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For the longest time, this didn't really make any sense to me. I guess I never really made the connection.

Who are these liberal elitists that the right decries? Who are these people? Are they people like me?

I thought that it might be so, but the clues were there all along. They are talking about the ecofeminists. They are talking about the "liberals" who talk about how minorities are so oppressed, and yet who when telling stories identify people by race rather than other characteristics, even when it is completely unimportant, proving that they themselves are indeed racists. They're talking about the so-called liberals who try to restrict freedom of speech, opposing Citizens United, supporting anti hate speech legislation, and supporting media censorship for the children.

They're talking about the people who claim to embody liberalism, but aren't liberal at all.

I had a teacher once who claimed that once you went far enough to the left, you were indistinguishable from someone on the extreme right. I disagree. I don't think these people are actually leftists at all, but cargo cult liberals, who claim to embrace liberal ideals without understanding them. But they are associated with us, and just like Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum are easy targets to point out the insanity of conservatives, so these folk can be used to ridicule us. But worse, we let them, perhaps out of fear of being made out to be racist, sexist, or otherwise "not liberal".

A lot of conservative attacks on liberals make a lot more sense now, misguided as they are.

What do you think? Have you run into these people? How did you deal with them? What can we do to prevent them from coming to be? Or am I way off base?

This post has been edited by Titanium Dragon: 10 March 2012 - 08:30 AM

I personally think it's not that deep. I feel it's more of a shitty cop-out remark people make when they have nothing else to say and can't seem to defend themselves. So they instead pick at the confidence of the arguer, like being confident about your stance is wrong.

"You're so elitist, why can't you just sit down and take my opinion as valid??"

(Because for the most part an opinion does not need to be seen as valid. Contrary to popular belief, you can actually have pretty misguided opinions.)

I think this is more of an American thing than anything else really. Over here no one would ever be accused of being 'elitist' what is this even supposed to mean? Is it something to do with the education levels of people who hold these beliefs or something, are they the elitists?

The other thing that's different is that in the US I believe the term 'Liberal' basically has a different meaning than what I would understand it to mean. In the US it seems to me the 'Liberal' basically means socialist, with all the accompanying connotations.

In the UK you have Conservatives, Social Democrats and Liberals. Liberals are the ones concerned with civil rights, freedoms etc. but are still free marketers and don't want to interfere in the economy. Whereas the Social Democrats are the ones who worry about workers rights, welfare and benefits, but interfere in the economy and clamp down on civil liberties.

Its probably unhelpful to think of the political spectrum as just a line with one side being left and the other right. The whole 'if you go far enough left, your basically the same as the right' has more to do with history and totalitarian regimes, they were indistinguishable in their methods. If you use a political compass it gives you a much better idea where you, and others stand, because it has two scales instead of just one.

Really though its probably just a consequence of the US's majoritarian system which encourages a more polarised politics leading to this kind of language being used, since I don't really know what 'elitist' is supposed to mean or why its bad, I'd say it was probably just a character attack rather than a valid criticism.

Is there such a thing as a Conservative Elitist?

So-called "Liberal Elitists" are just extreme-left activists, equivalent to PETA or similar. The Right-wing equivalent have so often been more extreme that no-one has ever considered the idea of a Liberal extremist: a Right-wing activist will condone races they consider inferior, censor the media, and feed their own pockets: in contrast, Liberal extremists will be in favor of human, animal and workers' rights, and will campaign for environmental protection, support anti-pollution measures and alternative energy source developement. In their own way, Liberal Elitists could be just as dangerous as Right-wing activists: take the Animal Welfare Front, the group of madmen who have attacked and sometimes killed in the name of animal welfare. They take Liberal ideals of fairness and equality and push them too far.
America's politics being the dickswinging contest that it is, the Republicans just need more ammunition to decry the Democratic regime as flawed.

This post has been edited by Sammy: 10 March 2012 - 12:16 PM

There is an elitist strain to American liberalism at least, but that's not particularly a bad thing. If you start feeling smug about your own opinions you probably fall under this category. Then again, it's not unjustifiable. Some people just can't deal with an attitude that doesn't assume automatic respect toward the opinions of others. They get an inferiority complex. Of course the liberal elite think they're better than you. After all, aren't they? Morally? Intellectually? If you're conservative, of course they are.

I don't think liberal elitism is the same as liberal extremism, but I don't know the usage in the US too well, so I might be wrong.

Passionate liberals come off as condescending, smug and opinionated, and even more so when people are used to a world where you can say "it's my opinion" and be allowed to hold a horrible bigoted view. It's strange and perceived as hostile to many people, as they don't realize that you can indeed have wrong opinions. They feel especially bad when they realize they're being proved wrong, and, unable to fight back, they feel inferior and cling to their views, resorting to terms like "liberal elitism". Basically what Jerk and Taeshi said.

