[TameAntelope]

> Any sufficiently selective style guide is indistinguishable from a censor.

Completely disagree. Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language.

> "You can say whatever you like, just in ways we like (which will sometimes include you shutting up entirely)"

The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.

[Banana699]

>Censorship is the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas, not the prohibition of the expression of specific language

You completely missed the point, the "selective" part is doing most of the work. By having a vague and ill-defined rulebook that nobody but an ideologically homogeneous group of people can invoke and enforce, this group acts as a censor that selectively switches on and off certain expressions it deems "not polite".

You also uncritically assume that polite language is universal, capable of expressing any possible issue. If I told you "you can write any program you want, just don't use C/C++/Rust" I have effectively banned you from writing a huge variety of programs, from OSes to Interpreters. Similarly, some things are inherently non-polite to say, because they express non-polite truths, and those truths will always exist because the universe is under no obligation to be polite. You can never discuss (say) Putin's human rights abuses in polite language, nor can you ever discuss how sexual predators use a trendy identity to escape retribution in a polite way using nice words.

>The parenthetical is a strawman, and not what I said, nor is it true.

Not at all, see above for my reasoning for why this is a natural implication of your words. You are free to dispute the major 2 points it rests on.

[TameAntelope]

You are not any less capable of writing quality software if you are prohibited from using specific programming languages, I don’t think that analogy helps you as much as you think.

Let’s stop being abstract; what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?

[Banana699]

>You are not any less capable of writing quality software if you are prohibited from using specific programming languages

Are you implying that it's possible to write an efficient OS in a language other than the likes of C/C++/Rust? Do mention an example.

>what idea is not expressable except in a way that results in effective cancellation?

- A lot of Transgender people are teenagers with mental health adopting the identity for attention and validation, with gross bodily harm as a result

[TameAntelope]

Your example of an idea that isn't expressible without effective cancellation is funny, because it's the precise position that many conservatives have expressed, who still seem to have jobs (e.g. Jordan Peterson). Honestly it's so common of an idea, it's actually odd you think such an idea results in "cancellation" at all. It's the default idea, in fact. You can't swing a dead cat in conservative circles without hearing, verbatim, what you've written here.

And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?" OSes are not necessarily "well" written software by their nature. There are lots of good examples of "good code" that aren't written as part of OS code. Why would that, of all things, be your metric? Seems utterly nonsensical, the more I think about it the less sense it makes.

[Banana699]

>who still seem to have jobs (e.g. Jordan Peterson).

Do you want a list of examples of other academics who were harassed and fired for saying this same idea to be convinced it's actually quite a cancellable idea, or is one academic not being fired (and not for lack of trying) enough for you to be convinced that "kindness" is an effective cancel shield?

>You can't swing a dead cat in conservative circles without hearing, verbatim

It's kinda a natural position when you can't swing a cat (dead or alive) in a trans community without both you and the cat changing gender. I, for instance, am not traditionally conservative (atheist and vegetarian, which are not traditionally conservative positions where I live. Also a moderate trans supporter.) and I still arrived at such an idea purely by observation.

>And the "Can you write an OS in it?" is not a good metric for, "Can I write quality software?"

My analogy was meant to convey the fact "Banning certain kinds of languages effectively bans certain kinds of expressions", no more and no less. You can't write an OS in a programming language that doesn't expose low-level memory primitives, and you can't talk about sexual predators grooming teens in a natural language that doesn't expose quite a lot of non-polite primitives.

You saying that you could write quality software without them being OSes is like saying that you could say truths in China without them being truths about Tiananmen square, yes off course you can, but if you do want to talk about Tiananmen square, you're out of luck. Nobody ever said censorship suppresses the full 360-degree field of conversation, just a very particular cone that upsets the censors.