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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29300 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.

  • Right-wing politicians, journalists and public personas suspended, banned and shadow-banned for years - "It's a private company, just don't be an asshole!"

  • Left-wing journos suspended for one day for doxing Musk - "It's fascism! Regulators, come and save us! It's free speech apocalypse!"

It is utterly fascinating how there's not a shred of even trying to apply fair standards here. Everything is completely motivated reasoning all the way down.

To be fair: European leaders were pretty against Trump being banned because they prefer censorship to happen on the national government level where they have control the power to decide speech to be in the hands of the people.

I feel in Europe it's a bitt different since there nobody gives a hoot about things like freedom of speech from the start, and there's no need to pretend. So you can just come out and say "we're going to control your speech for your own good, ordnung muss sein!" - and people will be ok with it. So maybe they can afford more principled approach since they are already in control. That said, given how they were pretty much silent over the era of censorship on Twitter 1.0, and started screaming immediately after Musk took over, I suspect they are also not as principled as they may say they are.

Welcome to society, enjoy your tote bag. There has never yet been a political principle that withstood the slightest shift in power dynamics.

But I feel like lately the veneer is peeling off more and the raw unadulterated tribalism is proudly paraded everywhere. We used to have people that are genuinely committed to things like freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc. We used to have people that tried to at least maintain the facade of evenhandedness and principles. Some of them are still around - but virtually none of them are part of the "establishment", whatever that means in a particular area - they are either forced out or left, foreseeing being forced out. The rule of the day seems to be "2*2 depends on whether we are talking about something useful for my tribe, or something harmful". People openly and vigorously defend opposing viewpoints in the timeframe of months sometimes, and they are not flustered anymore when reminded they said the opposite only a short while ago - they just shrug it off as "enemy propaganda" and march on. I don't know, maybe I am just noticing more, but it seems like it not used to be that way 10 years ago or so.

We never had a single person anywhere who believed in "freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc."

What we did have was a common understanding among educated people that they wouldn't win every election in perpetuity, what with roughly half the country voting each way. So it behooved intelligent people to maintain some of the facade of even-handedness. Once one side decided they didn't want to play the game, they wanted to win it, even this degraded hypocrisy exited stage left. Now it's only a matter of time.

We never had a single person anywhere who believed in "freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc."

Hello. I believed, and still believe, in those things. Your assertion is false.

And I believe you just haven't found the situation to falsify your "principles" quite yet.

Maybe we're both wrong.

Кто кого? All the way down.

But let’s not kid ourselves here- right wingers seeing their enemies get suspended are totally going ‘free speech? It’s a private company and you’re being assholes.’

Ya except this was a decision actually made by the private owner of the company, not the FBI sending threatening communiques and making demands.

This might be the only instance in the past 3+ years where the "private company" argument actually has any weight since at least in this instance we're pretty damn sure it wasn't the fascist security-media-intelligence complex state.

This is a reasonable point, I just don’t usually see twitter warriors making it.

Of course they do. In the middle of a culture war, you can't really expect it to be fought just by one side.

But let’s not kid ourselves here

… A statement which is rarely followed by good faith characterizations or steelman arguments.

Here’s who I’ve seen in my right-wing spaces

  1. Some “might makes right” folks cheering their outgroup being silenced and anticipating helicopter rides.

  2. Some “stand on principles of liberty” people asking, confused, why someone in their free-speech principles ingroup would apparently go against his stated principles, then seeing the suspended lefty journos posted links to Elon’s family’s locations in realtime followed by someone in black bloc getting on the hood of his kid’s car, and saying, “well that explains it.”

I know most peoples commitment to free speech is tenuous at best, but how many of such utterances are sincerely stated beliefs versus snarky backhands intended to remind progressives who was singing this tune not long ago?

And we cant just paper over the differences in application here. A sufficiently non-partisan crowd with warm sentiments towards the concept of free speech could be totally on-board with banning the amplification of public tracking data on completely generic grounds regarding public safety. That is not the same thing as banning people over jokes or misgendering.

I know that Elon's statements in support of 'free speech absolutism' has confused so much of the discourse around this. But he also said the platform would attempt to comply with the law, and ultimately wants Twitter to be a place for the 'sane 80%' (should such a thing exist), which of course would entail discrimination of some kind. Who exactly was expecting or wanting Twitter to turn into 4chan or kiwifarms?

It’s totally understandable to me why a South African billionaire is hypersensitive to people doxxing him after someone threatened his child. But the dominant mood I see from right wing twitter isn’t that, nor is it ‘well what goes around comes around’. It’s ‘inshallah censor our enemies’.

From outside it is sad and hilarious.

Reminds me about https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8363.msg337784.html#msg337784 (about Peru and still worth reading if you do not care about Peru)

(...)

This led to left wing protests and riots and a new state of emergency. The same people who praised Castillo's use of such tactics a few months ago flipped for pretty transparently partisan reasons. The left wing considers this a coup (despite it being completely constitutional) and the right wing considers this the successful prevention of a coup (which it was). The father of the right wing presidential candidate, Fujimori, staged a coup in exactly this way in 1992. And the left considers him a dictator. If there's a difference beyond partisan hypocrisy why it's different I can't see it. (Though this does add a wrinkle that the daughter of someone who can credibly be described as a dictator might end up as president. And that the right has the opposite position on legitimate/illegitimate coups making them hypocrites too.)

(...)

The opinion of the left is that the removal was illegitimate for... uh... reasons. Seriously, they don't have a legal argument as far as I can tell. It's all about neoliberalism and capitalism and that Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of a dictator. And her father's a dictator because he dissolved the Congress extra-constitutionally with the support of the military without calling an election. Which is completely different from Castillo because... he succeeded and Castillo failed I guess.

(...)

Fujimori speaks very highly of her father's presidency.

(...)

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