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Is anyone finding this terrifying? When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in every sector? Weren't the last p

Is anyone finding this terrifying? When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in every sector? Weren't the last people to make this move (more more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right? Is there something we can do to stand up for speech?

rayiner 6y ago
Democrats were proponents of free speech when Republicans controlled the media, culture, and institutions. Increasingly, the media, culture, and institutions are controlled by progressive Democrats (and I think there is a growing schism between liberals and progressives on this front), and traditional liberal ideas of the free exchange of information have no more value.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  Which is exactly why no matter where you land politically, you should be 100% in favor of fighting for free speech for yourself and the other side.
  - PTOB 6y ago
    This human has read his history.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I think there’s a disconnect here. Does free speech have to include someone knowingly purposely spreading misinformation with the intent to deceive people? Or someone speaking with the explicit intent to harm another person? Because I think nobody should be able to silence your thoughts, ideas or opinions but those things don’t encompass all speech.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tarboreus 6y ago
      Yes, it does, because who decides what is harmful or what is wrong? There is no freedom in speech if there is an authority deciding whether it is harmful. That is restructured speech, not free speech.
    - blacktriangle 6y ago
      A few decades ago homosexuality was a mental illness, global cooling was going to kill us all soon, and a healthy diet was a pyramid based on eating a ton of grains. Do you want to live in a world where people arguing against those points of view were prosecuted for "knowing purposely spreading misinformation?" Because that's the world you are advocating.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        I feel like we're arguing past one another. This is not about dissenting opinions or someone holding unorthodox views. This is about someone knowingly purposefully making stuff up, presenting it as fact, and spreading it around with the intent to deceive people. I'm not saying this should a tool to enable internet censors. This should be used to go after the networks of people people producing this garbage. Unless you operate a website or blog where you are literally making stuff up and spreading it around as fact then this doesn't affect you in the slightest. A lot of good examples of this surfaced when people were talking about what bathrooms trans people should use. It was an entirely manufactured controversy where no-name fly-by-night "news" sites would publish completely fictional stories about sexual assault cases to try and sway public opinion. I, and you, should be equally as mad at someone making up news stories trying to sway public opinion the other way.
        blacktriangle 6y ago
        You're right, it's not about opinions and who can say what. The issue we're arguing past one another, and the real important one, is who do you trust do decide that. The other guy seems to believe it's possible to have some government that is a benevolent determiner of truth vs propaganda, where I believe the other guy is painfully naive.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
I've noticed that there is a common belief amongst Democrats and Progressives that people are duped into holding conservative viewpoints because of Fox News. Whenever I have asked people on the left why they think Republicans and Conservatives believe what they believe, the conversation always includes references to Fox News and the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. So in that sense I can understand why so many Democrats want Fox News dismantled.
- rayiner 6y ago
  I agree that many people think that, but it gets the chronology precisely backwards. CNN has been on the air since 1980. Fox News didn't even exist until 1996, and didn't become popular until 2000. Fox News is a response to media bias,[1] not the other way around. [1] And by "bias" I don't necessarily mean open bias. CNN wasn't partisan in the 1990s like it is today. But it still provided news filtered through a liberal ideology. For example, 71% of republicans say religion "does more good than harm in American society" versus 44% of democrats: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/republicans-and-democrats-agree-religions-influence-is-waning-but-differ-in-their-reactions https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/republicans.... If you limit the analysis to white Democrats (the people who run newsrooms) the disparity is even starker: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/23/religiously-nonwhite-democrats-are-more-similar-to-republicans-than-to-white-democrats/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/23/religiously... ("Religiously, nonwhite Democrats are more similar to Republicans than to white Democrats"). Do you think that someone who believes religion is an negative force in society, maybe jokes about religious people to friends after work will report on COVID-related church closings the same way as someone who believes religious practice is important to societal health? Even if they are acting utterly in good faith, their ideology can't help but influence their choice of stories, the gloss they put on developments, etc.
  - zug_zug 6y ago
    The truth is, we don't know the causality. Nobody has a good explanation of what makes an otherwise normal, intelligent person believe Q-anon, for example. We have some ham-fisted theories about how Hitler riled his country to exterminate Jews, but it's not really a nuanced enough explanation to say when/if something like it could happen again [nor assure us it won't]. I'd like to pretend that we're all rational agents, but I know that there are certain "emotional backdoors" that people like Hitler have exploited in the past to get people to do horrible things against everybody's interest. For those of us who live in a country controlled by the will of the majority, obviously the education of the average person is a priority. If the shoe was on other foot, and I had a mainstream news channel that had 40% of the population angry and believing demonstrably false things (e.g. Aliens were running the country and I could point out the aliens for you), and I was hinting/insinuating a revolution was necessary, how hard would you defend my cable TV show? [Edit - Lol, I know I've got a pretty solid argument when nobody can answer the question but only give a pouty downvote]
