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Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
I think the definition of cancel culture and censorship used commonly is too narrow to explain what this actually looks like to the right.
Cancelling could (and should, IMO, to capture the whole means and goals of it) be defined as attempting to impede someone's ability to live a normal life as punishment for speech considered beyond acceptability by the canceller. It's never been just the workplace that's a target, it's also pressuring friends and family to cut ties, pressuring the school the kids of the person go to, etc... By that definition, an assassination is the ultimate cancellation (and a normal cancellation is a limited "character assassination"). What the right sees right now is that a long term campaign of implying that the milquetoast right wing beliefs that Kirk had made him Turbo Hitler made enough people believe that he was Turbo Hitler that the always statistically possible but usually unlikely person with the mix of ability, opportunity, recklessness and belief necessary to succesfully carry out an assassination actually turned up, and then as a response a large contingent (and I'm happy to note it's not all of them) keeps it up, even while saying something they obviously don't really believe like "I didn't really want anyone to kill Kirk..." they keep the cancellation/dogwhistle going with "... but let's not forget he was Turbo Hitler". If you see it that way, then it's not so much that the right has full control of the cancellation apparatus and is using it unilaterally to punish the left, but more of a messy struggle.
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This is a version of the Prisoner’s dilemma where if one side allows free speech, but the other doesn’t, the side that opposes free speech will win. So, if one side starts opposing free speech, that forces the other side to also oppose free speech, or they will lose.
Eh, kinda, but mostly not. To me the “hole” in OP’s setup is we aren’t really told how effective the intrinsic presumed bias towards free speech the government itself has. I think that plays a major role in how it all games out: does party A actually and factually use their time in power to effectively muzzle free speech? Is it an attempt but one that usually fails? How complete is their control, and how effectively does it get reversed if party B shows up?
So you can’t really escape some degree of fact and truth that affects the answer. (Also, point 4 is actually a good one that potentially puts a big thumb on the scale, despite the timeframes required for the benefits to mature and deliver)
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The canonical solution to the prisoners dilemma is tit for tat with forgiveness.
I think we’ve got the tit for tat part. I’m not sure if we’re down with forgiveness yet.
Against defectbot, plain Tit for Tat beats Tit For Tat with Forgiveness. Actually the best strategy against defectbot is to be defectbot; you can do no better.
But human beings are almost never actually literally defectbot. A defectbot is not intelligent, it does not adapt or respond, it cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, it cannot change its behavior. It is an automaton, it always defects. A defectbot in real life is a killing machine, and I agree that the only response is to kill it before it kills you. If your opponents are humans, they are not pure defect bots. And if they were close enough to round off the difference then we would already be in a civil war killing each other. If they start marching the streets gunning down every conservative they can identify, then I agree we shouldn't sit there and let it happen. But we're not there yet, we're not very close all things considered. Maximum defect-defect leaves us with 170 million corpses minimum, likely more. Tit for Tat with forgiveness is likely to lead to far fewer.
The machine the progressive left has built has humans as parts, but it is not human. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it only talks about tit-for-tat with forgiveness when the 'tat' to all its 'tits' finally comes around.
Except, because it is not a literal machine but is actually humans implementing complicated emergent behavior, it does not fully embody any of those. It can be bargained with, because the humans that compose it can be bargained with: both individually and collectively. It can feel pity and remorse and fear, because the humans that compose it can feel pity and remorse and fear.
It is currently engaged in a strategy of encroachment: defecting more and more often and more severely in order to exploit the forgiveness of its opponents and see what it can get away with. But this is NOT what a defect bot does. A defect bot defects: always. A defect bot cannot pretend to be anything other than a defect bot, because it has no degrees of freedom with which to signal anything. It does not pretend to cooperate or tit for tat in an attempt to fool its opponents, it just defects.
Again, look at the world around us. Are we currently in the middle of a civil war gunning down each other in the streets? No. That's what maximum defection looks like. We're not there yet. I hope we never get there. And strategic, proportional punishment to defections without escalating maximally is a good way to fight off the encroachment without immediately getting to that state. Even if your opponents are engaged in bad-faith behavior and you need to stop them, deceiving yourself into thinking they're something other than what they are is not strategic. Exaggerations don't help you learn or prepare effective strategy. Maybe you think the appropriate punishments need to be much harsher than they currently are in order to more strongly disincentivize future defections, but this only works because the opponents are not actual defect bots (who ignore punishment and can't stop defecting ever, and can only be solved with death).
It's a machine. However, it's not entirely defectbot, and it's not politically inclined either way. Currently it leans left.
