I also think part of the problem is that people feel they have to pick one side or the other, and that they should identify as such. Since there are no other political or social options available (outside of libertarian or green party, or other fringe ones, which still have their flaws), I think people tend to pick one extreme or the other.
I 100% agree. We seem to have lost nuance at some point, right around the time everyone had to have a side. Rarely do you see a person say, “I agree with politician X on this issue, but he’s wrong about this other one.” Either you’re all in or all out and that just means that only the extremes have a voice.
Okay, and so what is your point with this? The point still stands that the left wants to burn everything to the ground and magically a utopian society will arise. I’m frustratingly centrist. This “Again “ that Trumpians want to go back to never existed, unless you were incredibly wealthy. A perfect example of the Left’s blindness is the Arab Spring. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve all forgotten this. The left was certain that the dictators would be tossed out and a free, just and equal society would arise. So how did that work out?
And this contributes to the discussion how? I could post a video about a transgendered child dancing for money on Patreon and we’d be in an endless loop of gotcha posts. There are items for sale in a capitalist economy that are in poor taste. The alternative is to have the state or the mob censor production. I have no faith that either of those two alternates will work out well. In your example, if the shirt has no market then the distributor will stop production.
There’s a gleeful destructive streak with the extreme left that rivals the racist streak on the extreme right. No desire to correct the system, but an almost zealous wish to be around for End Times when everything collapses. If we can pick a better time in the history of the world to be alive in, I’ll hear it. What’s more likely though is anarchy ruled by whoever carries the biggest stick.
I love how every time this comes up the people who adhere to this censorship nonsense start babbling about some irrelevant super bad like nazis or dismiss it with a cunty remark. You get more sincere engagement from fucking creationists. Then again if my beliefs were so brilliant I never needed to defend them I'm sure I'd do the same.
I forgot the part where the Left had any part at all in Arab Spring. Unlike W in Iraq. That definitely didn’t work out.
My point is that your argument that the left is more censorious than the right at a time when journalists are receiving constant death threats (and the occasional IED) from the right rings incredibly hollow. And your assertion that the left has some zealous desire to destroy Western Civilization and hope for a utopia is ridiculous and unfounded. The left is trying to save Western Civilization by relying on the guidance of the institutions it has built that has made it so prosperous.
I don't think relying gender/ethnic studies college curriculum is what made Western Civilization prosperous. They seem to be the most prominent players in the speech suppressing shout down tactics. Truly sad their more outlandish stances will eventually trickle into the governorship of this nation.
I'm referring to the academy more generally, and the scientific community specifically. The free press; the post-WWII international order; economic liberalism; the rule of law; equality under the law. Those sorts of things. Basically everything that Trumpism --which dominates the right whether you like it or not-- stands against.
Look, I really don't like Trump either, but this pretending that society is going to collapse any moment shit is just too much. He's going to suck for another 2 years or less if he gets impeached before that. Western civilization survived 24 months of Trump. They'll survive 24 more. His censorship attempts towards the media have been more of an addition to an ever growing list of national embarassments than anything really effective. Plus, he has less, not more power for the next 2 years. And if western society ever needs saving it won't be tumblr femninists complaining about manspreading that reset it on the correct course. Just saying.
So it turns out that Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin are cancelling their Patreon subscriptions. That has to be a blow for Patrion - I think Harris and Peterson were in the top 15 accounts, and Patreon must take a cut of everything they handle. It also seems like thousands of patrons have cancelled their accounts. I don't necessarily think that private platforms should not have the ability to police their own content. My problem, as many YouTubers and Patreon users have noted, is that they have no meaningful terms of service and that they seem to be applying rules in an arbitrary or, worse, targeted fashion. If Alex Jones, Milo and Sargon of Akaad can have their accounts unceremoniously shut down for vague rule violations that aren't even reflected in the terms, but other extreme leftists (who have used racist or "hateful" language) are left alone, it's a problem. If there's a rule, it has to be applied blindly to all members. My thinking on this is that anything defined as "speech" should be left alone, no matter how bothersome. Anything that can be defined as a call to action is an entirely different manner. "I hate minorities!" would therefore be okay (if ignorant and distasteful), but "Hit minorities with baseball bats!" is a censorship issue and perhaps a legal charge. I'm unsure how else to move forward. People have rightly made the claim that YouTube ought to have the ability to delete, say, ISIS propaganda. The problem then becomes where is the line and who gets to decide where an individual sits on that line? That's the heart of the matter, and the only solution I can think of is to differentiate between speech and action.
