You make a valid point in that someone with near unlimited funds can easily violate the rights of someone who they don't like. After all, power and money are essentially just different kinds of currencies. I'd say that in an ideal society, the price of violating another person's rights unjustly should approach infinity. If we focus all our attention to try and limit the money that entrepreneurs can have, we usually end up doing that by just creating different kinds of opportunists, those who seek power through politics rather than business. This is bad, because politics inherently selects and promotes emotional manipulators. Another negative effect is that you force those who are successful in business to go into politics, because they will inevitably look for ways to convert their cash assets into political power since political influence doesn't get taxed. You end up paying for it by reducing the cost of violating the rights of the average Joe. And so instead of a few billionaires at the top that could could easily afford to violate your rights, you get a large and more powerful cartel made up of individually moderately powerful oligarchs that collude to keep the price of human flesh at a minimum.

So are you defending free speech, or arguing why your side has no moral responsibility to uphold it? The heuristic you seem to be using to separate the principled free speech advocates from the cynics gives me a lot of concern. I put more faith in those who push free speech as a sacred principal, because then at least then, the cynics will have to pay a higher price to betray that principle. If all you do is say "free speech, but... ", then you're paving a high speed expressway to the top of the hierarchy for the cynics on your own side. So who are the left leaning hardcore free speech advocates these days? Give me some hope, my free speech brother.

Most. But you might be forgetting about narcissistic parents, which could be as much as 5% of the population. We have a social climate that gets you tons of attention and attribution with unearned moral virtue for having a trans kid. That's like heroin for narcissists.

But if you had ranked choice voting, establishment Dems wouldn't be able to blame a Trump win on RFK Jr. and Cornell West.

Not sure what you mean by "this", but what was being objected to in 1949 is very much distinct from what is being objected to today. Ideologically speaking, DEI is motivated by common enmity identity politics, which is absolutely not a continuation of the civil rights movement of the 60s, which was based on MLK's vision of common humanity. It has much more in common with the black power movement.

It may be that we may not be that far apart in terms of moral sense or political principles. I can tell you that if I could go live in an alternate universe in which neither MAGA nor wokeness existed, I'd go do it in an instant. But for whatever reason, we're quite different in which movement we view to be the bigger threat, and maybe our abilities to read the intentions of those movements. You seem to be worried that the side that provides you safety is losing. I can tell you however, that I've had a very similar feeling and it's only very recently that I've seen some things that make me cautiously optimistic. I certainly don't regard the republicans as knights in shining armor. But in the larger general trend, I can feel the pull of marxism has been increasing in recent years. The other day I was listening to a Lex Fridman podcast while cooking, and my sister overheard the guest talking and criticizing capitalism, and she said "Oh, wow, he makes a lot of sense!". But what she didn't know is that the guest was Richard Wolff, probably the most prominent Marxian economist in the US. There are lots of things like this that are giving me a sinking feeling and a sense of impending doom. Maybe one reason I don't read the MAGA crowd to be as large of a threat as you is because I lived through the Satanic Panic, and a period in which the evangelical movement had a much stronger grip on mainstream culture than they do currently.

So while we might disagree on the marxist label, I at least understand your fear of overreach. But then the problem comes that this thing keeps getting bigger and threatens my well being even more, I have to be deferential to people like yourself to dictate my strategy since I'd be risking triggering a potential ally by making them think I'm signaling allegiance to an illiberal ideology. Do I just pipe down? Would you be ok to pipe down about racism so as not to trigger someone worried about the influence of wokeness? I wouldn't have expected it by your first couple of messages, but the thing I found most assuring is that you seem to have a sense of boundary between yourself and the wokeness, and also this

Not sure if you've heard, but a while back Dr. Kendi proposed an Antiracist amendment to the constitution and advocates for a fedral department of Anti-racism. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that his influence has peaked out.

BTW, have you by chance heard of Jonathan Haidt? He's a liberal social psychologist who has been researching social media toxicity and political division. I find him pretty fascinating and you might like him too.

