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If you could, how would you deprogram an extreme liberal?
(links.hackliberty.org)
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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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"Deprogramming" makes sense in the sense for the far right because there is a lot of misinformation and fake news and outrage bait and all that kind of stuff. Getting people out of those trappings is good because it allows them to see how things really are, rather than what people want them to think.
That isn't really a problem with the left. I mean, I'm sure you could find some extreme subreddit somewhere where people want to bring out the guillotine to kill all capitalists or cut everyone's genitals off in the name of gender equality... But ultimately they're much rarer than the equivalent alt right spaces.
Extreme conservatives are very common and an existential threat to many groups. Extreme liberals are a mild curiosity that need to go out and touch grass.
That should hopefully explain the votes, saying that you need to deprogram "extreme liberals" brings up questions about what you actually mean by "extreme liberal" given that it really isn't that big an issue in society.
... Or maybe all this is just my biases.
It's just your biases.
Of course it is. Since the terms left and right were invented (during the French revolution), left-wing extremism has been as much a problem as the right-wing variety. The ideology of equality and fraternity is a story of bloody revolutions, purges, famines, even genocides. Depending on definitions, the body count of left-wingery is arguably even higher than that of fascism.
Of course, what Americans call an "extreme liberal" (i.e. a woke progressive rather than a liberal) is not typically a murderous Stalinist. But the habit of fetishizing abstract ideas, and seeing everything in terms of group power struggles, and the obsession with ideological purity - I hardly need to cite examples, at least from abroad we can see that these things are alive and well in America and having bad outcomes.
Not as bad as the opposite extreme though, on that I will agree.
You can be woke, progressive, and liberal. You're talking nonsense.
Your tone here is not assisting constructive debate.
Do you Stalin think was an extreme liberal?
Of course not. An extreme liberal would be a neoliberal or ultraliberal, so basically the opposite of Stalin.
This is just America's weird misuse of the word liberal to mean "progressive" or "socialist" or something.
Neoliberals aren't liberal though, similar to how neoconservatives aren't conservative; neoliberalism is an explicitly postliberal ideology that rejects the tenets of Enlightenment liberalism.
Arguably true. But personally I prefer it when words mean something over time. The fundamental concept in liberalism, since the beginning, is a concern for individual rights. That was the revolutionary idea. Looked at this way, the word ultraliberal means exactly what it looks like: an obsession with individual rights taken too far.
The neoliberal etymology is murkier because it's really an economic term.
In any case the vernacular American usage is of liberal to mean "left-wing" is just wrong, or at least unhelpful. I wish you guys would drop it and find a more appropriate word! Progressive being the obvious candidate.