"you can say anything that is not directly illegal in the US without fear of being banned or other mode“
For a non-American, could you explain how this is far right? Sounds pretty liberal.
For a non-American, could you explain how this is far right? Sounds pretty liberal.
Compounding this is PR and network effects. Once they become known as the place for the far right, then more far righters go there, and more distant people avoid it.
Stalin and Mao would only be left wing if you prescribe to the thought that communism by nature must only be left wing. I assume your train of thought on Hitler is similar because you're likely equating the socialist word in the Nazi party to left wing socialism.
At best this is dishonest and ignoring actual policy.
One reason the Marxist kind of thought pattern is dangerous is because of something like that. The ideas in and of themselves can sound good and appealing - who wants poor people to live in squalor and so on? But if we look at what natural and sexual selection ingrains in biological life - it is by necessity kin-preferring, competitive and in non-eusocial social creatures, status seeking, for example. Things that prefer non-kin and don't compete just die out.
In that light, a sound philosophy would understand that those things can't be eradicated by human will, take the impulses and hone something constructive out of them. But Marxist thought is rationalist in the sense that it thinks doctrine and reason can mold human nature to whatever shape, and then achieve their utopistic ends. That, of course, cannot happen because we're built from competitive, kin-preferring, status-seeking genes, not utopistic ones. Marxism is incompatible with biological life, and to get biological life to comply for any length of time, it must be forced constantly, or the utopian society degrade into tyranny, which has thus far happened every single time these things have been tried. But it's never done properly, so we should try again.
I'm asking for people to delve into the so called left wing policy of the people they're claiming are left wing dictators.
So far people have only been listing people by their party names. Which would mean that North Korea is a bastion of democracy. I'm asking for substance to back up their assertions.
I have to add that "no overlap at all", may not be correct, as those points were shared by different political spectrums in the history. The point is: The core idea, is completly different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
The reality is that communism as a movement spans a wide political range, and both Stalin and Pol Pot had diverged significantly from any form of leftist Marxism in their hunt for power.
Even stalinist supporters decry Pol Pot https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/khmerrouge.html
Looking at simple party names is a red herring at best. It's best to look at the policy choices of the dictators in question.
Censorship is a product of political extremism though, it has no basis in one political ideology, only in how aggressively it is applied to society.
I'm not sure this demonstrates a deep understanding of the shifting patterns within Islamic culture.
On the HDI, the first majority Muslim country is the UAE, at 31, and that's probably highly skewed by its limited population, extreme natural wealth, and slavery. And considering it's involved in a human rights catastrophe in Yemen, it fails any human rights record-based index directly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
On the contrary, I'd say that Islam is stuck in the past, which doesn't help Muslim nations thrive and develop, and those that do, do it based on "luck" ( natural resources).
This is obviously just selection bias. Everything that changes is a loss for "conservatism"; ignore everything that stays the same, which is the majority of everything.
Here are some "conservative" (i.e. longstanding existing) policies: Due process, separation of powers, warrant requirements, freedom of speech. They are currently under attack. But the attackers are the ones on the wrong side of history -- even if they succeed, they lose, because then the monsters these policies were established to vanquish return and the polices get reinstated once the current generation has had a taste of what happens without them. But that route is a lot harder and bloodier than learning from history.
This depends on is being cancelled. It's not the left that cancelled Kapaernick or the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks or howled with rage that the Supreme Court - with the exception of three conservative justices - ruled their longstanding practice of cancelling gay people unconstitutional.
Kaepernick kneeling during the pledge of allegiance can only parse as an antiracist gesture if the thing being disrespected (flag/country) is presumed to be intrinsically racist, i.e. it's accusing the whole country of racism. There are a lot of non-racist patriots who would take offense to that. The answer still shouldn't be censorship, but calling any opposition racism is accepting the very premise that the people opposed to the gesture are opposing it over.
Moreover, the implication that everyone who has been canceled was a racist is contrary to evidence unless you're making some heavy tribalist assumptions about anything vaguely conservative automatically implying racism.
And you're still not addressing the original point, which was that the left going around canceling people over speech is inconsistent with freedom of speech. Nothing anyone on the right does can make that untrue.
Libertarians making money.
As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.
Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?
Did you ever wonder why you are calling others far right or far left? Why are you referring to other American citizens with those terms? Who is pushing those terms that divide the vast majority of normal Americans? Who stands to gain?
The fascist establishment elite are getting richer by the second, while the lower classes are calling each other insulting names and fighting amongst themselves.
