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'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

The liberals that come here are specifically redditors, so they're all idiots

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'm sure it's happened, I just can't remember any off hand.

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

Libs IRL

i can believe that, some PMC are very good at their jobs

in other online spaces

nah

I have yet to see anything more sophisticated than "the other guy is worse, though"

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

like a 14 year old who stole their moms laptop

I mean

yes, but they wouldn't be labelled a lib so this is a logical impossibility.

also, confirmation bias is at play here.

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

Yes, @FunkyStuff@hexbear.net

The girl reading this

No, never have, never will. Our Chewbacca is too strong.

Ita me im the libwral, ama

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

the mental gymnastics conservative animals have to do to think this is almost impressive