Amerika

Notice the subtlety of this category-based attack (found in The Guardian):

In response, Yiannopoulos told Breitbart:

With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives. This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.

Of course, this is nonsense. Freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to abuse or incite racial hatred. And in such tantrums about the right to offend – tantamount to a bully throwing his toys out of the pram – we hear nothing about the silenced free speech of those who, like Jones, are driven off social media platforms because the sheer level of vitriol is just too much to bear.

They are always beating that tin drum:

Category X is unacceptable, so anything we dislike is Category X.

Do they ever define “abuse” or “incite racial hatred”? Not with any specificity, definitely, which allows them to association any non-Leftist speech under these banners. It has nothing to do with the words, and everything to do with the signal. Only Leftist thought is acceptable.

That seems harsh, until you observe people like this in action. Someone who wants to get to the truth starts with describing Yiannopoulos’ behavior as closely as can be done, then explains why it was abusive in effect, and points out that a sane solution might be for Jones to stop replying to him.

The insane person creates categories of behaviors whose sin is being personally offensive to them. This allows them to call principled disagreement “abuse,” and to claim that there is “incitement” behind refusing the Leftist narrative on race, when incitement would actually be something like, “Come on everybody, let’s kill all the Irish!”

We see this time and again. Leftists agree on categories that are unacceptable, and then use those as swords of guilt to force everyone else to comply or to face guilt by association. At first it was “classist” and “sexist,” but then “racist” and “homophobic” came into use, and now “ableist” has joined the mix. Next, it may be “IQist” or even “competencist” which are for now nonsense terms, but you get the point. These are not useful words; they are red and green at a stoplight which determines whether Leftists attack or not.

In the meantime, the point is entirely lost: that for us to have an open society, we need to be able to discuss anything without people getting banned, fired, blacklisted, or arrested. How it is that grown adults think people should be jailed or ostracized for any speech escapes me, but as the late editor Andrew Breitbart said about Leftists, “they destroy people.”

Tags: insanity, leftism