There’s an old movie called They Live. When you watch it now, you can call it time shifted documentary.
It's a great movie, but a metaphor not a "time-shifted documentary", unless I missed the latest Qdrop.
Interesting position.
After rallying against liberals being "snowflakes" and needing "safe-spaces", Parler ironically enough ended up being just that for the extreme right.
I have seen discussions there from people on both sides of the political spectrum where neither side was downvoted to oblivion, which is more than you can say for most of Reddit.
Truth isn't welcomed there. For instance, you will be banned for simply stating that Trump lost the election
That's the point: they complain about everyone else except when it happens to them, and then suddenly it's totally just and necessary. As though the reason women, gays, lesbians, transgender, black, mexican etc. communities don't have their own spaces for the exact reason that otherwise they would be brigaded by no end of people who felt just overly necessary to drop in and talk about how they think none of their problems are valid.
/r/conservative isn't ridiculed because it's moderated aggressively, it's ridiculed because it's moderated aggressively by people who continuously argue that moderation anywhere else is an assault on free speech and wholly unnecessary.
In contrast, /r/politics claims to be about general politics but most content to the right of AOC/Bernie gets downvoted or deleted.
As Reddit has a user base that comes from the US less than 50%, this might have to do with the fact that the Overton window shifted so far to the right there that the opinions of AOC or Bernie would count as center-right pretty much everywhere else in the western world, with the Republicans being off the charts lunatic extremist right.
But that's not the only relevant dimension of policy:
Culture matters, and they are not remotely rightwing on culture.
The direction they want to move the country in matters, and they definitely don't want to move the country rightward either.
The centrist view, the average American, would be considered a leftist by conservatives. This is why they think they're getting brigaded everywhere. They are. Their beliefs are unpopular.
The only reason the US Republican party is viable while being so far right is structural voting advantages. That's why they've lost the popular vote almost every time for 30+ years. That's why 50% of senators are Republican when only ~43% of the populations votes R.
On the internet where these artificial advantages aren't present it's much more obvious that Republican policy is broadly unpopular, and conservative opinion is the minority. Or more accurately, the moderate left is actually the center, and the average Republican is substantially far right.
But I'll have to disagree, since the comment above me suggests that there are a significant number of non-American Reddit users who lean more left than the average American, skewing the upvoting patterns. I'd argue that there are a different set of "artificial advantages" on the internet, such as that.
And when I browsed r/politics during the 2016 and 2020 election seasons, it was clear that Bernie Sanders was the favored candidate by Redditors. However, more moderate politicians like Clinton and Biden actually won the nominations.
And the popular vote count is a reflection of the Electoral College process...if elections were actually decided on the popular vote, campaign strategies would be focused more on cities than rural areas shifting the results.
But it's also undeniable that the average American leans left. That's why Republicans lose the popular vote in both chambers of congress and the presidency nearly every election. Their positions are unpopular, that's why they get down voted on "mainstream" sites where the user base is large enough to revert to the mean.
And campaign focus outside of urban cores would mean that the average American is even farther left than they appear to be.
Biden is farther right than the average Democrat because he needed to be to win. The structural advantages to Conservatives means the Democratic party needs to run centrist candidates.
In comparison, the same advantages mean the Republican party can still win with extreme right wing candidates. For example, Trump was the first president that never hit 50% approval rating but it was still high enough for him to win and do okay during his second campaign.
If 2/3 of US internet users are left of conservatives, that's why they get downvoted to hell anywhere outside their safe spaces. IMO the crazy moderators on reddit are a result of the left lean, not the cause.
Reddit leaned a lot more right/libertarian before nearly all coservative subreddits were systematically banned under spez and Pao. Spez also enacted more subtle censorship like algorithmic tweaks to keep t_d out off the front page and eventually the creation of /r/popular to keep similarly "undesirable" subreddits from the front page.
The truth means nothing to those that wont listen. The Republican party is a far right monstrosity. The democrats in US are a right leaning party for all practical purposes. Hell, Biden said he would be fine running with a Republican VP.
The court documents (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...) from their case against Amazon contain other examples of hate speech.
I have no problem with platforms allowing any and all speech, since it actually just allows stupid speakers to beclown themselves.
Free speech is the most liberal idea there is - as Voltaire famously said, "I may disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I might have missed that obviously during my five minutes of browsing there, as a result, if they really call for murdering Jews, could you provide a link to such resource - calling to murder someone is a crime in the US, so such link would be a good evidence for prosecution.
Unfortunately you have to sign up to see comments, I wonder why...
