3 ms·

This is the pretty much why I oppose no-platforming people. If someone is going to get punished and excluded anyway, why would they care about the fine points

• majormajor 9y ago
  There's two sides of this. The too-quick-to-blacklist one you mention, which is extremely concerning to me—I grew up in Evangelical schools watching the people around me become increasingly reactionary and paranoid, dominated by an us-against-them mentality, and if you didn't toe the party line on things like abstinence, swearing (especially in music), and drinking, you were quickly condemned. Now I see the same thing happening to my social liberal friends, and it's worrying, because once you start thinking in such closed-off ways, it's hard to dig out of that. But there's also the impact of anonymity and zero-cost (dollar wise) widely-spread speech. Both of these are major recent changes compared to how things had been for decades previous. Maybe you're expressing it in the most extreme terms in part just for the reaction—this is obviously generally not productive from a societal perspective, but used to be restricted to a much smaller set of people who didn't mind the public blowback. Now you can do it for free with a throwaway identity. This also contributes to moving people further and further away from each other.