It's not literally defectbots. It's worse.
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So are you picking a strategy to deal with "the machine the progressive left has built", or the humans it has as parts?
The machine. The humans have added their biological distinctiveness to the machine's own.
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The point isn't about the best strategy knowing your opponent's strategy. If you knew your opponents strategy then just copying their move is the best.
The usual metric for rating success is one that works against the success-weighted average set of other strategies.
In US politics, there's essentially only two players at any given time. Which means only one opposing strategy out there to consider.
I think the cast of characters is a bit wider than that. Trump certainly isn't the same player as Cruz or Rubio.
Rubio is part of Team Trump at the moment, and Cruz isn't in play.
Just picking primary contenders.
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Iterated prisoners dilemma absolutely involves knowing your opponent's strategy -- you need to figure it out first is all.
I suspect if you ask Nybbler he will be inclined to frame the American Left (collectively) as playing defectbot; personally I'm not sure that P.D. problems map well to national politics at all.
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In a world where
then obviously the winning move is to suppress your opponents speech. But this proves too much - obviously the winning move is to go full Sulla, execute your opponents, steal their stuff, keep half of it and use the other half to reward your supporters, and use the temporary lack of opposition to amend the Constitution to permanently install your preferred policies. This doesn't happen because all factions in real-world politics rely to varying degrees on the support of normies who care more about the fate of the country than about their preferred faction winning.
The more serious issue about "is speech suppression tactically wise" is that empirically movements which don't support free speech can't stick to a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy, and end up suppressing their own internal debate as much as they suppress the enemy. Whether it's the Nazi Night of the Long Knives, the various Communist purges, McCarthy turning on right-aligned institutions like the army, woke cancel culture purging far more lefties (whether for heresy or just mis-speaking) than righties, political movements which start suppressing speech mostly end up turning speech suppression from a weapon against the outgroup to a weapon for resolving intra-group personal beefs. And then you have a culture of fear which gums up your own internal decision-making processes and you end up doing something self-destructively stupid like Arische Physik, Lysenkoism, or defunding the police.
Liberalism didn't just win in the debating club, it also won at Hiroshima. There might be a reason for this, and I think resistance to self-destructive purges is a big part of it.
The problem is the fate of the country often depends on who does win. In large parts of American society there’s been a huge and growing quiet withdrawal from certain demographics that even the Brookings Institutions has published books about, simply because the people steering the helm of the cultural ship excludes and doesn’t partake of the vision of society that would include these people. You won’t get people to participate if they feel there’s nothing in it for them. That’s why it’s so imperative that your side win out. Because if the other side wins, you don’t just lose, you lose everything, including a reason to keep trying.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people because ideology isn’t always relevant to most of what people had to do to get along with their daily lives thousands of years ago. And information also had a much shorter range and traveled much slower.
A society can often only please one party at the expense of another losing out. It’s why every society that exists on Earth, liberal or not, consists of winners and losers. Effective ones can figure out a way for people to make do with their unhappiness or until a political pressure valve allows them relief of their anger and frustration, which is difficult to manage. But it’s better than a liberal society that tries to please all parties involved because a society that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing no one in the long term.
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.
By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this? That’s practically how ‘all’ these societies were ran back then. By a modern more objective metric, sure, Sulla was as you describe him. If we’re grading him on a curve and placing him in the context and circumstances he lived with, he was pretty ‘good’ for the most part in governing a system where that kind of nepotism and cronyism went by the rule of law 2,000 years ago.
Part of the problem is looking back on this with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t like Sulla as a leader in virtually any capacity, but he was quite effective when it came to running the show and conducting the orchestra of the power brokers he was a part of.
His own? He manifestly failed at his self-appointed task of reform and was criticized even within his time for his behavior. Which, even then, was necessarily norm-breaking for a republican.
@Sunshine's point is damning actually: proscription worked for Augustus because he wanted to permanently destroy the constitutional order. Sulla was trying to fix a republic and picked the tools of a tyrant and expected it to work out.
I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this. Caesar also ultimately failed at his task of reform and picked the tools of a tyrant to do it. Things didn’t exactly pan out for him either. Sulla wasn’t the guy the Republic needed at the time, but he was the one they got nonetheless. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m not a guy that readily defends Sulla and I don’t like him, but I don’t think this is an appropriate criticism of him.
To my point he was brilliant, to your point he was ruthless. Two things can be true at the same time. His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy. At any rate he was a guy who thought the ends justified the means. Plenty of people not his equal thought the same way and yet he stood head and shoulders over many of them. I regard that as quite impressive. The man died peacefully in his own bed.
