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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I recognize that in the context of threads like these "liberal" just means "Democrat" but as a non-American, it still reads funny to me. I mean you can't properly call yourself a liberal by any textbook definition of liberalism and be in ok with firing people for their political views. This is the kind of stuff ACLU fights against, right?

It's a bit like saying "socialists have aggressively attempted to take away people's unemployment benefits".

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Agreed, but I'm an American so the misuse of the word "liberal" drives me even more bonkers, because I encounter it all the time.

> I mean you can't properly call yourself a liberal by any textbook definition of liberalism and be in ok with firing people for their political views.

Isn't this usage (not being okay with firing people arbitrarily) more compatible with the US/North American sense of 'liberal' than the modern non-Anglo European sense of 'liberal'? Specifically, the emphasis on individual liberties over government regulation, which the US sense of 'liberal' eschewed while keeping the social liberalism dimension. 'Liberal' parties at least in German-speaking countries tend to be very approximately (European) center-right, for instance.

Even then, I still find the usage of the word "liberal" or "libertarian" by no-rules capitalism apologists to be quite ironic. It is the kind of ideology who defends the "freedom" of an employer to fire at will his employees for any reason (like speech outside of work), without pondering for a moment what that means to the freedom of the employee...

What’s the point of comments like this? Words mean different things in different languages, and as you seem to be aware, “liberal” in the US has evolved to just mean left-of-center, and not what it means in your country.

Plenty of words in plenty of languages have meanings that are not justifiable by etymology; it’s not unusual at all.

Btw, “socialist” in many European countries is also used in a way quite different from its traditional meaning. The French “socialist” party would have been unrecognizable to traditional socialists like Marx.

There’s not really a point. It’s just weird to me seeing people deeply illiberal things call themselves “liberals” even though I know that it’s because the word “liberal” has a meaning in the US that has very little to do with classical liberalism and that’s just how it goes sometimes.

the point of comments like that is to showcase the hypocrisy of a group that previously was about open, diverse thought but has now become incredibly narrow-minded.

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