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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.

Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.

The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.

The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter

The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).

Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?

or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?

Maybe. But the left is already defecting from their own claimed norms of the last century, right now, and show few signs that they wouldn't go much harder if they could.

I believe that the "attitude of censoring opponents" has always existed; the idea that of course people who fundamentally disagree on the guiding principles of the society should not have the opportunity to spread their lies and slander, and that it's OK to go as far as to kill them if they do so, has been the natural and obvious pillar of the political society since forever. When the Roman elites heard that the Gracchi were going around proposing some reforms curtailing the powers of the elite, they didn't go "Well, I disagree with them but they should be entitled to say their word!", they went and organized them to be murdered. The churches saw no issues in making sure that heretics can't deter people from the true path by having those heretics slaughtered. And so on. It's the idea that everyone has a freedom of speech and a freedom of religion that is expectional and, indeed, some might say, unnatural; after all, if someone is saying things that you know are untrue, why should they be able to do so? To go around telling lies like that? Preposterous!

It's the wide spread of basic small-l liberal values overriding other values - nationalist, socialist and religious - that makes freedom of speech and freedom of religion and things like that seem natural and even obvious to us; when those values start losing their societal force and their reasons are forgotten, it's only to be expected that censorship and the repression of unwanted ideologies enters in force. It does, indeed, seem that this is happening, and it's only fed and fed by people who are like "well, if the other team is not playing nice, then we are not going to do so, either".

If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.

Huh? Them being wrong about everything is precisely the reason you shouldn't try silencing them. The only way to give them the rope to hang themselves with is to let them talk in from of common people, and reveal what they truly believe and want.

Indeed, this is why Libs of Tik Tok is so despised amongst the intelligentsia. She's not generating content or perpetrating hoaxes herself, she's just holding up the mirror and that's the last thing a lot of these people want.

Not because (outgroup) triumphalism is incredibly grating? Or because her coverage reeks of sensationalism? Because fact-checking takes an obvious backseat to a good outrage, as I’m sure @TracingWoodgrains will attest? Or because she’s a transparent partisan more interested in scoring cheap points than on anything the “intelligentsia” actually value?

Maybe it’s her position in the linguistic side of the culture wars. Or the association with TikTok, which already pisses off people over 50, and Twitter, which pisses off most of its users. Or her determination to construct the worst argument in the world by asserting that “libs” are best judged by a curated outrage stream.

Or maybe she just comes across as a bitch. I don’t know. Point is that there’re plenty of reasons to disagree with her coverage that aren’t just “they hated Jesus because he told the truth.”

If the intelligentsia hated transparent partisans they'd have to hate the entire intelligentsia

Fact checking

Have we gotten to the point where we're pretending now that TW wasn't having to produce active forgeries about the matter when Libs of TikTok expressed the exact criticism you're saying she didn't have?

I'd link to TW's post describing everything he did during that entire event, but for some odd reason, it was deleted. Funny, that.

Hm? My post is right here.

When did Trace's post get deleted? Was it during the original shitstorm, or was it more recently after some activists decided him clowning on LOTT for internet points was Bad, Actually as part of attacking BARPod? I think it was the former, but...

I deleted my motte summary during the initial storm. Needed to take a step back. The post itself was never deleted and I have no plans to delete it.

No one is "pretending" anything. Trace got quite a bit of blowback for that stunt (even on his own sub!) and I think realized that it wasn't his finest moment. He even explained at the time why he deleted his post. There's no sinister attempt to memory-hole things.

Handpicking the most outrageous content isn't "just" holding up the mirror. Indeed, if the only thing necessary to denounce the Wrong People was to let them talk, there would be no need or demand for sneer outlets of all varieties.

I think it's an important service when one of the first kneejerk responses you'll get when criticising the woke is "nobody actually says that" or "it's just a few kids on tumblr" (remember that? how far we've come).

So? Your model of the world isn't proven just by demolishing the weakest arguments against it.

It gains additional evidence by refuting lies issued against it tho?

Where are the strong arguments?

Not on LibsofTikTok, I'm somehow convinced.

The movement literally is full of Ph.Ds and law degrees who get tripped up over the question "what is a woman?"

More comments

If most people use weak arguments, why is it my duty to provide them with stronger ones?

And I mean in the real world, not here, so don't quote the rules at me.

Right wing censorship tends to be straight forward and thus simpler to both resist and circumvent. The left one is a bit more Orwellian in nature - they try to redefine words and meanings and memory whole things or rewrite the past.

Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.

Power corrupts, and if tables turn, you're right we'll probably be seeing right wing censorship. How do you come to the conclusion that it will be worse?

Every once in a while someone tries to trot out these old censorship controversies, and the most recent are things schoolboard in bumfuck, nowhere, voting to ditch some rat comic in their curriculum, followed by... the Dixie Chick controversy? Explicit lyrics labels? A bunch of Karens screaming about video game violence, and being completely powerless to stop it? The Hayes Code? I can only dream that progressives escalate their censorship to this level.

Right wing censorship seems vastly exaggerated from people on the left and grey tribes wherever I see it discussed. The NYT has been covering for communists since WWI.

followed by... the Dixie Chick controversy?

Just a reminder that no one called for the Dixie Chicks to be censored, and they weren't. Here's George Bush on the topic: "The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind...That's the great thing about America."

Their distribution on country music stations was cut off. That's textbook deplatforming and goes against the cultural value of free expression if not the legal construct of free speech.

Their tour continued, their CDs continued to be sold (though many customers stopped buying) and plenty of radio stations did continue playing them. Their record label also published their next CD which was "Not Ready to Make Nice". When they decided they wanted to speak up about what happened, they were given this platform. Not that bigtech was a gatekeeper at the time, but iTunes kept carrying their music.

Deplatforming isn't when you make your customers mad, but elites still love you and help you get your message out.

That is bad, though still not quite as bad as what happened to PWR BTTM, who got their discography straight-up deleted.

“A bunch of Karens screaming about X” is a good way to describe most censorship, regardless of affiliation. Banned books crop up periodically, especially when it’s Christians getting upset about witchcraft or evolution.

For the federal government, I’d count “don’t ask, don’t tell” as right-coded by today’s standards. Press coverage of Iraq was a message for various reasons, including censorship. The Bush II attitude to global warming was pretty explicitly censorious. We shouldn’t forget the Patriot Act either.

If you’re going back to the Hays Code, McCarthyism is fair game, and probably represents the high-water point of political censorship in the US.

