SubJeff on 20/2/2021 at 20:32
It's the extreme left who are cancelling people for expressing an opinion they don't like at the moment. That's why I bring it up.
The right are far easier to see and to dismiss as idiotic because they don't come with a veneer of sense about them.
The principles of the right are often just batshit crazy and mean (see the response to suggestions of social healthcare funded by taxes).
The principles of the left are far far nicer. Equity, liberty, socialist driven approaches. We may have a right wing government at the moment but the NHS isn't a right wing concept at all and goddamn it I'm proud we still have that.
The problem is all this great stuff from the left gets taken to the extreme right now and it's anti-capitalist, too socialist (you're evil if you're even a little bit wealthy) and far too accusatory of -isms. Everyone is racist now, even loads of people who aren't white. Everyone is tranphobic now, even it's just because you wouldn't date a pre-op trans-woman or think that the principles of consent to medical procedures clashes with suggested life changing prescribing.
In the West the right haven't got more extreme. They were always this idiotic.
But the left have gone nuts recently and they are the major threat to freedom of speech, right now, and not the right wing racists.
mopgoblin on 20/2/2021 at 22:23
Well they can't be very fucking good at it, from what I've seen, because other than the odd serial rapist finally facing consequences after years or decades of abuses, the majority of people "cancelled by the left" are just as noisy as ever. Many of them continue to broadcast their shitty views from larger platforms than anything available to the average person they harm using said platforms. Just look at how much easier it is to find dozens of terves yelling about how they're being "silenced" than it is to find trans women saying, well, anything.
And, you know, I'm really not sure where this whole "cancel" thing is coming from in this thread. This Rush dickhead wasn't cancelled, he was cancered, by his own hand. And normally I wouldn't make fun of that, but it was self-inflicted and followed years of trying to also inflict it on others with his backwards claims about smoking, so fuck him. But the thing is, this guy spent decades of expressing his shitty views to a wide audience, defending a policy of indifference towards HIV/AIDS (and celebrating the deaths it caused), giving a significant boost to the awfulness of American politics, and harming countless vulnerable people in ways too numerous to list. And we're still talking about him, yet now you're going on a weird side froth about people being "cancelled" by "the loonie left", whoever the fuck that is? Get some perspective, or a hobby or something.
(I'm not touching that dogwhistley transphobic crap because I know you're trying to bait people into another round of the same shitty argument, where you can be a dick and nothing will be accomplished. You talk about "cancelling" like it's some kind of unfair move, but you seem to think no one can see you lining your arse up to shit all over the chessboard until nobody wants to play)
SubJeff on 20/2/2021 at 23:15
Oh please, you're only annoyed by those trans issues because you're on the wrong side of them based on your emotions sans logic and you know it.
You know I'm perfectly capable of laying out a logical position on it.
There isn't a side issue on cancel culture itt. I mention it in passing as part of the greater debate on free speech. The left is very much pushing for some of this labelling and cancelling to become social norms.
As to who had been canceled - it's best manifest in deplatforming, which happens often enough. Some of the people who have been affected... it's almost unbelievable.
Nameless Voice on 21/2/2021 at 00:29
So, let's see.
By your logic:
1) You can't be racist if you're not white.
2) You can't be transpohibic if you can invent some kind of logical justification for it.
3) mopgoblin is incapable of being logical because she's an emotional woman.
The truth of the matter is that the only reason people are afraid so-called "cancel culture" is because they know, deep down, that they are bigots, and are afraid that they might actually suffer some consequences for their behaviours.
hopper on 21/2/2021 at 00:34
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Not when the people doing the defending are always
exclusively defending the "free speech" of people with bigoted opinions.
That's because there is no need to defend the free speech of non-bigoted opinions. If everybody liked your opinions, why would anybody bother to "defend" your right to voice them? It'd be a bit like claiming that rain is wet. Not exactly wrong, just pointless.
By defending Rush Limbaugh's right to free speech, we are defending our own right to it. If only "respectable" opinions are protected, your speech isn't really free, because it means letting the government decide which opinions are allowed. There's a word for that.
Nameless Voice on 21/2/2021 at 01:09
That's nonsense.
No one has truly free speech in any reasonable country.
The concept is that you should be free to speak out against and criticise the government without reprisals, not that you should be able to say whatever you want without consequence. Again, if you take it to the extreme, then my earlier examples of ordering someone else's death or talking/tricking someone else into killing themselves would be considered free speech.
Why is the right to be a bigot so sacred? It always boils down to this:
Why should someone's right to say words be considered more important than someone else's right to not be hurt by those words? What sort of warped and twisted moral system does someone need to have to make that the priority?
Furthermore, people aren't complaining about governments penalising people for their speech (at least, in most cases), they're specifically complaining that large numbers of people can decide that they no longer want to support someone or work with them, because they have decided that they don't like them based on their words.
Free speech laws don't apply to that at all, because they only apply to the government.
