To simplify all here:
guys
my post got flagged as off‑topic , i was just calling out @Terrance super long, age‑ist rant with a bit of sarcasm , i have no regrets
I remember a time before social media.
Oh, how I long for the glory days when the Internet and real life were considered separate worlds, and to cross the two was utter blasphemy. The Internet was source of entertainment, enjoyment, and escape. Everything was unencrypted and VPNs were hardly used, but there was a sense of true privacy because people didn’t care about your internet activity and none of it was done on your true name.
I see this topic is getting heated. Have we forgotten our roots, have we forgotten what the Internet is really for?
I am coming in late to this topic and just wanted to drop the above two articles into this discussion as they are relevant. It highlights that the argument ‘nothing to hide’ doesn’t actually work. The famous Snowden quote comes to mind:
"Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Irony is that, based on above, all of our rights to privacy, free speech and even truth are being blatanly destroyed and abused. Yet, the vast majority of people still don’t care and any privacy-conscious individual is automatically regarded with suspicion, distrust and regarded as someone with two heads.
We are down the slippery slope from private firings to government overreach in record time as the FCC coerced them into this action.
Tldr:
A principled middle path
We don’t have to choose between no standards and digital witch-hunts. A healthy response looks like this:
- Enforce clear, narrow rules against true threats and harassment with due process, not viral lists.
- Reject surveillance shortcuts (mass scanning, mandatory ID) that make de-anonymization effortless for both the state and partisan actors.
- Model the free-speech ethic you want to see: answer ugly speech with better arguments, not with doxxing databases.
Dutch late night show made a nice tribute to Disney censoring Kimmel:
There are lots of aspects to this issue.
If you truly value free speech, then you can’t have one side receiving all the consequences. Enough people on both sides need to be scare enough to motivate people to maintain it as a matter of principle, and not expediency. Otherwise, when you are in the out-group, you call for free speech, and when you are on the in-group you call for consequences.
The reason this is hitting close to home is that the shoe is on the other foot now. People on the right have known for a long time that they have to have good opsec because expressing their views can get them fired or subject to an HR struggle session. People were banned for expressing beliefs about COVID that were later vindicated. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal was successfully suppressed through aggressive censorship.
The left has not been serious about the size and scope of this problem because it never impacted them. Now that it is impacting them, they are now upset about free speech. The President of the United States was unilaterally banned from all social media over a weekend, and had his bank accounts canceled. In some cases, the same Twitter accounts that celebrate bans or “consequences” for speech a year ago are now complaining about it.
Principled people every day are checking out from doing the “right” thing out of principle because they don’t believe those principles will be there for them when the situation is reversed. You must remember that members of Weather Underground in the 60s were literally bombing people in political violence, and they received pardons and have university tenure. When people believe that they can conduct political terrorism and not face consequences, you deny people the recourse to deal with things appropriately, and you invite counter-violence.
Charlie Kirk was noteworthy BECAUSE of his approach to free speech. He was famous for going out in public and giving anyone the chance to talk, to challenge him, or debate him. That is the whole purpose that the American founders envisioned when writing the First Amendment. The assassination of Kirk is a way of saying, “Free speech is dead, we will kill you for it.” If people are celebrating this type of death, they are endorsing this message. They are also saying, “I personally believe it is good when my political enemies are killed.” Yet these people have jobs that deal with preserving life (nurses, doctors), or involve access to children (teachers), or are involved in law enforcement (who are supposed to be neutral under the law). It is a fundamental breach of social trust for someone who has control over your health, safety, and children to celebrate extralegal political killing.
Many leftists are saying things like, “It is good that Nazi’s are dead! All Nazi’s should die!” While this statement itself is wrong, it is even more irresponsible to call Kirk a Nazi. If you are treated as a Nazi when you hold views that are classically liberal, why not just become a real Nazi? If you get executed for jaywalking and executed for murder, why not murder? There are many, many ways our society has accepted imprecise arguments and analogies to justify transgressing the “standards” of human rights, free speech, free thought, etc.
Jimmy Kimmel did not endorse the violence (to be fair), but he did spread a malicious and slanderous lie about the violence, that the shooter was MAGA affiliated. The type of viewers tuning in to network television are often low-information and low-skepticism people who are not online and who inherently trust large networks. It serves to blame the victim while giving tolerance to those actually responsible.
