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The Extreme Center Keeps Banning Its Critics (jacobin.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/DeclineIntoCensorship@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

So leftists have free rein to promote crushing free speech now, right? We can stop pretending Nazis have equal free speech rights now, can't we?

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Not really. Crushing the Nazis' free speech doesn't do any harm at all to their ability to talk with one another, but it does insulate them from the wider community that might otherwise be able to talk sense into them. Also, it provides an environment where it's a lot harder to recover free speech for the leftists once things recover to a more stable civil society.

    Every case is different of course, sometimes it is okay to censor for particular reasons, but in general my opinion is that reducing insulation between communities is better.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I will counter that we got Nazis because Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, allowing corporations to buy up all the media and turn them all into Nazi propaganda outlets.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Centralized control of media is a huge problem, and yes gradually deregulating it and getting rid of the guard rails had a lot to do with that. Capitalism is just dangerous in general, you need to have strong safeguards for it once it gets too big. I'm not really in agreement that that has anything to do with censoring Nazis in leftist spaces though.

    For one thing, the actual literal Nazis are generally so unpopular that they get booted regardless of any kind of philosophy conversation. A lot of the time it seems like those "deplatforming" efforts seem like they're targeted at someone who's not really a Nazi, but just someone who is trying to publish some leftist thing on Substack (which is Officially Problematic (TM) because Richard Spenser is there), or said something which a very cursory reading could consider as transphobic, or something like that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I am convinced that the GOP and their voters are in fact actual literal Nazis so I question the claim of their unpopularity since they hold the most power and have the highest rated programs. I see no reason whatsoever to further allow their psychotic agenda to be promoted.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    GOP are not literal Nazis, although they are fascists and fulfill the Nazi part of basically any analogy to what's currently going on with 1930s Germany. I was talking about literal Nazis. There's a small overlap between literal swastika Nazis and MAGA Republicans but they're not the same thing.

    The supporters definitely aren't literal Nazis. They're victims of propaganda. They might be dangerous, we might even have a war, but assigning all the blame to them instead of recognizing the real source of the infection in their brains, I strongly disagree with. Maybe like 10% of them are genuinely just bad people who are glad of an opportunity to fuck up the immigrants or whatever, but most are just confused by the news they consume until they literally can't tell up from down and think they're doing the right thing.

    they hold the most power and have the highest rated programs. I see no reason whatsoever to further allow their psychotic agenda to be promoted.

    This part, I agree with. That was why I was saying it needs to go by a case by case basis. Providing a signal repeater (of sorts) for MAGA propaganda is very bad. One of the really notable features is that most of the MAGA propaganda isn't really "speech," in that it doesn't really allow any kind of disagreement and is deliberately crafted to disable mechanisms that might let people disagree with it or talk sensibly about the issues. So yeah, I'm very much against posting or allowing pro-Trump news outlets, for example, even though that might look like "free speech" and in a technical sense I guess it would fall under that heading.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm sure that many feel the same way you do, but when the goals are the same as literal Nazis and the ideology is the same as literal Nazis and the tactics used are the same as the literal Nazis and the literal Nazis got all their ideas from US conservatism then I conclude that they are all literal Nazis. All of them were raised to believe that Nazis were bad, freedom was good, and we are all obviously an immigrant melting pot. They chose to reject all of that along with the social contract we all have as a society. They didnt do it because someone told them to; they did it because they felt that they could start saying it aloud. They can be friendly, pleasant, fun at BBQs and will help you replace your alternator but they are still Nazis.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    They chose to reject all of that along with the social contract we all have as a society.

    This is the key part I want to disagree with. There's this impression among the sensible-thinking people in the US that the 1/3rd of the country that supports Trump is actually aware of what's going on, and supports it. They are not. Their news is full of incredible degrees of deliberate lying, such that anyone who comes up and tries to even tell them the reality of what's happening, they think is just lying maliciously on purpose.

    They don't know about CECOT. They don't know about the corruption. They don't know about innocent people getting snatched up. They think Biden fucked up the economy, and Trump is going to fix it, and Democrats are whining and making up all these crimes that Trump allegedly committed that he really didn't do. It's really, really difficult to grasp how distorted their view of reality is.

    This is why part of the occupation in Germany after the war was setting up movie theaters and rotating people through, showing them films of literally what had been happening. They didn't know (you could say they should have known something was wrong, and they kind of did on some level, but they legit didn't know the full extent). Some of them were crying in the theaters. It wasn't that they all thought "yay concentration camps, let's kill all the Jews." They didn't know.

    I'm not making excuses for them. I'm saying you have to understand the problem to solve it.

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