6 ms·

> They've been transparent about their desires to censor media. 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like t

• archagon 1y ago
  Except these revisions were driven by the publisher and not the Democratic party, as far as I can tell. An entirely different scenario.
  • jrs235 1y ago
    Anything not aligned and christened by the MAGA movement is considered left/woke/Democratic Party/etc. which means it's bad until they change their minds and adopt it, if they ever do.
• add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  It does matter and it is not a minor detail that the left is acting to help people and the right is acting to hurt people. You can always disagree with what the left does, but the left and the right are nowhere near equivalent in the big picture that actually matters.
  • kbelder 1y ago
    It's indicative of a broken world view if you believe you can help people by censoring speech.
    • hofrogs 1y ago
      It's not indicative of a "broken world view" at all. There are already laws against defamation, running afoul of those would lead to your speech being censored to help the victim of defamation, for example. This logic can be extended with care.
    • acdha 1y ago
      That apparent problem goes away once you recognize that you’re using the word “censor” incorrectly in one case to draw a false equivalency. In the case of the right-wing behaviour discussed here, “censor” is the correct word because the term refers to an official use of power to prevent something considered politically incorrect or obscene from being available even though the publisher, librarians, and reader all thought they should be accessible. In the case of the Dahl revisions, there is no official power being used to suppress individual preference. The publisher decided they wanted better sales for an older item, realized that things like anti-Semitism were unappealing to modern audiences, and created a new edition of their own property. Every part of that process was entirely voluntary and nobody’s purchased property is affected in any way – quite unlike the right-wing telling libraries to remove books with significant literary value which their patrons want to read.
• bilbo0s 1y ago
  I've been saying since Clinton when it started to become clear, that liberals and conservatives will eventually kill the ideals of this Republic. (And not only the ideals expressed in the First.) They've been chipping away for long enough that they now believe it is safe for them to chop. These people are all dangerous in the extreme. It's just that the conservatives have unmasked themselves and displayed the extreme danger they represent to our ideals in the US in a far more open fashion than liberals.
  • shlant 1y ago
    I might have given a shred of charitability to you if you said "far more open fashion than the left." but the fact that you said "liberals" tells me I shouldn't take your political perspective seriously
    • omnimus 1y ago
      So “I would take your politics seriously if it aligned with mine”? I am afraid that whole point of politics is finding compromise with people who you don't agree.
      • shlant 1y ago
        it has nothing to do with alignment of politics, it's that your description of reality is so wrong that it would be difficult to seriously engage
      • acdha 1y ago
        It’s more about good versus bad faith: you can compromise with people who are willing to be honest, but that isn’t possible when someone is redefining terms or contradicting all available evidence to make their position work. That commenter was conflating two very different sets of activities to smear liberals, implying that they somehow know someone else’s true intention even though that contrasts with their actions and public statements.
• ranger207 1y ago
  Yeah, both parties are becoming more authoritarian. IMO the solution is a different voting system than first-past-the-post that allows multiple parties to exist to force different political factions to interact with each other and compromise. But until then though I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, since under FPTP not voting at all would not be acting against the greater of two evils.
  • Guid_NewGuid 1y ago
    Evidence for the Republican party becoming more authoritarian: - attempted illegal book bans - suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare - US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings - deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally - continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio) Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme: - ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.
• Fezzik 1y ago
  Note one massive difference: nobody was trying to make a law that Dahl’s books be sanitized or running around to libraries and getting his books banned. That was a publisher taking unilateral action changing works they own (for better or worse). I see a massive difference between the two things.
  • fc417fc802 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • NietzscheanNull 1y ago
      This argument strikes me as fairly textbook "whataboutism." TFA shows a clear and present case of a particular action taken by one political faction. Your argument, that the opposing faction is equivalent to a greater or lesser degree and would follow the same course of action, rests entirely on a hypothetical; it isn't supported by any concrete evidence or cited examples. I'm certainly not asserting that any one faction/party holds a monopoly on moral high-ground, just highlighting that this kind of argument is frequently used as a tactic to deflect discussion away from ground truth considerations and shift the debate towards (artificially) neutral conditions.
      • fc417fc802 1y ago
        I certainly don't think it qualifies as whataboutism. I'm neither preaching inaction nor attempting to refute any prior claims. Neither do I attempt to claim a broad general equivalence. It seems to me that you are disregarding the context? From up thread: > No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. I did cite an example, at least indirectly, when I mentioned other countries. Consider the online speech measures in the UK as but one example. Not the same political party to be sure but the underlying ideology is shared. The only significant difference (IMO) is the presence or absence of first amendment protections.
    • radixdiaboli 1y ago
      > I don't doubt for a second that the far left would create such laws if they could. I mean, they could as much as the fringe actors this article is about. I'm not sure what you think is stopping them from going for it in the same fashion.
• antifa 1y ago
  TIL that giving book buyers the choice between the classic uncensored version of a book and a revised version of a book with blatant antisemitism removed, a choice provided by a book publisher, is an example of the Democrats being almost as bad as Republicans.
  • omnimus 1y ago
    Don't forget one is state censorship and other is independent private entity that (in the land of the free) can do absolutely what it wants if it holds the copyright.
• nwallin 1y ago
  > 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers". You realize that's significantly better, right? Like at least two orders of magnitude better? In one case, the copyright holder of Roald Dahl's books decided to censor (incorrectly, I agree) their own books which they own the copyright to. That's a private organization doing a stupid thing, making their own content worse. A private organization censoring their own words. No elected officials or persons appointed by elected officials were involved. In the other case, the government is unilaterally deciding to withhold information from the public. The government is censoring other people's words. You realize how that's not even remotely similar, right? "The left" is way better on this one.
  • ndriscoll 1y ago
    Without commenting on what's better or worse, note that the copyright holders are not censoring their own words. They're censoring the words of someone who died decades ago in books that are several generations old, and it's the government that says no one else is allowed to publish the originals. Granting exclusive rights to publish and modify the works several generations after they were written is government censorship. In this case the censored books become completely illegal to publish as well rather than simply unavailable in government libraries. (Feel free to substitute the situation with Dr Seuss books if Dahl isn't a fit because that organization also publishes originals, but even if the originals were still available, derived works are also censored)
• thrance 1y ago
  More stupid bothseideism. Surely the Dahl's family censoring their own books is on progressives, and it's equally as bad as Republicans trying to overthrow an election, send the troops after protesters, build concentration camps on national territory, ban books, revoke women's rights to abortion, revoke civil rights...