His first march on Rome was in response to Marius's use of the Tribunate of the Plebs to essentially usurp the authority of the Senate. It's difficult for me to decide whether this move was actually a good or bad one. On one hand the citizens and plebeians of Rome lose a say in the governance of the Empire and therein the ability to protect their self interests. Any few senators who did genuinely care for the welfare of the people would have been hard pressed to help them in an apathetic Senate. On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.
His proscribing of his political enemies was more testimony to his character, utterly ruthless and unforgiving. (Sulla's epitaph was literally "No better friend, no worse enemy.") In that respect he was greatly feared by both Senate and people and was allowed to retire when he had enacted his laws with very little political opposition.
Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.
Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.
I said his program was hindered from the beginning by his means and probably ill-conceived because of the fundamental contradiction. This defense, imo, is just leaning on the same contradiction. This worked for Augustus because he was trying to institute monarchic rule.
A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.
Sulla revealed the secret of the Republic - that generals can order their men to commit violence against the state and thus capture it - and somehow thought he'd put it back in the bottle. It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.
I suppose we can say that this is all in hindsight. That it's easy to say it's wrong now precisely because we can appeal to Sulla's experience. Maybe, at the time, it seemed just as likely that he'd be a new Cincinnatus.
But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.
As opposed to the rational decisions of people like Cato whose level of obstinacy precipitated the very outcome they were supposedly against? Even when people like Pompey tried to respect at least the form of republican politics they were blocked and so made common cause with the populists. If anything one could argue that the Senators were playing games with things that were essential to the livelihood and comfort of the plebes. If they had been willing to take steps to address them rather than vetoing their enemies things might have been different.
He died, what? A few years after resigning? If Cicero had died within a similar timespan he would never have faced a reckoning for killing Catiline and it might have looked like a move with all upside too.
I'm pretty big into ancient history and consequently Roman history. Good to know there's others here like that.
Well. Seems we agree then. That's much closer to the conclusion I wanted to emphasize. Not that his reforms weren't quickly reversed after he withdrew into retirement. They obviously were.
There is a question in here as to whether the Republic at large was just at the end of it's natural lifespan as it was transforming into something that was already beginning to look and feel different. I'm not saying the solution would've been for Sulla to linger around on the sidelines only that it was ultimately concluded more prematurely than it should've been. As far as collapsing into monarchy goes, you could argue Octavian's proscriptions were worse than Sulla's (a controversial statement, but one I've seen people make) but people are more willing to overlook it because it concluded with the Pax Romana, whereas Sulla's ended having enriched his friends and further solidified their positions among a corrupt ruling class.
Septimius Severus did that. There have been more than a few provincial emperors, albeit that they came at a bad time; being at the tail end of a dying Empire.
I'm also more sympathetic to Caesar by a long shot. With him however, I think his motives ultimately were questionable as to whether he wanted to become king or not. It's not as cut and dry as people think it is.
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Here's the fun epilogue: Two generations later, Augustus Caesar pulled a reverse-Sulla. Augustus realized that the office of Tribune was so powerful that it was the only office he actually needed to hold in order to rule Rome with an iron fist. He kept all the forms of the Senate in place, but he turned every office from Quaestor to Consul into powerless ceremonial roles he could use to reward his supporters while he himself ruled as a 'mere' Tribune.
Sulla weakened the Tribunes to shut the common people out of power, whereas Augustus weakened everything except the Tribunes to shut the Senate out of power. Unlike Sulla, Augustus' 'reforms' actually stuck.
The thing about the Senate is that it held almost no legal power at all. It was basically a club which every notable Roman was a member of. It had power as long as its informal methods of influence worked: elected public officials had to align their values with the Senate norms or they would be badmouthed and never win any important election. It was their version of "the Cathedral".
When political outsiders realized they could bypass the Senate by dialing up their populism without violating the letter of the Roman law, the whole republican system started crumbling. It took them a hundred years to get from Tiberius Gracchus to Augustus, but
Israel in 4BC had no mass communicationRome had no mass media, let alone social media.The actual heck are you talking about? The Senate had almost unlimited power through the Republic and well into the Empire (in theory if not in practice). The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum to suspend the constitution and grant the Consuls unlimited power, which Cicero used to execute a high-ranking Senator. The Senate could appoint a Dictator. The Senate appointed the governors of provinces. The Senate could declare someone an enemy of the Republic. The Senate could declare war.
