You are correct. If the flow of traffic in lane 1 or 2 is faster than the flow of traffic in lane 2 or 3 then it is okay to pass. Intentionally changing lane temporarily to pass a car on the inside is illegal.

The other poster confused your point.

If someone in lane 3 is going 69 and overtaking someone then there’s no reason to pass them, and probably isn’t safe or legal given there is, by definition, a car on the inside lane already.

Classical liberalism (just to give a concrete political term for those old school liberals) is admirable. I broadly agree with its values and I support all those points you mentioned. The progressive and conservative variants we often see in US politics are blatantly hypocritical and broken.

Unfortunately, liberalism’s core issue is that it’s an ideology based on an abstract concept rather than our physical conditions - it starts with the abstract, fair idea of freedom and attempts to apply it onto material reality. For example, the liberal approach to free speech, which theoretically creates a marketplace of ideas where the best prevail, just turns into a propaganda echo chamber when huge media organisation are owned by business tycoons with political agendas, and when social media companies are financially punished by their advertisers for allowing controversial expression. The utopian marketplace of ideas never really manifests at scale when that marketplace is collectively dominated by the like-minded owning class.

Without adding restrictions (a contradiction of liberty), the huge wealth of some people turns their freedoms into their political power. If the rich owning class can control the economy through a monopoly or similar, they have the freedom to control what news you can find, what products you can buy (if you can’t DIY it, like a computer) and their quality and how safe they are, what jobs they will give you, and so much more.

There are also plenty of other contradictions which we see play out, such as:

• How can we balance freedom of religion with giving people rights that a religion rejects? (e.g. abortion, homosexuality)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with someone else’s right to private property? (e.g. trespassing, restriction of the commons)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with community safety needs and expectations? (e.g. weapon rights, industrial and environmental restrictions, speech laws)
• Should liberalism be allowed to defend itself against a democratically-approved transition to dictatorship, or does this contradict political freedom?

In these situations, we have to resolve them somehow, so we end up with liberalism variants like conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, straying further from the pure old-school liberalism they necessarily contradict. Even without corruption, liberalism decays, distancing itself from its ideals, and ultimately turns into a playground for the powerful who have far far far far far more ability to realize liberty than almost everyone else.

I don’t even know how to respond to this. I feel bad for you. After Trump leaves office is the next republican going to be a far right bla bla bla too? I’m sad when elections don’t go my way but this is weird unhinged stuff. You’re basically acting as logical as a flat earther.

Ohhh, I get you now. Yes, that’s likely a thing most of them would believe.

(Not saying I agree or disagree with it, just trying to explain what Hexbear typically implies to most people in a factual, unbiased way because you said you’re out of the loop.)

Hexbear existed as an instance prior to the Reddit API changes of 2023. They’d been around for a few years. Most instances federate by default with everyone, but Hexbear took a slower opening of it because they already had an established culture. (Think of this similarly to people discussing the pros/cons of federating with Threads. It would be a big change to the way things are now so it’s controversial.) It’s possible they weren’t ever federated with beehaw.org (your instance) so you may have never seen them or interacted with them.