Because it's accurate from everything I've seen. We can trace the intellectual roots and we know who these philosophers are. We know who they venerate, and it's not Hayeck. The only thing I can grant you here is that wokeness is not vulgar marxism, i.e. marxism that focuses on social class over identity. But again, vulgar marxism is a term that woke intellectuals use themselves to contrast against their own movements. If their movements were unrelated to marxism, there would be no reason for them to invent this disambiguating classifier to begin with.

Also, I'm not sure if you're referring to wokeness as a whole or if you're referring to something specifically like BLM here. But there's an interesting Youtuber named Brittany King who was involved with the BLM movement in the early days, and discusses the shift in attitude from colorblindness over to Antiracist, so from what I can see, the influence of Marxist thought is quite strong.

For the record, I'm not interested in putting woke people in camps, much less the woke adjacent. I'm much more afraid that I could lose my job, bank accounts or maybe be forced into some camp because of my views. The most I'd hope for is social ostracization like that faced by the Richard Spencers or Jared Taylors of the world. My hope is that the people themselves can sense the difference between the ideologies and establish the boundaries without having to be compelled. That is why the marxist label is useful. I've heard it said that the woke share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. Which is a strategy to gain power from the non-woke. But you seem to at least have some sense of the differences, which I take as a hopeful sign.

If you're so sure that wokeness is not marxist in origin, who is the most credible philosopher/intellectual that debunks it? I've heard some people argue that wokeism is postmodern rather than marxist, but postmodernism itself gets key elements from marxism. If we were to take a philosopher from the 1950s who had a good understanding of marxism, but had never heard of Critical Race Theory, and tell him "take marxism, and substitute whiteness for bourgois property" and I guarantee you that he would have a very good idea of what Critical Race Theory is without having to crack open a single book.

This is a conundrum. There is one non-woke liberal who said something to the effect that Magastan is fueled by Wokeistan, or maybe that they fuel each other. If you were to argue that the right have a responsibility to keep a lid on white nationalism, then I am inclined to agree with you. But I would also argue that the left has an equal responsibility to keep a lid on wokeism. If folks closer to the center read each other as enemies, it gets very dangerous. So I feel quite worried that you read my criticism of wokeness as an attempt to impute well meaning people. But do note that wokeness causes people on the left to do something similar. A number of years ago when talking with a trans friend, who billed themselves a moderate liberal, but she was very quick to attribute white nationalist motivations to almost anyone on the right. My sense at the time was that she was confused between the traditional colorblind definition of racism and the woke definition. Later on, she posted a raving review of the book "White Privilege" on her facebook page, which I had also read recently, at which point I felt that persuasion was probably pointless. So even now I'm not sure what to make of that experience. Was she crypto the whole time, but trying to seduce others into this ideology? or was she herself just seduced by a powerful cult ideology? Either way, it was quite disturbing to me.

I mentioned it because you seemed to think I lacked nuance and reactively categorized me with the tiki torch guys. And you implied something like it by saying that by my criteria I could classify anything as marxist.

I didn't intend to refer to "THE Holocaust". I was talking in general terms, referring to the starvation and genocides that resulted from communist regimes. But since you mention it, I believe it was Stephen Hicks argued that the Nazis wouldn't have been able to come to power if it weren't for the communists fighting them in the streets. Eventually everyone except maybe a small population of liberals felt they had to choose a side.

Then what term do you propose I use? I used a broader term here primarily to contrast it with the political right. I tend to use "the left" when speaking broadly about the political left which could include american liberals, progressives, social democrats, socialists, communists, etc. I'm perfectly aware that there are major differences, but I was referring to a general social trend that is occurring, likely carried about by a small but very vocal and toxic minority who command a larger army of likely well meaning useful idiots. Certainly not the whole of the left. I don't tend to use the term "Liberal" as that is not particularly accurate and there are a number of parts of the left that are downright illiberal.

But if you're not woke and you're not a a crypto tankie, then why would you care so much about me making ideological similarities or distinctions, unless you're emotionally invested in that social hierarchy or somehow hope to benefit from the ideological murkiness and confusion. If you also see toxic elements on the left, we should be able to have a civil discussion. If anything, I hope to enable the principled folks on the left fight against those toxic elements. I want to see the left become healthy again, not defeat it.

