This comment has provoked a lot of good discussion here. First, censorship and suppression of dissent is never a function of ideology or political or general social position. It's a function of being in power. The champions of free speech, dissent, and "truth to power" are always those out of power. Those in power get drunk on it and te…
This comment has provoked a lot of good discussion here. First, censorship and suppression of dissent is never a function of ideology or political or general social position. It's a function of being in power. The champions of free speech, dissent, and "truth to power" are always those out of power. Those in power get drunk on it and tend to suppress dissent. We're seeing that play out in textbook fashion now.
I've also come to appreciate that political position can't be plotted with only 1 dimension, ie left to right. It takes far more than 1, probably a lot more. It's just at any time, there is a prevailing "alignment", depending on what's important at the time, the major questions and divisions society is facing that allow that multi-dimensional space to sort of be projected onto a rough 1D line which we call left and right.
For example, back in the late '80s to the '90s, I used to like George Will (and similar), thinking we were pretty close together. Now, however, I realize how far apart I am from George Will. I always was, it was just those large differences in the large space didn't mean much at the time. Now they do, and we are worlds apart.
That's what we're all seeing now, writ large. We're all seeing, wow, this person I thought was so far apart from me is really close, and this person I thought I agreed with is very different.
This comment has provoked a lot of good discussion here. First, censorship and suppression of dissent is never a function of ideology or political or general social position. It's a function of being in power. The champions of free speech, dissent, and "truth to power" are always those out of power. Those in power get drunk on it and tend to suppress dissent. We're seeing that play out in textbook fashion now.
I've also come to appreciate that political position can't be plotted with only 1 dimension, ie left to right. It takes far more than 1, probably a lot more. It's just at any time, there is a prevailing "alignment", depending on what's important at the time, the major questions and divisions society is facing that allow that multi-dimensional space to sort of be projected onto a rough 1D line which we call left and right.
For example, back in the late '80s to the '90s, I used to like George Will (and similar), thinking we were pretty close together. Now, however, I realize how far apart I am from George Will. I always was, it was just those large differences in the large space didn't mean much at the time. Now they do, and we are worlds apart.
That's what we're all seeing now, writ large. We're all seeing, wow, this person I thought was so far apart from me is really close, and this person I thought I agreed with is very different.
I agree that left vs right is a false or distracting axis. The important axis of political conflict is orthogonal to that: liberty vs tyranny.