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Other people have offered replies, and @gattsuru in particular brings the receipts as usual, but I wonder if this is something one really needs to see for themselves to appreciate. If you want to see it, you need to go back and really look at the things people were saying decades ago, the pictures they were painting about what the future world was supposed to look like, the promises they were selling to people about the concrete things their ideological proposals would achieve.
You also, probably, need to understand that your own experience doesn't generalize. I'd imagine just on general demographics that you're probably doing pretty okay, and so is most of your social circle. You have far less reason to notice or care that, say, every political speech on education in the last fifty years has effectively been the same speech on repeat, explaining how the things that never ever change are totally going to change this time. For you, I'd imagine, that lack of change isn't too bad. Other people's experience is different.
For a longer if not terribly adequate treatment of the issues, try this multipart comment, especially starting in the last paragraph of the first part. The problem your argument faces is that it doesn't convince the people it needs to convince, because it doesn't actually address their concerns. Hence BLM, hence Trump.
You are correct that dissidents have always been silenced. What you're missing is that a lot of our current society was built on the promise that there was a better way, that silencing dissidents wasn't necessary. That promise is now load-bearing, with the increasingly tenuous peace we enjoy depending on its maintenance: it allowed a great increase in the values-diversity of our society, to the point where it's no longer possible to get a workable agreement on who the dissidents are and how to suppress them. Consequently, censorship no longer functions to maintain social cohesion, but further erodes it.
Yeah, this comment was pretty out of touch, not gonna lie.
I dunno, it's the sort of reply I get pretty frequently on this point, actually. The social consensus slides freely between "change is long overdue, no more waiting, it's time to force the issue" when it's a change the consensus favors, and "what's the problem, everything's fine" when a change opposed to that consensus is proposed. Once you see this tendency once, you see it everywhere. it's completely endemic.
In my defense I was pretty drunk when I made this comment. As much as that's a defense.
I've personally shifted in the last couple of years from the 'everything is fine' camp to the 'change' camp, so perhaps it's just vestigial thought patterns rearing their head.
I will say that I was curious to see what the promises people came up with were, but probably shouldn't have defended liberalism so hard.
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