macspoofing 6y ago
>When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in every sector? When Trump got elected and it broke people's brains. At that point, everything became permissible in order to fight Trump. Now that Trump is gone, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Since Trump, the Democratic establishment has effectively captured Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Social Media (with Academia being already firmly in the Democratic tent). Mainstream media and Big Tech isn't even pretending to be objective anymore. There is now an incestuous pipeline between executive leadership in those institutions and the Democratic establishment. And I say 'establishment' because it isn't just the Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians that are getting censored. I don't like the anti-war, anti-American, class-focused Left, but those groups also get targeted, as are Progressives that focus on class (as opposed to cultural) issues. >Weren't the last people to make this move (more more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right? Apt analogy. This is the 'Christian Evangelical Right' from the 90s, with similar level of puritanism ... and with the backing of media companies and big tech. So much much worse.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I can't help but think 'puritanism' is a personality trait and there has always been a sizable portion of the American public dedicated to policing the thoughts and behavior of others. The underlying ideology may have changed, but the archetype sure hasn't. Maybe the so-called SJWs of today would have been Temperance activists 100 years ago.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    It's an authoritarian personality type which exists on both the left and the right. It's remarkable that when we look at the many personality subtraits of authoritarian types on the left and the right, they align extremely closely with one another.
    - reducesuffering 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
sneak 6y ago
The dirty secret of American hyperpartisan battle is that the two parties in the US are fundamentally identical where it counts: pro-surveillance, authoritarian war machines.
- Clubber 6y ago
  And don't forget pro-corporate, which has been historically the norm, to the point of overthrowing other governments to protect crop yields / revenue. There was a study that came out a few years ago, and I can't find it, but the point was that any laws passed that the general citizenry want were purely incidental. All the laws passed over the last 20 years or so directly benefited corporate and special interest groups. Another person described the spectrum of the various forms of democracy as a highway. The went on to describe the two US political parties as the two parallel lines dividing the highway. /rant
maerF0x0 6y ago
> When did democrafts, the party I vote for Probably around the same time as it became socially unacceptable not to vote for them? Note how you had to qualify yourself as a democrat voter as some kind of proof point of the validity of your claims?
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  ~75 million people voted for Donald Trump - it is hardly socially unacceptable to vote for a republican and you have a secret vote anyway.
  - skynet-9000 6y ago
    > it is hardly socially unacceptable to vote for a republican and you have a secret vote anyway. Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to protect themselves and even their jobs. It seems that, today, some vocal people arguing for censorship immediately assume that anyone on the side of free speech and liberal thought is secretly a Trump apologist.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      > Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to protect themselves and even their jobs. Black people have lost their jobs for years for being black (See, Kaepernick.) many mad about this post didn't care then. It's all fake, using free speech to coverup blatantly partisan items. They can't actually be on the side of free speech and be a Trump apologist. He was extremely anti-media, one of the most anti-press presidents we have had.
      - quercetumMons 6y ago
        Kaepernick did not lose his job for being black. You can be pro free-speech and anti-media for the same reason you can be capitalist and anti-corporation.
offby37years 6y ago
If you're convinced fascism has arrived in America, you'll excuse any means necessary to topple the dictator and to prevent a reoccurrence. The issue is in doing so, they've become the tyrannical force they propose to oppose. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." — Harry S. Truman
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nyczomg 6y ago
  Not only that, but the people gladly handing over more and more power to the government now that Trump is out will be in for a terrible surprise when they learn that someday someone like Trump might win another election and will assume those additional powers.
- TrispusAttucks 6y ago
  I like your quote. It inspired me to share another. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
citilife 6y ago
To be frank, the democrats have been directly calling for increasing amounts of censorship for years... In 2016-2018 it was slow at first: de-platforming people, refusing to let conservatives on media, etc. Since, 2018-2020 has been almost a militant level of censorship being pushed. There's a boatload of examples, but generally I recommend trying to join / visit different communities. While the right has been targeted to an extreme you can still see their points of view on gab.com or patriots.win pretty much uncensored.
jackson1442 6y ago
Agreed. Fortunately this appears to be only two house members sending this. If McNerney or Eshoo are your representatives, it might be a good idea to reach out and make your case.
TrispusAttucks 6y ago
Long-time democrat here. I am terrified of what my party is becoming! I'm more critical of my own party because I hold them to a higher standard. I'm getting very disillusioned with them at this point. All the behaviors I decried of the right so many years ago are now in full swing on the left side. The difference now is the consolidatation of control and power makes it an even greater threat. I fear a point of no return.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Same boat. People tell me, “but Trump is worse.” I didn’t realize that was the bar.

