DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Good explanation.

Just last night I also found myself explaining the misunderstanding around the term “liberal” to someone else who was talking as though they thought we were using conservative talking points because we were using anti-liberal language. I would bet we’ll be seeing a lot of that now. Here was my attempt to clear up the misconception:

Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.

When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.

Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.

It is true that there are plenty of people who use reddit that are not racist (setting aside the idea that everyone who lives in a racist society, which we in the west do, has at least some internalized racism). Some people on reddit even actively fight against it, to their credit. That said, as a platform, both in terms of the people who run and administrate it, as well as the larger majority mass of users, definitely tends towards racism. This can be seen in all kinds of ways, from admins always siding with of racists over bipoc to the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of the “orcish hordes” that dominates in every popular subreddit (and the silencing of those who offer even the mildest criticism of it), to the understandable yet very telling rabid defense of the privilege so many of them insist they earned when it is nothing more than old fashioned white privilege. You seem to agree that reddit is bad for its corporatist bullshit and its laser focus on profit at the expense of people. We agree. But that alone is inherently systemically racist for sociological reasons that I’m assuming you’re aware of, given some of your other comments. For all these reasons, it is hardly an overreaction or unfair to refer to reddit as “a racist website.”

As for “authoritarian” communists, all I’ll say here is that I hope you can learn to seriously, genuinely question a lot of what you have learned from what amounts to an ocean of propaganda deliberately spread for decades (even over a century) to demonize any successful socialist revolution. I’d encourage you to ask some of us “tankies” in good faith about some of that propaganda in other appropriate threads.

Surprise surprise, libs arrogantly assuming they’re the default and pearl-clutching about being “brigaded” because they got exposed to ideas that don’t fit the narrative they’ve swallowed, exactly the way they always do. Vapid, self-centered actors through and through.