If Patreon goes out of business, they’ll be putting some of the biggest douchebags in America out of work. Just listening to their so called “Head of Trust and Safety” turns my spine into glass. :“We hand-hold creators. Work with them one on one, and nearly every creator reforms.” .....yeah, fuck you. You’re not trying to help content creators, you’re editing THEIR art to your liking and then taking a piece that you don’t deserve. Part of Patreon’s rules entail that any account can not be unsuspended until a “thorough and sincere public apology is given”. So I’ll never support Patreon, or anybody who uses it, EVER again. Content creators deserve to be paid, I’m sure we can all agree with that.. Just do it somewhere other than Patreon, who make money off editing art to their liking. I mean... what exactly is Patreon, other than a paid Manager that doesn’t do any work?
I can understand banning Alex Jones because some of the conspiracy theories he propagates actually do fuck with people's lives. I don't really care for Milo because I think he's just an act and one that gets old after the first time you've seen it, but his getting banned seemed really ridiculous. It seems most places just posted some ape meme that one of his fans posted as the apparent justification for banning Milo, but that doesn't make any sense to me. If one of his fans says something over the line why would he be totally responsible for it? Every celebrity has their dipshit followers, and maybe Milo has more than some, but I don't see why a celebrity should be responsible for something his fans say. If it wasn't that, then what was he even banned for? For making fun of someone? And seriously, how could Leslie Jones be THAT upset over what some trolls on the internet said? I really can't fathom how a celebrity could be so hurt over what some random trolls said. I caught up on the whole Sargon situation, and it's kind of bizarre, really. In the clip that got him banned it is really, really obvious that he's using the slur in a way to make fun of the alt right and not as an attack on black people, but a lot of the pages I read reporting/discussing insist it was a racist attack against black people. They also keep claiming that he's alt right. I just can't understand that. To think it was an attack on black people is pretty dumb, but how the fuck could you possibly conclude from a video insulting the alt right that he must therefore be alt right? I honestly don't know if people are just lying when they say shit like this, or they're actually that oblivious. Either scenario is really weird to me. I've watched a few of Sargon's videos. He's not alt right, or even right wing. He's pretty clearly left wing, but he's just part of a fairly large online left leaning community who bitches about the current left because they think it should be reformed. Sargon really isn't worth watching in my opinion because as far as I can tell he essentially just makes the same video over and over, but this seems to be the response to all of the content creators in that loose grouping of frustrated neckbeard online left wingers. The side of the left that disagrees with them wants to pretend they're right wing... for some reason. I don't really see what the purpose of that is supposed to be, or what it's supposed to accomplish. In the long run companies like Twitter and Patreon are just fucking themselves over. The segment of the population that they're catering to are really loud, but they're not in the majority. Personally, I think any of these companies should be able to do whatever they want. I think they should be allowed to ban people for any reason, no matter how frivolous or misguided. Eventually, they'll either lose a good chunk of their market share to an emerging competitor, or get wiped out completely. It kind of reminds me of what happened with EA recently. They promoted battlefield V in a really silly politically correct way, and then when their fans complained about a lack of historical accuracy they told them not to buy the game. Well, the fans listened and it ended up costing them millions of dollars in revenue.
I currently spend about $25 a month via Patreon to support content creators that I follow. I could care less about what Patreon does or says, as I don't consider it my place to tell the creator how he/she wants to get their cash. They have said, "hey, if you want to financially support this channel, please do so via Patreon", so that's what I'm doing. That being said, there are a few rather large YouTube creators that are now pulling out of Patreon, so it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. Overall the Patreon end-user experience really sucks, so they are in a prime position to be replaced by something that does the job better. And with the new "JOIN" feature at YouTube, it seems like that is one competitor that is catching up to them. They were the first into this space, I think, but they definitely won't be the last... they better get their head out of their asses before they just go away. Some prime targets for their replacement are payment processors like Stripe, or as mentioned, YouTube. YouTube can do the actual tie-in to the content itself, so that is a huge competitive advantage for them. Without that, you have to rely on hidden links for content, but that doesn't work well. For instance, with AVE, as soon as he posts a video link on his Patreon channel, it's all over Reddit and non-supporters get access. All in all, I could care less... it's not a big problem, I don't think, and it'll sort itself out eventually. Like all other outrage on the Intarwebs, it'll go away eventually as people move onto a new thing to be outraged about.
It was a little disturbing how hard it was to tell the difference between a Russian psy-op and a genuine home-grown American moron. One of the major newspapers made a quiz to see if you could tell the difference between a tweet that came out of the IRA and one that was from Trump himself and you realized the biggest tell was that the Russians used a more extensive English vocabulary.