4 ms·

Maybe I'm not communicating clearly, but the point I'm making is, speech censorship is coming, and it is not coming from the government, it's going to be decent

Maybe I'm not communicating clearly, but the point I'm making is, speech censorship is coming, and it is not coming from the government, it's going to be decentralized speech censorship, and the reason why it's coming is because trolls are going to ruin all of our communications channels. The cost of speech and publishing has gone to zero in many ways, and with automation, trolls are going to conduct one big denial of service attack. When the founding fathers envisioned freedom of speech and press, they envisioned individuals with soap boxes speaking to crowds, they envisioned some people printing newspapers or pamphlets, they didn't imagine every single person with a megaphone able to blare at a loud volume, and even clone themselves via automation to go blast their megaphone in every hall and park. When there are no costs, bad actors can spam. The end result in email was the institution of very aggressive spam filters, which made it partially useful again. Public online discourse is becoming so toxic and troll ridden, that either commenting is going to be disabled, or it's going to be aggressive filtered and curated (i.e. censored) As soon as that happens, the right wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by left wing tech companies. The left wing is going to claim their viewpoints are being censored by an oligarchy in bed with the US empire, and everyone's going to whine about their particular video or missive being taken down by algorithms, because quite simpler, there's no perfect algorithm for this, and the problem is beyond human curation -- even assuming humans themselves could be unbiased curators. So increased censorship seems inevitable, no one is going to be happy, and mostly because social manners that used to keep people in check in the physical world, have essentially amplified the ability of people to wreak havok and bear no responsibility. Free speech was never freedom from responsibility. Someone deciding not to work with you of your public statements or behaviors or criticize you was always the check and balance. The thing with authoritarian leftists on campus, and the alt-right, is that the people getting hyperbolic over pronouns are a minority and not an actual threat. They're also pretty public about it, and don't need to hide who they are. They're not shooting up mosques or synagogues or churches or blowing up Oklahoma federal buildings. In the 70s, the left wing actually would commit terrorism, trying to sabotage property and the establishment, but that has mostly abated. What we're seeing over the last few years, is a rise in nationalism and ethocentrism, a 'great unraveling',and I worry about that a lot more than I worry about someone on campus demanding their trigger warning safe space. We have nationalists now at the levers of power, one in fact, the most powerful man in the world. When we have a President who is going to punish people for using the wrong pronoun, I'll start worrying about that.

syshum 8y ago
>>I worry about that a lot more than I worry about That is largely your left bias showing, where you completely discount the positions of everyone not on the left when it comes to things like Border Security, and Economic Trade imbalances, left positions that have largly be the cause of the right extremist rising in base few years because the left dismisses them and calls anyone that has a non-left position on the topic "racist" leaving people that do support limited immigration or limited economic protectionism to become more radicalized Also the fact you call Trump a "nationalist" feeds into my belief you are a far left authoritarian, Trump is alot of things, but for the most part is a Traditional Republican, his policy positions are not that much different than the historic positions of the Republican Party, Actually he is fairly moderate sharing many of the same positions of the Bill Clinton Era Democrats (including immigration policy. The Simply fact is the Democrat party has moved VERY VERY left... The Republicans have no shifted that much. You completely ignore and excuse the violence of AntiFa and then go back to the 90's to pull up extreme Right Violence. These are attempts to construct a Strawman to support your narrative that the Right is more violent and a bigger threat than the left therefore the upcoming censorship of the right is some how justified
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Evidence in studies of vote patterns of the house suggests otherwise and that it's the Republicans who have became more extreme, and the Democrats have largely remained the same range, but many argue have become moderate Republicans. (https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/06/polarization-1.jpg&w=1484 https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...) Nixon proposed national healthcare and created the EPA. Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, and signed the Montreal Protocol to salvage the Ozone layer, he even came to support Gun Control. George Bush Sr signed the ADA, strengthened the EPA, Clean Air Act, signed the Global Climate Change Research Act, etc. George W Bush created Medicare Part D. These Republicans would be considered RINOs in todays party. Trump isn't a Republican. He supported national healthcare. He came out for gun control. He was anti-Abortion. He supported a wealth tax. One could say, if anything, he was an opportunist, and has no discernable consistent ideological core other than nationalism and racism. He lacks neither the economic conservative libertarian values, nor the social conservative religious values. You can see this by going back to his politicking in the 80s, where he was constantly harping on the Japanese back then, and where he was involving himself in cases like the Central Park 5. If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom? No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats. Most people acknowledge there is some limit or capacity to absorb people, since there's a limit to how fast housing, schools, and other infrastructure is even built. But illegal immigration has been declining for decades, and was at a record low in 2016 compared to its heyday in the 80s, 90s. It was a "problem" that was on its way to self-correction. The fact that it has been made a front and center issue for the last 2 years is entirely a racist xenophobic phenomena, no different than the people who were scaremongered over Sharia law in the US. Given it was a declining problem, not a crisis, one has to suspect other factors driving the interest. This is not a 'left' position, it's a logical one -- why are so many people so upset over something that had already declined by 3x and during supposedly a red hot economy with low unemployment? Why are the Trump supporters still angry at the immigrants in a supposed "time of plenty"? I really really don't want to get into a debate about this, but it is patently obvious that reactionary politics are using the immigration issue as a way to distract from all of the other problems we are facing: widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.

