Sorry, BigT, but it’s plenty obvious that Velocity is a hardened transphobe and rarely misses an opportunity to throw little political jibes against the existence of trans people. You’re not fooling anyone, Velocity. We see you for exactly what you are. A fuckin’ bigot.
Ugh. Trying to get my MAGA relative to understand liberal’s meaning in contexts other than “flaming US socialist” like liberal democracy and Europe’s use of liberal economic systems (which are closer to our traditional Republican economic policy) has been pointless.
I don’t recall making up the term “right-winger” (although it’s barely possible that I’m the first to hyphenate it).
That said, while I may have to accept that the drift in the usage of the word is a fait accompli, I don’t have to like it. Feel free to view my cavils as merely expressions of my dislike for it.
I understand and respect your opinion on the matter. I understand why you dislike it. I only have an issue with repeatedly asking people to not use the term.
It’s like saying that nobody should call Republicans by that name, because they want a dictatorship, not a republic. While there would be some merit to that position, you can’t go around lecturing people for using the term that is used in regular speech simply because you object to it in your opinion. And stifling that speech makes it really hard to have a discussion about it, which is one of the worst things you can do on a message board.
Similarly, “classical liberalism” in many ways is the opposite of what modern day liberals believe in, so you could take the position that such people should be called “left-wingers” and not liberals. (Note that I’m not advocating this viewpoint, this is just a form of reductio ad absurdum.) But going around asking everyone to stop calling them that is tendentious to the point of being a jerk.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone who is a racist thinks they’re a racist. They just think they are a realist and people are calling them a racist incorrectly or out of hatred.
They aren’t usually emboldened enough to be as explicit about it as they are now, but in one form or another yes, you are correct.
Trump says the quiet part out loud and gets elected twice, so now they figure they don’t have to use euphemisms or push ideas that ultimately lead to those same results without being obvious it’s what they’re doing.
No it isn’t, outside of the idiotic tautology that “things the people in charge of deciding what’s bigoted are considered bigoted and are therefore identical.” The crucial factors are:
the prohibited views on trans issues include opinions held by median Democratic voters, which is certainly not the case for sanctionable views on race, feminism, or homosexuality -
the prohibited views on trans issues include disagreeing with opinions which were essentially unheard of 10 years ago and have barreled far ahead of any “liberal consensus” or public debate
Obviously, something has changed regarding the “conservative” position on foreign funding for AIDS prevention, a policy almost wholly created by George W. Bush. At some point the idea that “everyone Der_Trihs has ever disagreed with is a Trump supporter from the far right” has to be abandoned when faced with reality. It’s been a popular trope among the academic far left for some time, and it both leads to obvious absurdities (no differences between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump at all?) and is directly correlated to the Democratic campaign apparatus’s total inability to understand why they keep losing elections.
The data from the 2024 election showed that Gen Zers with their brains fried on TikTok propaganda and idiotic podcasts are more strongly Republican than older people.
Traditional conservatives understood that the most cost-effective way to keep brown people from coming to the US was to fund support programs that improve the livability of their home countries. It was not about altruism, it was about the cheapest way to insulate ourselves from immigration. Desperately poor people will risk anything to come to the US; people who are less desperately poor are less likely to make the attempt.
Modern conservatives say “fuck that, let’s just shoot 'em at the border. I don’t care if it costs more, it’s more satisfying to just kill them.”
You can see a similar calculus in the prisons vs social programs debate. It’s much, much more cost-effective, by an order of magnitude, to put low-level offenders on probation and support them with drug treatment and job training and other programs, compared to building endless prisons and locking everyone up forever. But one of these approaches satisfies conservative bloodlust, and one does not.