"Liberal" implies support for civil rights and individual liberty, which is GOOD. I regard myself as a liberal: in favor of the entire Bill of Rights including the Second Amendment. Servile = "The government is your master; shut up, pay your taxes, and follow orders."
The so-called ‘liberals’ of today are distinguished by their reliance upon feudal governmental behavior...
Socialism.
The intentional perversion of the language is a hallmark of the totalitarian mind, something Orwell knew well and made the center piece of 1984. They have distorted the meaning of the name "Fascist" so that most perfect descriptor of today's leftist intelligentsia is all but unusable too, again IMHO, with malice aforethought.
Words I want back because they are good and noble words which have been stolen and corrupted:
comrade
gay
discriminate
partner
I’ve been raving about this for years. Define the terms and win the argument:
‘Progressives’ - how can progress not be good?
leftist (there are no ‘rightists’) and no more Marxists either.
nationalist becomes xenophobic
homosexual changes to gay
traditionalist becomes chauvinist
celibate becomes sexually dysfunctional
etc. etc.
The left is really, really good at this. Of course having the MSM on your side helps a lot.
The list is huge.
Languages change, that is their nature. “Silly” used to mean “expensive”, not “whimsical”. “Gentleman” used to refer to a man of a specific socio-economic class. Same with “lady”.
I remember being thrown thrown for a loop when hearing the phrase “hook me up” at a potluck. The person saying it meant “I can’t quite reach that jello salad over there, would you mind spooning some onto my plate for me, please?” while I was taking it as “Could you set me up on a date with someone?” Not a message I was expecting to hear from a complete stranger!
There have been many discussions I’ve seen which had to be stopped in order to establish deffinitions for the terms being used. It gets confusing when everyone means something different.
Forgot to mention a slew of new words that end in ‘phobic’ - like homophobic.
ping
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW!
I have my own Newspeak dictionary:
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
- conservative :
- opposed to radical change of the sort which promote the idea that assigns authority to "liberals" while leaving the responsibility with those who work to a bottom line and therefore are subject to second guessing.