In your view, how does McCarthyism differ from the present?

The famous blacklist was put together and enforced by the same people (California elites) who enforce cancel culture today. Private companies would also hire consultants who would enforce the official ideology in order to protect their reputation, much like they do today. Government bodies have ideology tests today. And we have our own HUAC.

“A bunch of Karens screaming about X” is a good way to describe most censorship, regardless of affiliation.

...but "but being completely powerless to stop them" does not.

Other than McCarthyism, I'd happily take all of the above applied to me by the progressive side. Can I please get a "don't ask don't tell" for pronouns, or even better, for politics in general?

I suppose not being a journalist helps. “Talk about military setbacks -> lose your career” seems a pretty bad look. Not so enforceable for water cooler talk.

The modern progressive equivalent to DADT is probably something more like mandatory gender neutrality in pronouns. That sounds worse than what we have, except for the “yes, drill sergeant!” case, where it’s already implemented.

I suppose not being a journalist helps. “Talk about military setbacks -> lose your career” seems a pretty bad look. Not so enforceable for water cooler talk.

The reason I shrug at that is we already have that applied to the non-woke. In fact we have worse, they'll go after your indie gig, if you cross them, not just fire your from MegaCorp.

The modern progressive equivalent to DADT is probably something more like mandatory gender neutrality in pronouns.

That's the opposite of DADT. Mandatory speech cannot be the equivalent banned speech.

Banned use of he and she? I was trying to copy DADT’s “erasure”—it doesn’t matter who you are in your free time; on base you’re a soldier and won’t mention that icky gender stuff. That seems the natural implementation of DADT for pronouns, and I think you’d be right to chafe under it.

Yup, I'll take it. Refer people only by their (chosen) name. There was a teacher fired for that.

Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?

It depends on the people in question, I'd imagine. I doubt there's currently any shortage of moderate Reds, your Rod Drehers and so forth, who still cling to "enlightenment values" and "Constitutional Principles", who derived great pleasure and satisfaction from the dash and élan of the middlegame. I think there's less and less of them over time, though, because they lose too goddamn always.

Censorship is a constant. Free speech, to the extent that it has ever existed as anything other than a polite fiction, is unstable and unsustainable. It destroys itself. Progressives are correct that they are only doing what everyone everywhere has always done: setting bounds on acceptable speech, and then policing violations thereof. Reds failed at this responsibility when last we had a workable amount of social control. This was a mistake, and we suffer now for it. If we should secure power in some eventuality, it would be regrettable in the extreme to fall victim to the same foolishness again.

Reds failed at this responsibility when last we had a workable amount of social control.

An alternate explanation is that when you repress and control speech and behaviour (which both sides do), you create groups of outcasts. The genesis of the woke movement is when various groups were able to band together and discover there were enough of them, that they could begin to build their own narrative coalition. The tighter you close your fist the more people will be pushed into the other camp. You have to balance the level of social control, with the number of people you are pushing into the rebel side.

This isn't exclusive to conservatives of course, exactly the same will happen (and arguably is already happening) with progressive social control. Whether it is inevitable, or whether it is possible to have some form of social control which allows some kind of wiggle room, enough to put in place the social boundaries civilization requires, without creating big enough groups of outcasts who feel they have no choice but to push back and have the numbers to start the cycle again.

This is too totalizing and bleak. It's a matter of degree of censorship, and approximation to liberal attitudes on speech. It hasn't been exactly like it is now since forever, otherwise we wouldn't all be talking about censorship in the current era as if something important really has changed in the last decade or so.

Tangentially, speaking in terms of "we shouldn't let that happen again, so let's censor harder," fails to grasp that there are a number of disagreements within one's own tribe or political camp.

Demonstrate that more moderate stances can solve or even significantly ameliorate the problem, and I'll happily concede.

What's different this time, in the main, comes down to tech centralization, mutual reinforcement of Blue-Tribe centers of power, and the unusual fervor generated by peculiarities of the Progressive worldview. Progressivism has been a serious contender since the founding of the nation, but the fight didn't have to go this way, and I think it evident that it did go this way in large part through naïve trust in "enlightenment principles" that were never, ever going to hold.

And sure, there are a great many disagreements within all tribes or political camps. Have faith in human nature, give it a little more time. The escalation spiral works its magic, and such disagreements resolve themselves.

I think that anything Hanania writes ought to be taken with an entire sack of salt. When I first encountered him I thought he was a parody account along the same lines of Titania McGrath, but now I think he's something more along the Moldbug. IE an edgy left-wing activist type who started out as a tankie only to realize that there was nothing "edgy" about being a tankie in places like Berkley or the University of Chicago.

Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The impression that this really only crystalized in 2016 is presumably a product of being too you to remember the 90s and Clinton's efforts to quash talk radio and the nascent internet coupled with revionionist histories by left leaning journalists. For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s or trying to get D&D and violent video games banned in the 80s and 90s, it was people like Fredric Wertham, and Tipper Gore.

I am old enough to remember the 80s and 90s, and your history is inaccurate. Sure, Fredric Wertham and Tipper Gore were flagbearers, there have always been liberal activists crying "Think of the children!" But I also remember the Moral Majority. I also remember who was railing against D&D: it wasn't liberals, it was conservative Christians. Same with rock and rap, Tipper Gore and Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment notwithstanding. (Liberals complained about "violence" but that's about it.) Clinton complained a lot about right-wing talk radio and disinformation, but he didn't quash anything.

Authoritarians are very pro-censorship, and authoritarianism is not really a left/right phenomenon. Hardly a novel observation. But in the U.S., historically it's more often been the right pulling the censorship levers. That's reversed today, but I think you are the one looking at things with a revisionist lens.

The Christian right might have been trying, but they accomplished nothing. Even at the time. It wasn't just a long term loss, they lost all the short term battles as well. The major media outlets all ignored them and kept pushing left wing ideas the entire time.

That's not true: TV shows, comic books, radio stations, and yes, schools and universities, all were pressured by right-wingers and often censured teachers and classes, took programs off the air or refused to play certain episodes or songs because of (largely) conservative Christian complaints. "D&D panic" was definitely a thing, with some schools outright forbidding D&D books on campus. It's true there were few outright "bannings," but then, there are few outright bannings today. What is materially different today is social media, where it's much more visible when the people running the companies are kicking famous individuals off their platforms.

During that whole period I could walk into a bookstore and see all the D&D books lined up, ready to be bought. Show me the bookstore selling "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street"

Do you think this is the first time in American history that a publisher discontinued publishing titles or stores and libraries stopped shelving them because of political or social pressure?