I've heard from many people that "There's really no left wing in the US". What you call liberals may very well be in the center, or even towards the right, but you're so full of ultraconservatives that people near the center are seen as liberals, and greatly towards the left.

So I see it as a matter of perspective. "Liberal" because everyone's a conservative, and "elitist" because everyone's afraid to argue passionately and actually challenge their own views.

I don't like identity politics at all. It all falls apart when you get into a situation where if the person you hate says "the sky is blue", you have to agree with it. But doing so could cause you to appear as a "sell-out", a defector, or someone who abandons all your previous values completely. It's nonsense. Either something is right, or it isn't. And you can't compromise that principle around merely who is saying what.

You mentioned free speech, for example. If there are lines to be drawn at free speech, one line could be the incitement to commit imminent crimes, and even then that's something to be highly skeptical of due to the nature of slipperiness involving giving groups of people the power to censor certain words by claiming it is a provocation to violence and reacting accordingly (without having to prove so, I might add). There are people who say The Satanic Verses and the Danish Cartoons were incitements, when in fact the incitements to violence were coming from the likes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Islamic extremists. These were cases of transparent bullying against anyone who wanted to criticise Islam, but not many people were willing to side with Salman Rushdie and the cartoonists, and against those who thought it was okay to suppress gentle opinions with full-scale international violence. It was not akin to someone shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre as it keeps being repeated like a mantra. If anything, it was whispering "spider" in a playground with a few babyish kids. The right to criticise anything we like, especially religion, is not negotiable. Because the opposite of which is nothing short of totalitarianism. If you don't have the right to criticise religion, you have no right at all.

But going against the most obvious bullying of that sort can be seen as "disrespectful" by the left, and in particular the "multicultural" camp who would rather see any criticisms of religion be suppressed in the name of niceness. Come on. They are defending the very same people who will watch hours of TV and read pages of news until they eventually find something to be offended about, as well as those who can't even take the lightest joke about Jesus. This is what happens when you start thinking it's okay to silence views based on subjective feelings - anybody can feel like they can get in on it. I get verbal abuse thrown at me from time to time and usually it is pathetic, making it easy for me to dismiss. But even if it did offend me, I would not dream of shutting such a person up. In the words of Bill Hicks: "Life is offensive, you know what I mean?". Controlling the whole world based on what offends you as opposed to what offends anybody else is not remotely possible nor desirable. It's interesting to see how far the US has come compared to 50 or 100 years ago without any government interference on speech. Even the slightest inspection into history will show that the greatest oppression against minorities comes from states and theocracies that restrict speech, and a lot of other freedoms too.

Sometimes both sides of the spectrum can be blind. For instance, there is no justification whatsoever, and there never has been, for the prohibition of drug use. Indeed, President Nixon thought it would be quite the declaration during the disgraceful Vietnam war. Ron Paul seems to be the only presidential candidate in America who I am aware of make an explicit stance against the drug war, and the right for people to take whatever substances they like in their own private lives. I would not support him, however, due to his stance on other issues. But for a Republican, the promise to end the war on drugs was very impressive.

And sometimes the left can be very immodest, or unwilling to see through some of their double standards. What happened in Iraq and Iran during the 80s was stupendously imperialistic and insane on the count of the US, and some are still criminally living scot free from any accountability. However, that said, if you were to ask most people on the left why they were against the 2003 intervention in Iraq, they will point to this imperialism, when it could be argued that leaving Iraq to fall apart would have also been imperialistic. They will say that the war was motivated by profit, but at the same time complain about the large debt it put the US in. Not many people on the left are even aware of the people of Kurdistan's long struggle against fascism and anti-secularism of the worst kind in the form of Saddam Hussein and his crime family, which is no doubt liberally motivated. Chances are that if Saddam were still in power, the country would have been given to his sons, and the Sunni/Shia sectarianism would have erupted regardless. Saddam ought to have been taken out in 1991, and the act of leaving him in power even after his annexation of Kuwait was baffling in itself. Iraq will definitely go down as one of the US's greatest blunders ever.

Do I think the 2003 intervention was right? I don't know. But just as I don't speak for Bush or his simple-minded worshipers, I don't speak for those who "fight for liberalism" in their own country but dismiss liberalism struggles in other countries. The question of the intervention is a lot more complicated than most people think. And when I study the arguments against the intervention, I try to listen to people who are a lot more sophisticated than Chomsky and his followers think they are. Skepticism of an ideology must go up in proportion to the number of people who believe that ideology, and that goes for those who oppose the intervention just as much as those who support it.

