I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.
For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that.
The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.
IMHO, the most inflammatory and dangerous things in our political discourse nowadays are the "we're under an existential attack (by our domestic political opponents)" narratives. Shit stirrers in both camps are enthusiastically engaging in them, and in the short term that keeps their bases enthusiastic and committed, but it leads to a vicious cycle that might actually bring about one of the feared scenarios in the medium/long term. Power play responses to the "existential threat" posed by the other side are likely to themselves be interpreted as "existential threats" by that side.
Deescalation is needed, and that's going to look like compromise that the activists/partisans are going to be really unhappy with.
(Of course, even then it's not simple. There's also party infighting, subparties, etc, so even if my opinion on "what the issue is" lines up, my opinion on "what the solution is" might not.)
Edit: another complication is strength of conviction. For example, standard American left/right dichotomy comes with very strong conviction about guns. I have very very weak conviction about guns. Even though I tend to agree with my ideologies' opinion on what should be done about gun control, I don't really care that much either way whether there's no gun control or super strict gun control. So while I do "identify" as my ideology here, there's clearly a disconnect from the mainstream form of it.
I mean sometimes I fit with the far left (for example, mother Jones had a great article on private prisons a while ago), but for the most part I'm a conservative.
Anyway, my friend pointed out it's disingenuous to basically always end up with conservative views and claim to be independent because you want the brownie points. And he's right.
Like sure, neither of the major parties in America matches all of my opinions exactly but I still have strong opinions on a number of things, and they tend to align with a particular party.
I imagine this is the position most Americans find themselves in.
All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech.
Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.
Since when? You're attempting to give default context to a word that has none.
Somehow, api, I doubt that you'd be attempting that redefinition if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were silencing people and organizations of the Left.
Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc.
the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery
Popularity despite censorship just goes to show how the operators of Facebook are in a different narrative bubble than a sizable portion of their users. The notion that Ben Shapiro is far-right is just demagoguery of your own. Shapiro is a pretty benign and centrist-sympathetic conservative.
I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
The reason why is NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc are far more in competition with each other than Fox is with them. There are no major right of center competitors to Fox. This results in most right of center tv news watchers going with Fox. If there was only one left of center news channel Fox would closer to even with it.
No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1...
I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought.
You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever.
You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane.
Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises.
The Stonewall Inn was effectively a brothel with mafia protection, not a gay version of Cheers.
Drug deals and transactions for sex occurred at Stonewall just as they have occurred on Discord, but I’ve not seen any credible evidence that it was a primary function of the place.
It seems somewhat a habit of yours to find something bad about victims and then use that to dismiss any wrong done to them. Someone subjected to police abuse? Oh they had a criminal record, so it’s ok. Indigenous people being tortured, enslaved and slaughtered by Spain? Oh, it’s ok because some of them practiced human sacrifice. There’s no going the extra step and recognizing Spain was in the middle of the Inquisition and creating their own murderous horror, or that the Spanish allied with the Aztecs to eliminate groups that didn’t have human sacrifice, or that the Spanish cruelty was applied to the people in the Caribbean as sport from Columbus. It reads like intellectual laziness.
Recasting criminals as innocent angels is a disinformation tactic. You don't get to accuse people of laziness when they correct the record.
As far as I can recall the Spanish did not ally with the Aztecs but conquered the leading faction of the Aztecs through an alliance with rival factions and effects of smallpox.
Yes, that is insane, but I don't think the person you're replying to or the FNAF guy believe that. It sounds like Mr. FNAF might actually be opposed to Trump to some extent on LGBT issues. However, he feels more strongly about other things (USA-China relations, abortion), and he, like all of us, only gets two choices. So he chose the mix of good and bad stuff that he thought was better than the other mix of good and bad stuff. I disagree with him so I voted the other way, but I'm not going to hold him accountable for everything Trump says or does, and I hope I am not held accountable for everything Biden says or does.
