So, I've seen some rather disturbing media spin to the whole Elon Musk takeover of twitter. The corporate liberal media seems to be portraying this as a moral panic in which "hate speech" is on the rise, and how that's bad, and OMG, we need to DO SOMETHING about this. Maybe I'm a bit old fashioned, growing up in the wild west days of the internet, but why? Why is this such a big deal? I'm going to be honest. I don't endorse ANY hateful views. I want to make that clear. But I AM a libertarian of sorts, and I tend to trend toward the whole free speech absolutism line. That doesn't mean I support complete free speech absolutism, but I support it about as far as SCOTUS is willing to take it, where unless you're inciting violence, making direct threats, or something along those lines, your political speech is generally protected under the first Amendment. It seems like few people actually believe that these days, especially on the left. Mind you, the right proclaims beliefs in it but given they're doing their own moral panics over drag queens and transgender people and "wokeness", I can't really say they care about it either. But hey, I don't feel responsible for the right. I feel responsible for the left. The left is my side of the aisle, and generally speaking I do not believe they do a good job speaking for me these days. Especially on these issues.
Back in the day, the dividing line in culture wars was clear. The right wanted to tell people what to do with their religious nonsense, and the left just wanted a world where everyone tolerated each other, and we were all free to live as they want. Sure, there have always been some more authoritarian "paradox of tolerance" types of lefties, my pastor in Christian school used to rail against them all of the time while being anti homosexuality, but as I kind of found out later, at the time at least, those lefties were more a strawman of the left, not the actual left. What allowed me to actually come over to the left was the fact that those kinds of crazies were extremists who didn't represent modern liberalism, and that most liberals were far more chill.
But as we live in this post 2016 environment and how there has been a cultural revolution where the right is more mask off on the racism and the left is more mask off on their own authoritarian woke BS, I feel like an alien to both sides. I just wanna be left alone, man. I don't care about all of these BS causes and that includes the left and all of their woke nonsense. Do I generally speaking support a world in which we're all tolerant of each other? Sure, but I don't believe in mandating it, or suspending peoples' rights over this crap. The fact that the corporate media screams "WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT HATE SPEECH!" Just...alienates me. It's not that I like hate speech, it's that I like freedom, and I feel like the left is falling into this same weird moral panic BS our parents did when talking about Harry Potter, Pokemon cards, and drugs in our Halloween candy. OMG THIS IS A PROBLEM WE NEED TO DEAL WITH IT. And thus, a whole generation got sucked into this weird authoritarian tough on crime BS. It literally took us decades, and a new generation of people not indoctrinated into this crap, to break this mindset. And now the left is going right back into it again. It's bad enough that the right does this stuff. But, as we should know by now, for all they scream about freedom, right wingers are very culturally authoritarian. For all of their talk about the government being bad, they sure like using it to push their moral views and censor people for their moral panics, and that is wrong. But you know what? It's just as wrong for the left to do this too. I keep saying it, the reason I hate the woke left is they remind me of the religious right in a lot of ways. They have the same religious zealotry, and the same authoritarianism and moral panic toward views that they don't support. It sickens me.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe in the paradox of tolerance. I believe that free speech means that people have a right to be hateful. I believe people have a right to be stupid. I have come around on the idea of "hate crimes", something I was opposed to in my conservative days, on the basis that motive is an aggravating factor in the determining the severity of a crime. Negligent homicide is considered less severe in the eyes of the law than first degree murder, for example. And hate crimes implies a motive based in intentional malevolence. BUT, I honestly only restrict that to the commission of things that are otherwise crimes, or should be as they cause bodily harm to others.
Hate speech isn't that. Hate speech is just people saying stuff that is deemed hateful toward a particular group, and i kind of put the idea of outlawing bigotry as a thought crime. You can't just purge your way to a perfect society. Authoritarianism is what leads to horrid outcomes in the first place. As they say the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Leftists purged people who didn't think like them and they had a body count to show it. Rightists on the auth side of things literally did commit mass purgings based on hatred, and in their own ideologies they deemed such things as moral and necessary. We can talk about how twisted the nazis and the like for that stuff. I certainly ain't endorsing those views. But...the real question is, should people be able to have them? I would say so. I honestly never seriously considered taking away the right of my political opposition to express certain views. I mean, I believe religions are awfully authoritarian and intolerant, and I dislike a lot of crap they push, but that doesn't mean I wanna make it illegal to be religious or to kick people off of social media. The same goes other crappy views. I would say unless you're outright calling for the deaths of people or making direct threats or intimidating people or soemthing direct like that, it should be allowed. Kanye should be able to say he likes Hitler. I should be able to call him a "freaking idiot" for doing so. People say crappy things, and I say what i actually think back. And it all works itself out. Of course, some people can't stand the idea that maybe that would lead to a society that looks like a COD lobby, but as someone who grew up in the glory days of COD lobbies, and got my ideas and ethos from that era, I long for that. I mean, I really don't think mean words should be banned for the most part. Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me"?
Ya know?
I just hate this moral panic crap my side of the aisle is promoting. And I feel the need to keep my side of the aisle honest on this matter, because I believe they can do better. It is not the state's job to mandate what people think and feel. It is largely not its job to mandate what thoughts and feelings they can express either. Unless those ideas cause an immediate threat of harm under a very narrow definition in keeping with the exceptions to free speech that have always existed, then I do not believe speech should be curtailed. If that leads to the rise of questionable views then so be it. I'd rather live free and in a sea of filth in terms of what people say, than to live under some seemingly benevolent authoritarian mandating we conduct ourselves a certain way. Ya know? This is an issue that shouldn't exist. If people wanna say crappy things, let them. It's not the government's problem. it's not elon musk's problem. it's not mark zuckerburg's problem. It's not those sites' problem. We need to stop this BS cancel culture crap of trying to censor people for saying bad things. Let them say them. I like to know where people really stand anyway.
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