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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.)

So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.

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That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.

To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.

It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.

I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values.

There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless.

To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating".

To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years.

So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that.

It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.

"The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here - are you implying that liberalism is some sort of regime, or a bad thing that needs to be replaced?

Classical liberalism is a government, a regime, and it has been overtaken and is being replaced already. Hence why classical liberals feel surrounded by sharks.

> Classical liberalism is a government, a regime

I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me.

> it has been overtaken and is being replaced already

I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?

>I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me.

The government in America based on classic liberal ideas - to be specific, is being overtaken and replaced.

>I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?

It's not a good thing. But one also has to see why that form of government was overtaken the way it was. It becomes hard not to view classical liberals with a certain amount of contempt when they just advocate a return to a form of government that proved very fragile under pressure.

> a form of government that proved very fragile under pressure

Seems to have done pretty well [1], all things considered.

I see authoritarianism as an entropy state. It takes active energy to resist.

I agree that the US needs to put more energy into this.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-wor...

>Seems to have done pretty well [1], all things considered.

If being a democracy with elections is all that matters, yes. Putin's Russia fits that bill.

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