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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change. Conservativism is fundamentally about suppressing change in favour of familiarity and established norms, which could certainly be seen as censorship. An obvious example of this is the conservative/Puritan influence in American culture, which has lead to excessive censorship of sexual content and cursing in American media.

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.

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Counterexample - Islamic culture is conservative and thriving in the world (20% of all humans are Muslim), with roughly the same beliefs and culture as it's had for the past 1000 years.

> with roughly the same beliefs and culture as it's had for the past 1000 years.

I'm not sure this demonstrates a deep understanding of the shifting patterns within Islamic culture.

Who cares? Gradual changes in a philosophy of a culture that has become the great game-board of all adjunct powers, over and over again, is not relevant. At some point all that remains, is the fact, that getting pushed around on the school-yard of the world, is a bad idea. Nobody cares for the history of getting pushed around. Just for the now full of mud, blood and laughter.

I'm not sure thriving is the correct term. When it comes to HDI, human rights record, freedom of press/expression/etc. i can't think of a single Muslim-majority country ( which isn't the same as Islamic, and i chose the former because they fare better by definition on various freedoms)

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).

It'd be hard to make a monolith out of the beliefs, practices and behaviour of over a billion people even if you could boil some of it down into one book (and you can't even do that as even the Sunni majority uses at least 7).

> Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change.

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.

All the "conservative" policies you listed are currently being championed for by the left however.

Who is responsible for cancel culture? Tech censorship? "Believe All Women"? Who is calling for a new War on Terror targeting the domestic population?

Show me a case of "cancel culture" and I will show you a case where the "cancelled" person benefitted in popularity on the right wing side. The people that really do get cancelled, you don't hear from them. The examples you know of are all people who benefitted hugely from the "cancelling". Unless you count the #metoo people. But you probably believe all these men are innocent. I don't really get how due process and opposition to trial by media is usually not important with right wing people when someone is suspected of robbery, but when someone is suspected of sexual misconduct it is suddenly a problem. This feels like the protection of elites (because elites will never be part of a robbery, but can be hurt by a metoo-scandal). And I am seriously curious who is calling for a new war in terror. Tell me, who is doing this?

Ok, I'll bite. First three examples of cancel culture I can think of: dongle gate, rosetta mission guy, and more recent J. K. Rowling. How exactly they benefited?

CNN anchors and John Brennan.

> Who is responsible for cancel culture?

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.

"Whatabout Kaepernick" is not a denial that the left is doing this, or even that they're not the primary offenders.

No, but the juxtaposition of "footballers' antiracist gestures must be silenced" with "We must intervene to prevent Big Tech from declining to broadcast racism" in the rhetoric of prominent mainstream US conservatives is a pretty good indication that the longstanding tradition they are actually defending isn't "free speech"...

That only works if your frame for literally everything is racism.

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.

> Who is responsible for cancel culture?

Libertarians making money.

Cancel culture is just a right wing word to deflect from accountability

"Censorship is just another word for accountability," says person claiming not to be in favor of censorship.

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