Sorry for the confusion, but thank you for bearing with it (no pun intended) and engaging in good faith. I promise you that, at the very least, hexbear users are real people who are being sincere.

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you’re so valid for that to be honest, most explanations of the difference are made with leftists in mind, and very few liberals know leftism 101 so very few explanations detailing the difference are written with liberals or new leftists in mind (because knowing leftism 101 makes you not want to be a liberal any more lol)

The dividing line between leftists and liberals is most commonly agreed on as who should own the productive apparatus of society - liberals believe that individuals owning the apparatus necessary to sustain life, liberty, and happiness is fine, and leftists believe that the only ethical path forward is to make all of this apparatus collectively owned. The specific nature of this ownership, and how the ownership transfer should go down, varies a lot between anarchists, communists, Marxists, Democratic Socialists, etc., but we all agree that allowing an individual to own a means of production is a recipe for disaster.

In Australia, at least, our “Liberal” party is OG Liberal, but in the US Liberal has come to mean a sort of coastal consensus. Just throwing darts at the board, it’s a cagey alliance of progressives, Hollywood, Seattle, and New York, with varying opinions on “property rights” and capital.

Based on my fairly cursory reading, this split in the usage of the word “liberal” comes from the influence of liberal scholars in the US like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, who didn’t have the same clout in Europe or the UK. Their emancipatory theory, accept it or not, was whether minorities (e.g. Black people, women, indigenous people) could potentially have access to Capital, assuming it was accessible at all. You can still see echoes of this today in the “Margaret Thatcher girlboss” meme. If you want a short primer of “Liberals vs Conservatives” in the US context, you could say its a competition between current capital owners and potential capital owners, though obviously there’s a lot of cultural signifiers, political inertia, and alliances that in the short term go against that.

Leftist is an even more nebulous term. A lot of libs (in the US sense) consider themselves on the left, earnestly so. It could be defined as anti-capitalist in the modern context, but that would be the speaker declaring such a thing to their audience more than any cultural definition with any power. Obviously, the original reference to the French parliament, where more or less aristocratic parties were arranged from right to left, no longer has much relevance. Liberalism has subsumed aristocracy; the only aristocrats with much power do so within the context of Liberalism. It’s hard to say if vanguardism vs direct worker democracy is more or less left, I think the dichotomy breaks down at some point, partly motivated by the equivocation of “left” meaning “more good”.

I think its worthwhile to consciously avoid getting caught up in these games, especially at the behest of a bunch of online nerds. Take stock of yourself and the needs of your (real life) communities, advocate for their interests but also help them to improve. What else can one truly do?

(I am rather drunk right now, not in a fighty mood)

Here’s my favorite introductory text on socialism, by Albert Einstein, which is the “left” as opposed to “liberal” that you mentioned.