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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"

'Deplatforming is not censorship' is a stance I held and defended vociferously during the Cancel Culture debates, but I think the tide has sailed on that one, as they say.

  • -10

For clarity, am I supposed to pretend you aren't who people say you are or not?

You do you fam.

It seems to me there is a very big difference between a public institution endorsing controversial things for kids and calls to deplatform (eg remove from Twitter or prevent someone from speaking at a university).

I can be for the freedom to engage in consensual sex for money. I can at the same time believe that institutions can try to discourage prostitution. Similarly I can be against kids having sex and making that illegal without there being a contradiction.

Sure, there are principled reasons to treat the situations differently, of course.

I was just responding to a very specific form of semantic argument about how to define words like 'censorship' and 'banning' and so forth. Arguments that don't rely on those semantic distinctions and the emotional associations we have to them are not affected.

Yeah, it was a wild ride to see the same people argue for cutting off access of willing adults to messages they want to hear, suddenly turn around to declare it's beyond the pale for parents to curate what their children get to see.

Sorry, which platforms that have zero children on them were people being deplatformed from?

Universities, for one. Comedy clubs, where if there are any kids, I would assume they're there supervised. Professional conferences. Just to name a few to pop into my head.

On the other hand, can you point to single instance where you (since you said you defended that stance) have expressed that your primary concern was parents being able to curate what their children see? How do you explain the progressive's sudden about-face on "book banning", if it was their concern?

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