When I say the Kend-ites are cooperating with the tiki-torchers, I'm not claiming that they're drinking buddies. It's that their goal is to poach the political center. If they fail to do that then they both lose for sure. But if they can kayfabe fight until the center gone, then at least they have a 50/50 chance in the final confrontation.

Ah, yes, and you can't fight racism when you're not woke or anti-communist, right? As they say, the Iron law of woke projection never fails. I'm perfectly aware that not everyone on the left is woke or is marxist. If anything, wokeism may be falling out of fashion seeing how many liberals and progressives are giving pushback against it. They're getting sick of the left's insistence on ideological purity.

Just because you tweak a couple of variables in the program and rename it doesn't mean you've written a new program. The prevalence of narcissism and psychopathy in the human species pretty much guarantees that there will always be a vanguard party waiting in the shadows, so it's not an ideological distinction that is likely to prevent another holocaust.

Seeing this makes me think that you're someone who fancies yourself part of the vanguard. Can you even name any anti-communists or non-woke people who are fighting racism that you admire? The Kendi-ites are actually cooperating with the tiki torchers, at least until the final round when they establish a Dictatorship of the Antiracist(TM)

It generally refers to schools of thought that are derived from Marxism and Marxian conflict theory, but instead of focusing on the conflict between the working class and bourgeois, they emphasize the conflicts between identities, i.e. whitenenss/non-whiteness, straight vs queer, etc. The modern versions of wokeness are espoused by intellectuals such as Kimberle Crenshaw (Intersectionality), Angela Davis & Derrick Bell (Critical Race Theory), Gayle Rubin (Queer Theory), can trace their influence back to Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt school of critical theory.

Although these philosophers don't generally refer to themselves as "Woke Marxists", as they prefer to distance themselves from the failures of Marxist governments in the 20th century. But the term is accurate.

The reason Established Marxist regimes oppose the woke versions is that these variants is that they already have the power. These movements are destabilizing forces. Since they've already seized the power, then there's no need for them.

"intelligent and helpful" ? hah, you might as well just have called a black man articulate. I predict your next defense will be "no, no.. some of my best friends are Indian!" If you confess your wrongdoing now, you may get a lighter punishment.

I think Jonathan Haidt has some really good takes on this. I recommend everyone go listen to him. Social media is a far bigger problem than search. Essentially our attention span is being bought and sold. That we are divided into groups is just how the algorithm packages up our attention span to be sold. Big tech has invested billions into computing power to manipulate us into keep scrolling and increase engagement, consequences be damned.

The CCP isn't communist in the same way that Catholics aren't Christian from the viewpoint of some protestants. Sure, you can make some valid points that they have have a lot in common with fascists, but that's not surprising considering the similar intellectual roots that Marxism and fascism share. After all, Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist. What can't be obfuscated, is that China got to where it is by way of a unwavering belief in communism. If you've ever lived in China, you'll probably be aware that high school and college students are required to take Marxism indoctrination classes. It's been that way since Mao's time (assuming classes weren't suspended altogether) and never changed when Deng Xiaoping was in power or any time since then. The CCP may have utilized some capitalist strategies to develop their economy and parasitize free markets while they fortify their power over the common folks. So someone interested in engaging in communist apologetics and revisionist history might be able to make a technical argument that the CCP aren't truly communist according to some puritanical definition, but one thing you can safely say is that the CCP are not liberals and will never be liberals. The people making this kind of argument are likely quite illiberal themselves. As the Chinese saying goes dao4 bu4tong2 bu4 xiang1 wei4 mou2.

This post seems to assume that those who would limit speech have a trust hierarchy that is less prone to the propagation of lies, and I guarantee you they arent. Granted, moderation is useful for filtering out things like spam or disinformation, however it should be easy to opt out, or to select an alternate algorithm or hierarchy of trust. If you try to establish a ministry of truth, then you're just inviting people to distrust it. That's one reason I hope Musk makes good on his idea to open source twitter algorithms, because more freedom in the hands of the users is going to be good. It's the elitists whose social positions are highly reliant on rent-seeking and disinformation that will be pissing their pants about this.