I argue we're all susceptible to the Red Army's draw, and that we can only move forward by acknowledging that weakness. People who claim to be on the right do also censor. You may not consider them to be Christian, yet they say they are. Where does that leave us?
Hi, Robert. You're absolutely correct -- people on the Right do censor, some (perhaps many) of whom claim to be Christians. I've wanted to address this for a while now, but haven't because doing so properly would require more time than I've had available. That said, I'll take the opportunity of your question as the impetus to get started. I'll have to break it up into a series of related articles, both because I'm a slow writer for whom long-form work is grueling, and because, as a rule, people don't read long-form work anyway.
But you deserve at least some kind of answer to your question, so by way of a sneak preview, here's some of what I'll (likely) cover:
* My worldview (https://www.timothystephens.com/p/worldview) is the secret decoder ring that will help understand where I'm coming from. It may clear up how I've reached some of my stated conclusions on this or other matters.
* Both Right and Left censor because people, no matter their political/ideological affiliations, are still human beings, and human nature is inherently censorious.
* Anyone can claim to be a Christian but, like being a woman, the reality of this claim is up to God, not man.
* When taken to their logical conclusions, conservatism and leftism take opposite approaches to censorship. Leftism leads directly to it, and conservatism away. People, however, are not ideologies, and thus will stray from their allegiances for a variety of reasons.
* Since all of us are morally flawed, we all do things we know to be wrong. Those departures from our beliefs are not an indictment of the beliefs, but of us as individuals.
I hope this doesn't come across as a dodge because it isn't. Your observations are accurate and your question is important; I just can't satisfactorily address them in a comment. Hopefully, upcoming articles will at least hit the main points.
P.S.
Thanks for mentioning Article 58 in your article. It's been several years since I read Gulag Archipelago, and I've since wanted to reference Article 58 but couldn't recall its name. Thanks to you, I can now quickly search for the relevant passages in Kindle (until Amazon memory-holes or stealth-edits it).
Thanks Timothy! I really appreciate the reply. That's not a dodge at all. Regarding your worldview page, I roughly agree. In your comment above, I disagree on point #4 about logical conclusions of conservatism and leftism. For example, Trump's subreddit, r/The_Donald, heavily moderated its own supporters in secret. A sample of the innocuous removed content from there is: https://archive.ph/lvW29
So you couldn't even say "I do not like Mattis leaving." Such innocent content was removed thousands of times per day without posters' knowledge. That still continues across all of Reddit, left and right alike, and most social media. They generate "consensus" by secretly removing disagreement.
I hear you on long form being unappreciated. I think interest in that will soon return.
The craze over short form helps the censors because it's easier to create lots of short propaganda. I imagine the same happened with other new communications technologies such as radio. The early adopters nabbed attention with short content. Then people like C.S. Lewis came along to finally give the quality addresses that people needed to hear.
People may be craving good long form, they just don't know where to turn.
I hear you on all these points. I don't think we actually disagree on #4, I think we might just have different ideas about what constitutes conservatism, and (more to the point) who embodies it.
Trump, for example, is not someone I consider a conservative. At all. His sentiments clearly lie more to the right than to the left, but I don't consider him ideological (and thus, not conservative since conservatism is an ideology). Not to keep redirecting you to articles, but I elaborated on this in a piece I wrote on Trump vs. DeSantis (https://www.timothystephens.com/p/two-kinds-of-patriotism).
So far, I haven't disagreed with anything you've said about censorship coming from the Right. In fact, it's been my personal experience. I was censored my very first day on Truth Social, and then for several subsequent days because I just couldn't resist poking the bear. Steve Deace, who has a huge following everywhere else, could not get traction on that platform for the same reason. But again, the people doing this, regardless of whether they call themselves conservatives, are acting in defiance of conservatism not in accordance with it.
That said, there are a couple of caveats -- exceptions to the "conservatism doesn't censor" rule -- but I'll delineate and explain those when I get to the article(s).
Sounds good Timothy! It's good to hear your experience.
Regarding #4, I understand you would label some on the right as conservative, some not. The trouble is, the left would do the same. A left-leaner might exclude pushers of gender transition from their vision of the left. Everyone has their own definition of their right or their left, and it generates a lot of miscommunication.
So instead, let's group people objectively. We can divide Americans into those who support secret suppression, and those who don't. That's in line with both the conservative idea that God lets us choose what to believe, as well as the liberal idea that often places civil rights as the highest value.
I can identify people who support secret suppression on both the right and the left.
I believe if we create more content that focuses on this divide rather than the subjective right/left divides then we will find ourselves in a better place.
