Alternative viewpoint: platforms without censorship tend to be right wing because that is what succeeds in a free marketplace of ideas. Left wing ideas require censorship to thrive.
Mainstream ideas require censorship to survive. In the 60-70s it was the left that was obsessed with free speech because their views were less mainstream, something many people on the side of censorship seem to ignore.
As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.
Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?
Again, this only applies if we blindly use the cold war association that communism is a left wing ideal, without actually looking at the policy of the people.
The reality is that communism as a movement spans a wide political range, and both Stalin and Pol Pot had diverged significantly from any form of leftist Marxism in their hunt for power.
This is a very interesting world view you have where Hitler is left wing. I think that alone scuppers any substance to your argument.
Stalin and Mao would only be left wing if you prescribe to the thought that communism by nature must only be left wing. I assume your train of thought on Hitler is similar because you're likely equating the socialist word in the Nazi party to left wing socialism.
At best this is dishonest and ignoring actual policy.
Isn't the flipside of that coin that leftism is more or less just plain good and ceases to be leftism the moment it deviates from what we think of as good, ie. basically a No True Scotsman?
One reason the Marxist kind of thought pattern is dangerous is because of something like that. The ideas in and of themselves can sound good and appealing - who wants poor people to live in squalor and so on? But if we look at what natural and sexual selection ingrains in biological life - it is by necessity kin-preferring, competitive and in non-eusocial social creatures, status seeking, for example. Things that prefer non-kin and don't compete just die out.
In that light, a sound philosophy would understand that those things can't be eradicated by human will, take the impulses and hone something constructive out of them. But Marxist thought is rationalist in the sense that it thinks doctrine and reason can mold human nature to whatever shape, and then achieve their utopistic ends. That, of course, cannot happen because we're built from competitive, kin-preferring, status-seeking genes, not utopistic ones. Marxism is incompatible with biological life, and to get biological life to comply for any length of time, it must be forced constantly, or the utopian society degrade into tyranny, which has thus far happened every single time these things have been tried. But it's never done properly, so we should try again.
I'm hardly invoking any sort of no true Scotsman fallacy.
I'm asking for people to delve into the so called left wing policy of the people they're claiming are left wing dictators.
So far people have only been listing people by their party names. Which would mean that North Korea is a bastion of democracy. I'm asking for substance to back up their assertions.
As a german, I can definitly tell you that Hitler was not left wing. There is no overlap in the political views at all. (Something I can not say about germany's far right.)
I have to add that "no overlap at all", may not be correct, as those points were shared by different political spectrums in the history.
The point is: The core idea, is completly different.
Wow. This comment section is a mess. Did y'all miss the other countries in the world that seem to be left wing without censorship. Or just history in general. Typically it tends to be a bit cyclic cycling between "left" ideas being popular at certain times and places, and right wing ideas being popular at certain times and places.
Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change. Conservativism is fundamentally about suppressing change in favour of familiarity and established norms, which could certainly be seen as censorship. An obvious example of this is the conservative/Puritan influence in American culture, which has lead to excessive censorship of sexual content and cursing in American media.
Censorship is a product of political extremism though, it has no basis in one political ideology, only in how aggressively it is applied to society.
Counterexample - Islamic culture is conservative and thriving in the world (20% of all humans are Muslim), with roughly the same beliefs and culture as it's had for the past 1000 years.
I'm not sure thriving is the correct term. When it comes to HDI, human rights record, freedom of press/expression/etc. i can't think of a single Muslim-majority country ( which isn't the same as Islamic, and i chose the former because they fare better by definition on various freedoms)
On the HDI, the first majority Muslim country is the UAE, at 31, and that's probably highly skewed by its limited population, extreme natural wealth, and slavery. And considering it's involved in a human rights catastrophe in Yemen, it fails any human rights record-based index directly.
On the contrary, I'd say that Islam is stuck in the past, which doesn't help Muslim nations thrive and develop, and those that do, do it based on "luck" ( natural resources).
Who cares? Gradual changes in a philosophy of a culture that has become the great game-board of all adjunct powers, over and over again, is not relevant. At some point all that remains, is the fact, that getting pushed around on the school-yard of the world, is a bad idea.
Nobody cares for the history of getting pushed around.
Just for the now full of mud, blood and laughter.
It'd be hard to make a monolith out of the beliefs, practices and behaviour of over a billion people even if you could boil some of it down into one book (and you can't even do that as even the Sunni majority uses at least 7).
> Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change.
This is obviously just selection bias. Everything that changes is a loss for "conservatism"; ignore everything that stays the same, which is the majority of everything.
Here are some "conservative" (i.e. longstanding existing) policies: Due process, separation of powers, warrant requirements, freedom of speech. They are currently under attack. But the attackers are the ones on the wrong side of history -- even if they succeed, they lose, because then the monsters these policies were established to vanquish return and the polices get reinstated once the current generation has had a taste of what happens without them. But that route is a lot harder and bloodier than learning from history.
This depends on is being cancelled. It's not the left that cancelled Kapaernick or the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks or howled with rage that the Supreme Court - with the exception of three conservative justices - ruled their longstanding practice of cancelling gay people unconstitutional.
Show me a case of "cancel culture" and I will show you a case where the "cancelled" person benefitted in popularity on the right wing side. The people that really do get cancelled, you don't hear from them. The examples you know of are all people who benefitted hugely from the "cancelling". Unless you count the #metoo people. But you probably believe all these men are innocent. I don't really get how due process and opposition to trial by media is usually not important with right wing people when someone is suspected of robbery, but when someone is suspected of sexual misconduct it is suddenly a problem. This feels like the protection of elites (because elites will never be part of a robbery, but can be hurt by a metoo-scandal). And I am seriously curious who is calling for a new war in terror. Tell me, who is doing this?
Ok, I'll bite. First three examples of cancel culture I can think of: dongle gate, rosetta mission guy, and more recent J. K. Rowling. How exactly they benefited?
As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.
Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?