Tom Cotton's editorial was not run in social media. This is much, much bigger than social media. Also, do you understand that you're advocating self-censorship? How is that a positive development for a liberal democracy, when large swathes of the population just remove their voices from the public debate out of fear for the "shoot first, don't ask questions" social justice mob?

You call it self-censorship. I call it opsec. In case you haven't noticed, we don't live in a "liberal democracy". We live in a police state, where anything you say or write can be held against you, and you're lucky if it happens in a court of law.

I am very liberal in my politics and there should definitely be a way to moderate people's opinions on platforms.

Most of us moderates were shamed off social media years ago. I locked myself out of my HN account because I was tired of being flame baited by Woke tyrants. Don't use Facebook, don't use Twitter. This new ideology seems more popular than it is because the sane people have left the internet. Most of us keep quiet about this stuff because any wrong think will end our careers.

Congrats, Woke people. You'll never know the size of your opposition until election day because you've made it too dangerous to question the narrative openly.

You claim to be a moderate, but you speak as though you are quite politically biased, and emotionally so (though I can only go on tone here, since you didn't give specific examples). Lately there is a lot of usage of the word "moderate" to simply mean "I have clearly left or right ideologies, but want to sound like I'm above the rabble", and you should consider this pitfall.

The silent majority is bigger than any of us think. Angry twitter mobs give misleading impressions. Watching company after company, institution after institution cave to demands from the outraged woke-culture has completely pushed me the opposite direction.

I will never post any of these beliefs online under my real name. But I will vote.

If it was this easy to push you in the opposite direction, all it means is that you never had any core convictions to begin with. I find it easy to sympathize with people frustrated by the modern left, but I fundamentally don't understand the people who look at the horrendous, despotic, corrupt shit that the party in power is doing, and are more than happy to cover their eyes and ears just because they feel slighted by the other side.

I know myself well, and no matter how "bad" the left gets, there is no possible future in which I could vote for a party built around venerating money, imposing control, flaunting their lack of empathy, and — yes — propagating white supremacy. If, at some point in the distant future, the Democratic party becomes "literally Soviet Communism" (in quotes because I find this laughably unlikely, but w/e) then I guess I'll just have to stop voting, or vote for a third party. Frankly, I'm much more concerned about the US turning into a fascist hellhole to worry about that remote possibility right now.

Maybe you aren't a moderate? I mean, you literally are calling anyone who participates in the internet these days insane. That hardly scans as a moderate take.

The ground has shifted. Someone who was a moderate in 1995 would be considered "alt-right" today.

This is pretty hyperbolic. Somebody who was "moderate" in 1995 could be considered left-leaning or right-leaning today, depending on their specific politics, and in fact, without any specific context like "internet free speech", I would think a majority of them would be considered more left-leaning on average today. And even if that isn't true, the alt-right is a pretty specific flavor of hate-motivated shitposters, not just "people who are heavily right-leaning".

If alt-right has any meaning at all, I agree that it ought to refer to rather extreme beliefs. In practice, the left uses it as an all-purpose slur to refer to the half of the country that voted for the current President. (Hence my quotes.) These days, the only thing the word means is that the one uttering it is being an ass.

As a more specific example, though, Hillary Clinton was considered a moderate in the 90s. Back then she notably referred to Black youths as "superpredators". I think anyone doing so today would be seen as pretty far right. That's an example of the ground shifting.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/28/reince-pri...

I've been a moderate in 1995. At no point did I buy into ideology that we currently associate with the alt-reich.

> At no point did I buy into ideology that we currently associate with the alt-reich.

With phrasing like that you've certainly bought into some ideology.

The alt-right has a strong relationship to Nazi ideologies, "ironic" or not, and the parent is therefore reasonable in pointing out that it's an inappropriate comparison to 1995 moderate politics, regardless of left vs right opinions. The GP could have just said "far right". Now, if the parent was accusing a specific person of being alt-right, you could absolutely have a case against him based on how reasonably the label was being applied.

You're using the term "alt-right" like it is a monolithic thing, but it's not. The person I was replying to obviously wasn't using the term "alt-reich" as a nuanced description. It was a bad-faith smear.

Edit: policies that were once held by people like Bernie Sanders on immigration or Bill Clinton on crime are now considered "alt-right", but would have been considered well within the mainstream in 1995.

I'm with him - the internet somehow works as competition for who is most extreme. Sane, healthy people neither have the need nor the time to engage with this.

Consider that I couldn't agree more with your statement, yet to me, the GP post sounds exactly like (one side of) the extremists we're discussing.

I don't have any hard data backing this up, but in my experience most moderates who are exposed to the state of discourse on Twitter agree it's kinda crazy.