Liriena wrote:LRON wrote:Does it not make you authoritarian to "deplatform" right wing persons?
Not necessarily. It would certainly be described authoritarian if it happened to be a decision made from an unaccountable, undemocratic authority. But if it were a collective, democratically made decision, the product of a popular consensus...
This would almost certainly result in deplatforming the cultural progressive left sooner than anyone else. I'm largely fine with that. The problem is that the cultural progressive left controls the major institutions of culture and so they are the ones deciding who to deplatform in a manner at odds with the wishes of the public, and deplatforming the progressive left basically entails;
"We should shut down almost every news organization left of fox news, most social media, and fire most university professors." Because they've successfully managed to deplatform, ban, gatekeep, and censor alternatives until they control those institutions. So it amounts to a cultural revolution and the destruction of a huge amount of the professional class.
Again, i'm largely fine with that. But I doubt society is willing to tackle the extent of it, and i'm pretty sure; "Yes we're basically banned all our journalists from being journalists anymore and have confiscated large amounts of their property because of the fines against hate speech and their decades of violating those laws" would be used by this fifth column ideology to act hysterical and claim it's a dictatorial move internationally.
I'm also not convinced that we have the prison space to hold the number of people who would need to go to prison if the rules were applied evenly.
Further, the rest of the ruling class is going to be on edge about such a massive change in the power structure and setting the precedent of "Well as Guardian editor you published these articles clearly pushing hatred of men and white people for decades, so now you're going to prison like we would for other peddlers of hate speech" because rules for thee not for me, and setting the precedent that the public is entitled to remove their betters is one they don't want.
But if you straight up polled people on who to deplatform, the consensus is already in.
Deplatform the feminists, the intersectionalists, the progressive left, and so on. Ban them from organizing or speaking. People have concluded they are a hate movement that has overtaken our institutions and is using them to enact discriminatory policies.
Again, that doesn't much matter, because that group Is overwhelmingly white, middle class professionals. Which is exactly why the democratic notion of deplatforming will never happen under this current dynamic, and why we're stuck with the group everyone wants to ban from talking wielding the power to ban alternatives in a paradox of tolerance problem.
We tolerated the feminists and progressives and now have an intolerant society as a result where power to shape public discourse is rapidly centralizing around an ideology almost everybody hates, because it has taken over institutions and is intolerant of dissent.
Ideally we'd just start with a law explicitly clarifying that their nonsense rationalizations don't hold up, stuff like "Privilege+Power being used to dismiss racism and sexism is explicitly a racist and sexist statement given how it is used." and then slowly escalate as we squeeze them out fo public discourse.
Straight up no platforming them is too dramatic a change. One day we might reach the point where "This person was a member of a feminist group" is flagged in a similar way to "This person joined an explicitly racist organization" and it impacts their careers, and that would be desirable. But we're a long way from there yet. Instead, incremental deplatforming of specific statements is probably the way to go.
You can start with the privilege+power shit, then move on to attacking their usual nonsense and treating their handling of particular stats in the same way we treat the IQ stats stuff.
The reason we don't have democratic no platforming is its not in the interests of those with the institutional power to deplatform, since they would be the first targets.