I was talking about issues that have existed on this forum beyond what's just been mentioned in this thread. I'll reference other threads where exchanges on this very topic have taken place to prove that my points were not solely about this thread alone anyway.
You don't have to prove it; my question wasn't about that. I meant that I seemed to be talking about The Issue, and you seemed to be talking about The Thread (or, as it turns out, The Forum).
If it's got to come down to picking either "coercion" or "moral uprightness" then my original point leaned more towards the latter.
While I'm glad to learn coercion isn't necessarily your
default position, it's pretty troubling how all your comments about political violence are so qualified and diluted.
However, pointing out that such a concept "can't be generalised" is a vague response that doesn't account for the specifics.
What specifics? Here's what I was replying to:
"Why is it the offended who has to change but not the offender?"
It's an "All Lives Matter" kind of response - sure, it's an inclusive and agreeable sentiment on paper, but in practice it ends up coming across as a deflection away from the real issue.
It might be if I was presented with a specific concern and only gave you a general response, but that's not what happened. I can't deflect a point that wasn't made.
What I did do is make an educated guess about what you were asking, and explained my thought process when deciding between the two in various situations. Which is, like, the polar opposite of a deflection. If anything, I probably expounded more than was necessary, especially considering you (apparently) meant something else entirely.
It reminds me of
this exchange I had with Citizen Rules a while back regarding PC culture - he claimed that "any actor should be able to play any role", I countered him with a fairly detailed response about some of the problems with that, he didn't respond for whatever reason. That also doubles as another example of how it's the "offended" party who gets considered wrong outside this thread - CR posits that PC types being offended by creative decisions is wrong because it "kills creativity", whereas I contend that being inconsiderate is liable to do the same (though, to be fair, the topic only went that way because Dani was actually asking a sincere question about
The Danish Girl).
What is this supposed to be illustrating? You didn't get dogpiled on. CR said something you disagreed with, and you disagreed with him. This whole paragraph could be "I once had a disagreement with Citizen Rules."
I'd have to search way back in the indexes to find all the examples (especially when they pop up within unrelated threads like the one linked above), but a couple of the most prominent controversial threads in recent memory were started out of the mindset that the "offended" party was the one who was wrong. I'm mainly thinking of FromBeyond's feminism thread and DAnconia's Halloween costume thread when I write that - obviously full of inflammatory rhetoric from both OPs, but other members did not necessarily find their perspectives inherently disagreeable.
You realize that both of those members have been temporarily banned for starting threads like that, right?
That's what I was getting at - I can hypothetically acknowledge every possibility, but in practicality I tend to have to acknowledge one more than the others.
If you're simply saying that most of the people on this forum think little of political correctness, then yes, that's certainly true.
That was out of frustration with the fact that, in that thread and others I mentioned earlier, I was having to juggle not just arguing with the "extreme" individuals but also having to take the time to calmly explain myself to the "moderate" ones like yourself while the extreme ones were effectively left to rattle off whatever they wanted as long as they weren't drawing attention by using personal insults against other members. I guess my problem was that I expected fairness from the people who were ostensibly in the "middle" of the argument, but when it turned out that my side ends up being more outwardly disagreeable to the middle people than my opponent's - well, that just made the process even more exhausting. That's why I originally dropped the "accusation" - because I eventually realised that it wasn't worth pushing for a multitude of reasons.
I think it's pretty simplistic to think everyone can just be dropped onto an ideological spectrum and expect those in the "middle" to criticize everyone on either side of them.
You also seem to be conflating "extreme" rhetoric with extreme positions. Worrying about political correctness is not an extreme position, even though a lot of the people who worry about it try to sound as extreme as possible saying so. Similarly, the idea that we need to restrict this speech
is an extreme position, and continues to be one even when the person espousing it is outwardly polite and willing to engage with people about it. Omaronthewitnessstand.gif
However, when you quoted the parts of my post where I explained in detail about why I did consider it a serious concern, you didn't offer any comment past "agreed" or "ditto".
I feel the pedantic need to point out that I actually did, when I complained about the "u mad bro" stuff. But if you're saying that if I agree with you, I should say so to the people in question, well, this was literally the first thing I posted in this exchange:
"I think this thread was better when it was arguments and not memes. I suppose mocking a wrongheaded idea is a bit better than trying to protect yourself from even hearing it, but neither is nearly as good as making a cogent case about why it's bad."
Nobody's posted those since. So...what are you looking for? I should just write a few paragraphs anyway, expounding on why I agree with you about something that's not actually happening any more?
The vagueness of this part is a point of concern, though - what exactly does this polling define "restricting free speech" as? Does it also account for said young people's political affiliations (or lack thereof)? Could this actually overlap with a different claim that this current generation is turning out to be more conservative than previous ones, thus implying that right-wing youth might be more in favour of the restrictions than the left-wing youth who would presumably support PC culture as well? In any case, I would say that the polling's definition would be key to understanding the results and what exactly is being threatened by these hypothetical restrictions.
That's...not how any of this works.
If you're concerned about
which speech is under threat, then you've already implicitly accepted the idea that some of it should be, or that you can restrict some without threatening all of it. But if any of it's threatened, all of it is.
It's kind of like I told you a dictator has seized power, and you asked me which things they didn't like so you could figure out if they were a threat to you. The threat is that there's a dictator, full stop, whether his whims align with yours or not. Similarly, somebody doesn't really believe in free speech if they're only concerned about it when they think it's
their speech that's going to be restricted.