What Non-Liberals Dislike About Liberalism (restored)

Ironic huh?

♪♫ it’s like ra-a-a-a-a-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-a-a-a-a-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-n… ♪♫

Yes, your ‘requests’ are personal appeals, while mine are ultimatums, despite the fact that neither of us can enforce any such ‘request’. When I say to someone that they shouldn’t post the nonsense they do, I’m wrong, but when you say to someone that they shouldn’t post the nonsense they do, then you’re right, despite the fact that both of us presume to judge what the others are saying, and neither of us has any authority to prevent others from posting. Forgive me if I don’t find the distinction very firmly rooted in anything at all, except perhaps personal taste or bias.

I’d say ‘fuck off, now’, but of course you don’t have to fuck off at all!

I’m asking you to stop doing what you’re doing, you’re disagreeing, whatever. We (I think) agree that we’re free to keep asking each other to do whatever we want, no matter how futile it feels! We’ve got common ground!

But you were asking Sharpe to police this thread on your behalf. That’s the distinction I’m making.

I don’t see any distinction. I asked Sharpe to police the thread on his behalf, and declined his kind offer to make a thread to send me to. If the purpose of this thread is to educate people on valid criticisms of liberalism, then it ought to contain valid criticisms of liberalism, not the sort of trite nonsense you can find literally everywhere. If instead that’s what it contains, then it isn’t suiting the purpose of the thread, and someone ought to say so. How not?

Scott, your replies would make more sense in a thread entitled “What is wrong with Liberalism?” or something along those lines. If you aren’t in this thread to learn something about why non-liberals dislike liberalism, then you don’t really need to be in this thread. People who are not liberals often have opinions about why they do not identify as liberals and what about liberalism they don’t identify with (or don’t like). Telling them that those opinions don’t reflect true liberalism might be interesting, but it isn’t the point of this thread, so if you need to do it, copy/paste the stuff from here that you think is false or misleading into a new thread and argue with it there.

Here, we liberals should all try to either shut up or ask questions of the people who are telling us their opinions. Like, “why do you think that this thing you dislike about Liberalism is so bad given X, Y, or Z?” Or even, “How do you believe A and B when they seem to be contradictory?” I think I also crossed the line a few times upthread, but your posts have basically killed what could otherwise be an interesting thread.

I think I’ve communicated a willingness to rein it in a bit, in exchange for some acknowledgement that this thread isn’t supposed to be just a ‘safe space’ to spout false or silly statements about liberals. If I haven’t communicated it before, then I do explicitly now. But acknowledgement of that intent implies some kind of policing, else it will become exactly that; which, in fact, it already did. I don’t have to be the one to say ‘well, that’s a strawman’, but someone does. I don’t have to be the one to say ‘give an example of that criticism’, but someone does. Otherwise it’s just more rightist shit going unchallenged on the Internet, and fuck that.

If, on the other hand, it’s supposed to be a safe space for people on the right to bash liberalism with false claims about it, then say that explicitly.

No, no one has to do that in this thread. Whether it is a strawman or not, whether there are valid examples or not, the explanation is still a reason why a person dislikes Liberalism. There is no need to harangue people sharing their opinions just because those opinions are based on false narratives or cognitive biases or whatever other stuff. This thread was explicitly intended as a safe space for people to share their opinions. As others have noted, you are providing performance art for the thread’s title.

If the thread was entitled, “What non-binary gendered people dislike about the male and female genders” would you come in here to tell them that the things they are referring to aren’t really what gender is or what male is or are stereotypes with no solid evidence or whatever?

(Edit: holy cow, after a few moments of proofreading my post (after posting it) the link preview suddenly reformatted to Mike Pence filling the screen. If that’s not limited to a formatting bug on my side, someone let me know and I’ll try to edit the link or something so it doens’t do that. Yikes.)

I’ll take another stab at making an on-topic post. I can’t remember if this piece was referenced earlier in this thread, or if it was somewhere else around P&R recently, but of course it’s a pretty popular piece that has been cited a lot since it was published a year ago.

