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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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You have generalized one conservative's point of view to "enough conservatives that it would drive their policy if they had political dominance."

I don't think this was true in 2016. I think it is probably true today.

The gentleman's agreements that allow us to have freedom of thought have expired. We're in the hardball stage, and the degree of censorship is likely to only get worse as time wears on.

Counter argument: without censorship, online communities naturally drift rightward as the sacred cows of progressives are slaughtered one by one with simple evidence.

No, not so. You'd have to entice people to come back in the first place, and then engage in what we might call outright-draconian moderation to ensure that tactics that are harmful to the discussion, but do not qualify as normal censorship, are also banned.

And that's assuming communities don't just decide to take on that censorship themselves. I have yet to see anyone believe that all communities everywhere should not engage in censorship.

Uh huh. Just like the old-fashioned Internet atheist communities destroyed by right-wing Facts and Logic.

I don't know anything about internet atheist communities. But feminism and intersectional orthodoxies don't tend to stand up well to basic inquiry by those not within the academic social setting.

What sort of orthodoxies did you have in mind?

Core tenets like “diversity is a good thing” are hard to disprove. Others like “women ought not be restricted to the home” are outside the realm of proof and into that of values.

Like women have been oppressed by a patriarchy for ten million years.

Like 1 in 4 female students will be raped on campus.

Like confusing the pay gap with the earnings gap.

Like looking at black homicide victim statistics. (Police killing black men make up less than 1% of the total.)

et cetera...

Facts are progressive Kryptonite.

Core tenets like “diversity is a good thing” are hard to disprove.

That all hinges on the meaning of "good" being used. If diversity is axiomatically accepted as virtuous in itself, then obviously its benefit can't be "disproved." But otherwise it's not so hard to provide historical and current examples of comparatively more and less diverse places and societies and make a choice.

Others like “women ought not be restricted to the home” are outside the realm of proof and into that of values.

Hardly; the expanded economic role of women can also be observed in different historical settings, and the results judged (according to the viewer's criteria, of course). For example, there is a powerful argument put forward by Liz Warren of all people that the economic and social liberation of women in the 60s doomed the middle class by creating dual-income rat races and driving up the costs of family-formation essentials like housing and childcare.

One could argue that they were destroyed by being re-branded as right-wingers.

Pre-2000 the ability of either side to censor was more limited, but also the stakes were possibly lower. From a personal perspective it's not that big of a deal if a school bans a book, but losing your fakebook , gmail, paypal, or twitter account way worse, because you lose all those contacts/friends that took years to accumulate, and also you need those services for daily life. There are too many points of failure, in which people have entrusted their identities and livelihoods to these large, impersonal companies. Tech censorship is much more personal, whereas pre-2000 censorship affected communities or groups more than individuals (like a school banning a book or warning labels on records). Social networks have thrived because they are a very efficient way to consume new information and connect with people, but this makes them more vulnerable to censorship.

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