syshum 8y ago

>>I worry about that a lot more than I worry about That is largely your left bias showing, where you completely discount the positions of everyone not on the left when it comes to things like Border Security, and Economic Trade imbalances, left positions that have largly be the cause of the right extremist rising in base few years because the left dismisses them and calls anyone that has a non-left position on the topic "racist" leaving people that do support limited immigration or limited economic protectionism to become more radicalized Also the fact you call Trump a "nationalist" feeds into my belief you are a far left authoritarian, Trump is alot of things, but for the most part is a Traditional Republican, his policy positions are not that much different than the historic positions of the Republican Party, Actually he is fairly moderate sharing many of the same positions of the Bill Clinton Era Democrats (including immigration policy. The Simply fact is the Democrat party has moved VERY VERY left... The Republicans have no shifted that much. You completely ignore and excuse the violence of AntiFa and then go back to the 90's to pull up extreme Right Violence. These are attempts to construct a Strawman to support your narrative that the Right is more violent and a bigger threat than the left therefore the upcoming censorship of the right is some how justified

cromwellian 8y ago
Evidence in studies of vote patterns of the house suggests otherwise and that it's the Republicans who have became more extreme, and the Democrats have largely remained the same range, but many argue have become moderate Republicans. (https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/06/polarization-1.jpg&w=1484 https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...) Nixon proposed national healthcare and created the EPA. Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, and signed the Montreal Protocol to salvage the Ozone layer, he even came to support Gun Control. George Bush Sr signed the ADA, strengthened the EPA, Clean Air Act, signed the Global Climate Change Research Act, etc. George W Bush created Medicare Part D. These Republicans would be considered RINOs in todays party. Trump isn't a Republican. He supported national healthcare. He came out for gun control. He was anti-Abortion. He supported a wealth tax. One could say, if anything, he was an opportunist, and has no discernable consistent ideological core other than nationalism and racism. He lacks neither the economic conservative libertarian values, nor the social conservative religious values. You can see this by going back to his politicking in the 80s, where he was constantly harping on the Japanese back then, and where he was involving himself in cases like the Central Park 5. If you want to gauge if the Democrats are "far left" you need to survey the American people, and when you do so, on issues like Gun Control, Health Care, Education, Benefits, you find they line up with the majority of Americans. By large margins, ranging from 60-80%, the public supports common democratic positions. So if they're far far left, of whom? No one supports infinite immigration, other than some old school extremist libertarians, that's a strawman used to attack Democrats. Most people acknowledge there is some limit or capacity to absorb people, since there's a limit to how fast housing, schools, and other infrastructure is even built. But illegal immigration has been declining for decades, and was at a record low in 2016 compared to its heyday in the 80s, 90s. It was a "problem" that was on its way to self-correction. The fact that it has been made a front and center issue for the last 2 years is entirely a racist xenophobic phenomena, no different than the people who were scaremongered over Sharia law in the US. Given it was a declining problem, not a crisis, one has to suspect other factors driving the interest. This is not a 'left' position, it's a logical one -- why are so many people so upset over something that had already declined by 3x and during supposedly a red hot economy with low unemployment? Why are the Trump supporters still angry at the immigrants in a supposed "time of plenty"? I really really don't want to get into a debate about this, but it is patently obvious that reactionary politics are using the immigration issue as a way to distract from all of the other problems we are facing: widening income inequality, a healthcare affordability crisis, an education affordability crisis, environmental crisis, etc because to address those issues would require the government actually taxing and regulating the winners in the economy, and their stooges in Congress needed to come up with a way to divert people's attention.