It’s tricky. I mean, look at something like what’s happening at the borders around immigration right now. Two people with political views about how immigration should be regulated that are at opposite ends of the spectrum should still be able to look at the situation of families being separated and children mistreated and say “okay, this, right now, this is wrong and needs to be stopped”. If you’re exhausted from trying to tell someone that we need to address the treatment of families right now and they’re trying to talk abstractly about what the policy should be, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people” is a pretty good response.

But I resent the adoption of this as a catch-all response to any disagreement. It’s dishonest and pretty much shuts down the conversation with smug self-righteousness. From the piece itself:

Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

So there we go. If you disagree with a minimum wage hike, you don’t care about people. No room to disagree about economics, no room to disagree about other ways to address poverty. If you don’t agree with me about minimum wage, it’s because you don’t care about people, you don’t have the “basic human emotion of empathy” to again quote the article.

The sentiment obviously gets thrown around in the healthcare debate a lot too, if you’re not in support of the ACA you’re a monster who’s cheering for cancer, etc.

Anyone could put forth this argument, it’s not by nature something only a liberal could invoke. It would fit a pro-life stance against abortion like a glove, for example. But every time I see it it’s in defense of a government answer to a societal problem in which there will be no entertaining the idea that the government’s role could be different in addressing it.

I don’t know how to explain to you that disagreement about the role of the government in solving what we may agree is a very real problem is not indicative of a lack of empathy on my part just isn’t as catchy though.

Just ignore whatever scott posts in this thread. He’s openly refused to stay on topic as requested by the OP and others. His goal is to prevent discourse with which he disagrees. The only way to beat him is to ignore him.

Was there some sudden shortage of such spaces on the internet? Fuck me!

I don’t know that it’s a safe space per se, but jumping in and saying why conservatives are terrible (and then that conservatives don’t exist or whatever) non-stop isn’t what the thread is about. There is a whole “what is bad about conservatism” thread after all.

I also dislike this about liberals in a broad sense (though I am not a non-liberal!). There are far too many times that policy-du-jour is conflated with actual values like “you should care about other people.” There’s even a term for it! Surrogation - people becoming fixated on the measure and then replacing the actual goals with the measure itself.

That said, I do wish that this: “If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am” was more of a strawman than it seems to be. In other words, I wish that the response to “we need to raise minimum wages so that people making our food can afford to eat” was more often, “it would be more effective to do X so that people making our food can afford to eat,” and less often, “if the market doesn’t want to pay them more, they don’t deserve more, so stop boycotting or striking to enforce your views.”

I’m pretty sure I was responding to your own claim about conservatism. You’re saying that claims about conservatism belong in this thread, but responses to claims about conservatism don’t belong in this thread. This one. The one about liberals. I’m confused.

Which I’m fairly sure was a response to you talking about conservatism.

Whatever. I’m more than willing to have discussions about the pros and cons of conservatism. There is a thread explicitly for it. This the the mirror of that thread created because of the conservative one.

At this point both threads have merged into some sort of silly conglomeration of both threads where every time someone points out a thing they dislike about one thing, someone else jumps in with something they dislike about the other thing.

I’m just saying: lets keep the threads on topic. If you want to call out conservatism, do it in the thread about that and vice versa. There will be some overlap because of the nature of the thing, but changing this thread into the other one and then see-sawing back and forth between the two is just confusing and prevents actual discussion and leads to a bunch of whataboutism of whichever side a person disagrees with more often than not.

I don’t want to change this one to that or vice versa. I just want this one to be meaningful. That’s all.

Maybe we can find things where we all agree, like.

There are two genders, male and female.

We are all equal in rights, but different physically.

Every person can be racist.

Countries need to defend themselves. Sometimes with the use of violence.

I agree with most of that (room enough for interpretation on the last point that I’m a little hesitant to say I completely agree), but I can go ahead and tell you right now not everyone is going to agree with you on genders or defending countries with violence. And if we look long enough I’m sure we can find someone to disagree with you on the rest of them too.

I couldn’t have said it better.