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Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
lol, lmao even like, you can have that self-narrative for yourself, and that's cool but where were you in the past twenty years? you haven't done anything. Now the right has the stick of power and you retreat to principled liberalism? I don't buy it for a second. Show me your scars. Your medals. Your badges of honor that would have made you a pariah for twenty years. You don't get to claim stolen valor to defend the parasites of academia. You haven't fought for shit.
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal? You are going on these highly emotional and extremely militant rants and assuming that this person is retreating to liberalism for tactical reasons rather than, you know, just being a liberal.
Leftists have, indeed, done some real damage. For example, by supporting soft-on-crime policies. I'm no fan of such delusional ideas. But it seems to me that you are just lashing out blindly. You might do better if you describe specific leftist policies that have damaged you, and if you also do not automatically assume that people who criticize you are part of what to you is the enemy tribe.
Sure. Principled liberals have battle scars from running into reality, and magicalkittycat is neither indicating or claiming any, while repeatedly rejecting other people's observations on sophistic grounds in ways that classical liberals aren't exactly known for, even as he denies or ignores historical dynamics that principled liberals were publicly conceding for decades.
MKC speaks as a leftist assuming the mantle of a liberal, which has been a standard dynamic for decades, not as a classical liberal.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
Sure. Names will be withheld to protect the
guiltyinnocent, but yes.More options
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You can only be a principled liberal if you've been oblivious to the progress of the discourse of the past decade or so. (And indeed, I was right: they were just too young to have lived through the events of the oughts.)
And although their lack of exposure to these seminal events may give them a belief in liberal idealism, it doesn't incline me to take them seriously. When you start going on about 'we freedom fighters' there's a lot of 'who, whom' to be asked about.
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They're so rare, it's like finding a unicorn! Skepticism thereof may be wrong but certainly not surprising.
How do you define a "principled liberal"? Liberals typically have principles beyond "freedom of speech" and recognize that important principles sometimes conflict. Does being "principled" require a naive "Rank principles in order of importance and act based on that ranking." method of conflict resolution?
Mostly I was being cheeky and don't have a solid, well-thought-out definition of what it should mean.
I don't think it requires a naïve or writ-in-stone ranking, but one should, if trying to be principled, be able to articulate why they may rank principles a certain way and explain what may seem like unprincipled exceptions to someone else. In my experience not many liberals that claim to be principled are terribly effective at communicating reasoning behind their indifference to certain offenses or otherwise selectiveness of care.
That's fair. I do wonder how much of that is due to not being principled versus not being effective at communicating in general though? Effective communication skills aren't that common, particularly at the higher bar of being effective at communicating with an at least partially adversarial audience.
Indeed, that's certainly a component and it is most charitable to attribute failure to that.
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Well, I more or less am one, and for obvious human emotional reasons I enjoy spending time around other ones, so subjectively to me, while I do find them unfortunately much much less common than I would wish, at least to me they don't seem so rare as finding a unicorn.
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Interesting enough, I get the same exact sort of thing from censoring leftists! I was constantly hated on and accused of secret hypocrisy and conservatism for pushing back on things like cracking down on protestors in colleges for saying that people who do crime while protesting should be arrested while people who don't do crime shouldn't be.
It's interesting I've held the same belief and had people on both sides get angry at me.
I've had the same experience with both types of militant *-wing people.
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20 years ago I was a young child, I'm not sure what I could have done. Too busy with stuff like Pokemon ya know, but I don't think I can blame kid me for not paying attention to the greater world much.
But if you're asking what I've done before about leftist censorship, it's the same thing I'm doing here. Encouraging my fellow Americans (assuming you are one) to embrace free speech and free expression even of ideas they don't like.
Censorship doesn't make dissent go away, it just makes it hide in the shadows. The leftist war on ideas didn't win, and if you have a right wing war on ideas you won't be winning in the long run either. The censors tried to silence heliocentrism, they tried to silence evolution, germ theory, genetics, atomic theory, etc, they lost. The books can burn yet ideas can always be reborn.
Well, good luck with that. It won't work. If you're young as you say, you haven't yet experienced the crushing disappointment of realizing that the institutions that ostensibly protected these things have all been hollowed out and taken over by illiberal enemies. There's no going back. It sucks.
Why not? Trump won two elections, this second one being the popular vote win and a majority in Congress so it seems like the backlash against woke/Covid lockdowns/etc did bring about a change.
But as polling suggests, this seems to be fading away pretty quickly as he makes the same mistakes Biden did last admin. A lot of your supporters as a politician aren't dedicated idealogues, they're moderates or have their focus on other issues especially ones like prices and economic security.
I think that's part of why we see such swings between parties, they get into power and see an idealogical mandate that they don't truly have and then get pushed for it.
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Yet! Growth mindset. (just a joke)
The shifts on this one over time are fascinating and not addressed well enough that the ostensibly pro-evolution side shifted to anti-genetics. The original ostensibly anti-evolution side hasn't really changed much though.
I appreciate your optimism and will try to adopt some of it as my own, rather than my knee jerk pessimism. Thank you for taking on the challengers and not getting irate in this thread.
I agree it is really interesting. The left generally accepts evolution while somehow being opposed to the idea that different races could differ in other ways and I know plenty of religious folk on the right who accept genetics as an explainer for differences but can't seem to accept that divergences could add up over long periods of time for evolution. The "micro evolution not macro evolution" crowd. One of my college friends was a Southern Baptist who believed that.
This is the internet, there are far far worse people I've dealt with.
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