9 ms·

People are nostalgic for the days of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers when people were fine debating their opposing views in the papers without droppin

• jakelazaroff 3y ago
  Who is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.
  • c_crank 3y ago
    People like Musk who self identify as classical liberals, or whatever the faddish term for that happens to be. Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      Or it was just used against other people. You know, exiling gay kids from their families and friends has been a longtime tradition. Is that not “the hammer?”
      • c_crank 3y ago
        It's not the same hammer I'm discussing. The equivalent would be censorship of pleas made in favor of homosexual causes, which the US is not particularly known for.
        • ethanbond 3y ago
          What? You don’t think women/homosexuals/minorities were barred from holding certain cultural megaphones?
          • c_crank 3y ago
            Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
            • ethanbond 3y ago
              “X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument. You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!
              • c_crank 3y ago
                When you want to track censorship in those days, you'd typically look for lawsuits. The US had blasphemy laws in local areas for a long time, but those were rarely enforced or taken to court, for example.
                • ethanbond 3y ago
                  This is a total non-sequitur and ends up being a self-defeating argument anyway. You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc. I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.
                  • c_crank 3y ago
    • jakelazaroff 3y ago
      I mean, people were blacklisted in the 50s for allegedly being communists, right? People were actually killed for opposing Jim Crow. We had codes about what you were allowed to show in movies and comics. I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.
    • archagon 3y ago
      I’ve never seen anyone ”censored” on Twitter for opposing immigration.
• ethanbond 3y ago
  It helps that neither of those sides were morally repugnant. When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).
  • c_crank 3y ago
    Slavery wasn't a new thing when the Constitution was written. The divide between the North and the South was noted by several founding fathers as a nasty issue, and it was probably a mistake to unite the two territories in such a way to begin with.
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      Hmm it was only on the fringes of culture that people were strongly against slavery around the founding of the country. Then there was a “moral awakening” via the Quakers that made it less and less culturally viable until culminating in open warfare. So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.
      • c_crank 3y ago
        The moral shift played a part in galvanizing enthusiasm for the war, but the Civil War ultimately was started by Northern statists who were adamant about maintaining a firm control over the North American heartland. Recall that the Emancipation proclamation came three years into the war.
        • jakelazaroff 3y ago
          Are you really pushing the Lost Cause narrative here? It’s revisionist history that’s widely rejected by historians. The main cause of the war was slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
          • 3y ago
• chasing 3y ago
  On the other hand, if something’s morally repugnant it should be called out as such.