Gab looks like a version of Facebook that's mostly populated by Christian conservatives. Parler looks like a version of twitter that's mostly populated (or was, before) by Christian conservatives with a small side of some conspiracy theories.
Christian conservatives don't subscribe to the beliefs you think they do.
Things should be said based on the inherent merit of what they say, not be said just because it's not literally illegal to say them. If the only reason you can find for justifying what you say is that nobody has made a law yet to stop you (and we do have laws to stop some things from being said), then perhaps you need to find a better thing to say.
You're comparing an entire polluted pool that is unfit to swim in with a single floating turd in the ocean.
For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.
You've gone from complaining that twitter is consumed by the left to complaining that the left is allowed on twitter at all.
> For example, today's trending topics include the "cancellation" of Dr Seuss (with many tweets giving examples of why he should be cancelled in the author's opinion) and the use of the words "latinx" and "womxn" to avoid offending people by using gendered language.
Right-wingers post about that stuff 10:1 compared to anyone on the left. You're posting about it now.
I'm not complaining about anything though - are you confusing posts from different HN users? I really don't care who uses Twitter or for what purpose. I'm pointing out that it's unlikely someone could use Twitter and be unaware of left-wing posts on the platform given that Twitter themselves amplify such content daily.
Hell kpop shows up on the trending as often as leftist stuff but I don’t claim kpop controls Twitter.
far left far right
<---------------------------------------->
[Overton Window]
perceived perceived
far left far right
far left center far right
<-------------------|-------------------->
[Western O.W.]
[US Overton W.]
[ Gab users* ]
[ Twitter users* ]
There aren't nearly enough leftist talking points on Twitter as it appears to your rightist brain, and there's plenty of homophobia, "feminism has gone too far", "it's okay to be white", worldwide anti-immigration sentiments, and (still!) Trump supporters. Maybe they're bots or whatever, but the talking points are there.
If a person thinks that perhaps, maybe, there's 2 genders and not 700+, they should be prevented from civic discourse? That maybe we should not be providing chemical treatments to toddlers for gender reassignment, that's hate? If they believe that math isn't actually racist, but is an objective way of making sense of reality, are they racist? How about people who criticize Islam and argue that it is a fundamentally violent ideology? That lockdowns and "scientific" COVID-19 recommendations were harmful because Florida had fewer deaths per capita than NY or CA
Today, merely speaking any of these positions gets a person called a "transphobe" or a racist or a science denier. In addition to not convincing anyone and unfairly slandering the speakers, it destroys our ability to think as a society.
Socially "acceptable" speech has never needed legal protection (in any society, liberal or authoritarian). It's the offensive things that need protection from the book burners.
If we look at racist hate speech, people literally lecture that people who happen to look like me are "born into not being human", say the lives of people like me don't matter. We are told we should not speak and yet that our silence is violence. Trainings for "diversity" across a wide range of institutions have started segregating along racial lines, and the list goes on. During the Grievance Studies hoax, for example, one of their papers was sent back because it was too sympathetic and not sociopathic enough. Said paper advocated making white students sit on the floor and putting them in chains as a learning experience.
Yet open racism is fine, because the target ethnic group and sexual orientation are acceptable to the activist class.
Likewise, people who get kicked out for "transphobia" will often not be people who hate transpeople in any proper sense, but have policy disagreements where there are no win-win solutions. Yet anything but being completely on board with the activist class's 100% no limits pro-trans policy agenda is "phobia". The claim holds up as well as wet paper.
How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Said cultists insist on mantras of trans(wo-)men are (wo-)men in an explicit denial of biology that the best of our medicine can't alter: We just craft a facade that eases dysphoria to care for our fellow human beings. As Buck Angel put it: "I use testosterone to masculinize myself so I feel more like me." He's routinely called a transphobe.
This is basically the biology equivalent of flat eartherism or young earth creationism, but not subscribing to the creed is stamped hate speech. The mantra wouldn't even be necessary if its claim was actually true. Hell, it's arguably even worse than flat eartherism, since a human can't at a glance confirm that the Earth is indeed round, but TWAW/TMAM asks us to baldly deny the input of our eyes in everyday life.
It's not one side that has gone insane: Good chunks of both are open lunatics. Q at least is thankfully fringe, but even they've managed to get representatives elected.
> How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Trans girls have horrible anxiety about going through puberty. It's not them being "a little off their gender role". It's a fundamental dread about being given an irreversible treatment of hormones that will change their voice and secondary sexual characteristics.
