I assumed it was just “hire more LGBTQIA+ prison guards!” so-true

It’s worse than that. What I’ve seen recently because of federation is “(verbal performative) support for disadvantaged people as long as they maintain a successful small business in a disadvantaged area for no less than three years and aren’t anywhere to the left of Bernie Sanders!”

maybe-later-honey 🍷 🍷 maybe-later-kiddo

  • DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    50·
    1 year ago

    I haven’t read all the replies yet, but this misunderstanding over the term “liberal” has come up many times now since federation. I would highly recommend reading through this other thread which gets into it with quite a lot of detail and history: https://hexbear.net/comment/3731464

    In yet another case where this confusion happened, I wrote a brief explanation. I’ll paste it again because why the hell not.

    Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.

    When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.

    Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.