Has there ever been a Lib who wandered in here and made actually good arguments or at least tried to actually back up their claims?
I feel like I've actually encountered some Libs IRL and in other online spaces who at least sounded more intelligent. Every one that wanders in here just insists that their right, cites Wikipedia, and tries to troll people like a 14 year old who stole their moms laptop.
You think we'd occasionally get a somewhat more articulate one there but I've yet yo see it.
I've seen an hexbear user take the maximalist "stalin and soviet union did nothing wrong" stance and get lectured by an actual soviet historian but that was on another server. Smart people don't go looking for fights online.
im a big proponent of examining formats and interfaces to better understand why people decide to interact the way they do
thats why i think hexbear should host a guestbook on the hexbear.net domain but it should just be for libs and they can write a little comment about how tankies are bad and why
Remember the tide of internet funny money peddlers that claimed that database ledger positions associated with ugly monkey cartoons would revolutionize the world and somehow stick it to the big banks and the current ruling class (that more than anyone else bought into the fucking things)? Good times.
One of the early Bitcoin arguments was that it would help marginalized people in the global south who were cut off from traditional banking.
Fast forward to fairly recently, when some people in Palestine are using crypto to receive aid, Binance cut off access when Israel asked. No court orders necessary. Turns out crypto is easier to freeze than money in traditional banking.
Remember when people here said AI art was proletarianizing art by taking it from the """bourgeois""" artist class and putting it in the hands of the working class?
The only example I can remember is on another instance, around a year ago maybe. It was a surprisingly civil conversation between a liberal and some hexbears about the Korean War. The liberal actually knew dates and names of specific documents, knew the names of people on either side, knew stuff about 1950s diplomacy. So i was impressed. There was also a surprising lack of portraying North Korea as a cartoonish dictatorship where haircuts are illegal.
The liberal still used a liberal framework though and was completely wrong. Any bare level scrutiny over the claims would reveal them as imperialist and racist, but it's possibly the only time I saw a liberal around here have at least the bare minimum of a presentable argument.
I know it's a meme in its own right now, but LiberalSocialist's "power dynamics" thing at least had some legs when it came to the material conditions that are most likely in place between significantly different aged people in a relationship, even if they're both adults.
I specifically remember a liberal that posted here having kind of a decent response to an argument I made. I don't even remember what the topic was, but I specifically remember being annoyed by it and feeling a bit b*tched out when a fellow hexbear swooped in to basically cover my ass (but also continue to back me up if I ever show the slightest weakness please).
Broadly though, the liberals that come here are all needlessly butt-hurt people that got super obsessively mad over some shit they saw posted, and essentially come to us pre-cooked in their desperation to "get even" emotionally.
I tend to assume most of the smart liberals are self-assured enough to not really care enough about us to post here.
Some libs can be better than a class reductionist commie. But with some of the posts on this site, you generally don't get the good faith libs. I hear plenty of bad takes here (sometimes I'm the one making them) and it only takes a random lib to wander in and be right once or twice.
i think if we'd managed to stay federated with like 90% of the annoying instances we probably would've gotten one or two over the years. unfortunately our posting power was too strong to sail undetected
I feel like we always get ones that are impossibly embarrassingly smug, like to the point where if they said the sky was blue I'd avoid mentioning my opinions on the sky's colour to avoid association
The smartest lib I've ever encountered basically copy-pasted the technical definition of production functions and tried to use it as a bludgeon in defense of marginalism, that's it, I've literally never encountered any lib here or on the old sub who ever approached that level of misguided articulation
It's genuinely hilarious how badly miseducated libs on lemmy are, I've yet to see a single one give a convincing definition of the main terms we use, let alone back up their supposedly grounded opposition to our ideologies, they can't even define their own ideology
Not liberal, but left Libertarian here. I prefer having civil discussions about these topics because there might be misinformation on one side or the other, and you can't convince people to change their information when you're being uncivilized. However, the experiences I've had in the past is when I do try to have a convo about it, I get bashed, insulted, and belittled to eternity. So when that happens I become a smartass myself. Granted that hasn't happened here yet