FCC broadcasting licenses are not a right but a special privilege that most people do not have access to. The inherent limit of the frequency spectrum means that only certain people can broadcast. Similarly, access to the White House for press is not something that everyone is entitled to. Those who have that privileged access ought to be expected to handle it responsibly, but for too long there has been strong partisan bias and outright propagandistic use of the networks. This is the kind of thing that ought to compromise the monopoly of a network if they do not police internally.
I understand the fear of the slippery slope, but those of us on the right are not worried about the slippery slope because we feel like we are already at the bottom. It is unfair that our rights have been unprotected, therefore while we have power we should act on it. Then at least there is the hope that many on the left and center will realize that the ball is now in their court.
If you are playing basketball, it is right to get upset when people break the rules, but if one team breaks the rules constantly (injuring people on the bench, threatening/bribing referees, etc.) then you cannot expect the other team to just play fair basketball.
I think you are conflating private censorship with government censorship, and those are not problems of the same severity, but I won’t go too far into that.
Joe Biden never coerced any private corporation into suppressing anything about his son. His administration did make a request to Twitter to take down Hunter Biden’s nudes, but Twitter was under no obligation to satisfy the request, beyond it being against their ToS.
Furthermore, if you have a problem with such a request, Trump sent similar requests to Twitter, except Trump wanted Twitter to take down tweets criticizing him. I’d consider that worse from any angle you look at it.
If you’re going to say “the left” has a bigger cancel culture issue, I want to see evidence.
Not that I agree with either, but there’s a large difference between censoring swearing equally for all and censoring speech because it doesn’t toe the party line.
Can you name a single instance of a Biden appointee doing something like threatening ABC’s broadcasting license for the political speech on one of their shows, which you admit did not cross the line?
The government pressuring private corporations to censor certain speech is not something “the left” has been doing. You justify it in the name of revenge, but the acts you’re seeking vengeance for didn’t even occur. Also, revenge is not a good reason to trample on free speech.
TL;DR: This is NOT normal. I reject any attempt to normalize this kind of censorship.
So, two issues here.
First, while some of your reasoning and scrutiny is reasonable, you are very conspicuously only applying it to the people to the left of you - the people you already disagree with. You can find innumerable instances of folks in your ideological zone celebrating political violence, lying on large networks, pushing propaganda, and breaking the rules.
If you’re not able to see it happening across the political spectrum then that is due to an ideological blind spot. We all have blind spots, and that’s okay. But we must be aware of them.
Second, if you’re okay cracking down on others rights because you feel yours have been violated then I don’t feel that you’ll find much common ground in privacy communities.
I think we should call out problems when we see them, and to be honest this is coercive behavior when it comes from a government official.
It is not as coercive as the FCC making extremely public, showboating threats against broadcast networks like in this case. We are currently in a worse situation, yes. But really neither case should be accepted by people.
(I’m away at the moment but I’m hoping to get back to some of the other larger points throughout this thread soon)
I am not conflating anything, the two work together directly. The fact they are technically separate entities does not mean that they are truly isolated.
I had dozens of friends personally banned from Facebook for posting about it. It was widespread and orchestrated suppression for the purpose of eliminating the “October surprise.” The same with those who questioned anything about COVID, and who disputed the integrity of the 2020 election. Coming up to the 2020 election they had a hair trigger for bans on people on the right for the specific purpose of influencing the “temperature” close to the election. At one point I had 4 separate accounts to evade bans. Democrats jailed Douglas Mackee for an obvious joke about “voting by text” and treated it as election interference. Nick Fuentes was put on a No-Fly list under the Biden administration with no legal recourse and no conviction of a crime. Obama maliciously used the IRS against conservative organizations.
The Biden administration bullied and gaslit the US Military over the COVID vaccine where honorable men were threatened to have their careers ruined, Many were forced out of service for their sincere beliefs and hesitations about the vaccine. They would later be vindicated with the low efficacy of the vaccine and it not being useful for stopping the spread.