Presidents cause unnecessary death and suffering without exception. That's not to say that "everything's a gray area so nothing matters", rather it means that you can't just take one issue and be like "I can't imagine how you would vote for somebody who believes this". Maybe the other option was somebody who is ~3% more likely to start a bad war, for example. Or 3% more likely to lose an inevitable war. I might take a bible-thumping evangelical with a slightly higher chance of winning WWII over somebody with exactly my ethics in office with less strategic acumen. It depends on the actual degree of difference. I'd have to assign weights to things and sum them up, because it's democracy and that's what you do.
I don't think this is a cancellable offense. I think if you are going to sanction someone for voting, it has to be real and clear danger of present harm, not "they are republicans, you know they hate us."
Like, if that's the case, why not just sanction everyone who voted for him?
These are incredibly different issues. For me personally, given that we ought to only have a small peace time army and we currently have lots of volunteers I support only accepting the strongest, buffets, most agile soldiers which 99/100 times will be a mostly male force.
When we have a war, then we can talk about adding more people, but fighting a war or being in the army is not a right and frankly the army is too big.
Now whether those men are homosexual or not is immaterial, but trans soldiers would require higher costs and more lifetime healthcare costs.
Being "cancelled" isn't some autonomous process, it's not a button that gets pushed it's people reading about an issue and making a personal decision they're entitled to make. What I do with my free time and money, and who I choose to support is my decision to make. Not yours.
This guy can still produce whatever games he wants, say whatever he wants in a public forum, make his own websites declaring whatever he wants to declare, probably get on TV and talk about it, get licensure to establish a talk radio station and talk about it all day, ... He isn't legally muzzled, and he's hardly reached a point where he has no audience in society. This is the balance of free speech. You are allowed to hold and express an opinion and everyone else is too.
Basically it’s just like calling for a boycott and removal of apps and removal from social media platforms.
It’s not calling for execution, just for reducing the person’s ability to communicate and/or make a living.
This seems like a basic understanding of what “cancelling” is although it gets spun up quite a bit because lots of people like arguing about it.
But I think it’s a “bad thing” TM to call for boycott and removal from social media. Not that it’s illegal or shouldn’t be allowed, just that it’s dumb and people who do it are dumb.
Similar to how Tipper Gore was dumb in the 80s/90s for calling for the “cancelling” of rappers and whatnot.
So, people who are or care about LGBT+ share the information that Cawthon voted in a way that could harm them. That’s not ‘siccing a tiger’ for any disagreement whatsoever.
It’s not a good idea to “cancel” people based on a single characteristic.
Only if you believe mainstream media sources, if you step out of your bubble you will see that trump will be reinstated this August
> No really, that's it.
No, that's really not it. Cawthon contributed thousands of dollars to multiple Republican campaigns in 2020, including some noted hate magnets (e.g. Devin Nunes and Mitch McConnell). This naturally sparked discussion of boycotting his products, some of which was level-headed and some of which wasn't. As has happened countless times for many other vendors and issues across the political spectrum.
edit: I guess I hit a nerve, lol
Trying to end a career of people because they donated to some politician or said some inappropriate years ago (that very often was accepted back then) is completely different.
Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
>cen·sor (sĕn′sər)
>1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.*
Being authorized by twitter to do it on twitter is still censorship. A simple non-political example: censor bars on nudity in media, literally labelled 'censored': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images
The mental gymnastics to excuse censorship by private entities when it's done to the "correct" targets or for the "correct" reasons is infuriating.
Censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter who is doing it.
Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state (in the form of bans, fines, arrests, etc.) to suppress speech. There's very little of that in the USA outside certain well known areas like child porn or explicit personal threats of violence.
No, it doesn't, it historically means action by any locus of institutional power to control speech (and, before and directly inspiring that, specifically the review by particular officials of the Roman Catholic Church in the process of pre-publication review of material to assure it was free of doctrinal error.)