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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I'm not sure that it works that way so much. If a group is influential and powerful so as to be a risk of taking control and imposing authoritarian control they are less likely to be effectively censored. Its easier to shut up the weak.

If the though is that some day way down the line some toxic authoritarian ideas which are weak now might eventually take hold if we don't nip them in the bud, it seems to me that depriving them of free speech might backfire on more than one level.

1 - That people are trying to shut up claims can be taken by those adjacent to those clams as evidence that there is truth in what they are saying, and that the powerful are trying to suppress the truth.

2 - If you drive people with hateful ideas in to the shadows you don't recognize the people who have those ideas as much.

3 - Also when driven to the sidelines and shadows they face no opposition and contradiction in those shadows.

4 - The move to censor ideas is directly itself a deprivation of rights and and make society less free.

5 - The fact that people can shut up speech that is called authoritarian or that supposedly puts rights at risk creates and incentive to give more and more speech and ideas the label of "authoritarian" or "dangerous to our rights", making problem 4 worse and potentially creating a situation where existing competing political blocks that aren't' on the far fringes, to label each other as falling under those categories.

6 - The general acceptance that people and ideas can reasonably be shut up by force sets a precedent that empowers authoritarians should they take power.