A false equivalency. Persecuting innocent victims isn’t the same thing as avoiding or calling out predators and bigots.
There is no symmetry here. The Right is always a force of ignorance, irrationality, cruelty, malice, and tyranny; the Left is not. The Left can be good or bad, right or wrong; the Right is always in the wrong. Factually and morally.
If Sauron was real, he’d be right wing, and he’d fit right in. "Malice, cruelty and the will to dominate all life"is a succinct description of what the Right has always been about.
If when you write about how horrible and evil the right is, you actually mean neo-Nazis, you should really say neo-Nazis. Because billions of ordinary people identify as being on the right (conservative) and vote for right-of-center parties - surely you don’t want to accuse all of them of basically being Hitler?
? The internet is far less civilised than real life. It’s a place where people frequently forget the person behind the screen is person, and indulge all their worst impulses.
Real life is not always as good as we might wish, but I think there is far more of a consensus that direct aggression is bad and should not be tolerated/rewarded than there is for indirect aggression.
Basically this:
Contrary to @Der_Trihs , it’s obvious that, for example, many people blacklisted by McCarthy were in fact communists. And communism has killed 100m people. The people ostracised by conservative Christians for being atheists or questioning core beliefs also genuinely were atheists, or questioning those beliefs.
For leftists, questioning left-wing beliefs makes you a bad person (never mind that those beliefs may have changed by this time next year). For conservative Christians, questioning the existence of god, or other Christian beliefs makes you a bad person. The difference is entirely in the belief system of the beholder.
Yes, the politics in the US is pretty far to the right of the politics in most of Europe. By and large, European “conservatives” would be liberal members of the Democratic party in the the US.
@Irishman said ‘conservative’ in his post, and I said ‘conservative’ in my reply, and @Der_Trihs replied saying ‘right-wing bad’. So are we talking about the same people or not? The way I understand the terms, conservatives are right-wing (Merkel’s party is described as centre-right on Wikipedia, which seems correct) but the opposite is not necessarily the case. The alt-right and neoreactionaries are not conservative, for example.
‘Liberal’ is even worse, since Americans seem to use it to mean centre-left, or sometimes any kind of left-winger, even those who are decidedly illiberal (a distinguishing feature of what I think of as the woke left, but tankies are also illiberal).
Sorry, I meant civilized society ends where the internet begins.
Yes, the terminology conundrum is perplexing.
If I’m talking about Ted Cruz, John Cornyn (Texas Senators), Mitch McConnell, and Mike Johnson, I could call them “Republicans” for their political party name, or call them “conservative” for the American dichotomy terms used for the political divide.
If I start talking about MAGA, even though they are Republican and in the conservative party, they don’t actually hold conservative political views. They are autocratic, nationalist, and oppression of minorities. Yet the people who hold those views consider themselves conservatives and tend to hold conservative social ideas.
So “conservative” can apply or not apply anywhere in that spectrum depending upon the speaker and/or listener.
Similarly, a Democrat in this country is considered a liberal by our standards and are left of the other party even though in other countries you can’t be a liberal unless you are full socialist or even communist. Even American “progressives” seem less so than European ones.
But tell an American conservative that you are a liberal or progressive and they will equate you with an outright communist based solely on hyperbole. The American left does not have a very big communist presence.
And before we get a little bothsiderism going on, yes liberals are accusing a lot of the right of being fascists, but the difference is that the policies and actions of the political right are actually oppression and violence and anti-democracy. And those views are decidedly mainstream for the right.
Also, they aren’t trying to “conserve” anything, they stand for destruction and radical change to society. They’re radical reactionaries, not conservatives.
The Democrats are the conservatives, they stand for the status quo.
Well, yes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with “cancelling,” and virtually nobody actually thinks there is, either. “Canceling” is only bad when it’s done against something they agree with. Otherwise, it’s a “boycott,” or “consequences,” or “I’m just speaking my mind.” But almost everyone has a line where they think it’s okay for someone to suffer some form of consequence for expressing a sufficiently vile opinion. The only disagreement is where the line should be drawn.
Really? It’s a non-governmental, market-oriented tactic. “I don’t like what you’re saying, but rather than pass a law against you saying it, I’m just going to refuse to give you my money, and I’ll try to persuade other people to not give you their money, either.” What could be more classically liberal than that?
Classical liberalism includes the idea of free speech as a positive good that benefits society, not just in the narrow sense of supporting the US first amendment. Attempting to punish individual people for exercising their right to free speech is not liberal.
Probably there will always be some ideas so extreme that we decide it’s acceptable to ‘cancel’ them. But a wider field of ideas - greater freedom of thought - is good for society and for individuals, and narrowing that field - especially trying to suppress ideas that are widely held and/or have substantial evidence in their favour - is bad for society, especially in the long term.
The issue is that if you don’t allow ideas to be expressed, you don’t know if it’s for good or ill. Legalising gay sex was ‘obviously’ bad and immoral, until some people were brave enough to advocate for it and change minds. If you crush anyone trying to make the argument, that never happens.
That’s the conservative side. The left-wing one is to propose sweeping changes to society, and then silence anyone trying to argue against the new ideas or point out negative consequences. Then you go ahead with them and people suffer.
Allowing free speech is a major part of how you find out what’s true, and how to best run a society.
You can’t “cancel” someone for their speech until you’ve heard their speech. Well, i suppose you could, but that’s not generally what’s meant by “cancel culture”.
Is it okay to say, “you are in favor of torturing puppies, so i don’t want to invite you over to dinner”?
Free from threats of violence, or from government imposition, sure. But free from market forces? Never.
And that’s the end of the debate, isn’t it? Because you’ve agreed that canceling “extreme” opinions is acceptable. But what counts as “extreme?” Who makes that decision? And how do ideas move from the “socially acceptable” category to the “extreme” category?
Okay, but the idea that gay sex is “obviously bad and immoral” - that one we can cancel, right? Because it certainly had more than enough time to make its case. Or do we need to hold the door open for the possibility that gay sex might actually be bad and immoral, and we might need to ban it again?
Sorry, I’m not clear what part of the previous paragraph was “the conservative side.”
Sure, the way we all suffered after the success of the gay marriage movement, or the Civil Rights movement, or Women’s Suffrage. We should have paid more attention to the negative consequences of those things, I guess?