To be clear: Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus usurped all that power, but they did it by packing the Senate. Julius Caesar added 300 of his supporters to the Senate, including non-Roman Italians and Gauls. This is like if Trump added 10 diehard loyalists to the Supreme Court and told them how to vote on each case, and someone came along 2,000 years later and said "the Supreme Court held almost no legal power at all." The Senate had lots of power, that's why Julius and Augustus spent so much time usurping it!
It was not a legal power, the difference is subtle: they were not saying, "by the power of the Senate, this man is above the law". They were saying, "the members of the Senate have agreed to never prosecute the man for his actions in the service to the Republic". And since every public official was a senator, this approach worked. It's like the blue wall of silence.
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Sort of? I’m not a super Roman expert so I could be wrong and welcome corrections, but IIRC Augustus himself in practice spent a lot of time fighting in the several civil wars after the assassination. He was also patient and clever and politically savvy not to rush things or look too dictatorial? I was also kind of under the impression that by the time he was firmly in control it had been like a century of unrest and many of the big players already had played their hands so the Senate was already weak in practical terms not just because of legal or political maneuvers. Even then, it took like 40 years of rule to solidify things, so to me it looks more like good timing and skill of one rather than his approach necessarily being better, but again I could be wrong.
This is correct, but when people say "the Senate was weak" they elide a key factor: Augustus had himself elected consul 13 times. 11 of them were consecutive, meaning that Augustus was consul for 11 straight years (with various cronies as his co-consuls). The Senate was weak, but also, Augustus was monopolizing the power of the Senate.
After his 11-year term Augustus mostly stopped ruling as consul and started ruling with the powers of a tribune instead. This was in large part to free up the other consulship to give to his supporters as a reward, since the consulship was still prestigious even with all the real power stripped out of it. You can identify the exact time the consulship lost its power, because that's when Augustus no longer felt the need to hold it personally.
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Listen, if it's just me, and you, and we are trying to figure out our relationship with one another, whatever. I have my principles about how it's appropriate to treat someone, you have yours. Maybe yours hurt my feelings, but I refuse to reciprocate because I think it's wrong. Maybe it works the other way around. We could both be commended, or not, depending on how well we stick to our principles of how we believe people should be treated.
But this isn't that. This is a subject of institutional policy and legal precedent. I can be absolutely against certain behavior, but if it's actually written down in a binding document "Anyone who hurts the feelings of another at this institution, or makes anyone feel unsafe, will face disciplinary action", why should I not avail myself of the full protection of that binding document? It's sure as shit going to be used against me. Why should I not take advantage of it's protections?
The time to argue about principles and the sorts of nation we want to be is before these binding policy documents are enacted. Your leading hypothetical was the moment 10 years ago, before the rules are literally written. After that, where we are now, it's not a matter of principles, it's a matter of the rules. I may not have written them, but I'm going to follow them, and make damned sure you do too.
Your hypothetical should be "Faction A passed a law banning speech that makes people feel unsafe. When they are in power, they enforce that law against their political opponents. Should Faction B also enforce that law?"
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Btw the subtext here where republicans are the principled free speech party is historically incorrect. There were a long series of religious right-motivated censoring movements in the 90s (and not to mention the Dixie Chicks and Freedom Fries stuff following 9/11). If you came of age during the late 2010s or early 2020s you won’t have the visceral memory of what this was like but I assure you this was a major thing at the time.
The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).
The Dixie Chicks can barely even be called a boycott, let alone censorship, and "freedom fries" is just a way of saying "fuck France", again I fail to see how it prevented anyone from speaking their mind.
The moment you start criticizing the core ideas of liberalism, liberals start doing the same deplatforming campaigns that the far left does, using the exact same arguments.
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I dunno, Al Gore was a southern democrat and his wife was pretty clear about how she felt about naughty song lyrics.
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To be frank, I'd probably still consider myself on the left if the Dems were the same as they were in the 90s. Back when they were against racism (instead of for targeted racism/sexism against, well, me), somewhat areligious (instead of cheering on Islam, of all things), and enthusiastically for free speech (without the mile-wide "except for hate speech" loophole). Yes, I disagreed with them on the size of government, but it's not like Republicans were much better on that front.
An argument can be made that they still are as they were in the 90's, because that's when critical theory was being born; it was also the last major push for censorship in the universities.
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The Dixie chick's were never censored. Bush said they are free to speak their mind. Their label kept selling their albums, their concert tours continued, and major media gave them plenty of press to explain themselves and get their ideas out.
Some of their fans didn't buy more CDs. That's not censorship.
Renaming French fries to freedom fries in the congressional cafeteria isn't censorship either.
