So, debating online the last few weeks, I kind of realized something. This new, modern, social justice left really is an existential threat to free speech. I mean, I kind of knew that they had illiberal views on the issue for a while, but watching how they operate on sites like reddit over the past few weeks have convinced me that something REALLY needs to be done about these guys.
The fact is, their cancel culture nonsense really is at odds with the idea of free exchange on the internet, and this is becoming apparent, especially on reddit. Reddit has long been a bastion of free speech. So much so that when they started cracking down on overtly racist subs back in 2015 and 2016 or so, people lost their crap over it. And by "overtly racist", we're talking subs that I won't even name because they literally had slurs in them. We're talking stuff like "####town" and "watch######sdie". Yeah, you get the idea, and if you were on reddit at the time, you know what I was talking about. I even defended their banning in 2016, because they were used as a base through which to harass people.
I feel like since then, reddit has been slowly captured by the SJW left. And subs that are critical of them are now targets. There's a popular subreddit called "againsthatesubs" that seems to call for labelling any sub that disagrees with their ideology hateful, and banning them. Their most recent victims were tumblrinaction and socialjusticeinaction, subs that were not overtly racist, sexist, ______phobic, or whatever, and even had rules against that behavior, but because of the nature of the people who are often against SJWs, many of them were right wingers and held those views. Anyway, banned.
When this happened, I actually decided to call out admins for this, posting a comment on one of the banned subs sister subs that remained up that this was ridiculous. I got some positive comments from it, pointing out that this was a problem since gamergate and that they were trying to warn people back then. Now, I largely ignored gamergate. It seemed like an unproductive crapfest. At the time, SJWs were a small vocal minority of idiots who I felt no one took seriously. And some gamers were acting in a sexist manner. So I just kind of both sidesed it. I mean, my views should be apparent who posts here, but I largely agree with the left's actual agenda. An inclusive society where people can do whatever they want is a good thing. I just don't agree with their MEANS to get there, which is much of what my criticism of them is about.
Anyway, this also triggered me to get banned from another sub automatically. Some SJW subs like to autoban people who post in anti SJW subs. Many of these kinds of subs arent even political, but some are. Basically, if you post on subs that "side with fascists" as they call it, you dont deserve to post on theirs. This seems to be a petty attempt to push people out of mainstream reddit spaces for daring to criticize the social justice ideology. It's an authoritarian attempt to punish people for not thinking like them. Basically cancel culture in action.
It get worse, I decided to send a snide comment to the moderation team of the sub that banned me, basically telling them to "get f---ed", and guess what, I get a harassment warning from the admins for it (note, reddit mods do not serve in any official capacity and are normal members of reddit who police their own communities, so telling them off is not really inherently a sleight against reddit itself, most of them are power hungry neckbeards with a "respect muh authoriteh" mentality, hence my disdain for them in this post). Apparently merely "directing an unwanted invective" at someone is "harassment" now. This change happened a few years ago, but I didn't really realize it until now. I mean, how often do people tell each other off on reddit? it happens all the time, doesnt it? But...apparently it's harassment now, on par with literal stalking behavior.
This is ridiculous. Reddit claims that they changed the TOS in response to user input that the old policy wasn't strong enough. The old policy essentially requiring people to follow people around reddit and repeatedly harass them. Basically stalk them. But then they changed it were merely telling someone off is "harassment" now. The logic behind this change was that we need reddit to be an open and inclusive environment where people arent discouraged from participating. HA, what a joke. I literally got banned from a sub I didn't even post on, because I dared post on another sub critical of SJW ideology, and then I get warned for talking back to the mod? Because me telling them off might somehow intimidate them and discourage them from participating on reddit?! Ain't I the one being intimidated and discouraged from participating? Basically, if you don't toe the line of SJW ideology, you don't deserve to post on reddit according to some. It's a joke. And it's gotten me thinking about the state of that site over the last few weeks.
Anyway, I didn't air my dirty laundry just to complain about that. I just felt the experience goes into the larger cultural shifts I've seen online in the past few years. It used to be that the internet was the wild west, that whatever was generally covered by the first amendment was accepted on many sites. Yes, you've always had some places that were a bit more sheltered, but reddit appealed to my laissez faire free speech oriented nature. I got into it posting on r/atheism, which had a strong undercurrent of free speech at the time. They didn't take crap off of anyone. Anyone telling them they were offended just caused them to get more offensive. Because they believed in freedom of thought. And only in an environment with freedom of thought, could secular ideas survive. Christians and religious people were the ones who wanted to censor people. It were the christians who were snowflakes who couldnt handle their religion being criticized. And often the concept of civility was a way to tone police people from being criticized. Muslims didnt like you drawing muhammad? They made draw muhammad day to trigger the muslims. They would have blasphemy day and stuff like that. You might think that's immature, but if you were supportive of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and not bowing down to the fundies, well, you would be willing to break norms intentionally in order to normalize it.
But...this modern left isn't like that. Everything needs to be polite, civil, politically correct. You cant offend people. You can't hurt peoples' sensibilities. If you dont toe the line you deserve to be cancelled. Deplatformed, removed from online spaces. They'll act all stuffy and self righteous about it like "free speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences", but, anyone familiar with my economic ideology should see the problem with this. You can be free, but if you dont have an environment that allows you to exercise your freedom, it doesn't actually exist and only exists on paper. You can be "free" and not a slave, but if your environment leaves you no other option but to work for a living, you will give your labor much like a slave. If you are free to speak, but you are pushed out of any place to actually speak, then you aren't really free. ANd that's where the left goes wrong with freedom of speech. If freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, and the consequences involve sanctioning people or removing them from online common spaces, well, they're not really free to speak, are they?
