Thread by @Freesoilyeah

@Tallocat It's directional though. Maybe it would be easier to think about other places and times first. What would be the range of debate in the USSR in 1950? Someone who thinks "stalin didn't go far enough" might face some censure. But do you see how irrelevant that is?

@Tallocat The big cult of that place and time is "communism" or whatever. And the spectrum of thought is limited because the spectrum of speech is limited. The fact that turbo cultists get censured is irrelevant to the problem. The problem is this giant cult and the majority of thought

@Tallocat that is prohibited. For example, in the US, sure, you may have people who say "whites aren't punished enough we need to go harder", and they might get censured. Sure, but do you see how that's irrelevant?

The foundational beliefs are all established. For example, genetic...

@Tallocat equality between populations, the denial of races, that various groups were "oppressed" to any meaningful degree, or any questioning of how bad slavery really was.

You probably think questioning these things are horrible, but that's 99% because you haven't heard it.

@Tallocat You've heard OF it, and perhaps "inferred from critique". But think about any other place and time. Imagine learning about critiques of Christianity from a Scholastic critique of the critique.

@Tallocat The holocaust is a good isolated example of this. Now, someone says event happened. Clearly, burden is on them, because far more things don't happen than happen. So we'd expect a kind of back-and-forth. You got this thing, the bugaboo, which is the holocaust.

@Tallocat Now there is a very narrow range of allowable "debate" on that, and you might say there is a "right wing" or a "left wing".

But on that, because it's such a discrete event, it's just inherently obvious that the most meaningful discussion is "did it happen or not?".

@Tallocat And that is like 90% of what matters. And so the discussion about 90% of what matters is excluded.

Now, within the range of allowable discourse, are more "leftists" who pump the numbers up even higher effectively censured more than people who tamp the numbers down?