I am not asserting a one to one equivalency between today and the 1980s, I am asserting that the claim that the right wing never "successfully" censored anything is false.

Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR . . For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s

I'm not sure why you are implying that "not conservative republicans" = progressives, since the most conservative politicians in that period were southern Democrats (there were, of course, essentially no elected Republicans from the deep South in that period; see here, here, here and here )

As for the Comics Code, it grew out of the 1954 investigation by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee members during the hearing were : Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey),Estes Kefauver (D- Tennessee), Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. (D-Missouri), and William Langer (R-North Dakota). By the time the linked report was issued, Olin D. Johnston (D- South Carolina) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) were on the committee, but they did not participate in preparing the report.

Anyhow, the idea that moral censoriousness around images of sex and violence is the sole province of progressives, rather than conservatives, is very odd: Moral objections to that sort of material is pretty much a part of the definition of being "conservative" in the USA, and certainly when you look at efforts to remove books from schools and libraries, the pattern is clearly that liberals object to books that are ostensibly racist, and conservatives object to books that depict sex, nudity, or violence. And, of late book challenges are most common for the latter reasons.

One, you're conflating moral objections with legislative action.

Two, I didn't say it was the sole province of progressives, I was pointing out that support for censorship has always been a component of the progressive platform and the narrative being repeated by the OP and others in this thread that progressive democrats have always opposed censorship and conservative republicans always supported it only for the positions to flip in response to Trump is either deeply ignorant, or dishonest revisionism.

I wonder at the extent to which this is true. I remember William Bennett and Joe Liebermann handing out "silver sewer" awards to "cultural polluters". I likewise seem to remember support for obscenity laws and public decency standards among the Red Tribers of my youth. I don't remember a lot of legislative action, but I do seem to recall a fair amount of cultural pressure.

What's the model, here? Did Red Tribe never care about corrupting content or public indecency? Did they merely never care about it from a legislative angle? This seems like a thesis worthy of a deeper dive.

It's not that the republicans never "cared about corrupting content or public indecency", it's that legislative action seeking to silence it against it has always a been a distinctly progressive (think blue-tribe "Karen" archetype) phenomenon.

Remember that William Bennet was a Democrat when Reagan hired him and that your other central figures, Joe Liebermann, Tipper Gore, and Brian Williams, were not exactly "Red" by any stretch of the imagination.

Joe Lieberman explicitly profiled himself as a moderate Democrat, not a progressive, though, going as far as to endorse McCain in 2008. My understanding is that so did Al Gore in 80s. PMRC had four founders - "The women who founded the PMRC are Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius", says Wikipedia - and apart from Tipper, others were wives of Republican politicians or activists.

As I said to another user, I think this says a lot more about how far "the center" has moved to the left than it does anything else]

I don't follow. My points, to spell them out, were:

  1. Saying that "Joe Lieberman (...) was not exactly "Red" by any stretch of imagination" is incorrect; you could do it with some stretch of imagination, particularly around 2008

  2. PMRC wasn't simply some Democratic effort, as some posts in this thread portray it; apart from Tipper, there were numerous (presumably) Republican women involved.

The obvious response is that this guy is voicing an unusual/contrarian view among people who vocally complain about left-wing internet censorship, most of whom believe that internet companies getting to control what political views/information people are allowed to express is bad in general.

The more complicated response is that there is a false-dichotomy between SJWs and a subset of right-wingers as the relevant comparison. Traditional mainstream right-wingers don't even tend to be particularly vocal about left-wing censorship except for when they're censored personally, and there's a bunch of Republican congressmen who were shadowbanned on Twitter but have still never mentioned the issue. Youtube censored a mainstream pharmaceutical company at the behest of a NYT journalist because it was being used as a counterargument to an attack on Trump, and I don't think Trump mentioned it once. This is of course a dichotomy that SJWs very aggressively foster themselves, and anyone sufficiently loudly opposing SJWs tends to be tarred as "far right" and kicked out of any left-wing institutions (and lots of neutral institutions, and plenty of right-wing institutions). But the fact that mainstream right-wing institutions seem more prone to believing SJW claims and caving to SJW demands than anti-SJWs (including anti-SJWs who may qualify as left-wing or moderate in their general political views) seems like an illustration of why this isn't the actual axis. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently called for the censorship of Kiwifarms, does that mean "both sides" are pro-censorship or that the line doesn't really run from SJWs to MTG? And once you're considering the SJW/anti-SJW axis, remember that anti-SJW communities like /r/tumblrinaction (now banned by Reddit) are the ones who popularized "horseshoe theory" to describe how they considered SJWs the other side of the coin from groups like the Moral Majority.

For example the Gamergate surveys showed GG to have strongly left-wing demographics - but who would you trust to not fire you if a media campaign was screaming about how you were a racist, a group of Republican activists or a group of Gamergators? And this combination of views is pretty common with anti-SJWs, including the most common views seen in surveys of TheMotte itself. SJWs would of course say that pro-GG people are right-wing regardless of their votes for Obama or views on gay-marriage/abortion/government-spending, but you can't have it both ways. Either the anti-SJW and pro-free-speech people are right-wing, in which case it seems like the contingent of right-wingers most vocal on the issue are pro-free-speech. Or they're left-wing/moderate/oldschool liberals/etc., in which case this isn't about "the liberal left" vs. authoritarian right-wingers.

Now, once you get into political alliances and self-identification this gets more complicated. Undoubtably there are an increasing number of people who consider themselves "right-wing" precicely because they oppose one or more SJW doctrines or behaviors. This is understandable, since SJWs have rapidly progressed from co-opting groups like the Something Awful forums to co-opting groups like mainstream political parties. Lots of those people are going to place more trust on right-wing sources and be sympathetic to whatever they consider the right-wing position on any issue they don't have another reason to care about. And of course few actual politicians care about free-speech, or many of the issues relevant to the SJW/anti-SJW axis, so when SJWs do something unpopular enough that it shifts votes to Republicans the politicians aren't going to be perfectly responsive to their new voters. There have been a couple attempts at some sort of bill modifying Section 230 to get sufficiently-large internet companies to not arbitarily censor their political opponents, but they haven't gone anywhere. Politicians seem not to regard it as very important, unlike those in the trenches of social media, though that might eventually shift after enough big incidents like the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Politics is chaotic and it's hard to guess how things will go. But it's not uncommon for relatively small groups of invested people to end up dictating policy, and in regards to internet censorship those most invested in the issue seem to be those sincere in their opposition.

