Liberalism was the original leftism: see the French revolutionary National Assembly. It doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with capitalism. In general, liberalism is neither left nor right. It promotes individualism. Historically, it progressed from humanism.

leftism begins at anti-capitalism

Not the political science definition.

General definitions & the historical development of liberalism are academic.

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.

Some of the earliest liberal practices are found in the US Declaration of Independence, which predates the French revolution spreading the practice of liberal ideals throughout Europe. The US declaration pretty much rehashes core tenets of liberal philosophy

• inherent equality of individuals
• 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).

Note how capitalism isn’t mentioned anywhere: it’s nonessential. Capitalism predates & isn’t liberalism. Liberalism is moral & political philosophy, not an economic one.

The philosophy is a natural progression of humanist philosophies from the Renaissance through the Protestant Reformation & the Enlightenment that stress the importance of individuality, secular reasoning, & tolerance over dogma & subservience to unaccountable authority. To address unaccountable authority based on dogma & traditions, English & French philosophers defined legitimate authority based on humanist morality pretty much as expressed in the US declaration. They argued that political systems thrive better with limits & duties on authority & an adversarial system of institutional competition whether in separation of powers, adversarial law system with habeas corpus & right to jury trial, competitive elections, dialogue, or economic competition.

Nope.

“I got kicked out of several places by people accusing me of being a bigot” is an incredible comment to make, lmao.

Usually how that works. Personally what’s going on over there, fuck em both. All they want is violence. Let them have it. Problem solves itself eventually.

a predictable lemmy.ml user retort.

I meant the inability between distinguishing moderating hate speech and supporting genocide.

Lemmy.ml definitely has its problem with nuanced positions.

Idk where you got that those sites don’t defend Jews. I feel very supported in those places, and the moderation on Hexbear at least takes antisemitism seriously(I can’t say for the other two because I’m on there less often, but I’m yet to hear anything that would make me doubt that they defend their Jewish users as well)

Communists absolutely defend Jewish peoples, Zionism is anti-semitic, especially anti-Yiddish. We also don’t “simp for authoritarian regimes,” we support socialist systems where the working classes hold the authority in society, rather than capitalists. None of this is “simping,” I support worker-run structures because it’s more equitable and democratic.

In no way shape or form Ukraine is a genocide. By using that term for both Palestine and Ukraine you are just demeaning the word, and actually helping the propaganda against Palestine.

Ukraine is defending its sovereignty, and it is experiencing a national aggression by Russia, but what Israel is doing to Gaza is in a different sphere.

Russia is, in fact, not enacting genocide on Ukrainians. It’s carrying out an invasion which we can condemn, but calling every conflict a genocide is actually a form of genocide denial, because it minimizes the horrors of actual genocides.

If you want to see criticism of Russia in Hexbear (my main instance), yesterday there was a post asking for peoples’ opinions on Putin. Here’s mine so you can see how much we “love the Russian government”. You may be surprised to see that most comments and upvotes are highly critical of the contemporary Russian government.

I’m gonna paste a comment that I wrote some time ago responding to the whole “Soviets sided with the Nazis” lie that is often propagated on Lemmy. Feel free to respond to it, I’d love to engage with you in its contents:

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.

As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.

The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this

Jesus Christ. Westerners really are the most propagandized people on earth.

The communists spent the decade prior to World War II trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.

When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.

Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis. The Soviet Union did not agree to invade Poland with the Nazis, it was about spheres of influence and red lines the Nazis should not cross in Poland. When the USSR went into Poland, it stayed mostly to areas Poland had invaded and annexed a few decades prior. Should the Soviets have let Poland get entirely taken over by the Nazis, standing idle? The West made it clear that they were never going to help anyone against the Nazis until it was their turn to be targeted.

The communists were responsible for 80% of the total Nazi casualties. The communists beat the Nazis.

Look up what the term ‘order of magnitude’ means and please absorb the -fact- that you are wrong in this statement. The genocide in Palestine is literally the same order of magnitude as the holocaust.

Then look up the term ‘lampshading’ and refer back to your original comment at the beginning of this thread.

Crying preemptively about how people are going to call you a nazi doesn’t make you any less of a nazi.

Look at the response in context of Feddit. Its not a critique of you, per se, its a critique of the German law/ idealogical approach. Lets suggest, in your words, a full “national socialist” genocide is at least possible in this day and age. The world did no know the full extent of Germany’s action until well into the process.