Puberty is far more irreversible than HRT. The percentage of people who detransition is tiny; far more people who transition are much happier for doing so. It is also incredibly difficult to actually get HRT. The therapy is beyond the reach of most children. It's a total boogieman that this is happening left and right and all of the children are getting stuffed full of synthetic hormones.
Please educate yourself more.
Anti-trans positions are up there with "gay people are going to sexually assault my children" or "being gay is disgusting 'cause I don't like thinking about anal sex". Complete and utter bullshit based on unfounded fears.
Non-degenerates know that long lasting liberty comes with responsibility, and that responsibility is moderation and correction.
The far right operates in degeneracy. They may fly the banner of freedom but they fly it alongside nazi flags so what do symbols and ideals even mean for them.
Generally the argumentation presented is a dogwhistle for fringe elements (nazis, other unpleasant people, etc). Sadly they are currently dominated by far-right ideologies (and ofc the inevitable sexual predators).
Liberals are being called racists and anti-democracy as a way of attacking and deplatforming anyone who disagrees with the leftist tribe. This isn't about values, it's about tribal allegiance.
If you actually believe that these people are far-right racists then there is a strong chance that you are being fooled by tribal manipulation.
The center and left in the US are normally not in favor of hate speech, while the right is more supportive of it.
What happens then is people who want to discuss hateful topics and post hateful speech can't easily do it on the current popular social media platforms, so they need alternatives. That's the market for Gab and Parler mostly.
At this moment, it happens that the far-right in the US has a very "hateful adjacent" messaging. They generally support and promote populist, nativist, collectivist authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded ideas. Those often overlap with hate of immigrants and non-white Christians, as well as hate of liberals and social democrats due to believing in their participation in demonic conspiracies. They also tend to suggest violent and authoritarian methods to get what they want, like killing their opposition or storming the capitol, and other forms of violent insurection. Thus they fall in the market category of Parler and Gab pretty strongly.
It's mostly the far-right aka radical right, the regular right in the US does not all prescribe to these and don't all have "hateful adjacents" messaging.
Also some more extremist current left movements also have "hateful adjacent" messaging, though maybe less so, when they do it's often targeted specifically at the far-right, most likely as a reactionary measure.
Also, there are reports of such left-leaning accounts being banned and censored on Parler and Gab, hard to say how true this is, but even if a rumor, it keeps the less radical right from trusting them. And so they are often considered to falsy upheld free speech.
The left is very supportive of hate speech, it just has to have the right target. There's abject, open racism against whites all day. Black people attacking Asian people is white supremacy nowadays.
I'm personally more centrist overall, but I've tried as much as I could to give an unbiased summary, though being unbiased in those cases is hard. I'm trying not to judge the behavior, just observe it.
One thing I have observed is that the current moderate left in the US does seem to align more with Canada/UK/France style of free speech, with a broader definition of what is considered hate speech and stronger enforcements against it. Where as the right seem more aligned with the traditional American view on it, where hate speech is limited only if it can be shown to have directly and immediately caused lawless action.
This seems to be the crux of the issue as well. With the big social media platforms available today, it has enabled hateful speech to have more reach at a wider scale than ever before. It also enabled not only Americans to reach others, but even non-Americans can promote and propagate hateful messaging in a targeted and strategic way. The question is what if anything should be done about this, could it lead to instability and divide and throw the country in turmoil, or maybe it's actually a good thing and will allow more voices to be heard and considered.
It's the age old trade off of free speech and restricted free speech. Where do you draw the line? What risks are there on either side of it?
And my observation has been the right leaning Americans seem to still consider that there should be no regulations on this, and everyone everywhere, even non Americans, should be allowed to freely share, promote, upvote, and target any message they want, even hateful, no matter the intent behind it, because upholding the right to speak up and against the government is more important and so we should stay as far as possible from threading water or any slippery slope.
And my observation is the left leaning Americans seem more cautious, and think some regulations might be needed, to make sure that no bad actor takes advantage of this, or that discourse doesn't rely purely on emotions and hate targeted reasonings. And that not doing so would actually bring more instability and chaos, and the risk of threading the line between restricted but still free speech and non free speech is worth it, or maybe an exagerated concern, where they don't think in practice it would be difficult to distinguish dissenting views from hateful ones or those with bad actors behind them.
It's liberal in the same way it would be liberal to have a party where you walk around naked and smear feces on each other.
Definitely a liberal party, but not one that most people want to participate in. Most people would rather have moderation where you're not allow to scream the N word at blacks. Which concentrates N word screamers and similar onto these free speech forums