This is an astute observation. I think there's a tendency amongst a lot of people from progressive backgrounds to equate opposition to the "woke agenda" with being right-wing, and are thus annoyed, and maybe feel a bit betrayed, when they find out that much of the wider "right" has their own priorities and isn't as concerned the controversy of the day as they are.

I joke about it but...

"I'm a gay polyamorist furry who works for apple and is very concerned about HBD and Demographic decline, please subscribe to my substack"

followed by...

"Conservatives need to do more to cater to the preferences of gay polyamorist furries"

really is becoming something of a cliche' at this point.

If I owned and had the implied level of control over Twitter, I'd let feminists, trans activists, and socialists post, but under the same standards that applied to everyone else. That would be enough to stop the problems they caused.

He makes another interesting point about finding value reading the NYT. Is this true? I can’t subscribe because it’s funding the enemy. I feel like most new articles say at Bloomberg I can see the headline and get 95% of the article. X,Y,Z happened. Market zigged. Quite a couple fund managers getting their name in an article.

For something like Ukraine War it seems like the journalists follow the same twitter accounts and then NYT regurgitates the twitter accounts 24 hrs later.

I don’t think I follow a lot of the dunking on people accounts.

I feel like the NYT could be good for like a Doctor whose not always online or needing to dissect information faster but can get a more efficient day or two late news source.

I read the NYT every day, and I can say that every time I see a post here, or elsewhere, about "why isn't the media covering X," I had seen several NYT articles on the subject (eg: supposed noncoverage of Tigray; the claim that the media really wasn't covering Ukraine much any more). As it happens, the NYT is one of four US newspapers which still have foreign bureaus (the others are the Wash Post, the Wall St Journal, and the LA Times), and according to Wikipedia they have 2000 staff writers - twice what the WaPo has. So, yes, you are likely to see coverage there that is not going to show up elsewhere.

Yes but do they say anything on Ukraine that isn’t already reported on twitter 24 hrs earlier?

Well, I do not read every tweet that is in existence, of course. And much of what I do see on twitter is a link to reporting, including to reporting by the Times. Anyhow, much of what they report is not simply facts ("x soldiers were killed in town y") but analysis, discussion of strategy, etc, etc. I am sure there are political scientist or military historians who tweet similar things; indeed, I follow some of them. But, most people don't. And, of course, the NY Times covers all sorts of other stories, from business to the arts. And it publishes long-form articles as well Could I in theory get that same information from my Twitter feed? Maybe, but probably not in practice.

you don't have to subscribe to read the articles. archive.is works

And generally you can just keep reading their articles if your delete your NYT's cookies.

Those of us with libertarian tendencies are left wondering why our institutions needs to be captured by tyrannical dogmatic ideologues in the first place. I've lived in strongholds of the illiberal left and right, in a lot of ways they're different, in a lot of ways they're the same. It's the certainty that is the problem,

There's little to wonder about. Libertarians are generally incapable of building or capturing institutions because one of the defining traits of a Libertarian is "does not play well with others" and there in lies the rub becaues cooperative action really is our "killer app".

Libertarians are consistently shockingly well organized for their numbers and the newness of the ideology (which in its modern form has only existed for 50ish years.

the issue is Libertarians are randomly distributed (since the vast majority of them come to the ideology through the internet)... and as of now there is barely 5-10ish million of them if we include everyone who's liberty curious and maybe voted LP, or attended an evert , numbers that were vastly lower before 2008.

By contrast social justice has 15-40 million, comes out of several active traditions that did historically wield wide influence amongst large demographics... feminism, gay acceptance... and came with a built in institutional subsidy in the form of anti-decrimination mandates that the ideology has evolved to exploit

I don't think that's it. I've known plenty of libertarians, and most played well with others just fine. I think the actual problem is that people simply don't like to leave others alone. It really bothers people when someone isn't acting right, and they really want to make sure that person acts right. It's simply not human nature to be libertarian.

Well, we're going to find out. Many of the laws being passed about CRT and trans issues, though provoked by really bad behavior, are licenses for censorship, and mostly being implemented by red state legislatures. We'll see if the right can censor as hard as the left, but as of right now, I doubt it.

The reasons the illiberal right is winning out over the libertarian aspect could probably fill a book, but suffice it to say that it would be seen by right wingers who made the switch as a reaction to liberals signaling they would do the same.

As for whether that process is complete, I’m not sure, and I don’t think it is, but Florida and Texas(which is much, much less ‘news visible’ due to the nature of its political system) are both much more willing to punish progressivism than they would have been in the past, and the two biggest red states set the trend for the party as a whole. And internationally Orbán and Duda are the models, it seems.

Yeah this is really testing the concept of "liberal conservatism." One must ask themselves are they more liberal or are they more conservative? I think what's confounding is that for many classical liberals, they truly believe they reinforce each other and cannot be broken up.

I don’t think they claim to be liberal conservatives though?

is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power

My personal rebuttal to this is always something like ' yes - it is very bad that my grandparents went through the Holocaust in Poland, it is bad that my parents lived through communism in Poland, but it still sucks for me personally that I have to pretend a man is somehow a woman, or that I have to pretend everyone in the US is my equal, or that ... ' so yuh, its relatively mild - but it's still living in unreality, and it's still bothersome.

Tipper Gore is the reason my CD's had parental advisory stickers and the left is the reason tweets and podcasts and truthteller marks are all over everywhere telling us wrong facts.

Tipper Gore is the reason my CD's had parental advisory stickers and the left is the reason tweets and podcasts and truthteller marks are all over everywhere telling us wrong facts.

Which is why the whole bit about how the left only embraced censorship in 2016 in response to Trump is so absurd.

As noted above, Tipper Gore was hardly a member of the "Left." As for her husband, per his Wikipedia page:

During his time in Congress, Gore was considered a "moderate" once referring to himself as a "raging moderate"[41] opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment of silence in schools, and voting against a ban on interstate sales of guns.[42] In 1981, Gore was quoted as saying with regard to homosexuality, "I think it is wrong", and "I don't pretend to understand it, but it is not just another normal optional life style." In his 1984 Senate race, Gore said when discussing homosexuality, "I do not believe it is simply an acceptable alternative that society should affirm." He also said that he would not take campaign funds from gay rights groups.[43] Although he maintained a position against homosexuality and gay marriage in the 1980s, Gore said in 2008 that he thinks "gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women...to join together in marriage."[44] His position as a moderate (and on policies related to that label) shifted later in life after he became Vice President and ran for president in 2000.[45]

I don't think this invalidates my point so much as demonstrates just how far Democrats conception of "moderate" has moved in 30 years.

