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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28899 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface?

You make a really good arguement in most of your post except for the parts about "this bill will be used against progressives", where the best argument against this bill will sound more partisan and conservative than your take and be more correct. Trying to sound neutral ends up producing something not neutral.

In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition.

Another problem with that worry is that I believe an enormous part of the problem has been the unwillingness to apply the laws even handedly against progressive identity groups and progressives themselves. This applies with the entire antiracism issue but it is especially an enormous problem with hate speech regulations. That they are incredibly one sided and enable hateful speech of far left direction and censor legitimate valid opposition to it.

There seem to be some guilible conservatives who have internalized it as principle and support such laws. While others who are against conservatives find it strategically useful to claim to be such. And machiavelian leftists use this as an argument to promote double standards.

Double standards in application of the law feeds the ideology now backed by legal status quo, of treating so called protected groups including speech critical of them, differently. And people actually buying into the superiority of such groups. It feeds authoritarianism where if you applied the law with going after protected groups including leftists for offending right wing ethnic groups with racism, you would have a system where more parties are incentivized to have something less tyranical, because they too will be affected.

Of course powerful left wing organizations and ethnic organizations behind such laws are never going to be convinced of trying to do anything but control things, so they can apply them against the groups they disfavor and in favor the groups they favor. So you need to exclude from influence the hardcore ideologues, and unfortunately you got to work with some of the people who might had been willing to go along with parts of their agenda due to it being easier. I doubt everyone willing to vote for such laws necessarilly understands what they are doing.

But at this point there are no excuses. Such laws are simply not even handed in the least and that must be taken in consideration by people who discuss them and argue in favor of such laws.

I mean, if we are to consider a view to be hate speech, saying you support hate speech laws is hate speech. Considering the hate speech laws end up following the philosophy of treating minority groups as superior, not taking seriously or even punishing advocacy for the rights of their right wing groups, operating in line with the logic that you can't be racis against X. Protected group supremacy is a hateful racist agenda. At such the first people that ought to be punished for extremism on such issues, are the people behind such laws.

Of course, if you wanted the ridiculousness of the whole thing to be self-evident, you would be hard pressed to pick a better time to introduce the bill than right now. 25 years for "inciting genocide"? In a time when the word genocide is being thrown about wantonly by both Israel and Palestine supporters as the accusation du jour, no one knows exactly what inciting genocide means, except that you can get 25 years for doing it on social media when Albert Speer got only 20 years for his role in architecting a system of literal concentration camp slave labour.

Holocaust denial laws were introduced in Germany in the mid 90s. And we have seen UK transform into increasingly authoritarian state in a few years. I believe it is possible we get an increasingly idiotic tyranny ruining peoples lives over this. I don't see in the ideology and practice of people like Trudeau and their general faction something that would limit that.

From a cosmic justice perspective this is surely a satisfying outcome, but it's a lamentable world where our political process has degenerated into a saga of political gangsterism where the ingroup and outgroup each take turns exacting revenge on each other. This is definitely the direction we're headed in.

I think you are too quick to declare this direction. The trajectory hasn't changed in the direction where different sides prosecute each other, and the one where we are in to with compromising/appeasing conservatives and far left tyranny, is itself quite lamentable enough.

Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality. Maybe you are trying to appeal to progressives, but power being used by whoever, in a direction against current progressive excesses would be a good thing in my view, and necessary to fix things. Having a bias in seeing revenge against progressives where it doesn't exist could lead us into opposing things that aren't revenge but necessary reforms of balancing the system. Which requires power to be used against progressive excesses and extremists who abuse their power and influence, and have created networks whose agenda is to promote tyranny.

I genuinely think dismantling powerful far leftist and Ethnic chauvinist of left wing direction NGOs that have succeeded in infiltrating the state and private organizations and even collaborating with the cops is something that must be done if we are serious about protecting society from tyrannical totalitarian laws. Including when exercised by private mega corporations often used by governments as proxy in areas where the goverment is less able to get away with doing it, itself.

I totally agree. For example, it's bonkers (but not surprising) to me that the recent misleading residential school graves reporting (and subsequent exaggeration and demonization of the Catholic Church on social media) that led to scores of churches being burned down didn't even pattern-match as "hate speech" in the eyes of anyone in the establishment.

In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition

Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality

Thanks, I don't really disagree. But as explained in reply to another commenter, I think it's important to steelman the issue a bit and try to argue from a politically neutral perspective to explore how this issue can be argued effectively with progressives as well as conservatives. The reality as we know is that this bill has partisan objectives and I think everyone reading my post here is capable of filling in the blanks with their own experience of the actual political reality in 2024.

I appreciate this. The issue is that appeal lacks teeth because most progressives do know that such laws will be used in a pro progressive direction. I think it is a better idea to undermine the idea that political neutrality is about ignoring the partisan direction of such laws.

But maybe it is useful for both you to be making the more general argument and someone like me to be making the kind of argument I have made. Like one playing the good cop and the other the bad cop.

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