And that's the insidiousness of this ideology. It's effectively illiberal, and believes in building a better world by punishing people for wrong think. Don't get me wrong, they have good intentions. But to be fair, so do the christians on their little moral crusades to ban anything that doesn't toe the line of christianity. It's the problem with every authoritarian ideology. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But you know what? When I left the cave, I decided to be better than that. I never believed in BANNING right wing views, nor did most of the atheist community when they were mainstream. They would relentlessly mock religion, but they believed in freedom of speech in a relatively unfettered way. As long as you weren't harassing people (and no, harassment doesn't mean just being mean to someone in the internet), or doing something that violated the first amendment, it was generally okay. Maybe using the N word or something would get you pinched, but that was about it.
Take the modern issue with abortion. This isn't new. We've been having this argument with the right for 50 years, and we largely won it. And we won it in relatively free environment. But then Hillary came along, held the country hostage in 2016, while screaming BUT THE COURT, and she ended up losing the most winnable election to an orange moron who was able to pack the court with religious extremist justices.
And now, SJWs are mainstream, and they're LOSING to the right, because they're so insufferable and piss people off. Wanna know why a lot of atheists were so pro free speech? Part of it was a true genuine belief, but let's face it, many of us wanted to see religion disappear. But, we wanted it to happen naturally and organically. We didn't want to threaten Christian's rights, we wanted to make them leave religion voluntarily. Most of us were people who DID leave religion. We got religion. And here's the thing about the religious right. They have a massive persecution complex. They would always scream that people were trying to take away their rights. THe last thing you wanted to do was to play into their little paranoid fantasies as it just emboldened them and made us look like the bad guy. No, we wanted to make them look stupid, and say, "look, we dont want to persecute you for your views, we'd rather debate you and mock you than ban you."
The modern left isn't like that. There was a thread on reddit recently on r/bestof praising some authoritarian reddit mod for banning people from their sub who posted pro life views. I criticized this, only to be met with downvotes and a ton of hostile comments. Some were receptive to me in the comments, but most were just toeing the line of their "paradox of intolerance" nonsense and going on about how we shouldnt have to dignify the views of "christofascists" (notice how everyone who doesn't agree with them is a "fascist" now, or a "fascist enabler"?). And look, i get it, dealing with the right can be annoying and exhausting. I myself have gotten dillahunty syndrome from dealing with the right, and I largely avoid social issues because im so burnt out on them, I feel like my talents are better spent discussing economics mostly. But, that doesn't mean you have the right to ban them. They should have a right to spout their crap on a public forum, just as we have ours. They shouldn't be forced out of an online space just for having bad views.
But that's the problem with the left. They do believe in this "paradox of intolerance", in which we can't "tolerate the intolerant", because they will destroy a free society. It's the same mentality as "bash the fash' a few years back where they believed in just physically assaulting alt righters. But that isn't the right way. As I see it, if you act like that, at this stage in the game, you're just as bad as them. Both of you want to restrict freedom in their own way. The social justice left doesn't really believe in free speech and seems to want society to be a massive case of groupthink, in which "wrongthink" is banned and punished. And the right...well they want to restrict various freedoms too.
But for me, there's a difference between saying you WANT to do something and actually doing it. You can say you want to ban people for having bad views, and most people should, much like pre 2016, be like "no that's stupid, don't you believe in freedom of speech?" And that's how I literally approach the far right. No, you shouldn't be allowed to ban abortion, gay marriage, on the basis of your religion, screw off (OOPS I can't say that any more, because that is "harassment" and might offend someone too). And that's kind of the issue. I can't even SAY that in some spaces any more. We can't just work out our differences in a good old fashioned flame war or trollfest. I can't even address these people properly because of all of this civility nonsense.
Honestly, you might have some people just think I'm an uncouth loudmouth. I actually had someone say my idea of speech is like a 2000 era xbox live lobby. And you know what? You're not wrong. It was a simpler time. The internet was the wild west. People who didnt like each other would just trash talk each other. No one really took it personallly, except snowflakes. Maybe stuck on morons got offended, and they pressured these companies to change, and now you cant say anything. Minecraft just got taken over my microsoft, and now they're suggest to their insanely snowflake TOS. Reddit shifted from a bastion of free speech, to an SJW crapfest where it isn't even safe to express unsanctioned views on the site. Everything is getting way too touchy, and way too sensitive. And it sickens me. Yeah, I'd literally go back to unmoderated call of udusty lobbies than deal with this garbage.
Anyway, I know this one is gonna be controversial with some. Political correctness seems to be the default stance among the left, but you know what? Bite me. Maybe I'm a dinosaur of the 2000s and early 2010s socially. What's wrong with that? Things were a lot better than this woke garbage. And you know what? We had rightoids back then too. None of the views they have, other than overturning elections, are new. What's new is this new modern left being unwilling to tolerate anything that isn't them, because it's intolerance. And that is just as dangerous of an ideology as the far right in my views. I support freedom, period.
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