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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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