It is time for the Left to Take Back Up the Mantle of Liberty.

[parochial boy]

Different conceptions of what liberty means.

For the left it means not having your life dictated to you as a result of your socioeconomic circumstances.

For the right it's the really important stuff like being able to buy a slightly bigger coke or to call someone a "n****er" without getting in trouble

[parochial boy]

Different conceptions of what liberty means.

For the left it means not having your life dictated to you as a result of your socioeconomic circumstances.

For the right it's the really important stuff like being able to buy a slightly bigger coke or to call someone a "n****er" without getting in trouble

When you're done sodomizing that strawman, perhaps you can try engaging an actual argument.

It's hyperbole, but it's not a strawman. There's no real use in denying the fact that there are different conceptions of what exactly constitutes freedom; just the same as what constitutes liberalism, conservatism, democracy or just about any political concept is up for debate.

The trouble with the argument being presented here is that is presents "liberty" from a wholly biased viewpoint that does not reflect the ways in which people of the left, radical or not, view liberty.

As a simplistic example, a anarchist may consider that private property is by its nature authoritarian, as it inherently restricts other people's liberty of access to the property. Obviously, most people would vehemently disagree, but there isn't any ordained "nature" that required this to be the case, as fundamentally liberty is only ever what social convention deems it to be.

Added to this, a simplistic understand of liberty as "freedom from any constraint" is obviously simplistic, given that my freedom to do "X" could impinge on your freedom to do "Y" (me taking an unpaid internship may cost someone who does not have the resources to find that particular luxury, for instance).

So yes, there are different conceptions of what constitutes "liberty", and the right tend to view liberty through the framework of "removing constraints" whereas the left tend to see it through the framework of "enabling opportunity".

And the point still stands, that a lot of the decrying of attacks on liberty that we see are quite trivial, and are often more complex from that perspective than people would like to make out - why is the SJW wanting to no platform Richard Spencer inherently more "authoritarian" than someone whose ideology demands that someone should live their entire life in the country their parents were born in?

Happy?

[parochial boy]

That's not the point. Everyone gets that there are different conceptions of liberty, but your rhetoric crossed the border of hyperbole into the realm of strawmen and demagoguery. You say our cause is about racial bigotry and then want to walk it back to an intellectual discussion when called out. Good grief.

"The rights view of sex is about protecting the family while the left's is just about letting creeps shower with your teenage daughter."

"Hey man it's just hyperbole. Different groups have very different ideas of sexuality."

See how that works.

I was being facetious by picking two deliberately bad examples of what are simplistically held up as examples of "liberty" being under threat, as I was fed up with the argument that the left doesn't care about liberty because of the size of coke cups or whatever.

I apologise if you thought I was trying to make out that the right's cause was racial bigotry (but you've got to admit that "I don't agree with racism, but he should have the liberty to be racist" is a widespread argument used by people who are, usually, right wing) because that wasn't my intention - but when I gave an "intellectual" explanation of the initial point I was making (which evidently isn't something that a lot of people on here actually understand), you chose to respond with more righteous indignation rather than actually engage with it.