As many have pointed out, Donald Trump's policies and rhetoric where basically those of a 90s centrist. That he appears "Far Right" in contrast to most journalists and politicians today is more a comment on them than it is him.

Elon gets it.

No, none of those were remotely left positions, even 30-40 yrs ago. The left has been pro-gun control for decades, and there was a pro-gay rights plank in the 1980 Democratic platform

If Bill Clinton and Al Gore are right wing in your book, consider for a moment that your model of the political spectrum is woefully miscalibrated.

Dude, I didn't say they were rightwing. I said they were not part of the left. Geez, both were heads of the Democratic Leadership Council

, which was explicitly formed to move the party away from the left. A guy who opposed gun control and gay rights in the 80s simply wasn't on the left, just because he has a D next to his name. It is pretty common knowledge, after all, that the parties were far more ideologically heterogeneous in the past

From the article:

After all the LGBT, black, and women stuff that I’ve posted, this is like Al Capone going away for tax evasion.

Can someone who follows his Twitter feed give some examples? This would help calibrate how much censoring Twitter is doing.

Here are some choice ones from last weeks

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567548940610043906?cxt=HHwWhIDQ0ZndhsErAAAA

I suspect that the normal person goes along with LGBT propaganda in schools not because they're intimidated by radical activists, but because they see it as an acceptable way to make the weirdest and ugliest kids feel better about themselves.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567521638236946433?cxt=HHwWgoDQjf-n-sArAAAA

Taliban has an interest in establishing relations with Russia, extremists opposed to gov trying to sabotage. In a sane world we’d help Taliban deal with terrorism. It’s in everyone’s interest, but no, we’ll let everything burn for girls education, which you won’t get anyway. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1566739026031194112?cxt=HHwWgMCl5fu1lr4rAAAA

This story. If you have faith that there is hope for reaching out to leftists, read it and see the kinds of people that make it in their institutions. Hard to be optimistic, a level of ugliness and evil that expands your concept of what is possible. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1566390991380103168

There is probably more controversial things someone could dig up but this is fairly typical fair: https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1527689272119070720

Or this

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567896817169494017

(I think he got away with it because he is actually pretty funny sometimes)

I think the perspective of someone like Hanania is to a large degree born of the way social media just presents an onslaught of topicality. It's non-stop news, which is entirely made up of object level details and the triggered sentiment that goes along with that. It's very difficult to think high level, more like a political philosopher. Everyone goes into second order intellectual mode ala journalism, not some kind of academic-style creative synthesizer. A low-key tabloidization of everything is where even the smartest people are basically at now, and they're beginning to rationalize it. "Great minds think about ideas, media minds think about events, small minds think about people" is being rendered almost impossible to uphold.

People have already talked about the way the age of books and newspapers allowed for more disembodied reasoning. Now it's a bunch of little thumbnails of someone whose face you just want to punch (in an online environment that mimics a small town, as Megan McArdle observed) and whatever argument is attached to that, well so much the worse for it.

The people on the right who think the problem now is we didn't censor enough back in the day, I'm not sure what could have been done then would have any bearing on where we are now. Who saw censorship largely occurring in private hands in a handful of companies in California? 99% of the discussion of censorship had everything to do with government actions until about 5 minutes ago.

For my part, I don't identify as right-wing, but a 'muscular liberal'. I genuinely believe in free speech as a good in its own right. Part of that might be self-interest, since I'm incorrigibly contrarian and enjoy playing around with outrageous ideas, but I would be happy to defend it as being in the broader interests of the polis on broadly the same grounds that Mill laid out in On Liberty. I find myself here temporarily allied with rightists, both enjoying talking with them and selectively agreeing with them on topics as my conscience demands. I suspect a lot of the most ardent defenders of free speech are broadly on the same team.

I think there are limits to free speech. If the free speakers are convincing society that other freedoms should be restricted, in a way which violates property or self ownership rights, then such speach should be shut down because it is dangerous, however, if it convinces people to live differently but leave other people alone, that is fine.

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.

It's an interesting question just what territory you need to defend to defend free speech. Property and transaction rights are obviously important for free speech:

"Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a website if you are unable to pay for DDOS protection?"

If you've got people campaigning to centralize the political system or otherwise get the tools needed to remove freedom of speech, then that's a problem, as you say. Yet this sort of 'paradox of intolerance' argument has its own problems. Who is a fair arbiter to discern the genuinely threatening authoritarians from people who get labelled authoritarian?

Authoritarians denying rights and non threatening speech being suppressed as threatening are both problems, the best you can do is hope that whoever is in charge of enforcing free speech does not falter either way. I would say its pretty easy to tell whats threatening and whats not, if they are promoting anger and disgust toward people who engage in innocent activities, that is probably a threat, but if they are convincing people that said activities are bad for them and they should stop for their own sake, that is no worry.

Among the first social networks, Facebook and Myspace, were founded in 2004 and 2003 . Twitter came later , in 2007. Things were going well until 2016, when a certain favored candidate lost an important election. We're still reeling from the aftermath of that. The left is not going to let this go.

I’d peg the shift a few years earlier, in the mid Obama years. Occupy Wall Street started in late 2011 and used social networking to tap a bunch of anti-elite sentiment. You could arguably go a little earlier to grassroots-friendly political protests like the Tea Partiers; people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook as word-of-mouth.

Maybe journalism took a little longer to completely pivot to Twitter. At the absolute latest, GamerGate was in 2014. If that’s not social media drama, I don’t know what is.

I consider GamerGate to be the start of the online Culture War proper. It was the first time I recall seeing random companies and youtube channels putting out official statements about internet bullshit that doesn't affect them. Nobody with a comments section could claim to be "apolitical" after that.

You have generalized one conservative's point of view to "enough conservatives that it would drive their policy if they had political dominance."

I don't think this was true in 2016. I think it is probably true today.

The gentleman's agreements that allow us to have freedom of thought have expired. We're in the hardball stage, and the degree of censorship is likely to only get worse as time wears on.

Counter argument: without censorship, online communities naturally drift rightward as the sacred cows of progressives are slaughtered one by one with simple evidence.

No, not so. You'd have to entice people to come back in the first place, and then engage in what we might call outright-draconian moderation to ensure that tactics that are harmful to the discussion, but do not qualify as normal censorship, are also banned.

