Really? You don't see it?
I'm not sure anything I can point out or say will change your mind if you don't see it already. Perhaps you're more of a leftist than an independent, which is fine if those are your values. Curious which values you have that diverge from it...but in the meantime I'll address your points here with my own perspective, which you can take or leave.
I certainly don't see it. I feel I am open minded, but if I had to have agreed from the start, what is the point of debate?
I took the political spectrum test, and it is somewhere on this site. I was left of center and deep in libertarian as opposed to authoritarian. It is possible that I have been pushed further to the left. I have had a long time affinity towards entrepreneurship and fiscal conservatism. There are probably some of my rants still on here about my disdain for centralized authority somewhere here.
George W. Bush's administration started a dislike of the Republican party (the WMD thing was the main thing, but Guantanamo Bay, and wire tapping definitely didn't help), but still voted rather split ticket. I liked Ron Paul, and those that followed that ideology for a bit, but I will admit, the Tea Party soured be quite a bit on Libertarianism. Then all the government shutdowns pushed me to stop splitting the ticket.
Whatever ideals I have now, I cannot bring myself to join a party. To me, that strongly ties me to a set of ideas that get prescribed for me.
This I'm afraid is bullshit (though full disclosure, I am a hardline free speech advocate). Attempting a top-down curbing of disinformation via censorship only accelerates the problem it tries to correct, because the effort to control- even if the original intent behind that control was for people's own good- is (rightly) seen as a threat, the way anyone or anything asserting power over anyone or anything else accurately is a threat, and then people will back away entirely from the system, trustless, and operate in the dark instead like a feral cat. Maybe someday it can be done correctly, with a Fact Checking institution that everyone can trust, but most of the current fact checkers are just outsourced propaganda wings of the democratic party, and nobody on the right takes them seriously. Worse, they often just assume the opposite of what they say is the truth. The correct response to bad information or concerns of someone self-radicalizing is not less disseminated information, however bad, via censorship. The correct response is more disseminated information- get the bad stuff out in the open, let it be vetted against reality and debate. As human beings we should all know well by now that things repressed are made much worse by the repression. High quality new ideas, which are like sporadic flowers that grow on vast fields of shit, are also only possible because of bad ideas and bad information- challenging people to discover why they are bad, and in doing so discover other things along the way. There really just is no good argument for censorship that I'm aware of, aside of course from the "yelling fire in a crowded theater." But other than literally that, No.
I am not advocating any sort of top-down curbing of disinformation. What I am advocating is responsible reporting of facts by individual entities, mainly through individual training and application of critical thinking.
Nevertheless, the interpretation of the first amendment does have a precedent that excludes incitement to violence. I suppose these are two separate points.
These three real quick- the book burning thing came mostly from tictok (my girlfriend is into it and loves to annoy me with progressive videos, among others that genuinely do make me laugh), and she went through this phase a while back of sending me videos of people burning JK Rowling's books because she's anti-trans, or something like that. Also I saw they had a bible burning ceremony in Portland recently, and I've seen various other (likely not entirely serious) calls to burn books that leftists don't like. I know the staff at Penguin Publishers recently had an emotional breakdown trying to block them from publishing Jordan Peterson's new book (not literal burning, but same spirit). Stuff like that, not really a huge deal, but a sign of the culture. Doxing, regardless of whose doing it, is nasty nasty shit. I'm unaware of people on the right doing it, except maybe 4chan hackers/Anonymous or something like that, but I'd be open to examples. As long as we can agree that it's insane, and awful.
Yes. I'd agree that both book burning and doxing are horrible. Though I don't see it is something that should be illegal if there are multiple copies of books and someone burns one as a statement. I do worry about what that mean for those who are following the book burners, and I'd find it personally abhorrent. As for doxing, the 4-chan/8-chan/Q-Anon etc. hackers are the only type that I know about outside of those who leak government secrets to wikileaks and such. There are a lot of them.
De-platforming I think is just another word for cancel culture- the idea that someone should be publicly shamed, fired, never hired again, and presumably die of starvation- for their political beliefs. It also refers to the blocking/protesting/shutting down of any not-radical-left-enough speaker to prevent them from speaking. People like Janet Mock (for being Jewish), Nicholas Dirks (for having a high salary), Anita Alvarez (for being part of law enforcement), Bassem Eid (for being a Palestinian not hard enough on Israel), and the list goes on forever. It is yet another insane practice and terrible idea, particularly as it pertains to the censorship issue I just discussed.
