Some might wonder why I spend so much time defending right wingers and their freedom of speech, when I'm a leftie. I mean, why am I "carrying water for fascists" as I've been accused of? Well, it's simple. Because I support the right to free speech, period. If you remove people from forums for having bad opinions, do you really have free speech in the first place? Free speech becomes merely what society deems acceptable. Which undermines the entire freaking point.
But I also have other reasons for opposing such measures. The fact is, i used to be a right winger, as I've implied before. And how did I get out of it? Because I was able to actually debate these topics. I had opinions that these SJWs now call "fascist". Did I consider myself a fascist? no, and i wasn't, the word is as overused as "communist" is on the right. While I accuse Trump and some modern GOPers of that, it's because they tend to have blatantly authoritarian and anti democracy tendencies. But normal conservatives are just people who mean well. They just have a different system of ethics. And while their ethics is ignorant and uninformed, I don't know how anyone expects to get them out of their mindset by punishing them for their views.
I mean, most of these bad right wing opinions are based in religion. Abortion, gay marriage opposition, transgenderism opposition, all based in a specific christian worldview. And it is that worldview that we need to challenge. But, if you just punish people for having those views. Man, Christians just clam up, hunker down, and throw out the persecution complex. You see, the Bible tells them that the world will hate them and try to persecute them for their beliefs. And many are willing to sacrifice and even die to maintain their moral rightness with God. Punishing these guys from forums isn't going to do crap.
Even worse, it's just going to cause them to occupy the spaces that WILL accept them. Which happen to be radical right wing places. If right winger can't post on reddit and twitter and facebook, they'll take their business to patriots.win (the_donald's new home) and 4chan. And they'll just radicalize into extremists.
If anything, this kind of behavior, of people going into their little social media safe space bubbles where everyone agrees with them is why American society is becoming so polarized. Lefties only talk to other lefties and end up becoming extremists. Rightoids do the same. And as a result, no one is listening to each other, and the two sides become further and further apart. There's already a massive worldview divide between left and right. But, as someone who left "the cave" (the cave being that right wing christian view) and who has shifted to be part of the secular left, these new SJW types don't talk to other people. They are intolerant, to go back to my last article. They don't believe in having a discourse with a right winger, they believe in banning them or punishing them or denying them redemption for their views.
And as a result they are pushed away, become more polarized and more extreme.
I want to make things clear. Every idea I have, generally speaking, comes from deeply held principles that I have picked up over the course of my life. I have been on the right, I've been on the left. Now I'm some weird blend of independent center leftie.
It's weird, back in 2016 I considered myself "left of left". I had this radical secular worldview in a country dominated by Christians, and I had economic views that weren't quite socialist, but many would believe they were all the same. My views now are unthinkable to me as a conservative.
But I got here. Because that's where the evidence left me.
But this post 2016 environment is just crazy to me. You got lefties veering into illiberal socialist views, and you got SJWs who are completely intolerant of others. And then the democrats are just so weak and to the center with their convictions that it's just driving these guys further left.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole overton window is expanding, but it's expanding too much where dangerous ideologies, both on the left and the right are being let in. And while I don't believe the answer is to censor opinions, clearly something has to be done.
What we need to do is to win hearts and minds, the positive way. Not through force or fear, but through winning their hearts. I believe that some conservatives and christians are redeemable. I believe that some lefties need to tone their crap down. I think that most people are fundamentally good, but their ideas can at times be bad. But they have to learn from them.
All this hatred of the other I see on both sides is just driving us further apart, and it's getting scary. I know I was skeptical of Andrew Yang's "grace and tolerance" thing when he came out, as I do clearly take a side on the culture wars and will civilly, and sometimes uncivilly disagree with others, and I do believe that we need our side to win out over their side. But we should never forget peoples' humanity. I feel like this is being lost so much in modern online discourse. The extremes on both sides treat the other side like an existential threat to their existence, and that's dangerous. In some ways more dangerous than the threats these guys present us with.
This isn't to say we can't dunk on the right. Dunk on away. They deserve a lot of criticism. But that's the point of freedom of speech. So we can actually have these discussions, even if uncomfortable, and sometimes heated. I know I get heated too. If anything, I get annoyed when these censor happy SJWs tell me I cant get heated with people because it might hurt someone's feelings. But that doesn't mean we should deny people their humanity or kick them off of forums just for disagreeing with us.
Anyway, I had an article on this, but rereading it, it ended up coming out poorly, so I rewrote it, and that's what this is. If you're wondering what happened to the other one.
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