With all the cranks on here, downvotes are a sign of doing something right. Some instances hide downvotes entirely. Others offer settings to not show them.

Not sure blocking them affects the downvote count shown to you.

So, your argument is that

explanation = approval

? That pathetically superficial take pretty much amounts to media illiteracy^[1]: see fallacy Confusing an Explanation with an Excuse.

Can anyone factually explain atrocities in your presence without you treating any explanation as a defense even when it’s explicitly stated that the explained subject is immoral?

They answered the question & your not liking the answer doesn’t make it less true. There are better ways to deal with facts than insufferable irrationality.

Trump approves

The answers to all those questions may be yes.

People who make those works aren’t necessarily the best authorities on their condition even if they have it: they’re still fallible humans with blind spots who’ve only lived as themselves without another version of themselves to compare. Much like how competent speakers may lack explicit awareness of the subtle nuances of their language & may succumb to over-analysis suggesting false rules, just having a condition doesn’t make someone acutely aware of the distinctions that set it apart, so they may misattribute.

They may also be flat out wrong about having the condition, since it is the internet after all.

Some of it is a matter of degree where it’s relatable to everybody within manageable limits but a dysfunction beyond those limits.

Are untrained people as accurate at diagnosing themselves as the professionals with degrees who spend years to train for it?

Your judgement seems baseless and irrational. Be better.

That’s the whole western hemisphere.

I also loathed when they tried to teach me that custom, especially the whole utensils switching hands deal: it’s frustrating for a young child who will fumble and drop utensils to the floor trying pointlessly unnecessary maneuvers.

I loathe the European convention just as much: bring pointy, sharp thing to mouth in less coordinated hand? Fuck no.

I don’t follow either convention. Instead

• utensil that approaches mouth (fork or spoon) in dominant hand: least chance of fumbling, dropping food, self-injury
• knife in non-dominant hand: cutting doesn’t require fine coordination (practice makes it 2nd nature) & fumbled knife ends up on plate
• utensils never switch hands: minimizes fumbling.

Basically, the European convention with opposite hands.

Exposure therapy: nuke yourself a few times. Your anxiety will vanish.

sources who usually have a vested interest in the continuation of capitalism

cool ad hominem & appeal to unreliable authority fallacies. truth doesn’t ultimately rely on authority, but their arguments, so it comes down to evaluating their arguments directly.

• are they valid?
• are their premises true?

if so, then their conclusions are true.

if you’re only going by authority when an argument is provided & facts can be verified, then you’re vibe-thinking.

Though life expectancy increased during Mao Zedong (from 41 to 61.2 years), it didn’t double.

GDP per capita was mostly flat (modest growth from €733 to €1017 in purchasing power parity) during Mao Zedong & took off only later.

The criminal justice system seems more than capable. Mass murder & a hierarchy of uncontrolled government power/authority to abuse individual liberties aren’t necessary.

Wikipedia

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy

ie, not an economic philosophy.

Britannica

liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

Primarily about individual freedom.

• Classical liberalism: minimal government to eliminate traditional obstacles to individual freedom
• Modern liberalism: positive government intervention to address social & economic inequalities in the cause of individual freedom

I saw an extremely revelatory post on lemmy.ml on some kind of math principle with an objectively accurate answer (with a pretty straightforward proof of that answer included), and the comments were full of people presenting the wrong answer and arguing why, using exactly the same super-confident presentation and style of “resonant but empty” argumentation that they use when they talk about politics.

It’d be cool if you could find that. Seems interesting.

It’s possible for someone to study the spectrum of political ideology and rationally decide that Communism is the best system.

Seems you’re assuming all communists are tankies, when they wrote about communist nations, ie, communist states which are all some variety of Marxism-Leninism, not general communism. Who’s being reductive here?

random fan

Are they a fan?

It’s pretty easy: is there conclusive evidence? Corollary: can you successfully eliminate conclusive evidence?

That almost works, except critics of western propaganda exist everywhere especially in academia & intelligentsia. The west doesn’t try to suppress them. So why out of everyone, those guys with a salient agenda over the critics without a discernable one?

According to these guys, they’re a CIA strawman operation.

Other than that, it may have started with “I’m 13 and this is deep” and persisted with ideological thinking. 🤷

The common denominator of liberalism is the core liberal philosophy of universal individual rights & liberties, consent of the governed (governments exist for the people who have a right to change & replace them, & authority is legitimate only when it protects those liberties), political & legal equality. US modern liberalism primarily refers to social liberalism & progressivism. Liberalism elsewhere often refers to classical liberalism which more closely corresponds to US libertarianism.

American versus European usage of liberalism

Colloquially, liberalism is used differently, in its primary use in different countries. In the United States the general term liberalism almost always refers to modern liberalism. There are some parties in Europe which nominally appeal to social liberalism, with the Beveridge Group faction within the Liberal Democrats, the Danish Social Liberal Party, the Democratic Movement, and the Italian Republican Party. One of the greatest contrasts is between the usage in the United States and usage in Europe and Latin America. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (writing in 1956), “[l]iberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain.” In Europe, liberalism usually means what is sometimes called classical liberalism, a commitment to limited government, laissez-faire economics. This classical liberalism sometimes more closely corresponds to the American definition of libertarianism, although some distinguish between classical liberalism and libertarianism.

Liberalism worldwide

What constitutes a liberal party is highly debatable. In the list below, it is defined as a political party that adheres to the basic principles of political liberalism. This is a broad political current, including left-wing, centrist and right-wing elements. All liberal parties emphasise individual rights, but they differ in their opinion on an active role for the state. This list includes parties of different character, ranging from classical liberalism to social liberalism, conservative liberalism to national liberalism.

Several conservative and/or Christian-democratic parties, such as the British Conservative Party, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Spain’s People’s Party, are also considered to be neoliberal leaning or have strong liberal conservative and/or classical liberal factions, whereas some conservative parties, such as Poland’s Law and Justice and Hungary’s Fidesz, favour more state intervention but also support free-market solutions. Conversely, some social-democratic parties, such as the British Labour Party and the Italian Democratic Party, include liberal elements. Social liberalism and social conservatism are not mutually exclusive, and some parties espouse socially liberal economic policies, while maintaining more socially conservative or traditionalist views on society: examples of this include Finland’s Centre Party (see also Nordic agrarian parties) and Ireland’s Fianna Fáil, both members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE Party). In the United States, the two major political forces, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, are to some extent, liberal (see Liberalism in the United States and Modern liberalism in the United States).

⁝

Not all the parties using the “Liberal” or “Freedom” labels are actually liberal. Moreover, some parties, such as the Freedom Party of Austria, were originally liberal, but have since tilted toward a populist direction and abandoned most of the tenets of liberalism. Finally, some parties, such as the United States Republican Party, Australia’s Liberal Party or Norway’s Progress Party are liberal mainly from an economic point of view rather than a social point of view (see economic liberalism, libertarianism and right-libertarianism).