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Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
261–270 of 366 posts
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument you have presented is a classic tactic that the state uses to justify censorship and its abuse of power. Present scary group of people and then use it to justify taking away everyone's rights. it is a nonsense because. Firstly There simply isn't enough for these people to be politically relevant. The number of KKK members in the US IIRC is approximately 10,000 in a country of ~350 million. That is 0.002%…
That might be the number of card carrying members, the number of people who are cool with their general ideas but smart enough to not go around advertising it to everyone is far greater.
That maybe correct. However even if was ten to hundred times the number it would not be a significant percentage.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does to an extent, but the majority of users complaining about it are like the Twitter users complaining about it on Twitter and the YouTubers complaining about censorship on YouTube. In order for those companies to change their strategy they would have to see a mass exodus of users due to their actions. With the number one priority of large corporations being profit, they will continue to justify the censorship o…
>"It does to an extent, but ..." "but" part does not matter. There is always an explanation why they do it. Does not make it any better.
I don't disagree. It can be hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone that you wouldn't make the same choices as, but I'm just trying to explain why they are making those choices. Bottom line is they will keep doing it until it hurts their profits.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#264The rants about "cancel culture" from the US right are hilarious, given their long history of boycotts of brands they dislike and escalating hate and fear for everything up to actual book burnings of material like Harry Potter. I'm not saying that the accusations of cancel culture are unfounded, I'm saying they are wildly hypocritical. (It's good that efforts at censorship on the right are raised in the article as a…
I have concern here in the speaking in absolutes. Plenty on the right listen to metal or read Harry Potter, and play D&D. The right is not a homogeneous group. Being against anything the left proposes puts you on the right.
If you still think the right wing is predominately Mitt Romney types who clutch their pearls at the sight of a metal band then you are not paying attention to the drastic swings in politics that have happened in the past 7 years.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Mind-boggling, Dan. What did he say that even remotely comes close to "ideological flamewar hell"? Is "leftists" the keyword? Is criticism of "today's leftists" forbidden here? Meanwhile this thread[0] that rants about the supposed evils of the "US right" (burning Harry Potter books? complaining abut D&D and heavy metal? what is this, 1995?) is not flagged, not dead, and not officially chastised, despite being severa…
It's absolutely pertinent to bring up D&D in response to an article that says the "new right" is now engaging in censorship. The old right sure as hell did, too. Nothing new to see here.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't jewish minority suffer because of too much of free speech in Germany at some point? What about too much of free speech Hutu enjoyed in Rwanda at some point?
The Rwanda civil war was partially the outcome of colonialism by Germany and later Belgian administration, creating a class society where the rich minority group of Tutsi ruled supreme over the more poor Hutu. Belgium introduced identity cards classifying each individual as Tutsi, Hutu, Twa or Naturalised. Pretty obviously, such state of affairs wasn't stable. After world war 2 there were several riots and violence,…
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not just the black boxes though. You pick who you follow and hear from as well. Someone who is all in on Bernie probably isn't following many right wing publications and vice-versa. Not many people out there are interested in even being exposed to the other side of things. When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood. Now you can choose to ignor…
>When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood. Were you alive during the 20th century? If so, can you maybe go into more context for what you're referring to, because this was not my experience in my neighborhood. >instead, listen to a small cult on the other side of the planet if it so suits you. Take, for instance, those few who have left the west…
> Were you alive during the 20th century? If so, can you maybe go into more context for what you're referring to, because this was not my experience in my neighborhood.
I'm only in my 30's, but my adolescence was essentially pre-internet. My grandfather, who I lived with, was a very politically involved person. He essentially parroted whatever was on TV, which, since this was pre-internet, was pretty centrist in order to appeal to the most people. The internet had yet to break them into inflammatory niches for what little ad revenue was left. I remember he'd go and picket with various groups, argue on the street with Bill Clinton supporters and stuff like that. He's an extremely nice and polite guy, so talking with people in real life always kept him apprised of the humanity of the people he was disagreeing with. Hell, he had to see them afterwards in the grocery store on occasion.
Now he just sits on the computer and parrots whatever spam non-sense made it into his email inbox. The other side is no longer a set of people living much the same life as him, it's a cabal of rich people hell bent on murdering babies and they'll hand out all the money necessary to get whatever power they want. I've watched pretty much my entire family slide from center-right to nonsense-right over the last 20 years.
There was a small reprieve recently. He was working with a Black man who was his antithesis, and they got along OK enough. My grandpa seemed to settle down for a time. He's no longer able to work now though, and he's definitely back in the mode of spinning out over non-sense.
> There were cults and converts before the Internet. Some were very famous. You haven't heard of any of them? People...uh...found a way.
I don't think the internet created the phenomenon, but it, both, enabled more elaborate and large scale lies, and gave people a lot more options for which lies they want to be told. Before, you were limited to who you ran into, or word of mouth from a friend. Now, any kid feeling cast out from their peers can run to a dark haven of any sort, any religion, and political leaning, any take on violence, whether they live in rural Kentucky or a condo in Seattle.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#268I have a foreign wife and it really drives home one truth: America is a very nuanced place. We have this idea of almost unlimited free speech. Which sounds great, but in practice, it is not really true. Because ultimately, Americans do not have equal rights. We see this over and over in different aspects of society. The Frederick Douglas example from Boston in the article is a great example of why free speech is good…
>But, again, in practice, the people in power do not allow free speech. And this is fundamentally different from most examples of cancel culture.
Here in Canada we actually removed freedom of speech. Hate speech laws are tremendously vague and are really not used to prevent anything bad. Sure the Westboro baptists have their 'god hates canada' stuff but realistically speaking it's never used to prevent anyone who is promoting genocide. Literally not once.
Instead the hate crime laws have 99% of the time been used against political opponents. This has created an environment where every single right-wing leader has been labelled a white supremacist. Not because they are in fact white supremacists but because this would put them at odds with hate speech laws and can then be silenced.
Just look at this trucker convoy. The media smeared them as white supremacists and fringe minority. This weekend there was solidarity protests and they were labelled 'nation wide insurrection' and 'occupation'. Ottawa declared a state of emergency and has started arresting and ticketing peaceful protestors.
This is the justification for Gofundme to seize the donations and disperse the money to charities of their choosing.
In reality many truckers are Indian and certainly not white supremacist.
https://twitter.com/QTRBlackGarrett/status/14876208353639833...
https://twitter.com/vonbrauckmann/status/1487614201845600257
My favourite: https://rumble.com/vu5aom-two-indian-freedom-protestors-have...
Those Indian men are the white supremacists!
Yet there were pictures of nazi flags right? Yet here we are unable to determine who that was. It seems like this flag was counter protesters trying to label these Indian truckers as white supremacists.
This is why freedom of speech is important. When you create exceptions, political opponents use these to silence politics.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#269“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” ― W.B. Yeats That was written in 1919 and published in 1920. So the US has been there before. Came back from there, but it took a depression and a world war. We might get…
I’m honestly surprised people see this as anything new.
Re: Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we really need to have a “who controls the curriculum” conversation. When I was a teacher, we could chose from whatever the books the school had a ton of lying around. Not a good way to make a selection. At the same time, people are freaking out when parents want a say I what books their children are evaluated on. If it was up to me, we’d focus on the classics: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Dos…
Important to not accidentally let any 20th century books into the curriculum, let alone any 21st century ones?
Sorry, I meant to include Gilgamesh ;)