When gay marriage became legal by a court ruling, gays maliciously harassed and sued businesses who had sincere religious or moral objections to those practices and especially doing things they considered would make them parties to it. Religion is protected just like speech in the 1st Amendment, but out of petty personal vindictiveness, they targeted those specific people who had religious objections to try to “get” them rather than pick one of the thousands of other options. Where is the concern for the rights of Christians?
Furthermore, libel and defamation are illegal speech. We aren’t talking about someone airing a political opinion. We are talking about someone who maliciously lied and claimed that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a MAGA supporter.
I agree in principle, and I consider you Jonah to be a pretty principled person, and the kind of person I would not want the system to be weaponized against. It is a similar situation with the Young Turks, who I disagree with but they at least are serious about the values.
Ultimately it comes down to whether we are talking basketball or war. If we all agree on what the rules are, and we mostly follow them and accept penalties from the referees as legitimate we can continue, but the right has not felt this was whatsoever. We just watched a man who deeply believed in free speech get shot in the neck for talking. Whoever really is responsible for it can be determined later, but we watched as thousands of people were filled with joy to see him die. One man present there smiled and pumped his fist.
Is this representative of the left? I can’t say. There are some on the left who rightfully hate the violence and condemn it, but those who are overjoyed by a man who embodied the right to free speech getting shot for it can’t be allowed to remain integrated in our society the same way. We can’t support “free speech” for people who love violent suppression of speech of their enemies.
Out of curiosity, I went looking for research on censorship and political ideology, finding Chong et al. to be particularly insightful. The study examined censorship in terms of allowing public speeches, hiring college teachers, and allowing books in libraries. The percentages below represent the proportion of liberals or conservatives who tolerate certain types of speech.
According to the GSS data, liberals are more tolerant of speech from anti-religionists (~81% vs. ~69%), communists (~81% vs. ~69%), and militarists (75% vs. 68%), while conservatives are slightly more tolerant of racists (55% vs. 54%).
However, their survey data tells a more nuanced story. Liberals tolerate both right-wing and left-wing speech equally (65%), but not anti-minority speech (44%). In contrast, conservatives are more tolerant of anti-minority speech (73%) and right-wing speech (78%), but not left-wing speech (46%).
An additional data source suggests that conservatives are more tolerant of speech that expresses hostility toward minorities, as well as speech expressing hostility toward groups associated with conservative values.
TL;DR: While this evidence is not conclusive on its own, it suggests that liberals are more tolerant of speech in general, but conservatives are more tolerant of speech that targets specific groups, even if those groups are conservative-aligned.
Facebook is a private company, with their own TOS, who can do as they please, just like Twitter/X. The “Hunter Laptop” story turned out to be nothing, even according to Fox News. For the “obvious joke” about voting by text: trial by jury, used images, slogans, and text of the official Hillary campaign. That is the definition of election interferrance. Thousands of people are on the No Fly list, and don’t find out until they try to fly; these people also never committed a crime, and have no legal recourse.
I’m not sure I would call 90%+ efficacy low, and it was shown to save countless lives by lower the infection rate (remember, the point is to keep you from spreading it, not prevent you from getting it).
Beliefs don’t trump rights, and when the law changes, you have to change your business practices. Not following the law gets you sued. There are also a large number of LGBT+ Christians.
The day of the assassination, Jesse Watters claimed, on air, that “they are at war with us”, when nothing was known about the shooter at the time. This is another obvious and malicious lie said to rile people up (especially after you look at the responses on Twitter, with many on the right calling for an all out civil war and mass violence, posts that are still up). He is still on the air.
When a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house to kill her and her husband, we watched as thousands said it’s a shame he didn’t get to do it (not to mention news stories ran about it being a “gay lovers quarrel”, literal libel and slander). When a Dem lawmaker was killed in Minnesota, we saw thousands post in glee. The same for when Gov. Shapiro’s house was set on fire with his family inside.
With Kirk’s assassination, you saw all sides of politicians and officials calling for level headedness, to come together as a country, to stop “us vs them”-ing, while mass amounts of people are calling for a total and unconditional end to anyone and anything to “the left”. Both sides have done doxxing campaigns over critical political events (look at J6 for example), but when you look at the responses of people who self proclaim their beliefs: only one side calls for mass violence and retaliation. The data shows this. I sincerely implore you to look beyond your own side, you own beliefs, and realize that all this does is keep pushing the “us vs them” narrative, while distracting from them destroying the freedom of speech and right to privacy we all should have.