The idea of "left" and "right" politics is quite meaningless to me. They are political consensuses that are emphasised by mass media corporations. People who go against that sort of thing are seen as "disposable statistics" in their eyes. Reason, and the act of asking questions even in the face of unpleasant answers is a concept that most would rather throw away for reassurance and comfort. Those who say they don't believe anything they see on TV are just as bad as those who do believe anything they see on TV, and are the exact kind of people who will fall for the same predictable traps, in the same way that punks and hipsters think they go against mainstream music by joining another mainstream movement. My ideas are based on evidence and skepticism, and do not have any correlation with the opinions of anyone else. My own name is enough for me, and I don't need a label of any kind.

^^^^^ semantics bullshit don't bother reading

Semantics is quite important, Seppu. Most people dismiss it because it seems pedantic. But the whole point of language is to convey thoughts and ideas across clearly. If we're all operating by different definitions, nobody really understands what the other person is thinking.

^^^^^^ thinks semantic arguments matter lol

Also what makes you think the semantics here are wrong.

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I never said that

Okay, good. Now get out.

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This post has been edited by whf: 10 March 2012 - 08:28 PM

Okay I feel bad about shitposting so I'll make a statement about semantic arguments, but at the point when one begins; does it even really matter? Since technically, the semantics are set in stone? It's hard to find a semantic to be "wrong" if their definition is set in stone. To me it's pointless just to change semantics just to fit your idealism, that's how I feel about jameshogg's posts.

jameshogg, on 10 March 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

Well, reason is something many people won't use to get to what is right, so yes, it would be nice if everyone had the right opinions, but they don't. So it's easier to just group everyone by what their views and beliefs generally are, so you can know what to expect. You don't need a label by yourself, but when you're in a political context, it just puts your opinions in perspective of the general opinions of the country you are in.

For example, in the US, when you think "conservative" you normally think of pro-life, overly religious, anti-LGBT people, which comes in handy to know what kind of person you're dealing with, even if there are different flavors and not everyone is the same.

Seppucrow no one's debating semantics, go away.

This post has been edited by Itu: 10 March 2012 - 08:52 PM

Itu, on 10 March 2012 - 08:45 PM, said:

Yeah. I guess there is no way to stop people from naturally thinking like that without constantly spelling out the opposite. But I don't have it in me to be part of an identity. Reason and skepticism are the only things I can really be a part of since they are methods of finding out truth independent of group opinions. I can't not do that.

Seppucrow, on 10 March 2012 - 08:32 PM, said:

Semantics? Set in stone? I don't think you know what semantics are Seppucrow.
There is no such thing as a 'definite' or 'absolute' connotation or denotation. Even from a sociological perspective, 'cultural definitions' are still abstractions and by nature have conflicting values. That's why language evolves over time, and that's what semantics is all about. It's the fact that there are no 'actualities' in language, and it's just a system we've made in a feeble attempt to communicate some of the infinite factors and experiences we perceive and 'remember'.

Also, Itu, you just used semantics in that argument.



Why the fuck does everyone blow off semantics and sociology as chumpy bullshit? It's because everyone else said it right?

This post has been edited by CaptainBaconMan: 10 March 2012 - 09:53 PM

CaptainBaconMan, on 10 March 2012 - 09:45 PM, said:

I know I used semantics. Can you not? But I'm not arguing them in any way. I'm just using them to build an example useful at expressing a point. I'm not debating what the terms mean, or why the usage is wrong, as no one is doing that. I'm only explaining why labels like "liberal" or "conservative" are useful and why I don't mind them.

CaptainBaconMan, on 10 March 2012 - 09:45 PM, said:

It's because people tend to start picking at irrelevant semantics (not saying semantics are inherently irrelevant) in the middle of an unrelated argument.

This post has been edited by Itu: 10 March 2012 - 10:07 PM

I agree that semantics evolves, but I disagree with the notion that there are no actualities. Arbitrary use is what make semantics "set in stone" -- for example, cats are recognized as cats not just because people say so, but that they are defined in dictionaries as cats; referred to cats in books, TVs, and plays as so; you could say that semantics might change because people will start using a different name, but if it's only a few people, the general consensus will still use the former label, and that's what makes it set in stone. You could argue that nothing is truly set in stone and anything could change, and it is true that anything can change, but you're assuming things if you think they will all be eventually be changed.

This post has been edited by Seppucrow: 10 March 2012 - 11:17 PM

Actually, anything in biology is a bad example, considering if we find out a new difference in the traits of any animal we would classify them as something else.

I'm using semantics in an argument about semantics, Semantiception.

Like I've said before, anything can change, but you're assuming things if they will all be eventually be changed.

