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Comment by _DeadFred_ | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly how it went in Russia. First it was, ‘Well, this isn’t that bad.’ Then, ‘Okay, sure, this isn’t great—but it’s not like we need to take action yet.’ And bit by bit, people kept rationalizing, minimizing, delaying—until suddenly it was, ‘Well… we’re f’d.’ That’s why we should speak up now.

We’re already at the point where one side is openly arguing that due process isn’t guaranteed by the Constitution—because it's inconvenient. So how many rights do we have to give up before it’s acceptable to call it out? How many norms have to be broken? How many lines crossed?

It's not like (other than Elon) they're going to show up in Hugo Boss suits one day and announce 'we have crossed the line to where you can criticize us now'.

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I agree. But did you stand up against discrimination against innocent people under the banner of DEI? Did you stand up against government directed censorship campaigns on social media?

The time to stand up was actually way before the extreme actions of the left inspired this extreme reactionary overcorrection from the right. You're supposed to stand up while you're still in power, not after you've lost it, it's a bit late. I still remember people insisting "but deplatforming works!" as they justified mass censorship of conservatives. Honestly if you have not stood up for the people you politically disagreed with as the noose tightened over the last 10 years you are part of the cause of this terrible over-correction.

I can only hope that people start noticing this pattern and the inevitable next "correction" is not so extreme and we get some damping on the seemingly accelerating pendulum back and fourth.

The government never prevented anyone from speaking. Free speech was not violated when assholes were banned from platforms for being assholes. The owners of those platforms are not the government.

https://leftycartoons.com/2018/08/01/i-have-been-silenced/

Read the Twitter files. The government was actively involved in censorship. Zuckerberg has also stated the FBI was demanding certain posts be removed / demoted, users shadow banned, etc. The CIA also infiltrates and subverts many organizations and platforms. Wouldn't be surprised if they operate here, they've definitely been manipulating Reddit for at least the past decade.

You wouldn't have to keep referencing a tenuous connection in The Twitter Files (cue: X-Files theme music) if you came around to seeing government and corpos as quite similar creatures on a spectrum of coercion rather than as completely disjoint and disparate things.

So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).

Yes actually, i've been ranting about this for a long time, sufficiently powerful corporations are a form of government. I'm not conservative though despite being anti-dei so make of that what you will, i think a lot of people on the left are being lumped in with people on the right because we oppose the types of discrimination and racism now popular with the "left".

Great! It sounds like we're coming from a similar place. I wouldn't describe myself as "on the left" - more of a general libertarian that sees the merits and flaws in both rightist and leftist thinking. I had never voted for a major party in a national election until 2020, after the Republican party went batshit crazy.

The reason I judge The Twitter Files as a rightist talking point is that it's trying to pigeonhole the motivation for censorship solely onto the government. If an argument is simply about the coercive power wielded by corporations and governments, you don't need a smoking gun of cooperation/direction to tie the two - seeing them as similar organizations with similar top-down motivations suffices. That evidence is only important if you're aiming for reform using the first amendment (an understandable desire, but the wrong tool for the job), or trying to absolve the corpos as mere victims of the de jure government (delusional).

You mean the Twitter files, which relied on Matt Taibbi getting the name of a government agency wrong to form the key connection he then turned into a conspiracy?

Very different. They were not kidnapped by secret police or held in inhumane conditions in far away jails.

Yes for the most part.

The fact that current 'conservatives' kicked out pretty much all the historical conservatives I know as being not actual conservative/rinos tell us that this isn't about 'conservative' speech but something much, much different that is being labeled as 'conservative' speech when it is not.

I was a (hippie) libertarian at one point. Today the party of 'merit' has as their figure head... a nepo baby. They can't even be bothered to pretend to be 'conservative' or 'libertarian' anymore.

I don't shop where Confederate flags are sold. Requiring stores I shop at not to celebrate/promote racist anti-american losers by selling Confederate flags isn't me deplatforming anyone (BTW Amazon? Lots of Confederate flags FYI) it's me having standards for how I use my time/attention/money.

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