I think @mika was correct in pointing out that your scrutiny is not being applied equally. No court of law in the United States would consider Kimmel’s monologue as libel or defamation:
We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the President is taking this.
Reporter: My condelences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?
Trump: I think very good, and by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s going to be a beauty.
Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay?
It’s clear that Kimmel’s primary focus was on criticizing the MAGA movement’s behavior, rather than making a direct accusation about the shooter. While Kimmel’s words may imply that the shooter was a MAGA supporter, this interpretation is not the only reasonable one. In fact, the context of the proceeding words suggests that Kimmel was actually criticizing MAGA supporters for assigning blame before we knew anything.
If you have a problem with Kimmel’s words above, surely you must have a problem with the words of the Vice President of the United States, right?
We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe, is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet.
Vance was much more explicit in suggesting that the shooter was motivated by left-wing ideology.
Alright, fine:
This is true.
This is false. It simply does not reflect reality.
From a legal perspective, some people do want this to be the case, and this is a controversial topic in the United States and has been for a long time. Unless some “parental rights” amendment gets passed, it does not make sense to pretend we live in this reality, which has been affirmatively rejected everywhere else in the world besides the United States and Somalia.
This is true.
This is true, but I think it is obviously ridiculous to everyone on Earth at this point, but nobody bothers changing the rule because it only affects voters for 3 years of their lives.
The choice between a significantly better option and a significantly worse option is not a real choice. The internet frankly revolutionized society, and it is a fundamental need to many people who cannot move/communicate/etc. without assistance, as it should not be necessary for them to be completely reliant on others when we have the technical solutions here already.
I can’t spend too much time on this opinion because I honestly do not see how it is possible to argue that the internet can be completely ignored in 2025, when it is literally the only way to access most government and private services.
You are naming exceptions in history. Anonymous publication has been the driving force behind much activism since the invention of the printing press. Before printing, using word of mouth to spread ideas is inherently unreliable and thus builds-in some form of anonymity or plausible deniability by default.
The United States was founded on concealed authorship, it is fundamental to this nation. Thomas Paine authored Common Sense anonymously, as it was common among those in the Enlightenment era to believe ideas were more important than identities. Which I believe is true, currently we are too enshrined in irrelevant identity politics which has been the driving factor behind all of these recent conversations. Its publisher was anonymous as well.
There is a role to play in tying a personal identity to a cause. Rosa Parks is a good example of this. Her entire confrontation on the bus was planned by the NAACP and Rosa Parks in advance specifically because they thought she would be a good face for this particular cause, and they were completely correct to do so.
However, there is also a role for anonymous political speech to influence public opinion, and you should not diminish that.
The same does not apply to age verification, because age verification is being applied to whenever you receive information, not when you sharing it. It is not possible for the act of obtaining new knowledge to affect anyone other than yourself.
It currently does:
I think it is a false equivalence to compare a person being a public nuisance with publishing a post on social media.
It is exactly like you said: The internet is merely a library of information, so in this analogy publishing a website or post is more like publishing a book that’s available in a public library. Therefore, for your argument to work you would need to believe that a book in a library could disrupt library operations.
However, you literally cannot disrupt a public library by publishing information in it. It is not the library’s place to judge the books it is offering. I can walk a few blocks away and check out Mein Kampf right now if I wanted to. If sharing the epitome of hate speech is not disruptive to a public library, then information published online should not be disruptive to the internet.
As you acknowledge later, there is a compelling case for anonymity in Tor. I didn’t watch the video you linked, but I would extend that with the historical precedent of concealed authorship that I mentioned earlier. In addition to Thomas Paine, many figures of the Revolutionary war like Benjamin Franklin published pamphlets and letters with pseudonyms or completely anonymously. This is also a pattern you see among similar revolutions and activists in other countries.
Pro-privacy regulation is needed, but worsening privacy with age verification is not the solution. Companies should be forbidden from requesting IDs and other sensitive personal information without a legitimate need, not encouraged to do so.
Ultimately the problem with all possible solutions is government censorship.
