The left and right are not equal. The left does not rely as much on lies to advocate its positions, and the left is not as oriented around destruction and regression as the right.
We need a more robust understanding of speech than “allowed or not”. Emphasis & volume matters.
If you listen to the intolerant wing of the right, the parts that would legitimately support overturning elections and arresting political opponents, they sound eerily similar to your sentiment.
It’s a thought stopping theory that allows you to remain smug and correct despite being deeply ignorant.
Something needs to be done. Free speech maximalism is a threat.
To be honest, that's hilariously false. The left suppressed Hunter Biden's laptop story for two years, saying it was misinformation, before admitting it was true. The IRS targeted right-wing and Christian non-profit organizations deliberately for auditing. Obama claimed that forcing nuns to buy health insurance covering birth control was necessary, and claimed you could keep your doctor under Obamacare, which even PolitiFact called a Pants-on-Fire Lie. The left claimed that a baker needed to make a personalized cake supporting gay rights, or it would open the waves to discrimination, even though the baker was willing to sell any other cake to them that wasn't customized with that particular label.
I can go on and on.
Edit: are our neoliberal overlords a bunch of cold hearted shit heads? Yes. Should we elect and promote barely disguised fascists in response? No.
Who the fuck cares about Maxine waters?
> it’s not the one you think
Yes it is.
They don't need to because they have cool Twitter alternatives. Like Mastodon.
It existed before.
Open source, such that anyone can use it
"On the right, banning books means trying to prevent their kids from reading them. But on the left it often means trying to prevent anyone from reading them." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515563419386191880
> We, the members of the OUP USA Guild, are calling upon our colleagues and authors to take a stand against the upcoming publication of “Gender-Critical Feminism”. Sign the petition below (OUP employees and authors only).
Yeah, that's not a "ban", and "gender critical feminism" = TERFs. Ie, "people who think trans women are faking it so they can rape women and children in bathrooms or 'cheat' 'the system'"
Remind me which side thinks businesses have a constitutional right to refuse to serve people if it violates their "beliefs"...yet finds it unacceptable that unionized workers are objecting to publishing of research on a subject?
Also, remind me which side is boycotting a major entertainment company...because said company's CEO voiced displeasure...at a bill that bans any language referencing non-straight gender orientations?
I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.
It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).
Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.
The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.
That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter."
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864