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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29299 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.

From the brief reading I did last night, it appears they were banned by a possibly automated process after insisting on linking to real-time location doxing, including offsite, after an incident in which Musk's child was threatened by a possibly crazy person.

Per normal standards as I have come to understand them:

  1. Twitter is a private company.

  2. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

  3. The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.

It may be "fair" on some most basic level of fairness to invoke "your rules applied fairly". But it is not honest, not when you spent all your time speaking out against those rules, while pretending the issue was with the rules and not that it wasn't you applying them.

I mean, maybe. But that cuts both ways when the people falling on their sword to expose Elon's "hypocrisy" spent the last 5 years screeching about the intersection of speech and safety, and the "hypocrisy" they are exposing involves doxing a family's whereabouts after there was already an attack.

It's hypocrisy the whole way down.

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