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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Ding ding ding! Free speech is the position of losers -- or, at least, people who believe they have solid odds of losing.

Which, in a democracy, is everyone, periodically. Even in autocracies, dictators usually don't go full Orwell in part for fear of being at the losing end of a revolt.

Most people aren't pessimistic enough to care about free speech. They want speech policed according to their obviously correct values.

Well, no, most people are realistic enough, especially in a democracy, to foresee a possible future in which they are no longer in power, even if they are in power currently.

You genuinely believe the average person thinks life is doomed to a political back and forth, rather than people eagerly anticipating and expecting their permanent majority? From my end of things, it certainly seems that a sizeable chunk of the electorate believes it has a long-term cure for that pesky "losing elections" problem, whether that be from fortifying them or changing demographics (a fact widely celebrated in the open, so long as you don't call it Replacement Theory).

I do not think it's coincidence that the left has veered sharply more censorious in tandem with the left exerting ever-greater control over the nation's social and political future. And I don't think it'll be coincidence when the Right takes power and suddenly ditches this free speech angle to suppress the degenerates, the globalists, the groomers, etc.

You genuinely believe the average person thinks life is doomed to a political back and forth, rather than people eagerly anticipating and expecting their permanent majority?

For a certain value of "the average person" - meaning, "people who spend enough time thinking about politics to consider this question" - yes.

I do not think that for the most part, even your censorious leftists and equally censorious rightists are just pretending to want to let their opponents have rights until they can solve that pesky problem of not being in power forever and ever.

Of course, if being in power forever and ever actually becomes a realistic possibility, we might see people realigning their views.

They're barely even pretending. Politics have been mask-off for awhile; we wouldn't have all these deplatforming controversies otherwise.

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