooked, way too deep into the ruling class's ideology to be reasoned with.
As I said repeatedly, not the point.
Yes, and it is deeply flawed logic because it rests on an analogy which is fundamentally unrelated to electoral strategy. There is no "refuse and both parties get nothing" mechanism in elections. You have a choice between a 99-1 split and a 100-0 split, and rejecting the 99-1 split guarantees you the 100-0. They don't start the election over with new candidates and policies because you didn't like the options. One party wins despite your efforts. The election is the worst possible time to try to negotiate, when greater evil has so much support.
Are you high? They absolutely constantly do exactly that which is exactly why they win. I can't even count the number of people I know personally who hated Trump, but voted for him anyway because they viewed the Democrats as the greater evil. Republicans don't fool around with red lines, they dutifully act in lockstep to secure wins. Your claims to the contrary betray a terminally online isolation from reality.
The left has been shouting about red lines for decades, and I don't see a single positive outcome. You should definitely align with Democrats, you share an obsession with avoiding hard choices so strong that it prevents you from actually accomplishing anything you claim to want to do.
Lmao! That's literally exactly how my example works. You chose between $1 and $0.
Really? The libertarian party generally gets triple the votes of the greens, the biggest third party candidate in history, Ross Perot, primarily siphoned votes from the right, Trump in 2016, despite being the last candidate the establishment wanted, got the nomination after making a credible threat to run third party, and if you spend any time around actual Republicans, you'll hear them complaining about "RINOs" who don't meet their standards, and nobody goes around in Republican circles being like, "Yeah this guy doesn't support our views on guns or abortion, but you have to vote for him or the democrats will win!" That whiny nerd shit would get you bullied.
They absolutely, constantly use red lines and purity tests, and they've red lined and purity tested all the way to overturning Roe V Wade. That would never have happened if they were constantly compromising.
The "moderates" might fall in line, sure. The problem is that the left is full of those kinds of "moderates," while on the right they're only a fraction of the base. They "fell in line" behind what the radicals of their party pushed for, just like how liberals like you would fall in line if we ever got a significantly strong radical left to push for left wing candidates. That is very different from the radicals falling in line behind the moderates.
This is completely delusional and reflects your own "terminally online isolation." There are far more Republicans who won't fall in line behind "RINOs" than the equivalent on the left - and there are vastly fewer people on the right who would waggle their finger at anyone making demands of the Republican party and insist that anyone who doesn't immediately fall in line unconditionally is "just trying to make the right lose," that anyone who sticks to their guns on abortion or, uh, guns, "isn't a real right-winger."
No it fucking hasn't! When? Who? The left always falls in line. Every time. It's just that every time anyone anywhere makes even the smallest demand, everyone loses their mind over it because liberals (like you) are so preoccupied about how everyone always needs to fall in line unconditionally forever. Meanwhile, the right does that shit all the time and nobody considers it anywhere near as big of a deal because it's just accepted.
No, it isn't. Your example falls apart without the "refuse and no one gets anything" part. Unsurprisingly, when you change a major component of a scenario, the strategy best suited to the scenario often changes. Your solution to the scenario is to refuse, because the scenario you devised specifically assigns a significant outcome to refusal. Elections lack that outcome, refusal has no significant outcome.
It's like test taking strategies. Some tests penalize incorrect answers, some do not. Guessing is a logical strategy on tests that do not penalize incorrect answers, and an illogical one on tests that do. You are suggesting a strategy which is useful in the contrived scenario you suggested, but that scenario you suggested is so fundamentally different from the actual real life scenario of elections that the strategy is not only useless, but counter productive.
So? Come election day they vote for them anyway. That's exactly my point. They got their representatives in, and pushed farther right.
But I don't feel like wasting any more time with a hypocrite who doesn't know the difference between effective praxis and liberalism. As you keep saying, it is valid to brand someone with a label when they meet the requirements, even if they disagree. You are, thus, definitively an accessory to left-fracturing propaganda. Assuming you aren't a deliberate bad actor, I hope you eventually come to your senses. Otherwise we're doomed to the fascism you insist on helping to cement.
Republicans winning is the "no one gets anything" outcome of a breakdown of negotiations between the democratic party and their voters. So the example holds.
I like how you completely ignored all my actual examples and focused on the one thing I said that wasn't hard evidence, and just baselessly asserted the nonsense that "Republicans fall in line" without a single shred of evidence to back it up. It is unfalsifiable orthodoxy, assumed with no regard for how reality actually works, just like the unfalsifiable orthodoxy of lesser-evilism. Nothing you say is ever actually backed up by the facts, you're just regurgitating the "conventional wisdom" that the ruling class told you to get you to fall in line and not cause any trouble by doing things that are actually effective.
Again, completely useless pawn seeped in bourgeois ideology, a pure liberal through and through, completely and totally cooked. Your utter uselessness and fecklessness is the reason we're unable to change the conditions that are giving rise to fascism.
Oh hey, proving my original point.