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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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They absolutely did, pretty constantly too. They argued in favor of free speech and against things like top-down enforcement of morality.

Who, specifically are you talking about? One thing to keep in mind is that people change their mind - I used to be liberal until recently, and am dissident right now. At no point did I lie about my views.

Now the mask is coming off since Trump is in power again.

How is Trump limiting speech or imposing morality top-down?

Not sure what you're referring to here. Care to link an article or two? I vaguely recall Noah being somewhat woke previously, but it was mostly halfhearted, and he's been calling for its elimination for over half a decade at this point.

I'll look for some quotes tomorrow. If you can link some anti-woke and pro-liberal postings of his re: covid lockdowns,vaxx mandates, BLM, and the Twitter Files, I'd also appreciate it.

Musk is a pretty good example here. He claimed to be a "free speech absolutist", but then he started censoring a bunch of things he didn't like once he took over Twitter.

Looking for old articles is pretty hard on blogs, but I found several from Noah going back to 2021, e.g. him arguing against woke, arguing against motivated leftist science, and this one arguing against decolonization narratives.

I'm one of Musk's biggest critics around here, so I'll happily grant you that he's not what he portrays himself as, but he's not a very good example for you, for a couple of reasons.

First, he's not dissident right. He was censoring them in the aftermath of H1B-gate.

Secondly, this is like trying to use Zuckerberg, Bezos, Dorsey or any other Megacorp CEO that was full-woke, and suddenly discovered moderate liberalism. These people aren't liberals, woke, dissident right, or anything else, they're just covering their asses.

I was hoping for examples of public intellectuals or activists. Liberals would be people like James Lindsay, Peter Boghosian, Jordan Peterson, Johnathan Heidt, or Konstantin Kisin. Dissident right would be people like Yarvin, David Greene / Distributist, Auron MacIntyre, or Lomez. There's people who are kinda borderline like Chris Rufo (but I haven't seen him either promising free speech or censoring people), or people who changed their mind over the years like Carl Benjamin.

The liberals are still liberals as far as I can tell, and I haven't seen any phenomenon of any of them suddenly moving to the dissident right, when they got power.

Re: Noah Smith, I found some tweets where he was supportive of BLM, and seemed to think lockdowns were good, but you were right, and he seems a lot more reserved than I expected. Maybe I confused him with someone else.

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