>For the supposed paper of record, I found the choice to use the decidedly contemptuous language to refer to the right wing (that I italicized above) very telling.
I genuinely don't know how else they could describe what's going on. Braying means speaking loudly and harshly - an accurate description of how many public figures on the right discuss cancel culture. It's colorful language, sure, but it's an op-ed, which mean's its someone's opinion.
> With regard to conservative voice (as a former liberal) I can tell you it’s the left voice that doesn’t understand the conservatives and the value they bring.
As a recovering conservative (of 25 adult years) I can offer that any deafness is not only mutual, one side is currently bullhorning it as a virtue. As far as bolstering our energy supply, it isn't at all clear how revenge-based, hostility-flavored culture wars achieve this.
My observation is that one side has conjured up a boogey man from the worst possible perceptions of the other and now models all of it's own behavior on it. I can not see how this advances one worthwhile goal.
> whenever the left gets close to getting their voices heard in any broad sense, you start seeing these sort of polemics attacking them for not practicing absolute tolerance and freedom of speech whenever and wherever they assemble.
A lot of people want to see what happens when this particular culture group gets power. What will they do, how do they behave?
> wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out
So the right wing is preventing anybody from having a conversation—but it's okay because you don't want one anyway?
> if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb
> And if you try to make the case that something is exaggerated, you come off as a right wing nut job.
Doesn't it depend on the topic? I mean, remember when right wing news outlets were exaggerating the hordes of migrants invading borders etc and "left wing nut jobs" yelling that people are blowing things out of proportion?
I don't think each if these tactic necessarily belong to one political orientation. It's just a particularly infuriating way humans communicate and deal with verbal conflict.
Nowadays the general level of education is much higher than a century ago, yet there is still a long way to go; hopefully we'll have many more centuries to learn how to build a public discourse more effectively.
>the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades
Cool. How does the "real" left feel about speech these days?
>The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.
Oh. It's a special case because things are so bad _right now_. The same justification as in every instance of abridging speech we later come to regret.
> The right is concerned with maturity and personal responsibility and anti-political correctness, where those things are defined primarily in contrast to the left's perceived over-sensitivity.
I agree this is the common narrative, but surprisingly to me, it seems that the conservatives/right-wingers are getting very good at using outrage themselves. E.g. three times as many professors are being fired for expressing "liberal views" compared to "conservative views" [1], and the situation appears to be the same outside of academia, with people like James Gunn.
Not saying that all conservatives get outraged, but they certainly seem to do so a good deal more than immediately comes to mind.
> For some reason, a large part of the extreme left pays lip-service to non-violence, but is always quick to deflect criticism about left violence by pointing to (more extreme) right violence.
THIS! I'm not on the right but I've always felt that one of the right's biggest tactical errors was to allow their movement to be be seen as the violent side. Nothing in history that I've seen would suggest that the right, even the extreme right, is inherently prone to violence and yet this point is made frequently, casually by even fair minded people.
> Are you saying the realm of acceptable things one can say had shifted to the right? I may have misunderstood because I've never heard that before.
I'm kind of surprised by your surprise, because i feel like for years now people never shut up about the realm of acceptable things shifting right.
Although personally i think its less a right/left thing and more extremes on both sides becoming more vocal with the moderates being squeezed out. Its always easier to fixate on the crazy thing the other is saying then to look at one's own side.
> Us folks on the liberal left end of the spectrum can't complain about the right for employing cancel culture tactics
Except in pointing out the hypocrisy of the right, no one on the left is accusing anyone using the right-wing ”cancel culture” buzzword (which differentiates it from the old-standard “political correctness” that it replaced, which was used in internecine disputes within the left before being adopted by the right, but even that was never generally deployed against the right even though they used the same tactics; pretending that the main flow is the other way around reads like false-flag concern trolling.
> to a leftist, many far right conservatives feel a lot like comic book villains
Your arguments might carry more weight if you saw those with opposing viewpoints as more than caricatures.
What you’re describing as “far right” is a sizeable fraction of America. If your views are, out the door, anathema to them, I’m going to de-prioritise them—they’re politically nonviable.
I don’t think your views are nonviable. The language, however, makes the whole package so.
> Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist
A year ago I would have thought those people some weird online-only fringe. But not after travels around the USA for a couple of months last year, followed by time spent in Baja and interacting with Americans who came down there. So many young Americans are very concerned with pronouns and their proper usage, and the attitudes of early-millennium activist movements like Antifa seem to have made inroads into the wider culture. Of course, American society is polarized and there is a whole other camp.
I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”.
> Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
There are millions of religious people. The ones who view the world that crazy way are a tiny minority and are not particularly politically organized, but are very loud. They're the right's equivalent of the people who advocate the murder of all men as oppressors, or who claim that racism is justified as long as you're not white.
The only reason anybody notices them at all is that they're so conspicuously wrong that their opponents find it convenient to elevate their platform because it's so much easier to knock down than the actual positions held by the majority of the other side.
> There is far more violent rhetoric from the left than the right for the first time in my life.
No, there's not. Moreover there is, as has been true for many decades, far more violent political action in the US by the right (even excluding state action, though some of the longtime violent rhetoric of the right from outside of government, particularly against actual and suspect unauthorized migrants, is now manifesting as state action.)
> I'm getting tired of the right setting up this dynamic where they engage in ad hominem bullshit
its not different than the way the left attacks people as: racist, homophobe, mysangist, uneducated, hillbilly, etc.
the last one i find quite interesting, a party that is supposed to stand against stereotypes, labeling, and skin color references uses hillbilly / red neck a lot.
I genuinely don't know how else they could describe what's going on. Braying means speaking loudly and harshly - an accurate description of how many public figures on the right discuss cancel culture. It's colorful language, sure, but it's an op-ed, which mean's its someone's opinion.
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