"Liberal" people.
 

(This will be a short rant):

I am liberal. I believe in incredibly wide and unrestrictive civil rights. In my tenure on the internet I have encountered many personalities claiming to be liberal.

When a conversation on a forum goes like this:

Person A: [Link to some article concerning a gay rights development.]

YAY GAY RIGHTS!

Person B: I'm not gay, but this is good.


This means that you are not as liberal as you say. The simple fact is, if you need to preface a statement about gay rights with "I'm not gay, but...", it's quite obvious that you don't want people to think that you are gay. Inferring that this is a negative thing. If you truly are liberal, don't give a shit about whether people misinterpret you as gay or not, it's the same as someone misinterpreting your age or something, not a big deal, if you are actually a liberal person.

I'm not a liberal, but I agree.

I am liberal, and I am also really good at giving head.

Ain't I a catch?

I want head. Get over here!

Liberals are great in small doses.

I don't think liberal is as analogous to civil liberties as people think.

In the most extreme cases, a liberal society would be a classless society. One of the best ways to do that is to make everyone uniform. School uniforms for example, are a liberal thing.

You know, now that you mention it, it IS amazing how many people who claim to support gay rights take great care to ensure you know that they do it as a straight person.

I think they're a great idea. I was the only person I knew at school who did though. It's nice to get all self-righteous about your right to express your identity, but when you all dress the same the "cool" people are more likely to be considered cool because they're funny, or for something else that actually matters. (Not always - obviously the pretty people still had the edge, and people will always be people. But I thought it made the situation a bit better.)

Yep. Liberals. They are all about uniformity. That's why I don't like liberals. Instead of people having a sense of self expression, liberals will assume that children can't help themselves and make base judgments on appearance alone, all the while, stifling the individual child and insulting the character of every single individual on the subject. Liberals, institutionalizing childhood and self discovery since forever. Great job.

Oh, let's not forget that a nationwide smoking ban is also a liberal ideal, that brought down to a local level tells business owners that they don't know how to maintain a smoking and nonsmoking section. No, they wont say, "Hey, install air filters in your place of business", they'll just outright tell smokers they're not allowed to have a smoking section in places of business.

Wow, you know what... liberals are fucking assholes.

I wouldn't say that's fair. Liberal isn't about uniformity so much as freedom, hence, liberal, liberty. It's the political stance that what people do is their own business.

Kontan: I don't actually agree with smoking bans. There's one in this country in public places and I think it's wrongly restrictive. There must be something American going on that's masquerading as liberal.

No, it's PERFECTLY fair. Liberalism is about FORCING equality. It's essentially mob rule when left unchecked. Essentially, a group of people tell YOU what's good for you. That they know what's best for you instead of you deciding for yourself. They want to protect you from you.

Conservatism, of course, is tyranny and one-man-rules-all when left unchecked. Which is why I don't like the idea of a perfectly free market. It's an enabler for feudalism and lords.

Liberal laws are usually about overthrowing taboos rather than creating new ones.

And taboos are up to the discretion of what? The collective mob.

A kid getting into say... punk music or is say... eccentric, is taboo. Liberals, like you said, will overthrow that taboo. So now, the child can't be a child. It has to be institutionalized, told that its differences create conflict and must be the same as everyone else and in that, reinforcing the idea that there are only a small few things that are acceptable. But the child itself is NOT acceptable.

This is the same thing as Affirmative Action. It's a reinforcement that people can't help themselves but be racists.

Eh?

A liberal approach would be to say that the kid can listen to Punk if he fucking wants to. If some guy claimed to be a liberal and then said "Hey, let's institutionalize Punks!", he'd be the worst liberal ever.

JCC, there's a difference between American Liberals and European Liberals.

Seriously, things such as school uniforms for example, IS an American Liberal thing. The reason why it's not a conservative thing is because it's not based on the idea that "this is how kids should look", but more "protect your kids from other kids. I don't want my kid's feelings to get hurt, so everyone look the same."

But what they fail to realize is that this reinforces the idea that being different is bad and that conformity and trying to be a people pleaser is a good thing. You know, for the good of the people.

That's the opposite of the liberal I'm used to.

Also, it's a liberal thing because "it deters from the educational environment", assuming that parents can't teach their kids to focus on the lessons, instead of figuring out what Bobby's next hair color is going to be. So they just preemptively force children to conform and focus on the material. Liberalism in America likes to overthrow individualism. Especially when it comes to the kids.

Haven't you ever heard the statement, "Bleeding-Heart Liberal"?

I think one should note that classical liberalism and neoliberalism are two different ideals. The former being very libertarian and individualistic in thought and practice, and the latter leaning more Statist and more in line with the Labour Party of the UK and the Democrat Party of the US (though Republicans have lots of neoliberal ideals, as well).

I always thought it odd that "liberals" do not want anyone to own a gun, whilst "conservatives" support gun ownership. If you are liberal shouldn't you support others if they desire to own a gun or not?

And "liberals" want more of your money by raising taxes, whereas "conservatives" want less taxes so you can keep more of your money. Isn't it being more liberal to let people keep more of their own money? O_o

That's the point. There's so much mix up about liberals and conservatives that the words don't hold much water to what they mean once you get to the nitty gritty.

So really, it's more like a web of ideas where it's bit more complicated than simply saying you're a liberal or a conservative because they both want to champion individual freedoms while at the same time, stifling either an entire group of people or just the individual.

As people seem to have gone over my little not-so-funny-but-still-haha joke, I'm going to talk a little about this:
What kind of liberals are we talking about in here?

If we're talking about the real definition of liberal, then know that it means pretty much what people think is a libertarian nowadays. It is about individual freedom, but tends to be socially conservative, allowing for hierarchies, oligarchies, and all sorts of shit out of free enterprise.

If we're talking about the normal definition of liberal then I have no idea where the hell you're all pulling your arguments from. Modern liberals are simply inconsistent people that don't know the first thing about politics but don't want to appear close-minded. Conservatives are hypocritical; 'liberals' are just inconsistent, because they're opinions are contradictory sometimes only because they never really thought about them.

In England, we have state-funded healthcare and the welfare is far more generous than in the USA. So that money (theoretically at least) is going to help those who can't afford to support themselves, not just disappearing into the void. The ideal is sound enough to me - the actuality is another matter. But that's not a flaw in liberalism as a concept.

I am not against helping the underprivileged (in fact I raise money for health care clinics that serve the uninsured and undocumented workers in Southern California) but I was just taking the term liberal literally.

What some people and I find when discussing the duopoly in the United States is we cannot agree what liberal or conservative means. Sure, there is the general equality of liberal = Democrat and conservative = Republican, but we know Dixie Democrats who will vote for McCain and hate Obama, and Republicans who will vote for Obama and hate McCain.

From my experience the term has little to do with worrying about people needing to be protected and is more about the fact that "bleeding hearts" have a great capacity to empathize to a fault (note: this is not to say that all, or even most, liberals have any capacity whatsoever to put themselves in someone else's shoes)


The US really should just throw away the terms as they have no real meaning anymore and lead to unnecessary problems

Bah, when it comes to taxes, there doesn't seem to be such a thing as "liberal" anymore. The Dems say "We're going to raise taxes to pay for" something or another, and the Reps say "No new taxes!" and then go and raise taxes anyway. As far as I know, all other parties are the same.

Hey now, be fair, sometimes Republicans lower taxes...but they don't cut services which forces the governing body that they are a part of to go into massive amounts of debt so that the next wave of elected officials have to deal with it

"There are two parties: Democrats, which are a party of no ideas, and Republicans, a party of bad ideas"
- Lewis Black