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naraburns  nihil supernum  8d ago (text post)   26689 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent.

Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. And it's a much better excuse.

By your reasoning, voting for Trump is bad for Trump supporters because of the backlash, but also good for Democrats, and you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats.

Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture. The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump. And the biggest cancellations under Biden have been by right-wingers (e.g. the ivy league presidents).

you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats

I don't think voting for Trump helps democrats win elections, I think it helps woke leftists gain power within the democratic party. Which I think is very bad for democrats longterm. The best thing for democrats would be to campaign hard for a reasonable, principled liberal candidate in the primary, and then vote blue no matter who in the general.

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.

Rescinding the Dear Colleague letter, for example

The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump.

Man, we need some Catalogue of Cancellations, because I've lost track of what happened to who, and when. In any case I'd say the Twitter Files and Zucks confession of the government putting pressure to censor dissidents is probably more egregious.

The Twitter Files were mostly about attempts to censor Twitter by the deep state while Trump was President, not attempts by the Biden administration to censor Twitter. In other words, they are a point in favour of "1st-term Trump was too ineffective as President to do much about pervasive censorship," which is what @LiberalRetvrn seems to be getting at.

I'm pretty sure I recall that it was both, with a marked change in how hamfisted it was the moment Biden got into office.

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.

What he did was not deliberately try to make it worse which the Biden administration did. Merely doing nothing is an improvement over censoring Facebook.

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