Pretty similar to how one could attempt to understand that a country of +20 million people such as the DPRK probably works through a somewhat complex and elaborate system that involves the participation of hundreds of thousands of people only to form the state apparatus but on the other side it’s much easier to just say that Kim Jong-Un is a crrrrraaaazzzyyyy madman and he takes all the decisions of the country by himself and millions of people just obey him because lol. Liberalism needs to caricaturize its enemies in order to rally the people against them.

In addition, in another thread, a couple of users and I expanded on the dehumanization of the adversaries of liberalism by resorting to bigotry and slurs by making exceptions on racial, sexual or gender-based discrimination against those individuals who are deemed to be “deserving” of it. Here it is in case you’re interested.

TBF I’ve seen people here and on Hexbear do a bit of that, myself included. Deing myself us a process.

Totally agree.

This explain why they dismiss not only our talking points but even our very presence on the site with literal flat-earther worthy conspiracy theory based on thought terminating cliche like “you are clearly paid by this or that country” or “the majority of you are bots”. They are trying to gaslight themselves into thinking that the big faction of openly leftists, pro-lgbt, anti-racist peoples they can clearly see on here isn’t real because it break their narrative that they are the good guys, that their position is THE correct one and that anyone who disagree is is just a minority of bad and not very smart peoples. Until now, when radlibs were on mainstream platforms like reddit and twitter, we leftist were a small minority group broken up into smaller groups still that all disagreed with one another and so the only political opposition they could see, or rather couldn’t ignore, were the liberal right, MAGA, GOP, Republicans, etc, which wasn’t a problem to them since the bigotry and stupidity of the liberal right fit well into the aforementioned narrative, but now they are on lemmy where communists are too numerous and organized for anyone on the site to ignore, and the whole left in general who has been growing for a while is reaching a stage where they start to get noticed by a larger audience, a recent evidence of it being the number of liberals on twitter and reddit who have been complaining about far left peoples telling them that they shouldn’t vote for Biden, and so now that they can’t ignore us anymore they are confronted explicitly with a breach of their narrative they have no way to solve and so they resort to trying to patch it up with whatever they can, including the same type of deranged conspiracy theories they make fun of the liberal right for believing in.

Similarly I notice a lot of liberals resort to ableism/misogyny/racism in an attempt to belittle their opposition. I think that a lot of liberals just care about upholding an image rather than actually care about the groups they claim to fight for.

I think this is the consequence of Liberalism both being seriously unchallenged in the mainstream, and there being a complete lack of quality political education in the west. Without a proper framework to deal with issues people will simply resort to lizard brain thinking. Liberals also tend to develop an overconfidence because the only ones who oppose them most of the time are ultra reactionaries who are obviously stupid and malicious.

If a lib ever tells you liberalism is about the people, or human needs - start pressing on who they consider “people”

Lol. " Those damn libs are so stupid they dont deserve any respect." /s Seriously I think some people here and hexbear should have a good look at themselves in the mirror. I’ve never had so much hate in my life than the time I said I like South Park on hexbear. Litteraly 20 people telling me I should kill myself. So thanks for the moral lessons but I’ll pass. Lol, you want people to give poor Putin some respect?

I don’t think this has much to do with liberalism. howmany leftists, might be more politically correct for me to use neo-nazis as the example but whatever, have you talked to who say things like navalny is a nazi, all ukrainian troops are nazis, the free syrian army are isis, also isis is isis, israelis are nazis, kulaks were parasites, or the most classical one germans were nazis. just seems like people in general prefer to be against caricatures and comically evil people rather than humans

I dunno, politics in “liberal democracies” seems to be a whole lot of spectacle and aesthetics and if any good policy manages to happen its almost an afterthought. So I can’t view what a liberal does as hypocrisy as what they’re doing tends to be in support of “attracting attention to themselves and their pet causes” and “appearing to care about something”.

Because it’s all sports to liberals. They have no stake in anything they believe in. Foreign presidents might as well be polytheistic trickster gods to them. They call Xi Jinping a cartoon bear in the same way someone in medieval Iceland would spit three times to keep dwarves away. Liberals believe their criticisms of Putin and Xi are heard by the respective parties and somehow weaken them.

They dehumanize their enemies because their enemies aren’t real, tangible opponents for them. All their battles are in the realms of their own imagination. There’s a good quote I’ve always liked from the German Ideology where Marx is dunking on Max Stirner.

Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth, freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.

Liberals believe their politics are over abstract concepts like truth, freedom, and mankind, not tangible things like people and capital.

I don’t recommend dehumanizing anybody, not even our oppressors, but my interest in that is not so much for engaging their viewpoints as it is for seeing our oppressors realistically. The very same Axis personnel who committed horrific atrocities against thousands of innocents could also still give the impression of being well adjusted, polite, neighbourly people, at least when they were off‐duty. I remember reading somewhere about psychologists who tested surviving Axis war criminals but failed to find signs of insanity.

Dehumanization serves a purpose for anticommunists because it encourages them to shoot first and ask questions later (if ever). They’re less likely to feel pangs of conscience as long as they see their targets as inhuman, thereby continuing to do their jobs. There have been some exceptions in history, like Milovan Popović, but generally speaking anticommunists find it easier, faster, and less expensive to simply imprison or massacre us than address the root causes of our grievances.

The reaction of Liberals to the question “did you watch the Putin interview?” is telling.

It’s a severe degree of groupthink. Everyone knows Putin is a power hungry egomaniac with limited capacity for rational thought, so there’s no point in wasting an hour consuming obvious propaganda.

Once something has been established as ‘what the good guys think’, a Liberal doesn’t dare question it because it would diminish their reputation in the minds of other liberals.

It also keeps them safe from having to confront their core contradictions. For example, there’s a huge proportion of libs supporting Palestine now, but wind the clock back a few years and they were sagely approving the condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-semite. Ask them about Corbyn now, and they’ll stand by their condemnation, or wind it back to ‘he was problematic’, and they’ll get angry and defensive if you continue to press at that inconsistency.

Liberals don’t believe there are opposing view points. There’s the correct liberal facts and then there’s everyone else who isn’t as smart as them.

Don’t forget how ableist they get if you disagree with them.

They claim inclusivity and empathy because they are the “good guy team” and the good guys support those things. Being a good guy is an inherent trait to them, like being tall. You’re either on the good guy team and all your actions are good (or justifiable) or you’re not, and your every action is an evil one by default. Which is how they can see things like China’s poverty alleviation program or Cuba’s massive success in medicine and conclude that these universal goods are actually evil, because the bad guy team is the one doing them.