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It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already. The mainstream left has been ignoring the blatant anti-semitism on their side for years because they pretend Zionist makes it all better. As if the GOP would proudly stand by the KKK if the KKK just said they wanted to kill all negroes rather than black people. Trump got party-wide condemnation for having Kanye in his house compared to Dems not even being able to condemn the squad. To say nothing of them championing the rot of higher education because it provides "experts" who they can use to push their authoritarianism ever further. You'll note Claudine Gay was not fired. She was defended by every power structure in academia even after she resigned. Putting somebody like Stephen Miller in charge of immigration means the entrenched bureaucracy might get some pushback in the other direction finally. And considering the anti-merit/anti-individual Right has 0 power, compared to the same on the Left which is in place nearly everywhere and backed by the power of the law, I absolutely would say it is safer to side the the Right there even if I don't agree with them.
This is an interesting consideration. However, I think it presupposes that the badness caused by extremists on the left is somehow balanced and counteracted by badness caused by extremists on the right.
I think it's more accurate that the badness on both sides is orthogonal so this sort of "we need to push the unbalanced scales the other way" logic doesn't quite apply. The example of free speech seems instructive: there was a general perception around here that the left having too much power caused a lot of unjustified censorship of the usual topics. However, while shifting power towards the right did sort of fix this, this was only at the cost of even more extreme censorship of completely different topics (evolution, gay relationships, etc.)
Unfortunately, one side's extremists aren't going to save you from the other's---the only way out is to get both sides to police theirs effectively.
Uh, there hasn’t been censorship of evolution or gay relationships.
Something about 'Ron's book ban'.
This morning I read an article about a Florida school district removing some dictionaries because they included definitions on the word 'gay'. Wether you think this is a sincere attempt to avoid litigation or an insincere stunt, I leave to the audience.
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