Sorry for the disappearing act. Life threw me a curve ball that I’ll be swinging at for a while, but by way of a quick reply:
I agree that to meaningfully contend with any problem, we need concretions rather than abstractions, and objective rather than subjective terminology. We need hard answers to the questions who, how, where, and when.
The one question not addressed on the front lines is why. Why is this problem occurring? That's an important question because its answer can help to both stem the flow of the problem and prevent (or at least mitigate) recurrences. This is where terms like right, left, conservative, liberal, and leftist become important.
Yes, it’s easy to run headlong into the no-true-scotsman fallacy when dealing with these terms. They weren't handed down by God or anything, so they don't have any transcendent, fixed meaning that allows us to dogmatically declare one definition correct and another incorrect. But these are terms of art within the political industry, and they do have generally recognized boundaries -- points at which a given idea can no longer be considered conservative, liberal, leftist, etc.
Like all words, these are just pointers (h/t to your software engineering background) to something real. Two people may disagree about what "liberal" means, but at the end of the day what they're really arguing over is which of two worldviews "liberal" should represent. The term is, over time, flexible/subjective, but the worldviews themselves are objective realities, and it's these realities that frequently answer the question why.
So when it comes to dealing with a problem like censorship, I think we need to determine our objective in order to know which tools are best suited to achieve it. If we're trying to stop existing censorship, we are working within the physical realm. Our timeline is immediate and our tools are going to be things like elections, legislation, lawsuits, etc.
If we're trying to determine why censorship is taking place, we're (at least initially) working within the metaphysical realm and concerning ourselves with issues like morality and the inclinations inherent in human nature. These are eternal, immaterial concerns addressed by thought rather than action. Once the "why" is answered, there will, of course, be practical follow-up (who, how, etc.).
Both of these concerns need to be addressed, though not necessarily by the same people at the same time, as that often results in the kind of confusion you mentioned.
And that was far more than I'd set out to say (a common problem for me). It's unlikely that I'll be able to continue conversations like this one with any consistency, at least for some time, but please feel free to continue talking. You've clearly thought through your positions, and that makes them both thought-provoking and a genuine pleasure to read.
I completely agree that censorship done solely by private actors is a moral issue. I'll have to reread your comment later to get a better understanding of it. Thank you for engaging! Also I like your latest post.
Hi Timothy, I'm the author of Reveddit, a site that shows Reddit users their secretly removed comments. You might like my article on the Internet's Red Army: https://www.removednews.com/p/hate-online-censorship-its-way-worse
I argue we're all susceptible to the Red Army's draw, and that we can only move forward by acknowledging that weakness. People who claim to be on the right do also censor. You may not consider them to be Christian, yet they say they are. Where does that leave us?
Hi, Robert. You're absolutely correct -- people on the Right do censor, some (perhaps many) of whom claim to be Christians. I've wanted to address this for a while now, but haven't because doing so properly would require more time than I've had available. That said, I'll take the opportunity of your question as the impetus to get started. I'll have to break it up into a series of related articles, both because I'm a slow writer for whom long-form work is grueling, and because, as a rule, people don't read long-form work anyway.
But you deserve at least some kind of answer to your question, so by way of a sneak preview, here's some of what I'll (likely) cover:
* My worldview (https://www.timothystephens.com/p/worldview) is the secret decoder ring that will help understand where I'm coming from. It may clear up how I've reached some of my stated conclusions on this or other matters.
* Both Right and Left censor because people, no matter their political/ideological affiliations, are still human beings, and human nature is inherently censorious.
* Anyone can claim to be a Christian but, like being a woman, the reality of this claim is up to God, not man.
* When taken to their logical conclusions, conservatism and leftism take opposite approaches to censorship. Leftism leads directly to it, and conservatism away. People, however, are not ideologies, and thus will stray from their allegiances for a variety of reasons.
* Since all of us are morally flawed, we all do things we know to be wrong. Those departures from our beliefs are not an indictment of the beliefs, but of us as individuals.
I hope this doesn't come across as a dodge because it isn't. Your observations are accurate and your question is important; I just can't satisfactorily address them in a comment. Hopefully, upcoming articles will at least hit the main points.
P.S.
Thanks for mentioning Article 58 in your article. It's been several years since I read Gulag Archipelago, and I've since wanted to reference Article 58 but couldn't recall its name. Thanks to you, I can now quickly search for the relevant passages in Kindle (until Amazon memory-holes or stealth-edits it).
