Defining the noun "Liberal"

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Bowser, Nov 18, 2016.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    They have no inherent positions on restroom regulation. There are lefties and righties on all sides of such issues. And there is no correlation at all between "extreme" views of the left or right, and views on restroom regulation.
     
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    The extremists do.
    ======================
    Right-Wing Group Plans Nationwide Target Protest: 'Sin Is Not a Civil Right'


    A new video protesting Target has a message for the LGBT community: “Calling evil good will never make it right.”

    By Nico Lang
    May 24 2016 10:38 AM EDT

    Anti-trans conservatives are vowing to take their Target protests to “another level” with a message for LGBT equality groups: “Sin is not a civil right.”

    That’s the theme of a new video from Faith2Action, a religious right-wing group that bills itself as “pro-life, pro-family, and pro-active — to win the cultural war for life, liberty, and the family.” Founded by Janet Porter, the organization was classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016.

    On its YouTube page, the organization has posted a one-minute music video in protest of the big-box chain’s decision to allow transgender people to use the bathroom that most closely corresponds with their gender identity in all of its locations.

    In the segment, a man follows a young girl into the bathroom and corners her in a stall, a sequence that's nearly identical to the anti-LGBT ad used to oppose nondiscrimination protections in Houston last year. A woman's voice is heard singing over the footage: “No matter how loud it’s shouted, sin is not a civil right. Calling evil good will never make it right.”

    To keep scenarios like these from happening, the video urges shoppers to cut up their Target credit cards and join them in a protest June 4. Called “Don’t Protest Our Daughters,” the demonstration is scheduled to last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at stores across the country.
    ======================
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Those are adherents of religion, not economic policy. Their stance is in the culture war, not the economic battle.

    The headline could read "extreme Christians", or "extreme conservatives", maybe, if somebody insisted on using the word "extreme".
     
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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    OK. I generally consider conservatives to be right wing.
     
  8. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    I think they come in several flavors. Maybe not as many flavors that exist with Liberals, unless we decide to label some Liberals as being "Extreme."
     
  9. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    But, sorry, I have already explained several times that imposing various economic hardships does not count as violence. What counts as violence is taking your property or otherwise removing your property rights.

    "Anyone" does not cover whole landscapes, but usually only a single home. And if a community covers a village, leaving for all other people possibilities for travel similar to those which have existed before, this is also not a problem.
    As explained, if they have similar streets to travel, none of their rights has been taken away.
    Yes, I see a problem with this. It is artificial nonsense. Imprisonment is not freedom to travel.
    With "actual liberty" being a code word for actual access to material things? So that "equal rights" becomes an equal distribution of property? This is typical for socialists, not classical liberals.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The example involved denial of equal rights. That is inherently violent - as with property rights, but property rights are not the only ones. The hardships imposed - and they are often violence as well, you're wrong about that - were merely consequences.
    And if they don't, as in the US if racist white communities are allowed, they have had their rights taken away. Hence the problem, in situations such as the US racial setup.
    So the right to travel is not the only consideration, even for libertarians of your brand - let alone liberals, such as those who would defend despised races from the abuses of their racist neighbors. In addition to the right to travel, the physical ability to travel is also involved. Hold that thought.
    No. Just go with the actual posting - it's not in code.
     
  11. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    But a gated community does not deny equal rights. Everybody would have the right to create gated communities on their property.
    Given that libertarian theory rejects violence, and that I defend here libertarian theory and not the behavior of some real racists, this is irrelevant, and I have, btw, also not made claims about the real behavior of real racists.
    No. This is not a consequence of allowing racist white communities, but of allowing them to ban blacks from public roads, and, therefore, for allowing them to take away some of their property rights.
    No. This is not about the physical ability, but about actions of the other side which prevent you from using this ability.

