Thuggery

> Have humans lost the ability to tolerate the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may disagree with them?

Maybe the majority never had it. That's what I've been thinking recently. In the past, a person could mold themselves to a much more static community. A person that grew up in a Presbytarian community would not much interact with a Muslim family and vice versa. It's also much easier for a person so sensitive of disagreement to delude themselves that all their friends and neighbors were basically of the same mind on serious political/moral issues in meat space. Essentially, the past had naturally occurring filter bubbles.

The Christian social conservatism you recall of the 80s and earlier were people that were pissed about control of mass culture dominated by cosmopolitan urbanites, but they had their own parallel culture to an extent. With smartphones, everyone is suddenly in each others face and I think it's broken the brains of some of the people that never comprehended that level of social friction and disunity.

>They don’t have to allow their platforms to be used

This is a major flaw in modern legal tradition and social morality. Society will continue to suffer from it. People need to stop pretending Internet media is an optional luxury. It's now integral to the public's extended mind and method of social/political discourse. No one is writing letters to the editor anymore, or going to salons, or likely talking heavy politics with their neighbors.

> Were they really?

I'm no linguist, but every time I've looked into this the answer has been yes. Though there is this weird trend to heavily suggest otherwise even in supposed serious sources, which has given me a major chip on my shoulder on this issue.

What they have is proto-writing. The Mayans have full writing, supposedly, and Aztec "script" seems to look like the Mayan's so many assume it must be the same, when it is not at all. Proto-writing pictograms are not at all like cuneiform or Chinese characters. There's no word, for example, for the to be verb in any Aztec script/pictogram. What nouns you can say exist are only what any picture anywhere would have. You can't say "Tototl was feeling despondent on the rainy day of 5th reed" and have someone else read that thought a century later because there are no words to construct a spoken sentence like such. The best you could do is draw a mural with a guy, with rebus device to suggest his name, surrounded by rain, hoping to convey such a sentence. But at that point you're just guessing.

It changes things a lot. I was reading the blurb on that Fifth Sun book and they were getting quite romantic suggesting a narrative of the true forgotten story of the Aztec in their own words the Spanish conquerors didn't want you to know! That's so dishonest to a naive audience. Whatever scholarship they are doing it has to be a combination of post-colonial recordings of oral history, post-colonial Spanish or Spanish influenced contemporary writings, and archeology. There is no other way.

> The Aztecs (or Mexica) also have a written history from before the Europeans came.

This might come off as a dick reply, but I kind of doubt that seeing as how, as far as I know, the Aztecs were an illiterate civilization.

They were also the first, as far as I know, to pioneer the concept of video game "let's plays" aka watching others play video games with commentary for fun. On the English side of the Internet. Probably would have happened organically without them anyways but just saying.

If even that. Really a journalist at Wired that put his voice behind two whole "historians." One of which, Luke McKernan, has this to say recently in the blog where quotes were lifted from:

> There has been renewed interest in this 2018 post after it was quoted in a piece by Thomas Nicholson, ‘YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K. Historians want them to stop‘, for Wired.co.uk. The piece is chiefly concerned with the recent ‘upscaling’ of early films done by Denis Shiryaev on the Neural Love site. I rather admire this work, which is reasonably honest about how it has treated the originals, and is fun. Contrary to what the article’s title states, this historian does not want them to stop. I just want there to be better understanding, not least of the consequences.

Isn't it funny how reddit ended up the opposite of what it was seemingly designed as? A system with a community policing vote process turned into a community that is one of, if not the, most top down moderated spaces on the Internet. Where the voting system turned into a supplementary group control system rather than a liberator.

As far as I know, the Klan doesn't actually exist anymore. In its second most famous incarnation it was a fraternal order like the Freemasons. But that disintegrated in the 40s. Since there's no legal enforcement of the brand anyone can and does use the title for cultural history reasons. Today there are dozens of disparate "KKKs" with no official continuity with the famous KKK that amount to a couple thousand people in a nation of hundreds of millions.

So what would you even be banning other than the word KKK itself?