I don't like protests keeping people from speaking at universities. This is certainly not a new phenomenon, however. What may be newer is the universities caving to those demands. With that said, if private institutions want to control who speaks at their spaces, and if private forums want a particular forms of speech removed, there are a plethora of spaces to choose from.
We still allow neo-Nazis to march. We still allow them speak their mind. This is as it should be. The perception of "thought police" over people vehemently disliking these actual deplorables, to me, constitutes its own version of political correctness. We should allow people to express their dislike of bad behavior or unpleasant speech, just as much as we should allow that speech.
If people are boycotted because of bad behavior, I have little sympathy.
An authoritarian leader can only come from those who have the authority to be such, but I was referring to the "authoritarian personality type," as coined by Theodor Adorno at Berkley in 1954. His focus was on right-wing authoritarianist types:
Later, Edward Shils identified the left wing authoritarian personality type:
Sound familiar?
Authoritarian personalities can certainly exist on every part of the political spectrum. But I am not afraid of the ones on the left. They are mostly children and have little in the way of actual power.
But the authoritarian personalities on the right:Trump is the sitting President attempting an unprecedented denial of the will of the people. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, all authoritarians in their own right are only without dangerous power in their hands because of the infighting they had with Trump.
I'll call out any right-winger who blindly listens to authority, or gets aggressive over forcing traditional roles or concepts on other people. I've known and dealt with plenty, though not a whole lot, in my life. The profile of a right wing authoritarian type does not fit the bulk of my conservative peers, but the profile of a left wing authoritarian type fits most- if not all- of my left wing peers. It certainly fits the profile of just about every politically vocal individual on this forum, administrators included. Maybe it's a sample pool thing and I'm wrong? Just speaking to my intuition on that one.
I applaud you if you actually call out people on the right. I have friends and family on both sides of the spectrum. My own experience is that the people on the left are actually the ones who hold their tongues for the most part when dealing with those on the other side. Generally, those on the left are younger and more diverse culturally. They don't tend to have the social power in their circumstances. They are the left leaning daughters of right leaning parents, the left leaning employees of right leaning employers, the minority culture in their social group...
The forum is a group that is more global, more empathetic, and more introverted than the general population. All of this tends to swing left. But, if everyone seems crazy...
I will say, in regards to authoritarian personalities with their hands on the levers of power, that there are plenty of governors with hands on said levers, and between democrats and republicans, one of the two tends to be far more draconian than the other- as revealed by COVID, and the devastating use of lockdowns.
There is plenty of evidence that it is the virus itself that shuts down businesses. Even the Democratic governors who have been more lenient (like CA's Newsom) are coming to terms with notion. People won't be going to bars and night clubs when people they know start getting COVID, and others they know start dying. We are in the third spike with
more single day deaths than 9/11.
We almost had this virus going the way it did in China in Mid May during the nationwide lockdown, but we ended it arbitrarily just a week or two early.
I think neo-nazis
are the alt right,
right?
Fuck them and everything about them. I don't know of anyone else who identifies as alt-right except for that tiny,
universally condemned by the majority of sane conservatives as an insane hate group, faction of Hitler groupies. They certainly have absolutely nothing in common with the rest of us. It's a shame leftists can't say the same thing about their own psychos, it would really go a long way towards making them less of a nervous laughing stock in general among conservative circles.
The alt-right had a chief of staff in the white house when they started. Recently, the proud boys were asked to "stand-by". This hardly seems like a rebuke by the right in general. Again, I applaud you if you do it personally, however.
And again, the psychos on the left seem like mostly children and grad students with virtually no power in their hands. Laughing at them just seems petty and bullying, frankly.
This is, however, a complete non-sequitur to the point that woke culture has gone so backwards in regards to race that it judges people based strictly on it once again. At least Proposition 16, to repeal an anti-discrimination law, was shot down by voters in California- though it is an accurate representation of the direction leftist radicals want to take people.
At a time when a black man was killed by an officer with a history of brutality by kneeling on his neck while other officers stood by, this comment is tone-deaf at best.
Worrying about "woke-culture" when the number of death threats that I've gotten from white supremacists have gone up by an order of magnitude is ridiculously out of line with my own experiences.
White-fragility is a real thing, and the main reason the white-supremacists have as much control as they do.
Complaining about woke-culture when my own experience of everyday racism is the worst it has been in at least 15 years is ridiculous to me.
Thank you, I'll give these a read when I have some more free time- spent all I had tonight on the thoughts above.
You're welcome. The tl;dr is that sexual development is complex, even at the genetic level.
Jaimie Lee Curtis for example has Y chromozome, but has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
