- Aug 2, 2006
- 34,221
- 29,550
Some real avant- gard views there osh kosh bosh
I swear, everytime you post about issues like this, it’s interesting and wild how you completely leave out history of this type of ****, when it comes to speech. You act like we’ve always lived in some society, where all voices have been treated equally .
I don't know how you came to that conclusion?
I didn't say "everything has been equal up until now"
im commenting on the dynamics about speech and culture today.
not across entire human history.
Of course all voices were not being treated equally.
and for most of my life it was traditionally progressives who were arguing for wider range of speech.
and it's been the conservative and racist voices engaging in suppression.
that why I find it so bewildering for progressive to be arguing for giant corporations
to exert great control over speech and expression.
people who have historically had no voice, or talked to anyway…finally get a medium and platform to say….”this isn’t okay”…And you cry unfair cancel culture. It’s reductive. People are free to say annnnyyything that they want. Of course you know there are consequences.
There are two problems.
1. is it creates a framework where any amount of suppression can be justified if you can frame it as the protection of marginalized people.
you don't see how this can be disengeously abused by the most mendacious people in any group?
this constantly happens in book publishing, authors get early copies of books and they grab quotes that a racist or sexist character says
and they use that to foment an online mob against the author.
I don't actually think it's just marginalized people finally getting a voice,
I think it's also disingenuous actors using marginalized groups as a cudgel to pursue their own agenda.
2. It's fine for people can say they don't like something,
my problem is framing disagreement as bigotry and delegitimizing dissent.
unless an idea is super marginal you can't use suppression to get rid of it
all you do is create an environment where life is like jane austen comedy of manners
where everyone has to memorize and arcane series of speech rules,
but basically maintain the same beliefs
you can't suppress your way to justice, you actually have to persuade people.
so imo this culture of shunning
doesn't benefit anyone other than college educated cultural elites.
It’s like you have this abstract idea of some libertarian fantasy world…where some cultural liberal elites are silencing conservative voices all over America because of some power of pressure , and they are helpless to say words or right things anymore, because of the big bad cancel culture. When in fact, they DOMINATE media. On all platforms. And literally have a bunch of silicon valley right wing libertarians (thiel and zuck) giving preferential treatment and boosting algorithms for them.
contemporary popular media and culture is dominated by progressives.
Conservatives are popular on facebook because facebook is for old people now.
The Zuckerberg example proves my point.
Zucks bet on the metaverse is essentially a recognition of this,
he knows facebook brand is tarnished with young people, and he's trying to get in early on the next communication space prime demographics will occupy.
the most valuable consumer demographic is young people
and young people are by in large progressive, so music, tv film, is going to try mirror their perspective.
Look at where we are today man. Nothing could be further from the truth. We, us…grew up in a time and entered the workforce in times where we couldn’t even fully express ourselves as black people to the fullest. All are education was whitewashed. Our speech actually denied. Music. Censored. Entertainment black balled and otherwised to be completely outside the mainstream . Even comedians in the 90s…having to perform at black clubs.
It was not that long ago, that Michael Jackson…in the midst of arguably the biggest album of all time…couldn’t get on MTV. Prince, couldn’t get played in the Midwest. Where he’s from.
all this is true, what does it have to do with the point im making?
the fact that white socitey and conservatism once had greater control of culture
it means that anything progressives do today is okay? huh?
Seriously tho man, that **** is annoying and offensive when you play these imaginary semantic games, over things and ideas and movements we’ve seen in history real time…time and time over.
Ppl of course aren’t perfect, and ppl searching online for “gotcha” moments to mark people as bad, can be annoying. But that’s not really doing anything.
The people that suffer consequences for their f-d up speech, have it coming.
stop with this "imagning" stuff
YOU yourself say that now marginalized voices have more of voice to say "this is not okay" today vs the 90's
so something HAS changed.
i'm not imagining anything, you just think it's good. that's fine
I don't agree totally. but acting like it's all imaginary just seems contradictory.