My guy, you’re the anti-intellectual person here. I’ve been nice and here you are getting to extreme levels of arrogance.
Could you tell us all how you learned about what these words mean? Have you gone to university for it? Are there any professional educators you follow that offer free courses or lessons? Could you name any books you’ve learned from? You mentioned looking it up earlier, where?
Compadre, I don’t know how you could think someone would spend that much time trying to explain something to you and be completely faking.
Yes, that is what it is. It is not my definition, it’s how the people who study these topics professionally use the terms. You can take your time to live with it.
Okay, what you’re misunderstanding is that what a political or social philosophy is differs from how it is colloquially referred to. It does not mean, “a person who values people” and if you knew the history of this brutal system you’d see just how insidious such an assertion is. Yes, “liberal” is an abused term in NA as it benefits liberalism (yes, capitalism is liberalism and vice versa) through the occlusion of any alternative way to understand the world. When they say that liberals are radical socialists, they are purposefully misrepresenting what socialism and social justice is. They are not talking about liberalism when they use it that way. Liberalism is fundamentally an individualist way to understand the world that emerged through the processes of European imperialism and settler-colonialism after the sixteenth century (but we really consider it recognizable once they start talking about republics and individual liberties at the turn of the nineteenth century. You’ll see why in a moment). Private property is at the center of its way of organizing and the value of individual human bodies (not beings) is built not despite of that but to facilitate it. Racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are all systemic constructions that emerged to devalue human bodies relative to their position in the hierarchy and consequently the form of exploitation they experienced in the service of white-settler-colonial reproduction. (i.e. Slavery preexisted chattel slavery and racialization. Chattel slavery was made possible through the naturalization of an othered group as deserving of generational forced labour, and so racialization emerged as a means of rationalizing that violence).
“Capitalism” refers to a social order wherein capital is the primary organizing principle in society, which is to say individual pursuit of capital. It is described economically by its imperatives of profit maximization and infinite growth, both hallmarks of colonial perceptions of land and bodies as commodities. It is the economic system that settler-colonial countries grew into because it is already consistent with how they viewed the world.
Liberalism’s appropriation of “progress” and civil rights (“equality”) is how this social order effectively responded to challenge of the hierarchy. The narrative that people “earn” their rights through civil disobedience presupposes that what we imagine to be rights is in fact an absolute truth that we either restrict or permit access to. Conveniently, those rights are legally constructed in terms of pursuit of capital and private property as a metric of human fulfillment. The black Civil Rights movements of the mid-twentieth century is imagined to end when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968, which intentionally secures the state’s authority over the determination of inequality and redirects challenges to racism into the legal framework of the state. When Black Liberationist militant groups persisted, you get the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex (which is itself enabled through the legal end of slavery that still permitted forced labour of prisoners). There are many other examples of how this works, but slavery and racism tend to be very clear demonstrations. Message me if you want a reading list.
What you have done here is made the understandable mistake of assuming how the words are used is exactly what they mean, and yes language is fluid which is why they push these misuses in the first place. Make no mistake though, these are not distinct ways of organizing society, they are cooperative in their endeavour to reduce the living world to property. When you see this, liberal inaction at climate change is not only comprehensible, but expected.
What exactly do you think liberalism is?
We really have to start talking about the reality that capitalists will never concede or negotiate. The more real this becomes, the more the privleged people will convince themselves that it is too late to change and therefore it is a fight for survival. Settler-colonialism and imperialism are are very good at generating rationalities for brutal violence and genocidal narratives have emerged from far less dire circumstances. You think it’s a coincidence that doomer narratives appeared in the metropole once the effects of climate change became undeniable?
Climate change mitigation is a death threat to capitalism. There is no world where they coexist as a capitalist system will never accept the material constraints of our world and will seek to dominate any alternative in its imperative for infinite growth. Liberals will always choose a dead world over a living one because their entire way of life needs to construct the world as an object to extract from. When they lie and say they want change, they hope that it will buy them enough time for the genocide to be acceptable in metropole.