Proponents of “zero-knowledge proofs” and similar technologies are too focused on the authentication process between themselves and the websites they are visiting and making that authentication as private as possible, but not on the underlying technologies that make that authentication possible in the first place.
Any age verification system will ultimately derive its knowledge from the government, who will be free to both 1) decide what needs age verification in the first place, and 2) decide who they will grant a digital ID to. The conflict of interest is inherent.
You have stated numerous times that children are being harmed and therefore need protection, but much like the governments pushing for age verification you have not provided any evidence to back up this claim.
Many of the resources you share from organizations like UNICEF and the Childrens Learning Institute promote the government and schools introducing better technology education and digital literacy programs. They do not propose direct intervention and censorship as a means to protect children from dangerous content.
The resource you shared from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Social Media and Youth Mental Health promotes technology companies making their products less addictive, and making strong privacy regulation so that privacy violations like age verification aren’t normalized. They note that “six-in-ten adolescents say they think they have little or no control over the personal information” being collected about them online, and mandatory ID checks will only strengthen this problem.
One source you shared notes that children of parents with disabilities feel more empowered and independent than their peers, and had higher self-esteem; it also notes that this has been a shift in recent years (they cite papers from 2015-2019 compared to challenges noted in papers from the 90s). It seems logical that this shift could be explained by technology and free access to information, so stunting that access could drag these children down considerably.
Some of the resources you shared address general parenting problems and do not touch on the internet, social media, or age verification at all.
The resources I have read, including many of the ones you shared yourself, indicate that if this is a problem it is not widespread, and it can be largely solved by providing better guidance and education to parents and children alike, without any need for direct government intervention.
At the same time, direct government intervention—in the form of age verification, chat control, etc.—has considerable downsides when it comes to freedom of expression and the freedom to access information. The downsides are so significant that even if children were being harmed to a much greater extent it still would not justify these solutions.
I am a big advocate for digital literacy training and a much, much, much better approach to technology education in general in the schools, and I think such curriculum changes would have a much more significant impact on children’s safety than the government stepping in as a psuedo-parent ever will. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the government is not interested in the best outcomes for children, but only for the outcome that they have the most control over.
I personally believe this is certainly not true, but even if it were this is an extremely uncompelling argument. Two wrongs don’t make a right and all.
Oh, the list that was created by George W. Bush following 9/11 alongside the PATRIOT Act and other completely unconstitutional programs and laws? The ACLU accurately predicted all of these problems since the inception of these programs.
This is the exact problem with granting the government extensive and broad powers. They will be abused.
What you are advocating for right now is basically the creation of another no-fly list, but for the government to ostracize “cyberbullies” on social media with a similar lack of due process and due diligence. If you get your way then you will just be complaining about a Democrat-controlled FCC cancelling a right-wing late night show 25 years from now.
It is our job and our responsibility to prevent the potential abuse of power regardless of who is in power now or what they claim they’re going to do with it.
We need to make a distinction between whether these businesses are refusing to serve certain people, or refusing to say certain things. One is discrimination, the other is legal.
A cake shop not offering their standard wedding cake service to a couple simply because they are gay is discriminatory, and the simple act of providing a good or service by a business is not in itself protected speech.
The reality of this particular case is that they refused to bake a cake that they would have baked for a straight couple, which is unacceptable. If it were a case where they were being asked to offer a brand new cake service out of the norm for their business, or actually publish some pro-LGBT speech, then they would actually be in the right to refuse, but that was not the case here.
For it to be libel there would actually have to be someone being defamed. Who is the subject of defamation in this scenario? It isn’t defaming Kirk to speculate about his killer, and it isn’t defaming the killer to call him MAGA. On the flip side, the examples @DuskCube58 gave, and many on the right claiming that specifically Governor Tim Walz hired the person to kill Melissa Hortman 10 minutes away from where I am, are all far more likely to be considered defamatory statements.
Even in cases of defamation and libel though, the bar to clear before it becomes illegal is exceptionally high in the United States. There are very few examples of successful defamation cases (although to be fair the few that were successful are very high-profile).
