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by tailrecursion 586 days ago
I agree with the first part totally, and you're probably right I invented something there. I only meant that free speech / "more information helps" seems to resonate with the right, and censorship seems to resonate with the left. Not so?
2 comments

Censorship of books seem to resonate well with the right.
And rewriting books resonates with the left. Is this a game of left/right tennis I've walked into?
Depends what you mean in regards to rewriting. If there's a position that runs counter to our current scientific consensus, I think it should be updated to reflect the current consensus, but when I was reading my history/physics books they would cover what people believed at a particular time period. I don't see any issue with that. We're always learning more about the world around us. We are not an omniscient species.

Unless there's a more specific example you can think of w.r.t rewriting.

Sounds like you haven't heard of the re-writing of books in the interest of over-enthusiastic DEI. There's non-fiction and fiction examples. Salman Rushdie described it as "absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed" [1].

Apparently children's books can't use the word "black" or "white" any more. And in the children's book "Witches", a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now poses as “a top scientist”. It's blunt-force rewriting by patronising leftists. Witches are not meant to be role models for little girls. It doesn’t matter where they work.

[1] https://x.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627075835525210113

Neither the left nor right are monolithic enough to make those generalizations. The anti-communism suppression of the McCarthy era is a counter-example of that resonance & plenty of left wing examples of the exact idea of "more speech is what is needed to extinguish bad ideas." Those are counter examples to demonstrate it is not a monolithic group in neither time nor space.