rayiner 6y ago

Democrats were proponents of free speech when Republicans controlled the media, culture, and institutions. Increasingly, the media, culture, and institutions are controlled by progressive Democrats (and I think there is a growing schism between liberals and progressives on this front), and traditional liberal ideas of the free exchange of information have no more value.

blacktriangle 6y ago
Which is exactly why no matter where you land politically, you should be 100% in favor of fighting for free speech for yourself and the other side.
- PTOB 6y ago
  This human has read his history.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I think there’s a disconnect here. Does free speech have to include someone knowingly purposely spreading misinformation with the intent to deceive people? Or someone speaking with the explicit intent to harm another person? Because I think nobody should be able to silence your thoughts, ideas or opinions but those things don’t encompass all speech.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tarboreus 6y ago
    Yes, it does, because who decides what is harmful or what is wrong? There is no freedom in speech if there is an authority deciding whether it is harmful. That is restructured speech, not free speech.
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    A few decades ago homosexuality was a mental illness, global cooling was going to kill us all soon, and a healthy diet was a pyramid based on eating a ton of grains. Do you want to live in a world where people arguing against those points of view were prosecuted for "knowing purposely spreading misinformation?" Because that's the world you are advocating.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I feel like we're arguing past one another. This is not about dissenting opinions or someone holding unorthodox views. This is about someone knowingly purposefully making stuff up, presenting it as fact, and spreading it around with the intent to deceive people. I'm not saying this should a tool to enable internet censors. This should be used to go after the networks of people people producing this garbage. Unless you operate a website or blog where you are literally making stuff up and spreading it around as fact then this doesn't affect you in the slightest. A lot of good examples of this surfaced when people were talking about what bathrooms trans people should use. It was an entirely manufactured controversy where no-name fly-by-night "news" sites would publish completely fictional stories about sexual assault cases to try and sway public opinion. I, and you, should be equally as mad at someone making up news stories trying to sway public opinion the other way.
      - blacktriangle 6y ago
        You're right, it's not about opinions and who can say what. The issue we're arguing past one another, and the real important one, is who do you trust do decide that. The other guy seems to believe it's possible to have some government that is a benevolent determiner of truth vs propaganda, where I believe the other guy is painfully naive.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

I've noticed that there is a common belief amongst Democrats and Progressives that people are duped into holding conservative viewpoints because of Fox News. Whenever I have asked people on the left why they think Republicans and Conservatives believe what they believe, the conversation always includes references to Fox News and the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. So in that sense I can understand why so many Democrats want Fox News dismantled.

rayiner 6y ago
I agree that many people think that, but it gets the chronology precisely backwards. CNN has been on the air since 1980. Fox News didn't even exist until 1996, and didn't become popular until 2000. Fox News is a response to media bias,[1] not the other way around. [1] And by "bias" I don't necessarily mean open bias. CNN wasn't partisan in the 1990s like it is today. But it still provided news filtered through a liberal ideology. For example, 71% of republicans say religion "does more good than harm in American society" versus 44% of democrats: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/republicans-and-democrats-agree-religions-influence-is-waning-but-differ-in-their-reactions https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/republicans.... If you limit the analysis to white Democrats (the people who run newsrooms) the disparity is even starker: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/23/religiously-nonwhite-democrats-are-more-similar-to-republicans-than-to-white-democrats/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/23/religiously... ("Religiously, nonwhite Democrats are more similar to Republicans than to white Democrats"). Do you think that someone who believes religion is an negative force in society, maybe jokes about religious people to friends after work will report on COVID-related church closings the same way as someone who believes religious practice is important to societal health? Even if they are acting utterly in good faith, their ideology can't help but influence their choice of stories, the gloss they put on developments, etc.
- zug_zug 6y ago
  The truth is, we don't know the causality. Nobody has a good explanation of what makes an otherwise normal, intelligent person believe Q-anon, for example. We have some ham-fisted theories about how Hitler riled his country to exterminate Jews, but it's not really a nuanced enough explanation to say when/if something like it could happen again [nor assure us it won't]. I'd like to pretend that we're all rational agents, but I know that there are certain "emotional backdoors" that people like Hitler have exploited in the past to get people to do horrible things against everybody's interest. For those of us who live in a country controlled by the will of the majority, obviously the education of the average person is a priority. If the shoe was on other foot, and I had a mainstream news channel that had 40% of the population angry and believing demonstrably false things (e.g. Aliens were running the country and I could point out the aliens for you), and I was hinting/insinuating a revolution was necessary, how hard would you defend my cable TV show? [Edit - Lol, I know I've got a pretty solid argument when nobody can answer the question but only give a pouty downvote]

