Political Memes

"Liberal" and "libertarian" both derive from liber "free, unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious." In much of Europe today, "liberal" is associated with free markets, which is associated with conservatism. It can be very confusing, and so I've stopped using the term "liberal" as the general term.

As a technical term, when you're talking among educated people, you can use "liberal," but for a general non-technical sense, I've started using "progressive" to describe myself lately. Another good word is "left" or "left wing", but I think progressive catches the essence of the idea better.

I think unrestricted freedom is sort of a nutty idea, and so the original sense of the root word matches the nutty libertarians better, anyways.

Awesome crop

Great message, but the cropping of this image is frustrating and offensive.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/eleanor-roosevelt-quote-liberal/

The problem folks ignore, is that Liberals gave Nazis power.

The reason we hate modern Neoliberals is precisely because they historically are the firsts to give maniacs power.

Now, how are your deathcamps going?

— 🏴️‍🅰️

"Liberal" today is about the free flow of money from the masses to the rich, while avoiding the tax man.

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

• Frank Wilhoit, American Composer, ca. 2018

Your husband threw 100,000 Americans in concentration camps, Eleanor.

"liberal" capitalism? gross

liberal socialism? based

Wtf is with it being a cutoff screenshot?

How about, democratic socialist? Or progressive. If more people bothered to learn what any of that meant I think they would find themselves aligning more with that.