And that's assuming communities don't just decide to take on that censorship themselves. I have yet to see anyone believe that all communities everywhere should not engage in censorship.

Uh huh. Just like the old-fashioned Internet atheist communities destroyed by right-wing Facts and Logic.

I don't know anything about internet atheist communities. But feminism and intersectional orthodoxies don't tend to stand up well to basic inquiry by those not within the academic social setting.

What sort of orthodoxies did you have in mind?

Core tenets like “diversity is a good thing” are hard to disprove. Others like “women ought not be restricted to the home” are outside the realm of proof and into that of values.

Like women have been oppressed by a patriarchy for ten million years.

Like 1 in 4 female students will be raped on campus.

Like confusing the pay gap with the earnings gap.

Like looking at black homicide victim statistics. (Police killing black men make up less than 1% of the total.)

et cetera...

Facts are progressive Kryptonite.

Core tenets like “diversity is a good thing” are hard to disprove.

That all hinges on the meaning of "good" being used. If diversity is axiomatically accepted as virtuous in itself, then obviously its benefit can't be "disproved." But otherwise it's not so hard to provide historical and current examples of comparatively more and less diverse places and societies and make a choice.

Others like “women ought not be restricted to the home” are outside the realm of proof and into that of values.

Hardly; the expanded economic role of women can also be observed in different historical settings, and the results judged (according to the viewer's criteria, of course). For example, there is a powerful argument put forward by Liz Warren of all people that the economic and social liberation of women in the 60s doomed the middle class by creating dual-income rat races and driving up the costs of family-formation essentials like housing and childcare.

One could argue that they were destroyed by being re-branded as right-wingers.

Pre-2000 the ability of either side to censor was more limited, but also the stakes were possibly lower. From a personal perspective it's not that big of a deal if a school bans a book, but losing your fakebook , gmail, paypal, or twitter account way worse, because you lose all those contacts/friends that took years to accumulate, and also you need those services for daily life. There are too many points of failure, in which people have entrusted their identities and livelihoods to these large, impersonal companies. Tech censorship is much more personal, whereas pre-2000 censorship affected communities or groups more than individuals (like a school banning a book or warning labels on records). Social networks have thrived because they are a very efficient way to consume new information and connect with people, but this makes them more vulnerable to censorship.

He's mostly correct. It annoys me to see tech leaders hauled before Congress to get lectured about what a nice platform they have except for all that excessive free speech, and how bad it would be for something to happen to it if they don't fix the excesses themselves ... but isn't essentially the story behind the Hays Code? The Comics Code? The Hollywood Blacklist?? I suspect that most current "supporters" of free speech are just fair-weather friends who would be more than happy to reverse their support and double their zeal, if only they were the ones in charge.

But the other reason I have that sad suspicion about much of the right is simple induction from the sad certainty about the reversal much of the left has already made. It was so much nicer when I innocently assumed that everybody opposed the Hollywood Blacklist because we were all actually pro-free-speech and anti-blacklist, not pro-Communist. To be fair to the right, their future betrayal is still merely hypothetical. Maybe it's not just wishful thinking to imagine that some actually learned something.

"Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity."

Isaac Asimov character, "Robots and Empire"

Free speech is rarely a primary goal.

It's a defensive line when you lose control of the mechanisms of censorship. This has nothing to do with left or right, it's like the deficit. Good when you're in power, bad when you're out of power. The left figured out how to stampede private companies into enforcing their censorship, but that's an unstable equilibrium. Sooner or later someone is going to remember that twitter trolls don't command armies, and can be safely told to fuck off.

I think the problem is it comes down to the amount of people being censored. The lefts desire seems to be to want to censor 50% of the population maybe more. I don’t believe this is the same as communists which was a small part of the population. We were also at war with communists at the time. Actual shooting war almost the entire time. And it’s an I’ll ideology that’s has proven itself to be disastrous to mankind.

The problem today is now 50% of the population wants to censor the other 50% of the population and now EVERYTHING is literally fighting Nazis. I think the difference is sometimes you are actually literally fighting Nazis (and I include communists in this too) and sometimes you are fighting people debating scientific papers (masks, vaccine studies) and equating these people as being the equivalent of literally Hitler. We all agree with murdering and censoring Hitler. The difference today is everyone who disagrees with you literally Hitler because they looked at some studies and don’t think there is a reason for them to wear a masks?

The lefts desire seems to be to want to censor 50% of the population maybe more.

Maybe, but it's hard to draw parallels: in the past censoring "the population" never really came up. You only needed to censor the tiny fraction of the population that had a chance of getting published/produced, and if you managed that then why would anyone else grab for that brass ring while expecting to be squelched if they ever caught it? Only with the internet is everybody halfway to being their own publisher and censorship needing to be more extensive.

We were also at war with communists at the time. Actual shooting war almost the entire time.

When the systematic blacklist started in 1947? Am I forgetting a shooting war? We hadn't even seen the Berlin Blockade yet, much less the Korean War etc.. In hindsight we really were riddled with Soviet spies, but hindsight's 20/20, and IIRC McCarthy never found more than a handful of the actual threats. Also note the distinction here between "communists" (any of the marks who fell for Marx) and Communists (the few specific organizations paying lip service to Marx who we ended up in conflict with); allow equivocation to that extent and the "fighting Nazis" types can justify censoring just about anyone too.

HUAC's communism-in-Hollywood report was 1938, but while the Soviets were screwing over their own citizens and Poland at that time, they would be US Allies during the intervening years.

And it’s an I’ll ideology that’s has proven itself to be disastrous to mankind.

Sure, but there's that 20/20 hindsight again. In the 1930s we were still happy to give out a Pulitzer for getting suckered into Holodomor denial.

We all agree with murdering and censoring Hitler.

Executing after a trial, sure. Censoring, definitely not. Whatever direction the next Hitler comes from, the last thing we need is for him to be able to justify an "oh I'm so persecuted" act publicly, spread censorable material privately instead, and chuckle at the irony of nobody being able to really properly rebut his arguments because they'd have to be able to admit to acquiring the contraband themselves first. Or worse, the censorship might actually work ... and then a few generations down the road, when we've actually forgotten the arguments we thought were so dangerous, we could innocently reinvent them ourselves under a different name after having lost all immunity to them.

Korean War started in 1950. Berlin Airlift 1948. Churchill first used the term Iron Curtain in 1945. Germany pre WW2. The War had definitely already began before 1947. First shooting perhaps not till Korea in 1950; but it’s not like we didn’t already see war coming.