Plus, I think @stunned832’s assessment that Kimmel didn’t even make a statement about the killer’s identity in the first place is accurate. He was pointing out that the killer has been variously and dubiously characterized by different right-wing outlets as having a very wide and inconsistent variety of beliefs, because they are reporting without having factual information.
Logically, of course “the MAGA gang” wouldn’t claim he’s one of their own, why would they? The real question is why they were instead claiming he was part of some other group without having evidence of those claims.
Thank you for responding! Will look more into what you are saying and evaluate more of my opinions on the matter.
Also to just mention the studies, I added a lot of studies that didn’t support my argument that is why I said:
As, I don’t want people to just listen to me but to make up their own decisions.
With the disabled parents argument I could not find a single study as there wasn’t any on online safety. There are more studies for kids who are disabled than for studies of parents who are disabled (but even some of those are lacking). So, I think that is an oversight in the society as a whole.
This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study with the aim of describing how children and adolescents experience their everyday family life when having a parent with deafblindness.
Different everyday life
Although the children stated that they lived a life like anyone else, they also said that they were experiencing a different everyday life. This included Acknowledging differences, that they were Adjusting to the parent’s needs, and that the parent’s deafblindness led to a Financial strain.
Adjusting to the parent’s needs
Some of the children said that they needed to adjust themselves to their parent’s needs, as stated by one child “I have always adapted myself to my parents’ needs” (Interview no 7). Adjusting to the parent’s needs included the need for adapting the communication method.
Financial strain
Having a parent with deafblindness might lead to financial strain for the children. One child said that one of the parents had to work a lot of overtime to survive financially since the other parent was unemployed due to deafblindness, and one child said that there were a “lot of expenses involved when being deafblind”
Being there for the parent
Being the child in a family where at least one of the parents had deafblindness meant being there for the parent by Helping the parent and Protecting the parent from harm.
Being emotionally affected
Feelings of frustration, Feelings of compassion and Need for support were the subcategories interpreted as describing how the children were emotionally affected by living with a parent who had deafblindness…
Other situations when feelings of frustration occurred were when the children had to repeat themselves several times since their parent did not hear what was being said,
Need for support
Some of the children stated that they had not been offered any special support in school or from a counsellor due to their parent having deafblindness. Since some of the children stated that they believed that they had difficulties managing school due to the lack of help from their parent with their homework they believed that they would have benefitted from some special help in school. Despite this, some stated that they did not need any special support and some children expressed a need for emotional support; not only for themselves but also for other children experiencing the same situation as themselves. The present emotional support was mostly given by family and friends, “I get the support I need from my friends” (Interview no 5), and in some cases from the school, “I´ve talked a little with the school nurse regarding how it is to have a parent with deafblindness.” (Interview no 9).
But all in all I thank you for responding!
Edit: Had to fix the link. For some reason after replying the link added a / at the beginning and end of the URL. Which made the link unusable.
Please refer to my previous post:
First, while some of your reasoning and scrutiny is reasonable, you are very conspicuously only applying it to the people to the left of you - the people you already disagree with. You can find innumerable instances of folks in your ideological zone celebrating political violence, lying on large networks, pushing propaganda, and breaking the rules.
If you’re not able to see it happening across the political spectrum then that is due to an ideological blind spot. We all have blind spots, and that’s okay. But we must be aware of them.
You are exhibiting the same blind spot here. There are innumerable examples of the right wing, including the administration currently in power, gleefully ‘breaking the rules’ and celebrating political violence. Many of them have been brought up in this thread. If you’re not seeing them it’s not because they don’t exist. It’s because you’re not wanting to confront things that challenge your ideological bent.
We all have blindspots - it’s human. The best we can do is be aware of them, and not assume they represent objective reality. I would appreciate some acknowledgement of that reality, and I find you skipping that part of my post in your response to be a concerning and conspicuous omission.
On the other hand - if one willfully maintains their ideological blindspot and uses it as reasoning to oppress others then that is truly chilling. I’m seeing some red flags that that’s where this discussion is headed, and I would appreciate some clarification to put that concern to rest.
Some of the biggest tragedies in history have come because people were dogmatically stuck to their ideological viewpoint and refused to acknowledge things that challenged it. If we don’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat it.
The gap between your views and mine are too large to find common ground, so I am not going to continue.