Mindreading.
> They literally don’t care about the fallout their language has on society as long as it brings them political power.
Mindreading. Possible projection too, but I don't want to engage in mindreading.
> become aware of the many realities encoded in speech and avoid saying things that negatively impact others
Get a time machine, tell that truck to James Madison. Tell it to John Stuart Mill.
There is one proven way of raising consciousness and of expanding the possibilities of consciousness, and that's free speech. Every other mode of conceptualizing the kaleidoscope of realities leads to bad places. Every other mode other than free speech is a blasphemy against the Enlightenment. I will defend your right to blaspheme of course, but reserve my right to sneer at your "dialectic" and at your deeply broken toxic simile about how "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons".
s/like/in lieu/, and we should be damn grateful for it.
Your initial point that GP is making an unsubstantiated claim about the intentions and strategy of a large group of people with diverse motivations is a good one, but the claim is stated in a rather unproductive way that detracts from your argument (significantly).
> Get a time machine, tell that truck to James Madison. Tell it to John Stuart Mill.
This second argument seems like a straw man to me. The GP is not saying that we should apply new ideas about speech to past thinkers. GP is instead simply stating that the left happens to have these ideas about speech and that this is the intention of them.
> There is one proven way of raising consciousness and of expanding the possibilities of consciousness, and that's free speech. Every other mode of conceptualizing the kaleidoscope of realities leads to bad places. Every other mode other than free speech is a blasphemy against the Enlightenment. I will defend your right to blaspheme of course
Once again, I think that your argument here that free speech is the only way to raise consciousness is an interesting one with significant merit, but the subsequent straw man really derails it. You imply that the GP is "blaspheme[ing]" free speech, but GP does no such thing.
> I will defend your right to blaspheme of course, but reserve my right to sneer at your "dialectic" and at your deeply broken toxic simile about how "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons".
This bit doesn't really add much. "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons" is not a simile, and sneering at GP's use of the word dialectic + the scare quotes doesn't really add anything substantive to your previous assertions.
NB: I suspect that this comment will come off as overly patronizing, and I apologize in advance. I hope that this will at least add to a constructive discussion of this topic, and help other readers focus on some important points in the parent's post.
> the claim is stated in a rather unproductive way
Do you mean, identifying it as "mindreading" in this terse way is unproductive, or the subsequent phrasing and is unproductive?
> The GP is not saying that we should apply new ideas about speech to past thinkers
Oops, that wasn't what I meant to imply. My point was, JM and JSM would roll over to hear what I saw as GP's (recently revised) weasel words, e.g. "negatively impact" for "harm", employed towards what I saw as GP's desire to delegitimize large swaths of the political spectrum. But maybe that's some mindreading of my own.
I had a visceral reaction to what I read as GP's roundabout argument against free speech. It seems to me like GP is imputing and denouncing the motives of people they dislike, and questioning the legitimacy of people's free speech rights given that GP know's what's in their soul. Do you see where I'm coming from here?
< is not a simile
How not?
Indeed he had a point there. In my defense, talking about something as vaguely as “the right” or “the left” is always slippery terrain, especially without lenghty definition.
When I write “the right” one person might think about the extreme right fringes while others think I speak about everything right from the center. Additionally right movements from different areas differ, so as someone who grew up in Austria and lives in Germany our right are clearly nazis, while the right in the US might have more diverse movements on top of the classical fascist right that I meant (e.g. libertarians).
As I said: the right tries to speak reality into beeing. You might disagree and and tell me that “everybody” knows these where just figures of speech and not meant to be taken literally, like the thing with the mexicans that will pay for the wall. But wouldn’t that proof my point that the right tries to talk things into existence?
On the other point: The right does suddenly care less about free speech when it is in power (historically) or when the speech doesn’t fit their ideas. Also for that there are countless cases, while I know of no case with a right wing government or dictator where they suddenly valued dissenting voices and free speech.
As you might have guessed I am not an American and while I know free speech is valued immensly in the US, I am afraid that a democracy abolishing fascist movement would find their way to re-interpret it in a way they can jail their enemies (as communist spies or something).
So I am sorry to say this, but desperate tries to bend reality with words will not undo stated fact. Not even with the toxic smile you paint on my face.
So I’d argue that there is a dialectic relationship between the speech sensitivity on the left and the post-truth-I-know-it-is-false-but-I-will-say-it-anyways-tactics of the right.
And that isn’t the case because speech is a thing the left wants to take away from the rest of us ― no, speech itself has become the battlefield on which the decisions about the future are carried out. Both the left and the right have understood this. So I said the left and the right are in a dialectic relationship when it comes to speech. Here is what this means: As the discourse is getting more and more unhinged and boundaries we traditionally had are completely gone: things that were unspeakable a decade ago are now said in the news.
So the left is in their own weird way trying to keep control about what should and shouldn’t be said. The right on the other hand tries to expand what can be said, because it gives them an advantage. They literally don’t care about the fallout their language has on society as long as it brings them political power. The raw discourse certainly helps to divide the public into binary camps and the hope on the right is that the speech-aware left can be beaten by a right that is not bound to any ethical consideration when it comes to their choice of words. In fact the reason why the language on the right is so unhinged is because they belive it gives them a tactical advantage and not because any of them believes in free speech per se.
So the left tries to change speech in such a way, that the speaker should become aware of the many realities (race, class, gender, culture, ...) encoded in speech and avoid saying things that negatively impact others. The right literally tries to speak things into existence in a way that acts as a tribal identity in times where tribes cannot exist without friction. So where the left has accepted this post-tribal state of affairs and wants to respect as many realities as possible (and sometimes more) the right does the polar opposite and needs to keep as many realities as possible (and sometimes more) out of their speech in order to maintain the group.
That beeing said they are both phenomena that are rooted in the structural changes our societies are going through as a consequence of the internet and the fall of the soviet union (which meant for the first time capitalism didn’t had a socialist counterpart and there was no need to look social anymore).