That was a major motivator behind my switch. If I had to fiddle anyway, might as well use something where the fiddling has more payoff. Also don’t want to whack-a-mole AI surveillance from a company close with the fascist regime.
I’m honestly more concerned with them misrepresenting its ease of use than anything else. I ran into a lot of guides and videos that wanted to make it seem more aporoachable so as to not discourage potential users that significantly downplayed the amount of extra work it would take to use Linux. Bash is typically sidelined if they’re promoting Mint or Zorin for example. I study humanities, but I have a good amount of experience with terminals and so learning a new CLI wasn’t s big deal, but I know that’d be a deal breaker for a lot of new users who would likely feel bamboozled by the insistance that it’s “just like Windows.”
Yes, I know there are queer people and women on Linux, it wouldn’t exist otherwise. Their use of it doesn’t explain why it’s so prominent on Lemmy though. Most evangelists are STEM men and I used the word “libertarian” very intentionally as most also would not consider the surveillance bad because of its danger to vulnerable groups but rather because of a discomfort with any challenge to private ownership. I do agree with them that the user experience is significantly better on Linux and that alone is a good reason to switch.
I agree, the ability to better control my visibility to an increasingly fascist state is a major benefit of Linux. With that in mind, I think it is very important for antifascists to practice internet sovereignty and build infrastructure that exists independently from the interests of capital.
Who doesn’t use guns, exactly?
I reckon a result of its reputation as an alternative to “mainstream” sites like Reddit, which is also a STEM-oriented gamer-nerd site disproportionately represented by men. So, tons of dudes on here use Linux professionally and are also of a libertarian mindset that is conducive to Linux evangelism on the basis of an ever-encroaching capitalist authoritarianism. edit: Also adding that I’m sure age is a factor in both the decision to leave other social media sites and a particular intolerance for the surveillant, bloated state of consumer PC’s at this point.
They’re not wrong, Linux is honestly the best route to a decent desktop experience now that Windows is caught in an AI deathloop and the Linux community is expansive enough to support casual users (I don’t care about Apple stuff, but the cost would detract from the experience certainly). I made the switch when it got to the point that Windows literally took more work to use on a daily basis because of how hostile it has become to the user.
Bullets are cheap y’all.
Another good thing to point out. If you have the time to interact with those communities, it’s demonstrably populated primarily by bot-like content. Even more, moderation tends to be more opaque and aggressive against leftist comments or posts.
You sound so desperate for me to not block you dude.
Very important to point out with this that Reddit has gotten markedly more fascist in these past three years – which is saying something – even while there is inexplicably a large number of people who call it “left-leaning” on the platform itself. It is safe to say that a high amount of “user”-content is bots of some kind, and that platforms that have high numbers of bots tend to become more conservative and fascist.
“… I don’t feel superior to anyone… . … evoked some feeling of shame from you isn’t my problem.” You can’t even pretend to be an honest person without trying to suggest other people are less morally pure than you. This is not a simple life, it is a dishonest one. I will not be responding again, obviously. There’s no conversing with people who lie to themselves.
It’s difficult to read this and not feel less empathetic toward you. Such desperation to feel superior without any clear indication that you are invested in actually embodying a set of morals yourself.
If you care, you should take the time to explore inconvenient explanations for why this happens and refuse satisfaction with actionless answers.
This is a good question to ask. This person is not very critical of what they’ve said and is clearly satisfied with liberal (as in liberalism) explanations for people’s behaviour.
Their point is that people are just fundamentally bad and that is why these companies make profit despite an apparently universal condemnation of their actions. It’s shallow, inaccurate, and is only useful to feel morally superior to some imagined decadent group that they believe is the source of this problem.
I think it’s a bit self-indulgent to consider that this is big-brained or world-shattering to people. You’re just repeating the dominant explanation for why these companies can make profit despite their immorality, it isn’t challenging or new.
It’s important to make a distinction between liberals who strive for moral purity through performativity, and people who value human life by recognizing the inequalities in labour and material security under capitalism. Narratives that reproduce the idea that people are just fundamentally impure and can’t stick to their values only strengthens liberalism’s claim to morality.
Did you seriously not read my explanation and then called it disingenuous? That’s in there.