Many European countries had already been physically separated from us pre-1947.

We all agree with murdering and censoring Hitler.

Consensus-building?

For actual Hitler, deposing (or assassinating maybe) before he starts the war, certainly a targeted strike after he starts it, and strong and vigorous argumentation against as soon as his strugglefesto gets published?

Sure that’s consensus building. Point I was making similar to Hannania is everyone (almost everyone believes) in some repression of a great bad. Hitler I’m assuming to 98% of Americans is that great bad. The comic book villain whose sole pleasure of tormenting humans. And the closest real example of someone with near universal support as the great bad.

Sure most great bads actually have large support basis. Darth Maul ended up being the defender of planets being abused by the Capitol and the Star Wars cartoons and sort of a good guy.

I for one will try to remain stodgy enough to keep my views from "evolving" to suit my immediate object-level ends should the shoe ever be on my foot. Whether that's a mindset that will keep the shoe from every getting anywhere near my foot, I don't know but do suspect, and if this means I'll be left behind by the side I am now on like seems to have happened to quite a few from the other side this past decade, then I suppose that'll be the price to pay for being principled.

Of course, given that I'm presently in the past of that possible future, I'd like to do my part to keep that from happening, but I am totally blind about how to do that. Ah, well.

Banning discussion of the legimitacy of elections, discussion of whether the neovaccines/masks are effective or not, discussion that homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic mammalian species on the one hand,

and explicit content parental advisory lyrics on the other hand.

Personally, I think that's a false equivalency.

discussion that homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic mammalian species on the one hand,

I don't think any major political coalition goes so far as to deny "sexual dimorphism."

I hate to keep ringing this bell, but I actually think the disagreements of fact between well-researched pro-trans people and well-researched anti-trans people is fairly small.

Ask any empirical question, and you'll get agreement on what our technologies and medical interventions today can and cannot do, and what unknowns exist in this space. I've read the WPATH Standards of Care, and most of the objections people bring up (GNC kids mostly desist, puberty blockers might have effects on bone density, etc., etc.) are all discussed and given weight in the discussion. They acknowledge risks, and gaps in our current understanding all over that document.

On the other hand, normative discussions like:

  • Which sex-seggregated spaces should trans people have access to?

  • Which sports divisions and teams should trans people participate in?

  • Should trans healthcare be included as part of government provided healthcare?

aren't directly based on empirical principles to begin with.

Sports rules aren't handed down from on high - we very consciously make decisions about what form we want a sport to take. If including transwomen in a women's sporting division is undesirable to some, then another league that only allows cis-women could exist alongside it (much as weightlifting competitions have pro-doping and anti-doping competitions happily existing alongside one another.)

With all other questions, we have to determine what risk tolerance and error bars on current knowledge we have as a society.

WPATH Standards of Care

That seems to be from 2012. A lot has changed in this discussion space in 10 years.

If including transwomen in a women's sporting division is undesirable to some, then another league that only allows cis-women could exist alongside it

This is literally already the case, and the entire point. Sports have an "open" and a "women's" league, and the TRAs think that sectioning off the women's league for cis-women is intolerable bigotry.

the disagreements of fact between well-researched pro-trans people and well-researched anti-trans people is fairly small.

"Well-researched" people aren't the ones who get you fired or kicked off of social media.

In a parallel reality where sense and rationality rules the land, your hypothetical utopia might possibly exist. But in this reality, there are very vocal trans activists that will hunt you down, dox you, petition your boss to fire you and try to get your kids expelled from their school if you say that homo sapiens are a dimorphic mammalian species.

And that's assuming that your account was suspended to begin with.

I'd like proof of this.

The case of Keffals et al versus Jesse Singal?

I'm not familiar with the details. What have Keffals and her allies done to Jesse Singal that would qualify as trying to "hunt you down, dox you, petition your boss to fire you and try to get your kids expelled from their school"? At most, I can imagine 1, maybe 2 possible confirmations of your list.

It seems trivially true that whoever is in power will be biased in favor of censorship, and this is the left’s turn. Fair enough.

But the right, I’m told, already had a go at social regulation, and it seems to pale in comparison to what’s happening now. From where I’m standing it’s the right’s failure to “censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way” that has landed us where we are today.

You can’t have it both ways. The resentment I feel radiating off of the online Gen X and older Millennials gives me the impression that the Christian family-values right was so stifling, so overbearing to the extent of being undeserving of political legitimacy. And I can agree that they now appear to not have any political legitimacy. But what socially-left ideas did they manage to stop? For all the hegemony, where is the territory?

So to hold these ideas that the right was at one time censorious, which proves that they’ll try it again in the extreme if allowed, it’s in tension with the fact that they did quickly lose control and whatever the left is doing now seems to be much more effective.

If anyone here is willing to claim that he professed Christian tenets, aloud, to keep his job, or pretended to support the invasion of Iraq to keep his job, this would make me back off these claims.

Cancel culture over the Iraq invasion definitely happened.

Cancel Culture over whether Lon Horiuchi was a hero or a villain definitely happened, which is part of why I roll my eyes at the suggestion that this is a recent phenomenon.

No, the Dixie Chicks were not cancelled, they were simply boycotted by some erstwhile fans.

It wasn't just Dixie Chicks. Among other things, Clear Channels immediate post-9/11 no-radio-play list included the entire catalogue by Rage Against the Machine.

Sure, numerous post-9/11 cancellation wave figures bounced back, but so have many cancelled right-wing figures.

I'm not sure any response to 9/11 is comparable to cancel culture. As dreadfully offensive as they are, I don't believe any sane person will argue screaming nigger or insisting on Twitter that transwomen aren't real women is remotely equal in offense to a literal terrorist mass murder on American soil.

While I concede these are technically similar, in that they both show censorious overreach, I think that the go-to for the censorious right is the worst event in our nation's collective history and the go-to for the censorious left is being racist or anti-trans itself tells a story.

That story being "yeah, if literally the worst thing happens, the right can and will censor people, but man..."

Nah... anyone can tell a story about why their pet cause is what justifies censoring the outgroup. I hold that the reasons for post-9/11 censorship are just as frivolous, but it's reach was nowhere near what is happening now.

