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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.
It's not, though, and the people crowing about it don't understand how the game is played. And I'm not saying that because I'm butthurt that some journo I've never heard of that's supposedly 'on my side' is the unlucky ox du jour.
When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer.
When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism. The small fraction of principled libertarians are slinking off, having lost again, while the conservatives pretending to be principled libertarians are cheering the fact that the libs are getting owned.
They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people. And it needs to be more inspiring than 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' People need to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. It needs to be more than 'I'm really angry after the last 5 years and after forfeiting all my morals I just want to hurt my outgroup,' which, I don't mean to pick on that commenter personally, but that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here.
And you know what? There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade. Something has to change; I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.
Oh ditch the fucking halo, it doesn't fit.
Most of the time the facts behind racism claims don't bear out, like when asked to estimate the amount of unarmed black men they will wildly overestimate. They defend career criminals and violent recidivists purely on tribal allegiance to skin colour. Lab leak? Hunter laptop? Vaccine efficacy? The "misinformation" turned out to be closer to the truth all along in every case. And with masks the Powers That Be initially claimed they didn't work and nobody needed them before harsh-reversing course and mandating them! Were any of these errors ever acknowledged and apologised for? Were they fuck.
What if owning the libs is, in itself, a moral good? What if you see these people leading us down the path of speech authoritarianism, transing of children, diversity quotas, quality of life selfdestruction in the name of the climate gods, cultural suicide, race to the bottom globalist economics and paedophilia apologia, and simply think that stopping or impeding them is the single greatest good you can do in the world right now? We have to stop things getting worse before they get better. If someone is destroying your sandcastles, you need to stop him before you can rebuild. This much seems incredibly obvious.
You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.
Yes! Much closer.
I don't think they're orthogonal at all. If your animating principles are derived from lies and misinformation, they're not worthy of respect. If verifiable reality contradicts your beliefs, your beliefs are simply wrong. If you don't even know the underlying statistical reality beneath your own beliefs, I have trouble calling your beliefs sincere. If you felt that strongly about it, wouldn't you know the truth? But it seems not.
I really, really don't care if the crazy guy in the street genuinely, truly, sincerely believes that the Blue Men who live in the TV will murder his daughter if he doesn't provide them a blood sacrifice, if the fact is that he's waving a knife at passers-by. However real it is to him doesn't matter at all.
This line of reasoning can be found on any number of /r/politics posts about the conservative talking points you gave in your earlier post in this thread. "My ideological opponents are lying / tricked by misinformation" isn't exactly an uncommon belief in the Culture War. And we frequently have discussions in this thread arguing over the object level truths of most, if not all, of the claims you list.
But there's still a difference between claiming the moral high ground and being wrong and just straight-up claiming the moral low ground, which, uh, isn't a phrase because it's not something that people usually (ever?) do. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr is observing the Elon Musk appears to be doing the latter and wants to know what is going on (or what he's missing?) and how this fits into the stories the right tells itself about free speech and their ideology in general.
You appear to have proposed the principle that the left's ideas are harmful and reducing their spread as much as possible is good to reduce the harm they can cause. Which seems like a coherent principle to me even if we disagree on the object level facts.
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People here tend to be overly literal, so you get arguments of "well, they're not lying".
There's some equivalent of "reckless disregard for the truth" that should apply. Someone who doesn't check facts, doesn't understand when purported facts look suspicious, and engages in motivated reasoning such that he doesn't look closely at facts that seem to support him, is sincere. He's not lying. But morally, willful blindness is pretty close to lying.
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