You're trying to make "slippery slope" argument, that if we don't allow completely free speech, then where will it end? But that only works under the assumption that all speech is free, which it isn't and never has been. It's always a question of where the line is, how much harm do words have to cause before they are no longer protected?
Pyrian on 21/2/2021 at 01:18
Quote Posted by hopper
That's because there is no need to defend the free speech of non-bigoted opinions. If everybody liked your opinions, why would anybody bother to "defend" your right to voice them?
Y'know where people are trying to stop non-bigoted free speech right now? Here. In this thread. We are discussing whether it's okay to express happiness that Rush Limbaugh died (on account of the things
he personally said and publicly advocated, not because of his race or whatever). And people are arguing that it's
not okay to
say that
because Rush Limbaugh had the right of free speech.
AFAIK nobody has advocated that Limbaugh's estate needs to suffer legal consequences, which at this point is basically the
only thing his right to free speech actually means. Somebody (I think it was SubJeff?) decided on a standard of literal personal murder before you can "tastefully" express happiness at their death, but that's just a made-up standard and not one I agree with in the first place. Limbaugh doesn't deserve basic courtesies because Limbaugh didn't engage in basic courtesies.
demagogue on 21/2/2021 at 01:48
The sad part about Limbaugh dying IMO is that he didn't have enough time in his life to be corrected, humbled, and penitent, and in a position to use his talents for good to teach compassion and tolerance to his great following in a way many would take to heart. He just died unrepentant and with his followers left as misguided and galvanized towards rage and hatred than ever, which is unhealthy for the whole country. That's what is sad about the situation.
I don't have any personal connection with the man himself so don't have any feelings to express. He did great harm to the country with a glee that eventually seemed to me so comically caricatured and engineered that I had to see it as some mix of irresponsible showmanship and transparently covering over many of his great personal failings and vulnerabilities. Both of those things also speak very sadly for him and the whole movement built around him.
The whole thing is just sad, and I can't muster anything like schadenfreude or the like. In recent years I've had long discussions with a kind of monk (or he writes from within a kind of post modern brand of the Franciscan monastic movement, the compassionate side without the actual Christianity bit for the most part) that has very clear and persuasive opinions about compassion and skepticism of being dragged into over-enthusiasms of any order. I can hear his take in this kind of situation. (I also wrote another thing in Starry's FB post on this I can cross-post here later.)
This is just my own take on it. Generally I'm not one to lecture other people about their emotions over something as final as a death and how they should handle them, unless I think it's really unhealthy I might at least mention that. In this case, I wouldn't call people feeling actual glee at Rush's death as particularly healthy, since they're still kind of giving into his game of baiting our worst emotions in the long run. But I can understand the impulse, and I can at least hope some of that energy translates into action that helps people or changing minds in healthy direction so it's not all just exchanging pure vitriol for vitriol. If people felt relief that that force for stoking hatred is gone, that seems a bit healthier at least.
Tocky on 21/2/2021 at 01:52
Quote Posted by SubJeff
Yeah. Freedom of speech is important but no one has to like what you say. If it alters the way they deal with you that's really what you're asking for, isn't it?
At my age I'm just happy to find there are those who are decent and good people. How fucking hard is it just to be good? People act like that is difficult. It should be natural. What in hell could possibly be wrong about not wanting black folk to be shot? Nah. We have to find that thing which makes it about us? Really? Why in the fuck can't it just be that we shouldn't shoot blacks at any higher rate than white? Nah. Got to be some shit. Got to be one dick who thinks blacks have no right to be offended and then how whites are so put upon for just giving respect to simple life. BLM is some affront to whites also being killed? Nah. In no fucking way whatsovever. Fuck shitheads.
Yes I'm goddamn drunk. Fuck it.
mopgoblin on 21/2/2021 at 02:18
I'm in your thread, doing emotion posting with my illogical vagina (:
Anyway,
Quote Posted by hopper
That's because there is no need to defend the free speech of non-bigoted opinions. If everybody liked your opinions, why would anybody bother to "defend" your right to voice them? It'd be a bit like claiming that rain is wet. Not exactly wrong, just pointless.
I get the idea behind that argument, I even believed it myself once, but in the last ten years or so I've found that it doesn't really track when you look at the speech that doesn't get defended. Women without large platforms get kicked off social media all the time for things like using the wrong tone (or, sometimes, any tone) when talking about how men (in general) have hurt them, and the free speech crew are nowhere to be seen. Look at the attempts by right-wing groups and the US government to deplatform sex workers. Try talking clearly, consistently, and non-apologetically on most big sites about how bad problems like structural racism or sexual harassment are, and
why they persist, and you'll quickly find out how free speech really isn't all that free - especially if you're not white or not a man respectively.
So yeah, I'm all about the principle of free speech, but in real life it seems like its defenders are always out to prevent anyone from reducing the size of the platform of some bigot who is always punching down, but they'll stand idly by as personal - and political - experiences and analysis from vulnerable people are systematically suppressed. As far as I'm concerned, the bigots can have their free speech when the rest of us get ours.