Bluesky civil war shows free speech is harder than it looks

This article is written from an innocent perspective because it assumes that shouting away your ideological opponents is motivated by a personal need to preserve identity, or prevent harm, to yourself or others. That may be true sometimes, but there are nation state level efforts devoted to manipulating democratic institutions into believing some view point is represented by a strong and numerous collective, thereby gaining more political influence for that viewpoint. The issue mainly gets complicated because of geopolitics.

It’s well known that some of the least progressive nations, for example, will run campaigns to foster discontent in secular, liberal democracies. But it’s less heard of that some progressive agendas want reparations to certain nations from other states which they hold responsible for their current state, hundreds of years and many generations later. The ideology behind equity, for example, is about creating democratic will in Western liberal democracies to pay reparations, including by giving away land. But who are the leaders who these reparations will be paid to, and will the people of those nations ever receive any benefit from them? It’s ironic that progressives often stand up for cultures or leaders who are very much not progressive themselves, and it’s doubly ironic that democracy is often dismantled by itself, often by its own rules.

Glad that some people are coming around to BlueSky being yet another social media shithole. I called it from the early days, when it was settled by Redditors, and later all the Twitter people driven off Twitter by Elon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507880