When asked why the British author's views on trans people aligned with the Nazis, and Rowling said that Nazis did not persecute trans people.

The most famous forms of Holocaust denial and revisionism tend to focus on Jews, casting doubt, for example, on how many were exterminated in the camps. But denying the impact the Nazis had on the other groups they targeted, including queer and trans people, disabled people and Romani people, is still Holocaust denial. Maybe someone should tell J.K. Rowling.

  • JoBo@feddit.uk
    3·
    9 months ago

    It’s usually used perjoratively by the left, tbf.

    In the established party-political sense, Liberal is now clear enough. But liberal as a term of political discourse is complex. It has been under regular and heavy attack from conservative positions, where the senses of lack of restraint and lack of discipline have been brought to bear, and also the sense of a (weak and sentimental) generosity. The sense of a lack of rigour has also been drawn on in intellectual disputes. Against this kind of attack, liberal has often been a group term for PROGRESSIVE or RADICAL (qq.v.) opinions, and is still clear in this sense, notably in USA. But liberal as a pejorative term has also been widely used by socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of lack of rigour and of weak and sentimental beliefs. Thus far it is interpreted by liberals as a familiar complaint, and there is a special edge in their reply to socialists, that they are concerned with political freedom and that socialists are not. But this masks the most serious sense of the socialist use, which is the historically accurate observation that liberalism is a doctrine based on INDIVIDUALIST (q.v.) theories of man and society and is thus in fundamental conflict not only with SOCIALIST (q.v.) but with most strictly SOCIAL (q.v.) theories. The further observation, that liberalism is the highest form of thought developed within BOURGEOIS (q.v.) society and in terms of CAPITALISM (q.v.), is also relevant, for when liberal is not being used as a loose swear-word, it is to this mixture of liberating and limiting ideas that it is intended to refer. Liberalism is then a doctrine of certain necessary kinds of freedom but also, and essentially, a doctrine of possessive individualism.

    Keywords --Raymond Williams

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Good point that is also true and it’s the reason no leftist self-identifies as a liberal. However, my comment was in response to this statement:

      She’s not a conservative, she’s a liberal (in the political science sense of the word, not the USian synonym for leftist).

      My point (which you are supporting) is that leftist and liberal are not synonyms in the US except to people in the US who apply the term liberal wrongly.