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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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We're going through a similar process now. Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.

I have done a cursory search on both reddit and here but I cannot find the juicy gossip. I really absolutely have to know the specifics of this incident. Yes it is salacious gossip. Yes it is an utterly irrational guilty pleasure. But please please please can someone spill the beans on exactly what went down.?

And please, just this once, can we ignore the usual motte precepts and fully and shamelessly engage in friend/enemy distinctions? Can we embrace sarcasm and mockery just this once? Can we be a little uncharitable to our censorious enemies? Can we pretend that they will never read this because they probably won't?

Please I would love someone to leak all the intimate details of the parenthetical comment being deleted while I engage in apelike disdain of my outgroup.

Thank you in advance, and please forgive me this one time for bucking the very pillars upon which the Motte rests.

Zorba explained it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/778?context=8#context

Thank you. My entire lifetime, teachers warned me that we must always be on the look out for anyone infringing on free speech or authoritarians censoring us and that they ALWAYS try to start small and then move on to bigger issues.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

They were always pro-censorship. Even your teachers were. After all they probably would have stopped you swearing in class, or engaging in blasphemy or calling for violence (depending on location and timing). You just weren't saying the kind of things they wanted to censor.

It's one of the thing I find surprising where people are surprised that majorities of the population support authoritarian things like lockdowns or vaccine mandates or censorship. And think this shows some kind of overnight sea change. This is the the default. Liberalism is a deal in the absence of one side (in whichever scenario) having more power, they agree not to censor pragmatically. Once one side has more power, and you try to say something they dislike then they will favor that censorship.

Standard caveat for the three principled Libertarians in the corner, trying to start seasteading to escape the whole thing. I know you are there.

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