You can't defederate, I'm the only person keeping !ohio@midwest.social and !cleveland@midwest.social active. The power and frequency of our posting is a boon to the rest of the Lemmyverse.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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All that media is owned by capitalists
Some is owned by states owned by capitalist
The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Seriously, if you look into each cubicle we're in we aren't all the same person
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i dont know where these people came from. Do they not know that lemmy was started by users of /r/fullcommunism after reddit banned it?
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If the allowed spectrum of "leftist" discourse only ranges from free college over here to legal weed over there, there really isn't that much to talk about.
There's more to talk about, and yes argue over, if actual fucking leftists are talking beyond that narrow range of relatively inoffensive to 
discussion topics.
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We say things that you think are untrue because reddit has been aggressively sheltering you from the truth. Lemmy is not controlled by the US State department like Reddit is. That is a big part of the reason Hexbear exists. When you step out of the censorship zone you meet ideas you haven't met before.
We were exiled from the censorship zone. We made a home out here in the wilds where we were challenged every day. We helped each other. We taught each other. We sharpened each other's posting skills. When you stepped into lemmy during the spez revolt (or whatever that was I dont know why reddexit happened) you thought it was an empty land but we were waiting out here.
Recently our admins figured out how to bridge the gap from our custom fork back to lemmy proper and so we came to see if there were any new Ideas to test and any new minds to spread our ideas to.
We are like Fremen but we post.
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Im not going to lie, I've been confused as fuck for like a week because of comments in hex threads and had to look up "liberal vs leftist". all that search did was confuse me further. I did realize that I'm probably not a liberal anymore, if the simpleist distinction between lib and left is "liberals support capitalism". I don't think I want to be anything other than angry and patient after sitting on lemmy for a month tbh.
In Australia, at least, our "Liberal" party is OG Liberal, but in the US Liberal has come to mean a sort of coastal consensus. Just throwing darts at the board, it's a cagey alliance of progressives, Hollywood, Seattle, and New York, with varying opinions on "property rights" and capital.
Based on my fairly cursory reading, this split in the usage of the word "liberal" comes from the influence of liberal scholars in the US like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, who didn't have the same clout in Europe or the UK. Their emancipatory theory, accept it or not, was whether minorities (e.g. Black people, women, indigenous people) could potentially have access to Capital, assuming it was accessible at all. You can still see echoes of this today in the "Margaret Thatcher girlboss" meme. If you want a short primer of "Liberals vs Conservatives" in the US context, you could say its a competition between current capital owners and potential capital owners, though obviously there's a lot of cultural signifiers, political inertia, and alliances that in the short term go against that.
Leftist is an even more nebulous term. A lot of libs (in the US sense) consider themselves on the left, earnestly so. It could be defined as anti-capitalist in the modern context, but that would be the speaker declaring such a thing to their audience more than any cultural definition with any power. Obviously, the original reference to the French parliament, where more or less aristocratic parties were arranged from right to left, no longer has much relevance. Liberalism has subsumed aristocracy; the only aristocrats with much power do so within the context of Liberalism. It's hard to say if vanguardism vs direct worker democracy is more or less left, I think the dichotomy breaks down at some point, partly motivated by the equivocation of "left" meaning "more good".
I think its worthwhile to consciously avoid getting caught up in these games, especially at the behest of a bunch of online nerds. Take stock of yourself and the needs of your (real life) communities, advocate for their interests but also help them to improve. What else can one truly do?
(I am rather drunk right now, not in a fighty mood)
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Here's my favorite introductory text on socialism, by Albert Einstein, which is the "left" as opposed to "liberal" that you mentioned.
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