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RE: Self-Censorship and Toxic PC Culture

in #freedom6 years ago

You had my attention for the first part - but your argument started to fall apart for me when you started to split this up as “left and right”.
I like your example: “It is not possible to not offend anyone. A religious statement may offend certain religious atheists. An atheist statement may be offensive to religious people.” - but I don’t accept that this is a problem sitting on a spectrum of left and right.
Please correct me if I’ve misinterpreted this, but you seem to be blaming this entire problem on the “left” at one point you state:
“If you are not an active leftie researching a few hours a day the latest trends a simple conversation may seem like a minefield that is impossible to navigate. And this is not affecting a small minority, it is a large part of the centre and the right.”
Again - I just don’t accept your position here. A well articulated starting position just turns into what I see as an “us against them” position where a particular group is being demonised - this just doesn’t look like the constructive argument I thought you were about to make based on the start of your post.
Your post then meanders back into something I absolutely agree with, you state “Any separation of people in groups is not helping. It reinforces the idea of us vs them.” - so why the separation to left and right earlier in the post? I think the issue you describe is quite real, I just think it’s a far more complex topic than a simple left and right divide where one side is the offender and the other side is the defender of rights - again, this is my interpretation of what you’re saying and I’ll happily accept a correction if I’ve misunderstood.
As I’m sure you can tell by now, I started drafting my response before finishing reading everything you were saying - but I’m just as confused as when I started typing.
You sum up the article with “If you happen to identify on the 'left' (where left vs right is nothing but another useless separation of people), why do you not try to live your ideals and let others see them applied in practice? Because right now what people see in the left are just angry controll freaks and nobody wants to be like that...”
You appear to be contradicting yourself, you’ve mentioned that left versus right is a useless separation of people but you still appear to be blaming the left - you’re asking a specific group of people why they have the problem, but this is a specific group of people you have grouped together.
Can you please help clarify this as it looks like a contradiction between what you’re saying the answer is and what you appear to be doing.

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I think I mostly agree with you, the left/right paradigm is not helpful and PC culture is not the fault of an ominous 'left'. It is caused by people but these tend to identify themselves as being left.

I think that certain statements can be made about groups, but these should only be expressions of facts. When I say that PC culture is largely created by left-identifying people, I think that is a correct statement. But I should not start to blame the 'left' for it, just the individuals that are actually responsible.

In fact I used 'left' and 'right' a little to generous in the post, which was at least partially laziness on my side.

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