Thanks Timothy! I really appreciate the reply. That's not a dodge at all. Regarding your worldview page, I roughly agree. In your comment above, I disagree on point #4 about logical conclusions of conservatism and leftism. For example, Trump's subreddit, r/The_Donald, heavily moderated its own supporters in secret. A sample of the innocuous removed content from there is: https://archive.ph/lvW29
So you couldn't even say "I do not like Mattis leaving." Such innocent content was removed thousands of times per day without posters' knowledge. That still continues across all of Reddit, left and right alike, and most social media. They generate "consensus" by secretly removing disagreement.
I hear you on long form being unappreciated. I think interest in that will soon return.
The craze over short form helps the censors because it's easier to create lots of short propaganda. I imagine the same happened with other new communications technologies such as radio. The early adopters nabbed attention with short content. Then people like C.S. Lewis came along to finally give the quality addresses that people needed to hear.
People may be craving good long form, they just don't know where to turn.
I hear you on all these points. I don't think we actually disagree on #4, I think we might just have different ideas about what constitutes conservatism, and (more to the point) who embodies it.
Trump, for example, is not someone I consider a conservative. At all. His sentiments clearly lie more to the right than to the left, but I don't consider him ideological (and thus, not conservative since conservatism is an ideology). Not to keep redirecting you to articles, but I elaborated on this in a piece I wrote on Trump vs. DeSantis (https://www.timothystephens.com/p/two-kinds-of-patriotism).
So far, I haven't disagreed with anything you've said about censorship coming from the Right. In fact, it's been my personal experience. I was censored my very first day on Truth Social, and then for several subsequent days because I just couldn't resist poking the bear. Steve Deace, who has a huge following everywhere else, could not get traction on that platform for the same reason. But again, the people doing this, regardless of whether they call themselves conservatives, are acting in defiance of conservatism not in accordance with it.
That said, there are a couple of caveats -- exceptions to the "conservatism doesn't censor" rule -- but I'll delineate and explain those when I get to the article(s).
Sounds good Timothy! It's good to hear your experience.
Regarding #4, I understand you would label some on the right as conservative, some not. The trouble is, the left would do the same. A left-leaner might exclude pushers of gender transition from their vision of the left. Everyone has their own definition of their right or their left, and it generates a lot of miscommunication.
So instead, let's group people objectively. We can divide Americans into those who support secret suppression, and those who don't. That's in line with both the conservative idea that God lets us choose what to believe, as well as the liberal idea that often places civil rights as the highest value.
I can identify people who support secret suppression on both the right and the left.
I believe if we create more content that focuses on this divide rather than the subjective right/left divides then we will find ourselves in a better place.
Sorry for the disappearing act. Life threw me a curve ball that I’ll be swinging at for a while, but by way of a quick reply:
I agree that to meaningfully contend with any problem, we need concretions rather than abstractions, and objective rather than subjective terminology. We need hard answers to the questions who, how, where, and when.
The one question not addressed on the front lines is why. Why is this problem occurring? That's an important question because its answer can help to both stem the flow of the problem and prevent (or at least mitigate) recurrences. This is where terms like right, left, conservative, liberal, and leftist become important.
Yes, it’s easy to run headlong into the no-true-scotsman fallacy when dealing with these terms. They weren't handed down by God or anything, so they don't have any transcendent, fixed meaning that allows us to dogmatically declare one definition correct and another incorrect. But these are terms of art within the political industry, and they do have generally recognized boundaries -- points at which a given idea can no longer be considered conservative, liberal, leftist, etc.
Like all words, these are just pointers (h/t to your software engineering background) to something real. Two people may disagree about what "liberal" means, but at the end of the day what they're really arguing over is which of two worldviews "liberal" should represent. The term is, over time, flexible/subjective, but the worldviews themselves are objective realities, and it's these realities that frequently answer the question why.
So when it comes to dealing with a problem like censorship, I think we need to determine our objective in order to know which tools are best suited to achieve it. If we're trying to stop existing censorship, we are working within the physical realm. Our timeline is immediate and our tools are going to be things like elections, legislation, lawsuits, etc.
If we're trying to determine why censorship is taking place, we're (at least initially) working within the metaphysical realm and concerning ourselves with issues like morality and the inclinations inherent in human nature. These are eternal, immaterial concerns addressed by thought rather than action. Once the "why" is answered, there will, of course, be practical follow-up (who, how, etc.).
Both of these concerns need to be addressed, though not necessarily by the same people at the same time, as that often results in the kind of confusion you mentioned.
And that was far more than I'd set out to say (a common problem for me). It's unlikely that I'll be able to continue conversations like this one with any consistency, at least for some time, but please feel free to continue talking. You've clearly thought through your positions, and that makes them both thought-provoking and a genuine pleasure to read.
I completely agree that censorship done solely by private actors is a moral issue. I'll have to reread your comment later to get a better understanding of it. Thank you for engaging! Also I like your latest post.