That's not how I remember it; I recall that '
Clear Channel' EDIT: 'Cumulus' radio removed them from the airwaves, many people sent them nasty letters, and one pundit told them to "shut up and sing" (how would that work, even?).So a single struggling group of radio stations decided to stop playing the Dixie chick's. The big one (clear channel) did not.
Certainly not a situation like, e.g., Kanye getting cut off by his record label, radio, social media, streaming and his bank.
I'd definitely call the latter censorship, particularly given that we know the govt is often pressuring these "private" companies behind the scenes. (I am not aware of Bush doing that, though Obama + Biden definitely did.)
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Rashomon is bullshit; there is an objective truth. Clear Channel did not ban the Dixie Chicks, though a different company called Cumulus Media took them off the air for 30 days. There was a congressional investigation into this.
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2010s and 2020s Democrats are not 2000s and 1990s Democrats. If they were, we'd all be calling antifa a terrorist organization, and we'd all be putting tremendous pressure on universities to deal with the mouthy brats and unqualified professors picking at the scabs of the past, and we'd all recognize that the collective campaign to demonize certain "intersectionalities" is unacceptable and we'd all (at least superficially) be demanding border security, and we'd all be drawing the line at compelled speech surrounding transgenderism. If we had 2000s and 1990s Democrats, we would still have a coherent identity and a purpose and an agreement about the American experiment. We would bitch and complain about taxes and healthcare, and there would be problems to contend with, but those problems would be debatable and reconcilable.
In the limited scope of history you reference, yes, Republicans were actually quite bad in some ways. Democrats had their issues too, but they were culturally sane. 2010s Democrats shifted on a fundamental and cultural level to win an election, and they hitched their wagon to progressives that hijacked the Overton window and took America's culture hostage and irrevocably (thus far) changed it. Mitt Romney never had a chance. He was a racist to the Democrats. Clearly, Democrat behavior is not the only factor for why things changed, but it is the most salient to the average American who has not been heavily captured by progressivism.
It’s my eternal disappointment that Romney ran in 2012 and not 2016. He would have been fantastic in that moment in my opinion. Not a realistic hypothetical because he also ran in 2008 primaries, but Obama was a monster and I think Romney would have done pretty well in most other times and against most other candidates (maybe even 2008, ironically! I could see people trusting him more to handle the financial meltdown that was just starting to happen in the middle of election season than McCain was, who didn’t really seem to have a clue)
In hindsight, yeah I think that would have delayed cultural division, but this would have played into the left's hands. My doubts about Romney in 2016 is that he wasn't the type to directly or effectively challenge the exploding Wokeism that was sweeping across the country. He was probably a much better choice on bread and butter issues, but he was no match for Woke culture. Trump's election created massive division, but the only two real choices in my opinion were division caused by the right putting their feet down, or the left gaining an even more powerful stronghold over our institutions in the long term.
Romney was preference, whereas Trump was necessary.
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I have been happy to see right-wing commentators call our Pam Bondi on her "hate speech" comments:
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1967948684886450235
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1967950157095530518
Bondi later clarified that she meant incitement to violence: https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1967939882980085980
I have also seen push back on Libs of Tiktok posts where she calls on people to cancel those who simply didn't like Kirk.Unfortunately, those don't have as many likes as her posts calling for the cancellations.
Thank goodness for this blowback. What a dumb statement by her.
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What did she mean by this? I guess she’s referring to posting somebody’s address online, but that isn’t illegal! It’s not even about constitutional issues, you could probably get a narrowly-tailored anti-doxing statute past judicial review (factual circumstances have changed since Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn), but nobody’s done that yet. Does she think posting someone’s address is incitement to violence?
In context, I guess? But right wing commentators are calling for Trump to ax her over all this mess.
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If Faction B remains pro-free-speech, Faction A can speak at all times and Faction B can speak only when they are in power.
If Faction B switches, each faction can only speak when they are in power.
Assuming being able to speak helps both factions (sometimes it doesn't; e.g. letting the Dreaded Jim faction speak likely wouldn't help their electoral chances. But usually it does), Faction B should definitely behave anti-free-speech.
The opposite argument is basically the bicycle cuck argument. It's better for your enemies to have free speech and you to not than for neither of you to have free speech, because it increases the total amount of free speech in the world.
All this is true whether or not free speech is a good policy.
I'm not really worried about the "orgy of vengeance". I think that's fine and a lot of vengeance is called for. I am worried (but not surprised) about the right taking on cancelation not just as reprisal or revenge, but as a good thing in itself. But the no-cancel/no-cancel state appears unavailable; the left will cancel when they are in power because they believe that is good policy.
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