[QUOTE=Tyrone Slothrop;533921]
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You're not really talking about authoritarianism at all, you're just making hyperbolic claims about it to set up your usual beefs about free speech.
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These are interwoven. Just this week, the 5th Circuit ruled that the Biden admin was likely violating the First Amendment by leaning on social media companies to squelch certain speech. In the case of what DeSantis is doing in FL, there is no doubt - he is acting as an authoritarian, banning free expression.
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I don't think that's a very good description of what's motivating the people on either side about whom you're talking, but you're doing your hyperbole think. Complaining about accuracy here is like complaining that Dali isn't a realist.
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I think it absolutely is because what I see at the extreme poles is delusion, religion. MAGA thinks they're in a fight for the soul of America. Their counterparts on the extreme left believe that the country must be reinvented down to its plankings. Neither is at all realistic or living in anything close to reality.
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I think you are using lazy versions of the terms "zero sum" and "Orwellian," and I choose to honor Orwell's memory by asking for more precision and care in politics and the English language. Hi Hank!
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When you seek to create a society in which there is correct-think and wrongthink and wrongthink is banished, you're in Orwellian waters. And that is a zero sum game, as it insists on the opponent not having a voice.
The first rule of Authoritarian Club: Stifle dissent.
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No, that's hyperbole, and isn't responding to my point.
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It is absolutely not hyperbole. Behind the scenes, most people roll their eyes at the ESG and DEI compliance nonsense, and all the idiot virtue signaling of corporate America. They think it's a fad. And they'll tell you so over drinks. But they genuflect dutifully because he who does not can get himself in a career pickle.
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You're not even talking about laws. You just want to live in a world where there are no consequences for what you say?
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No. I want to live in a world with reverence for facts. Where people who offer facts are not pilloried, from either side. Where kids in FL or anywhere can read and learn about LGBTQ issues. Where a person can assert as we all now know that a virus started in a lab and not be silenced or ludicrously deemed, by a coven of narrative-fixers in govt and media, as a racist.
I do not defend the sorts like Alex Jones. Those people should be mocked and abused for stating the grotesquely false. But if you don't find the squashing of the Hunter laptop story disturbing, or worse, the letter, offered with knowledge of its falsity, by 50 ex-intel officials, calling it Russian propaganda, you don't really care much about freedom of expression.
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It's not really much of a thing anywhere, tbh. The story is that it doesn't actually change much of anything.
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That's just not true. These things have created a society in which certain silly pieties are compelled to be observed. And if you think I'm wrong, look up how lucrative DEI consulting has become in the past decade. And this ESG nonsense has cost real people real money, and burdened the bottom lines of corporations for no defensible reason.
ETA: A school I attended just lost a bunch of money over "inclusion" policies. Donors got into a battle, pitted themselves at the extremes of right and left, nobody in the middle was heard, and who lost? The kids.
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Sure. Meanwhile, politically, the fraction of the country that feels differently has taken over the GOP as the wedge for its grievances.
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As have their doppelgangers on the left in the Democratic party.
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I think you keep using the term "authoritarianism" to get a rise out of me. A-ha! Subtle authoritarianism! The kind no one notices! Like Mussolini, but nudging the trains imperceptibly in the direction of being on time.
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Were it only so nudging, Mr. Sunstein. But it's not. It's a silly new form of religion, just like MAGA.
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The urge for false equivalence is so strong in you. One cannot imagine Trump every doing what the kids at the US Open did, for so many reasons, but here you insist that they have the same "mindset."
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I can. I saw him do it on January 6, and many times before and after. There are about 500 hours of him throwing tantrums and insisting someone hear his grievances about his election loss and how he was treated in office. Yes, climate change is real, and Trump's claims of election theft are false, but a tantrum is a tantrum.
