5 ms·
The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?
by edoceo 8d ago
The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- Whoppertime 8d agoHow did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?
- henryfjordan 8d agoThe perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance. Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
- coloneltcb 8d agobroadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word. Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)
- henryfjordan 8d ago> Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
- sapphicsnail 8d agoWhat's wrong with empathy?
- seba_dos1 8d agoBroken people consider it a weakness.
- ipaddr 8d agoPolitical correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship Cancel culture is literally censorship. Deplatforming is censorship. Debanked is censorship. I don't know what the R word is but there is a group of people you can't even look down at because they have been deplatformed and cancelled. The left has passed laws and people do get jail time for social media posts in the UK.
- liveoneggs 8d agoThere are more subtle forms of censorship, continuously employed by the government to prop up or push down various things. Covid had many such examples of pressure tactics from the government come to light but I'm sure it happens constantly. For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
- GJim 7d ago> the R-word ??
- nosioptar 7d agoThe r-word is "retard".
- GJim 6d agoThanks. Though surely to say a system or process is 'retarded' means something is holding it back? To equate this to a derogatory term for a learning disability (worthy of self-censorship!) is, frankly, bizarre and rather smacks of virtue signalling.
- liveoneggs 8d agoTipper Gore targeted music and Hilary Clinton targeted video games (remember - 1990s)
- k12sosse 8d agoThe PMRC. Megadeth even wrote a song about it.. in '88 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8 https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics
- swasheck 7d agoWarrant’s “Ode to Tipper Gore” is something of a classic
- ipaddr 8d agoThe Christian right was trying to ban books in the 70s/80s. Fought heavy metal music in the 80s. Then you have 911 censorship. But after 2008 the left brought woke to power which saw banning people from twitter, social media, right speech. Then we reached covid which saw banning of facts. Deplatforming / banning / doxing became the norm until the return of Trump who then moved the needle and started pro Jewish censorship which has pushed the needle for the anti Jewish censorship crew which is taking over.
- liveoneggs 8d agoHarry Potter is the funniest example because it started out being a target of the evangelical "right" and has become a target of the culture-war "left"!
- kyboren 7d agoIndeed. I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism. The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker. I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper. Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.
- joquarky 8d agoIf Tipper Gore weren't such a prude, there might have been enough votes to overcome that butterfly ballot issue.