Probably not the type of person you are directing the question towards, however, to me “Liberal” when used as a genuine marker of someone’s political philosophy is effectively someone who believes in the status quo, but with slightly more protections for individuals, or relatively minor changes to existing political processes. They refuse to believe that other market or political system options are worthy of attempting or simply do not consider them feasible.

As to the second part,

Either words’ definitions matter or they don’t, and if they don’t, then none of what you say matters.

Unfortunately, definitions change over time or simply aren’t accurate, homosexual used to inaccurately be defined as “sexual orientation disturbance” for example. That definition of liberal also covers things like the ““Classical Liberalism”” movement as liberal, they believe in COMPLETE market deregulation and capitalist “anarchy”, their version of “rights of the individual” is the rights of an individual to do whatever they want to when they have the money to do so, without allowing any government to intervene in any way. This can (and frequently does) include using money to discriminate against other people, that’s something worth fighting against.

Also FWIW, “Neoliberal” is defined by Oxford Languages as “favoring policies that promote free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.”, sometimes when people refer to “libs” they mean neoliberals, and yeah, deregulation and free-market capitalism has been tried, it sucks and deserves to be shat on.

• an anarchist

I know, right?! Why!!!

I saw that thread, there were some extremely weird and gross responses, one person wrote like 6 paragraphs on how they couldn’t stop using it, with one of the reasons being they “liked the mouth feel”??? It’s baffling the lengths people will go to to justify saying a slur.