macspoofing 6y ago

>When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in every sector? When Trump got elected and it broke people's brains. At that point, everything became permissible in order to fight Trump. Now that Trump is gone, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Since Trump, the Democratic establishment has effectively captured Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Social Media (with Academia being already firmly in the Democratic tent). Mainstream media and Big Tech isn't even pretending to be objective anymore. There is now an incestuous pipeline between executive leadership in those institutions and the Democratic establishment. And I say 'establishment' because it isn't just the Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians that are getting censored. I don't like the anti-war, anti-American, class-focused Left, but those groups also get targeted, as are Progressives that focus on class (as opposed to cultural) issues. >Weren't the last people to make this move (more more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right? Apt analogy. This is the 'Christian Evangelical Right' from the 90s, with similar level of puritanism ... and with the backing of media companies and big tech. So much much worse.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
I can't help but think 'puritanism' is a personality trait and there has always been a sizable portion of the American public dedicated to policing the thoughts and behavior of others. The underlying ideology may have changed, but the archetype sure hasn't. Maybe the so-called SJWs of today would have been Temperance activists 100 years ago.
- hntrader 6y ago
  It's an authoritarian personality type which exists on both the left and the right. It's remarkable that when we look at the many personality subtraits of authoritarian types on the left and the right, they align extremely closely with one another.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

sneak 6y ago

The dirty secret of American hyperpartisan battle is that the two parties in the US are fundamentally identical where it counts: pro-surveillance, authoritarian war machines.

Clubber 6y ago
And don't forget pro-corporate, which has been historically the norm, to the point of overthrowing other governments to protect crop yields / revenue. There was a study that came out a few years ago, and I can't find it, but the point was that any laws passed that the general citizenry want were purely incidental. All the laws passed over the last 20 years or so directly benefited corporate and special interest groups. Another person described the spectrum of the various forms of democracy as a highway. The went on to describe the two US political parties as the two parallel lines dividing the highway. /rant

maerF0x0 6y ago

> When did democrafts, the party I vote for Probably around the same time as it became socially unacceptable not to vote for them? Note how you had to qualify yourself as a democrat voter as some kind of proof point of the validity of your claims?

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
~75 million people voted for Donald Trump - it is hardly socially unacceptable to vote for a republican and you have a secret vote anyway.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  > it is hardly socially unacceptable to vote for a republican and you have a secret vote anyway. Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to protect themselves and even their jobs. It seems that, today, some vocal people arguing for censorship immediately assume that anyone on the side of free speech and liberal thought is secretly a Trump apologist.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    > Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to protect themselves and even their jobs. Black people have lost their jobs for years for being black (See, Kaepernick.) many mad about this post didn't care then. It's all fake, using free speech to coverup blatantly partisan items. They can't actually be on the side of free speech and be a Trump apologist. He was extremely anti-media, one of the most anti-press presidents we have had.
    - quercetumMons 6y ago
      Kaepernick did not lose his job for being black. You can be pro free-speech and anti-media for the same reason you can be capitalist and anti-corporation.

offby37years 6y ago

If you're convinced fascism has arrived in America, you'll excuse any means necessary to topple the dictator and to prevent a reoccurrence. The issue is in doing so, they've become the tyrannical force they propose to oppose. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." — Harry S. Truman

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nyczomg 6y ago
Not only that, but the people gladly handing over more and more power to the government now that Trump is out will be in for a terrible surprise when they learn that someday someone like Trump might win another election and will assume those additional powers.
TrispusAttucks 6y ago
I like your quote. It inspired me to share another. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

citilife 6y ago

To be frank, the democrats have been directly calling for increasing amounts of censorship for years... In 2016-2018 it was slow at first: de-platforming people, refusing to let conservatives on media, etc. Since, 2018-2020 has been almost a militant level of censorship being pushed. There's a boatload of examples, but generally I recommend trying to join / visit different communities. While the right has been targeted to an extreme you can still see their points of view on gab.com or patriots.win pretty much uncensored.

jackson1442 6y ago

Agreed. Fortunately this appears to be only two house members sending this. If McNerney or Eshoo are your representatives, it might be a good idea to reach out and make your case.

TrispusAttucks 6y ago

Long-time democrat here. I am terrified of what my party is becoming! I'm more critical of my own party because I hold them to a higher standard. I'm getting very disillusioned with them at this point. All the behaviors I decried of the right so many years ago are now in full swing on the left side. The difference now is the consolidatation of control and power makes it an even greater threat. I fear a point of no return.

rayiner 6y ago
Same boat. People tell me, “but Trump is worse.” I didn’t realize that was the bar.