There is also the hypocrisy angle, which fuels a hot burning rage deep inside of me, but I learned no one cares about hypocrisy anymore, so I keep a lid on it. The implication of these "conservatives were just as censorious when they had power arguments", is that the specific people here, protesting censorship would use it themselves given the chance. That would have been very compelling, if it wasn't for the fact, that I was vehemently against post-9/11 censorship, and am now being called a rightwinger for not changing my mind, now when the shoe is on the other foot!

I'm not saying 9/11 justified the censorship. I'm saying there is a qualitative difference between a unified nation suppressing dissent after a massive loss of life and one party in a fractured system being able to casually exert that same suppression for nigh whatever reason they want.

Feels like kicking the can down the road: anyone can come up with a reason why there is a qualitative difference between when we do it, and when they do it.

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As dreadfully offensive as they are, I don't believe any sane person will argue screaming nigger or insisting on Twitter that transwomen aren't real women is remotely equal in offense to a literal terrorist mass murder on American soil.

Uh, what? The equivalent of those things in this comparison is, of course, not terrorist mass murder in itself, but unsuitable political discussion of the response to the said terrorist mass murder, or discussion of terrorist mass murder in ways differing from the general narrative, or simply doing anything that might be considered as potentially offending people in the wake of the said terrorist mass murder.

I think that the go-to for the censorious right is the worst event in our nation's collective history and the go-to for the censorious left is being racist or anti-trans itself tells a story.

I'm pretty sure the worst event in your nation's collective history is, for differing definitions of event, either the American Civil War or the collective institution of slavery, both of which of course loom large in any discussions of left-wing cancel culture.

Uh, what?

I'm not sure what you don't understand. Your reply is missing my point. The right censored for awful disasters, when they had a nearly-unified country behind them; the left censors for every offense. One is distinctly worse than the other, even if both are bad.

As for what scars the nation's psyche -- War isn't unusual, neither is exploitation, especially since both are a 'victory story' for the cultural ruling class. But dirt farmers being able to strike at us in the heart of our empire, that's novel. More importantly, it's in living memory and makes us the victim. 9/11 has a far more profound impact on people than a war over a hundred years old.

Why do you assume that the left's attempts at censorship will be any more effective than the right's?

Because they have been. It is now illegal, punishable by dismissal from employment, to assert that transwomen are men. The theory goes that doing so is harassment of any transwomen at your workplace.

From where I’m standing it’s the right’s failure to “censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way” that has landed us where we are today.

Well wokeness itself, emerged from basically a coalition of those who were outsiders to the right (or at least to a particular ascendant variety of the right). Do we need to recap over gay people hiding in the closet et al? Women being denied work opportunities? Redlining and Jim Crow? 1950's gender roles?

You're not going back far enough if you are asking about Iraq. The seeds of wokeness were sown decades before that. The 90's and early 2000's were roughly where both sides were in balance, shifting from one cultural hegemon to another if you will. The right did not quickly lose control (to the extent they have, see below), it was a slow decades long process.

But if it helps, even today in my small Red rural town, I do not admit to being an atheist. It was only 10 years ago that:

"Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to."

And in many places that still holds. As I said a week or two ago, don't confuse the national media dominance of the blue tribe to think that red tribe conservative values are not dominant in many local places.

Meh, that hasn't really been my experience. I live in a pretty red part of the country and work in a gun store. I'm an open atheist and nobody gives a shit (at least not out loud). I've clocked a few shady looks about my discussion of religion and politics, but a Purple Heart covers all sins on the right. As with race, sexuality etc. I don't think it's atheism at all that people object to, it's the politics they assume goes along with it. Prove you're not the outgroup, and the atheism doesn't matter. The right thinks the left hates America. I can prove I don't, so they're fine with it.

This is a bit tougher with the left. There's no straightforward path to legitimacy for heretics.

To be fair there is a big difference between not voting for an atheist and banning the atheist from free speech.

I don’t have any belief that a person like myself could become the Presidential nomination for the Democratic Party but I think in 1995 I could hire you as my investment banker. I am not sure that I could openly be myself at Goldman Sachs or google today. Theirs a huge hosts of elite employers today where I’m unemployable today even if I had impeccable qualifications.

I am sure job limitations happened significantly in the past but now it’s like 40% of the population is excluded.

The right has its own communities and territory, like churches, Fox News, some podcasts, and such, but it failed to lay any inroads in tech platforms, hence why it's so far behind. And alt tech is not good enough unless somehow Facebook + twitter meet a similar demise as Myspace, which strikes me as very, very unlikely. It missed that chance. I think right wing communities may be more inclined to censor compared to left-wing ones, but that would limit their success. Instead, the left's approach is to minimize censorship early on and then censor later after gaining key market dominance.

Well it really depends. It would be hard to become twitter if, from the beginning, you banned feminist posts. Just as twitter did not become twitter by being a censorious leftist platform. Its formation is more of a bait and switch. Start off as nearly a maximalist free speech platform to hoover up as many users as possible, then when you achieve that, you leverage that for political ends. Almost every major tech platform that is currently censoring the right, had, at its founding, right wing power users that drove huge percentages of their current users to the platform.

The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

This is interesting. Mr. Hannania always has incisive insights. I think from a business standpoint Twitter knows it must strike a balance between speech and censorship. Speech is more profitable, so more censorship would hurt profits, beyond edge cases like overtly taboo stuff. Having opposing tribes clash with each other means more ad views/clicks, more engagement overall. Also, Twitter's approach may be worse because they will let you build a large following and brand and then pull the rug, after you have invested so much time on the platform, when being banned from the onset would be be better. Twitter will let you get a way with a lot, until they decide they that have had enough of you, and then --poof-- gone, like Nick Fruentes, Trump, or James Lindsay.

The real issue is that the "muh private company" argument no longer applies to Twitter. There is evidence that the whitehouse, and the DNC have persuaded Twitter to censor their political enemies. That's the problem. That's a violation of the first amendment.

I also question that conservatives are pro censorship. At the height of their instutional power they put stickers on rap albums to warn of "explicit lyrics."

And that was seen as an overstep.

At the height of their instutional power they put stickers on rap albums to warn of "explicit lyrics."

That was the bipartisan PMRC, co-founded by the notoriously conservative Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore.

I do have to wonder about the political leanings of the anti-violent-games people from back then. Broadly-Democratic-slash-Neoliberal-but-willing-to-vote-Republican?

As a data point Jack Thompson (infamous in the 2000s video game space) claims to have voted Trump 2016 then switched parties in light of BLM and voted Biden 2020.

Robert Lindsay

Do you mean James Lindsay? You know, Jimmy Concepts?

fixed

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