Geez. I might as well say that I don't believe there was ever a debate on global warming or that a Flat Earth Society ever existed or there is no such thing as quantum physicis so don't bother me with any evidence that any or all exist or ever existed. And how do we know whether Thanatos or anybody else is a liberal if we can't come to an agreement on what the defintion of liberal is? I love you too, Pogo.
Miss me yet?
To wrap up this loose end: what you've got up there with global warming, the Flat Earth Society et al, are actual things. What I was talking about was a
terminology. And more importantly, the reason for that terminology.
Here's why it's important to make this point:
There's certainly an element of futility in any discussions of 'liberal' or 'conservative' values without first squaring off against all the confusion regarding what the terms themselves mean. If you want even bigger challenge, try talking to people about 'corporatism'.
I would actually love to discuss corporatism but on a different thread. Dealing with the topic on this one is complicated enough, most especially as you say, we can't get anybody to focus on the definitions. And I'm about to throw in the towel on that for that very reason. When you have people who absolutely are NOT interested in the concepts but are rather interested in blaming or trashing somebody, no producive discussion is going to take place.
Focusing on the definitions is exactly what I've been trying to do. When you try to split the term "Liberal" into a good liberal in the white hats (your side) and the evil liberal in black (the other side), you're engaging in lexicographical revisionism. As noted before you've already lumped them into, respectively, Republicans and Democrats, and that's BS. This is just the kind of Eliminationist tactic that degrades our discourse; paint the world into a good vs. evil dichotomy and proceed to destroy the evil. Wrongheaded.
"Liberalism" means, meant, and will continue to mean, a 'laissez-faire' attitude, that government is like a referee, just there to ensure the playing field is level for the populace to act out its own interests unencumbered by government. As noted before, the word "liberal" has been misused and conflated (I alluded to the 1988 presidential campaign, and I'd add the post-World War II McCarthy days, when the words "liberal" and "communist" were deliberately conflated by dishonest demagogues). But there's no reason we need to continue that tomfoolery today. It's not what "liberal" means and never was.
Take the USSR. Please. Some wags here will cite the Soviet Union as an example of "Liberalism"; it was in reality anything but. It was certainly related to
Leftism, at least superficially, though it had far more to do with Authoritarianism. But Leftism isn't the same as Liberalism. Liberalism gets opposed by both the left and the right. Marxism, Fascism, affirmative action and gay marriage laws, to cite easy examples, are all examples from the left and the right that oppose liberalism. Or take the case made in another thread of pornography: the Right opposes it because it's "immoral"; the Left opposes it because it objectifies and exploits women; the Liberal attitude is to simply let it be. That's what
Liberal means.
I submit to you that the concepts "left", "right", "liberal" and "conservative" are four different things, not two. Trying to hitch one to ride with another is just not accurate. But to paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there's a whole lot of conflatin' goin' on, and it goes on for the express purpose of, again, painting the world into that black-and-white dichotomy so that the evil side, once identified, can be summarily eliminated and the protagonist side -- the one that created this false dichotomy -- gets to walk away with the world. Or so they would dream.
That's not the way it should work; we need as noted before a balance between the right and the left, checking each the other, exerting only the minimal regulations on our Liberalist-derived government. Not a bunch of demagogues trying to paint each other as evil monsters in an endless selfish game of political football just to "win" some personal points on political message boards.
Sorry, I'm more tired than I expected and I have a very distraught patient on the phone. I think I'm repeating myself, but I hope it's at least clear why I feel these terms should not be taken as lightly as we've been doing. And that's why I won't accept the revision of
Liberal into "classical liberal" so that we can morph the term into its own opposite.
And like it or not, Liberalism... meaning the movement that founded this country in the 18th century... originated from the left, i.e. the populist opposition to the then-status quo power channels of Church/State/Aristocracy. Had it not, we'd still be living in a theocratic feudalism.