    If you climb on some mountain and then appear unable to come down, this is your personal problem. If somebody refuses to help you, this is amoral according to many moral codes and some law codes, but not an issue of libertarian theory, which does not propose any right to receive help. Instead, your action which prevents another person to travel (in your example closing a door) violates his right.
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    But not "extreme" right wing - that's pretty radical and tradition-busting.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    A single, small, properly located one may not. Cover the landscape with them, and they do.
    The racist communities you defend, at the density required to give all white racists equal rights with each other in the US, deny civil liberties by force and thereby impose violence on black people.
    They would have the same effects if they allowed blacks on the public roads (they still would be banned from the gas stations, motels, restrooms, etc), or if - and this is common - the roads were owned by the residents and therefore "private". You do understand what a gated town - the specific kind you introduced - involves, I hope? It means banning black people from the public thoroughfares in that town - the sidewalks, the parking lots, the roads, the parks, anything and everything within the town geographical limits. The "sundown towns" of US history.
    Exactly. That's how the racist white communities violated - and would continue to violate, unavoidably, had they not been forbidden at gunpoint by the US government - the civil liberties of black people in the US. They physically, economically, biologically, etc, took them away.

    Which is why they have to be forbidden, by a liberal government.
     
  14. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    This does not make sense. If one small, properly located gated community does not violate rights of others, many small, properly located gated communities don't too. Then, there is no density requirement in giving rights. I have the right to flight to the moon, and there is no density requirement for this right, no need to build public transportation to the moon. Same for gated communities. Once they don't, as small appropriately located communities which do not disturb travel, violate any rights of other, they should be allowed. If it is simple or hard to build them is irrelevant, as well as how many of those who like to live in such communities can afford it.
    Your "sundown towns" are clearly not libertarian, but democratic. Some democratically elected city council or so decides this, and then the owners of gas stations, motels, restrooms are forced to reject black customers. This is clearly anti-libertarian, violates the rights of these owners. So, here the principles of democracy would require modification, not libertarian principles. Libertarian philosophy protects the right of the motel owner to reject black customers as well as the right to accept them even if the whole town does not like this. But so what - his motel is on a public road. If it would be inside a gated community, he would have volitionally signed the community regulations which forbid this, no problem too.
    So you declare a whole group of people, united by their race and political ideas, to be unavoidably criminal, and that one has therefore, at gunpoint, deprived of some of their rights, namely the right to live together in gated communities.

    Conceptually not that different from concentration camps for Jews. Jews are also unified by their race (at least in the Nazi version) as well as their religion (by the Christian version), antisemitism presents them as inherently bad and criminal, in particular that they would continue to rape German women or so, had they not been forbidden at gunpoint by the Nazi government. At least I do not see any important conceptual difference here (only a large one in degree). If you see one, explain.

    Instead, libertarian theory clearly rejects the step from some statistical claims about how evil white racists tend to violate well-defined laws forbidding aggression toward laws which forbid them to do completely harmless things. If one such evil white racist uses violence against some black, this particular white racist has to be punished. But not all the other white racists.

    On the other hand, libertarian theory gives you the complete right to hate and despise all white racists. As long as you do not violate their rights. You are free not to allow them to enter your home, your own shop, your own gated community. And the mentioned statistical observation, even if it is not a fact but only an unjustified prejudice, is completely sufficient to justify such a boycott.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Right; hence the term. They are on the same side of the scale but very far to the right.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Conservatives are not very far right on the left/right scale, in the US.

    Someone who is very far right is not in any sense "conservative", in the US. Adopting very far right proposals would involve radical and dramatically untraditional, unprecedented changes in US governance.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    But they do, in fact. This is where actually checking your theory with physical reality would help you a lot. Remember that requirement of yours, above, that closing one small road or excluding blacks from one small gas station did not violate their liberties? It was predicated on others being available. There are only so many roads, so many gas stations, so many motels, etc - as soon as enough white racist communities are on the landscape, blacks can no longer actually, physically, travel as whites can. The percentage is not nearly as high as you seem to imagine, either - many hospital emergency rooms can be significantly cut off if just a couple of intersections miles away are shut down, for example.

