• 2 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I think the idea here is that, as Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, the minority party can do a lot to simply break the government.

    If the Democrats had the intestinal fortitude to be real resistance against an authoritarian takeover, they could start filibustering everything, and using every procedural trick to delay or block every Republican action until some set of demands are met. Perhaps removing Musk from every government system, or reinstating all of the DoJ personnel who have been retaliated against.

    Here we see Democrats basically unanimously going along with the Republican agenda so that they can feel like “the adults in the room,” rather than fighting for the life of our republic.





  • I would be careful with phrases like, “there is no contradiction.” There is a comprehensible tension between free speech as the ability for anyone to say what they wish, and a prohibition on hate speech as a prohibition on saying specific things. Denying that risks damaging one’s credibility because it can appear that we are merely refusing to acknowledge that tension.

    I argue it’s better to admit these tensions. And that’s not an admission that the arguments for prohibition of hate speech are weak, but it is an admission that as real people in the real world, we can never have the comfort of a tension-free, contradiction-free theory for anything of significance.








  • It would be nice to have some opposition, though. Even if most “conservative” media right now is little more than xenophobia, or cult worship, there do exist sound arguments against the typical internet-left positions. I don’t have a solid enough read on what comes through New in the fediverse to say whether any of that is being submitted and just downvoted off everyone’s feeds, or if all that’s being submitted is the average conservative media junk.

    Still, political spaces without opposition/diversity invariably degenerate into purity contests, and circle jerking.