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Comment by twrkit | Hacker News Reader

It's hypocritical to both support and oppose liberty

A contextless and monolithic "Liberty" is one of those dumb polarizing concepts, like "you're with us or you're against us".

It's fine to support "liberty" but to not take into account your subjective understanding, interpretation, and practice of the concept, come on now. Just saying the word does not make society a better place. It's not a magical power phrase.

That's not what hypocritical means.

To clarify, the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the Twitter 'internet activists' are supporting freedom for their kind and to protect their common ground (the Internet), while simultaneously lamenting that the freedoms of another coalition ('mouth-breathing, NRA-card-holding gun nuts') are not further imposed upon.

The Constitution in this case is irrelevant; rather, this boils down to the preservation of individual liberty, regardless of what your beliefs are regarding the 2nd or 4th Amendment rights.

If one purports to serve liberty in any form, and secretly opposes pieces of it, this is hypocritical. If one purports to pursue the best society we can manage, one is not necessarily constrained to making decisions based solely on what they do to liberty - even if you believe that the choice that maximally preserves liberty is always what leads to the best society, in your view the person in question would be mistaken, but not hypocritical.

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