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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29392 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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And he once said that if he owned Twitter — the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity — he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.”

I remember this Substack post and find it remarkable how bad faith this take on it. Hanania's entire point here was that his political opponents are actually pretty charitable when it comes to free speech, that if he had any real power, he'd definitely silence them entirely, so the extent to which conservatives are censored is actually pretty tame. Here's the relevant bit:

The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends. Tyler’s attitude is much healthier on these things and maintains the proper perspective. I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.

He's saying that they're kind of right to regulate Twitter and he understands the situation!

I agree with most of what Hanania says. I'll be pretty interested in seeing where he goes from here.

But even that is stupid. If you ban conservatives in toto, you can’t influence them. Instead, you subtly ban conservative thought to make the on the edge conservative believe the vast majority are not conservative. Humans are social creatures. They are influenced by “everyone else seems to agree with X so I probably should too or at least keep quiet about it.”

I don’t think RH is that smart to be honest.

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