> That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission.
It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things. A response being largely emotional does not make it inherently less valid, and not everyone is required to discard half of the human experience in order to be taken seriously.
> How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police.
I would say far too many, but also I would caveat that by pointing to the other pile of corpses from people who did the same thing for just being themselves in the wrong place. Or worse still, had the violence inflicted upon them by another's hand.
So clearly, at the very least, we can agree that it's not just "words on the internet?" They clearly have dire consequences for all parties involved.
> How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians.
"Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting? And given what people are happily not only saying, but being paid to say, (usually while whining about how censored they are but I digress) I'm frankly incredibly skeptical of this position.
> They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness is not new.
Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it. I personally have carried friends through that mess and to that, I can testify first party. However on the opposite side, all I really see is people complaining about how censored they are, on public platforms, to a wide audience, and usually in some way monetizing it: book sales, shows, public speaking engagements, all the while moaning about how they can't speak their minds... while speaking their minds. Repeatedly. For profit.
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I'm rewriting this because the comment above changed substantially since it was originally posted. Below is the original thing I wrote which I'm leaving up because I'm proud of it:
This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.
We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.
And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"
And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.