They also have that stupid-ass disengage rule that they weaponize to suppress criticism & dissent as they slip in the last word when the established approach of simply ignoring responses/ceasing to answer them has always worked without shutting down discussion for anyone else: example. (In that example, I then took the liberty to edit my last comment from an incomplete Socratic discourse to a fully contained criticism, which I encourage everyone to do in that situation.) They seem terribly confused about the relation of liberty to anarchism or whom public discourse is for.

Public commentary is for the public, not their authors: unlike private messaging (concerned with communicating directly to authors), public discourse is specifically for the public to engage ideas & to present ideas (including contesting ideas) to the public. Especially on an anonymous public forum, authors are peripheral/irrelevant to the public consideration of ideas.

By granting the author discretion to suppress criticism of their public commentary, it represses the liberty of the public to decide for themselves whether they get to see such criticism or contribute some themselves. Encouraging commenters to get possessive about their public comments & make it about themselves (which their rule does) detracts from the public interest & focus on ideas. It misleads participants to focus on themselves instead of on the public & their interest for an open, public discourse to competitively deliberate ideas.

It’s an atrocious, pointlessly complicated system resulting in convoluted project histories prone to confusion. Trunk-based development with sensible tags of releases & hotfixes achieves the same thing without the junk complexity. Git flow isn’t overkill, it’s just ill-conceived.

I’ve only seen this confusion around liberalism come up in lemmy. I think it’s due to tankie rhetoric poisoning the idea.

When people outside the US mention liberalism, they typically mean social liberalism, which the US severely lacks.

It’s the other way around as explained extensively.

General definitions & the historical development of liberalism are academic & largely accepted worldwide.

liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

Some of the earliest liberal practices are found in the US Declaration of Independence, which predates the French revolution spreading the practice of liberal ideals throughout Europe. The US declaration pretty much rehashes core tenets of liberal philosophy

• inherent equality of individuals
• universal individual rights & liberties
• consent of the governed (governments exist for the people who have a right to change & replace them, & authority is legitimate only when it protects those liberties).

Note how capitalism isn’t mentioned anywhere: it’s nonessential. Capitalism predates & isn’t liberalism. Liberalism is moral & political philosophy, not an economic one.

The philosophy is a natural progression of humanist philosophies from the Renaissance through the Protestant Reformation & the Enlightenment that stress the importance of individuality, secular reasoning, & tolerance over dogma & subservience to unaccountable authority. To address unaccountable authority based on dogma & traditions, English & French philosophers defined legitimate authority based on humanist morality pretty much as expressed in the US declaration. They argued that political systems thrive better with limits & duties on authority & an adversarial system of institutional competition whether in separation of powers, adversarial law system with habeas corpus & right to jury trial, competitive elections, dialogue, or economic competition.

In time, goals shifted from addressing obstacles to individual freedom due to government to addressing obstacles due to the rest of society. Thus emerged the distinction between classical & modern liberalism:

• Classical liberalism: minimal government to eliminate traditional obstacles to individual freedom
• Modern liberalism: positive government intervention to address social & economic inequalities in the cause of individual freedom

As explained before, in the US, modern liberalism (which includes social liberalism & progressivism) is simply called liberalism whereas classical liberalism more closely corresponds to libertarianism.

I think US liberals & the rest of the world agree that modern liberalism ought to be standard.

Any moderation that goes beyond the content of a message in context is questionable. Plus, some of us take pride being constantly downvoted as gadflies for challenging lack of critical thought where it’s most inconvenient & unwelcome. Moderating based on “reputation” leads to unreflective conformity hostile to the “wrong” questions.