This post has been edited by Seppucrow: 10 March 2012 - 11:18 PM

So why is it not right to say a term is incorrect? Especially in this case, when were trying to identify what liberal elitist are.

I don't recall saying that is wrong. I think Itu explained it best with my gripe with semantic arguments:

Itu said:

Seppucrow, on 10 March 2012 - 11:23 PM, said:

But I don't see how jameshogg was that far off topic for it to be a bad use of semantics.

Oh, that complaint was just generalized.

My comment was a criticism of identity politics - how words like "liberal", "conservative", "left" and right" can lose their meanings. I don't know where people are getting semantics from.

I think losing their meanings can relate to semantics, but regardless I'll take what you said for granted now. I have misjudged you.

@jameshogg
I apologize for calling it semantics, my mistake.

>>Seppucrow calls out jameshogg about semantics
>>Seppucrow is only arguing about semantics

This thread is funny.

Ace, on 11 March 2012 - 01:17 AM, said:

Taeshi, on 11 March 2012 - 12:54 AM, said:

Even I make terrible mistakes.................................................

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I'm not sure if calling PETA "extreme left" is correct; while they're obviously extremists, the trouble is that people have trouble wrapping their brains around the idea that extremism has absolutely nothing to do with where you fall on the political spectrum, and everything to do with how extremely you hold the positions you are at. You can be an extremist moderate, or be an extremist conservative without actually holding extreme far-right positions. This is particularly true of single-issue folk; for example, there are many "gun nuts" whose overall social positions are not actually all that remarkable, but if you even imply guns are bad they go ballistic (pun fully intended).

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Conseratives actually like folk like bankers and industrialists, so I think its somewhat more complicated than this.

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Not really. Someone in the US who is liberal is often not a socialist, or at least the only way they're really meaningfully socialist is regarding healthcare and public goods. Personally, they aren't really for socialism - they like business and free enterprise.

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Ron Paul is not really a Republican; he's a Libertarian who runs as a Republican because its hard for third party candidates who are not independently wealthy to garner much attention.

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You have to understand that the Kuwaiti war was a mistake to begin with. Kuwait was drilling horizontally into Iraq's oil; Iraq told them to knock it off. Kuwait didn't; Iraq invaded. The main reason we got involved in the war was a lie - the Kuwaitis lied, claimed the Iraqi soldiers were killing babies in hospitals, dressed up a government official's daughter and had her come forward to lie to Congress.

The truth is that the right thing to do is to let their governments rot on the vine; Saddam wasn't particularly worse than anyone else in the Middle East, and it is far better to wait for an organic pro-democracy movement to emerge to help out rather than trying to force it on them when they aren't ready for it.

The reason I oppose it wasn't imperialism, because the war was not, in truth, imperialistic. Rather, the reason I oppose it was because just having a bad guy in charge of a country is not sufficient justification for an invastion when you don't have any structure to replace it with. There weren't any "pro liberal" forces at work there.

I am kind of wondering though why you guys are trying to bitch about semantics when they're completly irrelevant to the issue at hand, or even anything really.

I suppose it is too much to ask for people to ask whether their political opponents might have a reason (however flimsy) for percieving them in a negative fashion.

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While it is true they often use namecalling in the place of actual arguments, I don't know that that is particularly valid. Why call them liberal elitists and not something else? There has to be a reason why they've latched onto that particular insult, as opposed to something else.

This post has been edited by Titanium Dragon: 11 March 2012 - 03:40 AM

Titanium Dragon, on 11 March 2012 - 03:34 AM, said:

Probably, but I'd chalk that up to the standard conservative's gross misunderstanding of economics.

Titanium Dragon, on 11 March 2012 - 03:34 AM, said:

Because it's passionate liberals who come off as condescending, smug and opinionated, so the term "liberal elitist" is a good portrayal of the bad part of that confidence and passion.

Partly unrelated, but I've known people who think these forums are full of liberal elitists. I think several people here fit that stereotype, but not necessarily in the bad way.

This post has been edited by Itu: 11 March 2012 - 03:52 AM

@TD
I agree with you, but I'm kinda confused about what you mean by "extremist moderates", I know it's not a big deal, I'm just confused.

I think he means something like this. When your views are moderate but you hold them strongly and even violently, probably with activism and such. I think it's pretty hard to find a place where moderates are actually called moderates though, as in the context of a particular country, the views are almost always generally skewed to one side, so moderates may be considered liberals or conservatives.

So being an extremist somewhere between the opposing views of the particular context.

This post has been edited by Itu: 11 March 2012 - 04:04 AM

Itu, on 11 March 2012 - 04:00 AM, said:

Alright, that makes perfect sense.