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Sums it up quite precisely (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
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[–] 25 points 4 days ago* (15 children)

I went normie > libertarian > liberal > socialist > anarchist. I've been on a journey. In a sense my viewpoint now is a synthesis of my initial instincts and what I learned since. Thesis: libertarian, antithesis: socialist, synthesis: anarchist.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Same. The branching point was libertarian, or discovering that they just meant they wanted to replace government with corporations.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago

    I came close to getting sucked into libertarianism back in college. I had a roommate who was college libertarian, and he had a whole friend group that were pretty libertarian. And he was working for the Kinky Friedman campaign so our apartment was filled with Kinky for Texas governor signs. Who didn't love Kinky Friedman? Especially with the other options.

    But the more and more we talked with each other the more and more I started thinking hey this is kind of fucking crazy. One of them was convinced that we should get rid of the US Military and replace them with Mercenaries. Mercenaries. Cuz that's always a great concept. That always works well for a country. Slightly unrelated but another one of them said that the Postal Service, the band which I think has had to change it's name, was better than Michael Jackson's music. So clearly they were all out of their minds. And I pulled away.

    I think most of them grew out of it too thankfully.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago

    I was fortunate enough to have a classmate foist his copy of The Fountainhead on me when I was 17. Only got as far as the "rape is fine, actually" part, but hated it so much I skipped the whole libertarian phase and went straight to socialism. Thank you, Dana, you have terrible taste.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (5 children)

    Imma be real this "LiBeRtArIaNs" bullshit is new, misguided, and region specific, and even within that region is debatable.

    Small "L" (goddamn sans serif fonts) "libertarian" is literally just the diametric opposition if "authoritarian." That's it.

    "Big L" "Libertarian" for some reason has come to mean The American Libertarian Party™ specifically. "They've been taken over by the right" maybe, sure, but they can't have the entire concept of libertarianism no more than the US Democrat party is the entire embodiment of democracy, they're named after those concepts but those concepts still exist without the bounds of the US party and the whims of said US parties' current leaders. Even if the Libertarian Party™ happened to perfectly align with your views on what "liberatarian" (as in the antithesis of authoritarian) means at any point in the future, they still don't have ownership of the concept simply because they're named that.

    In reality, "libertarian" describes any number of people and ideologies as long as they're anti-authoritarian, including anarchism, and just like anarchism you can find many examples of people who claim it but do not understand it in the slightest, or seek to pervert it to their will intentionally.

    Don't let authoritarians poison you against a word for a concept in an attempt to sway you to their side.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    I understand your point, but it's a losing battle. Words change as people use them. Language evolves. A lot of modern vocabulary is bastardized from its origin. It's not authoritarians necessarily poisoning language, even though it can be.

    Socialism "was" a poisoned term, that I think has slowly returned to it's meaning.

    Example: Nice

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (3 children)

    If that's the case than literally now literally always means "figuratively."

    And sometimes, it does, when used incorrectly or sarcastically, but that doesn't mean that the literal definition of "literally" is no more.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (2 children)

    Literally, yes

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (1 child)

    That would mean the concept of "literality" no longer exists, but you just used it, (I'm taking your words literally, to mean that you believe "literal" now means "figurative" in perpetuity) so it must still exist. I also just used it, so even if you meant "literally" figuratively, the literal definition still exists, because I just used it.

    You see why we can't just say "oh welp words change" now? They do but also if nothing has meaning just stop speaking languages at this point because they're, well, meaningless.

    Hell I'll give you another popular example, you ever watched South Park? You remember the biker episode? They argue the same thing you do here, that words change meaning, but about a different word (and with a better case for it, no less). You wanna defend the evolved use of that word publicly here right now?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    My god, I was being facetious in that last comment. I was merely highlighting that your frustration was not going to change the course of people's use of language.

    I'm not arguing that definitions are meaningless.

    Chill.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Kinda similar. Went from liberal, to socdem, to anarchist, to Marxist-Leninist. My growth since becoming an ML has been in getting a deeper understanding of scientific socialism, as well as getting organized and putting theory to practice.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    You might find Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars(Red, Green, Blue) series of books interesting. In them he details a completely different economic system where corporations do not exist. It was fascinating and I would have been happy to read an entire book just about the economic and political ideas he expressed in the Mars books.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    I was on the path to being a far right ethno-fascist CHUD because of how I was treated at large by the local bit of society I grew up in. Thank god I went to college at all, it started me reading and understanding politics and how we got where we are today. I started shifting left pretty hard when Obama was elected, saw the Tea Party for what it was, and seeing the "field" of GOP candidates and hell even Democrat ones.

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