I gave you one. “Liberals” support capitalism, but in America specifically “liberal” also implies that they trend toward supporting more safety nets than “conservatives” and being more “left wing on cultural issues,” but neither of those is consistent and it’s a spectrum. The main uniting trait of “liberals” in the world is support for capitalism.
*PS I have a meeting in 5 minutes so I can’t continue this
I have no idea what response you were looking for, sorry
There’s no clear dividing line, it’s a continuous spectrum. Many American liberals look center-right to non-Americans.
Here, I grabbed one for you, full of sus-looking comments. Just pick one and I’ll ask the user what their sincere thoughts are. It’s a thread from three days ago about trump’s mugshot. https://hexbear.net/post/422814?scrollToComments=false
defederated
Go to the actual URL, hexbear.net
Ick
You’re reaching for some “fascists always pretend to be joking until they’re not” thing, but the Hexbear community originally formed around a deeply irony poisoned socialist comedy podcast called Chapo Trap House, and hexbears themselves are unsurprisingly also very irony poisoned. On top of that they were an insular unfederated community for three years, with no reason to make their banter intelligible to outsiders. They have a rich set of in-jokes and an emoji list a mile long. Your exposure to them is probably one thread where you argued with them and ten threads of lemmy.world users making shit up about them in absentia.
comments from Hexbears supporting DJT
show me one
*make sure it’s sincere though, because I’m gonna go over there and ask the user what they think of donald trump and why
Most American conservative voters also support some form of social welfare. Something like 70% of Americans support singlepayer healthcare.
My definition mentioned support for capitalism.
in America, “liberal” also usually implies “left-wing on cultural issues,” which excludes Trump — but like I said American liberals are a large group and aren’t always consistent on cultural issues. I’m also necessarily being kinda reductionist because political labels are pretty messy and hard to pin down. I chose to reduce it in a way that highlights the main disagreement between leftists and American liberals because I think that’s the most clarifying.
*I have pictures, mentioning this at the top because apparently no one reads this comment
I’m not the person you replied to earlier. I don’t know how the Soviets factor into this, and I don’t think it’s necessarily ideological to mention a concrete detail about an event. Established, western, non-communist, non-china-supporting media sources covered the protests in person for months, and their reports and pictures show a spread of perspectives among the protesters. Deng Xiaoping’s government had detractors from multiple directions.
Hexbear users can be obnoxious, but they’re not “pedo right wing shit heads.” Ask them what they think about pedos and right wingers.
To clarify my tone, I’m not some scoffing, irony-poisoned debatelord, and when I say “it’s wild” I’m not rolling my eyes sarcastically, I’m genuinely surprised to see this shit.
There were multiple perspectives represented among the protesters. Some waved slogans for democracy, others had framed paintings of Mao Zedong. The protests went on for months and were not a unified, centrally organized affair.
This is just not true lol
Go ask them for their opinions about Russia and China. You’ll get unanimous agreement that Putin is a homophobic capitalist reactionary and Russia is not a socialist or left-wing state. For China, you’ll get disagreements, but most of the takes will be pretty nuanced either way. Some believe Deng’s reforms were necessary to avoid economic strangulation, others are deeply suspicious of the direction China is headed.
only a small minority of hexbears are fascists, but almost all hexbears tolerate fascists
A huge portion of hexbear users are trans or otherwise LGBTQ. Ask them what they think fascists want to do to them. Fascists also massacre socialists — often with American support, as in Indonesia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, and Bolivia. Ask them how they feel about this. Hexbear users do hold some complex views on topics like China and Russia, but they have reasons for this and would tell you if you asked. You should consider talking to them, instead of making things up about them in an authoritative tone of voice. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a hexbear user who doesn’t want Trump dead or in jail.
is Cuba a far-right regime? They just passed the most comprehensive pro-LGBTQ legislation package on the planet.
in most of the world, “leftist” implies that you are anti-capitalist, while “liberal” implies that you support capitalism. Leftists believe workers should control production, while liberals believe owners should control production. Liberals might be “left wing on cultural issues” but it’s a lot less consistent among liberals than among leftists. You can find, for example, a large number of anti-trans liberals, but you’ll have a harder time finding anti-trans leftists.
So you think hexbear users sat around unfederated for 3 years and just pretended to be communists to each other?
it’s wild seeing these comments get zero pushback.
Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.
Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm