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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Кто кого? All the way down.

But let’s not kid ourselves here- right wingers seeing their enemies get suspended are totally going ‘free speech? It’s a private company and you’re being assholes.’

Ya except this was a decision actually made by the private owner of the company, not the FBI sending threatening communiques and making demands.

This might be the only instance in the past 3+ years where the "private company" argument actually has any weight since at least in this instance we're pretty damn sure it wasn't the fascist security-media-intelligence complex state.

This is a reasonable point, I just don’t usually see twitter warriors making it.

Of course they do. In the middle of a culture war, you can't really expect it to be fought just by one side.

But let’s not kid ourselves here

… A statement which is rarely followed by good faith characterizations or steelman arguments.

Here’s who I’ve seen in my right-wing spaces

  1. Some “might makes right” folks cheering their outgroup being silenced and anticipating helicopter rides.

  2. Some “stand on principles of liberty” people asking, confused, why someone in their free-speech principles ingroup would apparently go against his stated principles, then seeing the suspended lefty journos posted links to Elon’s family’s locations in realtime followed by someone in black bloc getting on the hood of his kid’s car, and saying, “well that explains it.”

I know most peoples commitment to free speech is tenuous at best, but how many of such utterances are sincerely stated beliefs versus snarky backhands intended to remind progressives who was singing this tune not long ago?

And we cant just paper over the differences in application here. A sufficiently non-partisan crowd with warm sentiments towards the concept of free speech could be totally on-board with banning the amplification of public tracking data on completely generic grounds regarding public safety. That is not the same thing as banning people over jokes or misgendering.

I know that Elon's statements in support of 'free speech absolutism' has confused so much of the discourse around this. But he also said the platform would attempt to comply with the law, and ultimately wants Twitter to be a place for the 'sane 80%' (should such a thing exist), which of course would entail discrimination of some kind. Who exactly was expecting or wanting Twitter to turn into 4chan or kiwifarms?

It’s totally understandable to me why a South African billionaire is hypersensitive to people doxxing him after someone threatened his child. But the dominant mood I see from right wing twitter isn’t that, nor is it ‘well what goes around comes around’. It’s ‘inshallah censor our enemies’.

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