    This happened, in the US. Allow yourself to acquire information, ok?
    1) That's irrelevant to the point - the physical situation faced by black people is the same regardless.
    2) That is not true, historically, in the US. The custom was usually by informal, unwritten, voluntary agreement among enough of the white racists to make it too expensive or dangerous to oppose, and communicated by informal social dealings. (Official, legally established "sundown towns" were found mostly toward the North, where enough white people on enough of the landscape were unfamiliar with that level of racism to make informal establishment uncertain for white people without a written law, signage, and so forth. In the South, no such clarifications and formalizations were necessary)
    Not unavoidably. Only if they commit the crime of depriving black people of civil liberties they enjoy themselves, say by establishing hundreds of town sized exclusion zones all over the landscape. The actions, not the ideas, are criminal.
    If your conceptions fail to distinguish between the guards and the prisoners, fail to distinguish between the inside and the outside of the Camps, and so forth, you might be in that situation.

    In some way one can see that the German bigots were imprisoning themselves as well as the Jews, much as the whites in the US were crippling their own lives as well as the lives of the blacks, much as the man who turns the key is locking himself out of the cell he is locking someone else in: but this kind of Zen insight is levels above the practical realities of town politics, motel management and the like.
    The most significant differences are those of physical reality - for example, if the anti-Semites had been completely correct about "the Jews", not lying and slandering, some kind of imprisonment of Jews (or at least exclusion from the community) would have been justified.

    The conceptual differences lie in how one's theory discovers and handles physical fact.

    Liberals, more than most, emphasize attention to that, and more often place agreement with physical reality above agreement with theoretical prescription in their analysis of a situation. That's one of the virtues of liberalism, that libertarians (say) could benefit by recognizing.
     
    Last edited: Dec 2, 2016
  18. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The way liberals define those who are racist, sexist, etc., is based on anyone not agreeing with them. For example, the current sales pitch of liberalism is anyone who voted for Trump is racist and sexist, causing their base to freak out.

    Consider the white middle class white male watching sports, such as football or baseball. In these two sports, black players are often the best players. If Trump voters were racists wouldn't they avoid watching? Wouldn't they also forbid their children wearing the team shirts of top black players?

    Sports, in a microcosm, reflect the attitude of the Trump voter. They believe in a level play field, where everyone plays by the same rules. There is no favoritism and each person who shines, is chosen by the fans based on their ability to perform on and off the field.

    Liberals are more about stacking the deck to appease what they define as injustices from the past. If they were in charge of sports they would want so many women, children, and handicap people on each team. They would want to change the ball size to accommodate smaller hands, etc.. If you don't go along, with what they convince themselves is brilliant, you have to be sexist, racists and have phobias.

    Trump people are about natural selection, like in nature, where, like in sport, all play by the same rules, and hard work and ability is selected; based on statistics or hard facts. Liberalism is about unnatural selection. Trump voters are anti-unnatural selection.
     
  19. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    The irony here is that Trump voters are all about the denial of science, including evolution.
     
  20. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    I voted for Trump and do not deny science or evolution. I might question it from time to time, but I won't flat out call it a lie.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Repeatedly asking long-answered questions you have based on long-invalidated assumptions is denial of those answers and invalidations.
     
  22. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well, if that is so, you are one of the few who don't. The fact is Trump's supporters believe in a number of things that are just not true. I've seen many elections and I have never before seen a bigger liar than Trump. His ghost writer, the guy who actually wrote "The Art of the Deal" for Trump created a euphemism for it. He called it "truthful hyperbole", but the truth is there is nothing truthful about Trump or his "truthful hyperbole".
     
  23. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    Say what? As much as I would love to lump people into tightly definitive stereotypes, I prefer to pose the question in a forum. I know the word "Liberal" is not limited in it's broadest definition, so let's not assume that all Trump supporters fall into a narrow definition.
     

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