If we rely on the logic of the German approach, we wouldn’t be able to call the thing a thing until its too late. The point being made is that if you wait long enough to be able to a full historical analysis, you’ve effectively become an apologist for genocide on the basis of a lack of evidence.

And I would argue that Israels actions over the previous 80 years are extremely comparable to what the National Socialists did in Germany, and in some ways, even more disgusting. Germany ran concentration camps for around 12 years. Israel has been running them for almost 80. Germany treated it as a war of extermination. Israel is running it as a war of extermination. What other than a death camp would you call Israelli detention facilities?

The only difference is that we have the opportunity to stop Israel in its tracks, now, as its becomes clear the Israelies are not going to stop until the entire Palestinian population is eliminated. Disallowing or diminishing comparisons between the most famous historical genocide and the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine supports genocide

The ability to recognize the genocide in Gaza as a genocide is very much there

Only while saying the people resisting it are also wrong and doing Holocaust exceptionalism in defense of liberal zionists, lmao.

And now let’s go back to the original zionist accusations. The original comment was removed because of the last part of it, which said “Providing material support to Israel is no different from providing material support to Nazi Germany”. As much as people don’t want to see it, the situation in Gaza is actually different than the situation in Nazi Germany. The Jewish population in Nazi Germany never launched rockets at Germans, in fact, jewish people in Nazi Germany were exceptionally peaceful. In Gaza, there is genocide happening, there is a power differential, and Palestinians need to fight back, but there is simply no rational denying that it’s not the same as the genocide in Nazi Germany.

The original comment was good and correct. Supporting one settler state committing genocide is actually the same as supporting another.

What I mean was in the time before the Holocaust even started.

When do you think “Israelis” started committing genocide against Palestinians? Hint: “Israel” is a settler colony.

I’m completely aware that this originally started with the zionist invasion of palestine in the early 20th century.

From your other comment next to this one…

“The Jews never fought back” is not what I said. Again, you intentionally try to misinterpret what I said. I was specifically talking about the time before the Holocaust even started, there was no reason for Germans to fear Jewish people, as they were just normal people.

Do you not see how you’re not being consistent?

Really? Because elsewhere you’re blaming Hamas for starting it

Do you really not understand that Hamas did not exist before the genocide of Palestinians started? They cannot have provoked this in any way, as you repeatedly have attempted to imply with your arguments that this is different from the Holocaust.

The “Israelis” are colonizers. Not a single acre of the land they live on is rightfully theirs. It’s all stolen, except maybe a very, very small minority of Jews who lived there prior to the colonization AND consider themselves “Israelis” now AND still live on their ancestral properties, but even they still benefit from the colonialism.

I’m not misinterpreting what you said. It’s just that what you said doesn’t actually make sense the way you think it does, because you think (incorrectly) that this is a thousand year old religious conflict. That’s orientalist propaganda designed to make you support the existence of “Israel”.

In reality, where this is not a thousand year conflict but a hundred year colonization and genocide, the only way what you said makes any sense is if the Jews didn’t fight back. Because Hamas is fighting back and you are arguing it’s different from the Jewish reaction to the Holocaust. The Jews did fight back. It’s not different.

Edit: I just realized this is a 10 hour old comment I replied to in the parallel thread.

there was no reason for Germans to fear Jewish people, as they were just normal people.

Not even trying to hide your naked bigotry against Palestinians.

I mean look at ml.

You mean the place constantly flooded by disagreeing liberals? Let’s be honest here; by “echo chamber” you just mean “place where my ideology isn’t the default”

No. Having instances with varying approaches to defederation is good for the fediverse. Having no defederation is how you end up with nostr.

If my instance didn’t defederate hexbear I wouldn’t be on the fediverse at all.

I think defederation only really makes sense if there is a concern of botting. Individual bad actors should be banned on a case by case basis, blanket banning seems shortsighted. However, I do believe there are bots on some instances now, compared to say a year ago where I believe they were more far and few between.

Part of my issue is also with bad actors “flooding the zone”. If enough noise is getting pushed constantly by bad actors/bots, it can sway public opinion just by virtue of people seeing those opinions more often. This was one of the things that killed Reddit for me, personally. Well that and a slew of other issues.

When avoiding ideas or being challenged yes. When avoiding abuse no

And it’s not like we don’t have a down vote button.

I’ve been banned from communities merely for downvoting posts in them. Such behavior is toxic (on the part of the community’s mods, not me), but that doesn’t stop it from happening.

Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.