Your perspective seems to be completely orthogonal to reality.
1. That is actually how "wages work". The state decides what is the minimal possible wage and then businesses will pay that amount to low status workers because businesses seek to maximize the surplus value out of their workers. Suggesting that businesses will opt into paying their workers a living wage without an external pressure is laughable and ahistoric.
2. Nobody serious is suggesting that $15 is some magical number but given political reality, it seems like an easier sell than proposing a minimum salary that dynamically adjusts based on local cost of living and inflation. It would also be a massive increase relative to the abysmal figure it is today.
"There is a very real chance that the more of those battles they win, the worse the outcome will be."
Such as the battle for minimum wage, the weekend, the 40 hour work week or the abolition of child labor?
I'm waiting for a credible example of a pro worker regulation having overall negative consequences for workers.
That's a common piece of libertarian propaganda but what happens in reality is businesses are forced to offer decent wages to attract labor and the ones that don't, perish - as they should.
> Such as the battle for minimum wage, the weekend, the 40 hour work week or the abolition of child labor?
https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm tells me that the average hospitality worker is working 25 hours a week. Did we have another huge fight to bring the 40 hour work week down to 25 hours? I suspect not, or people would talk about that instead of the 40 hour week. That victory looks a bit hollow - much like any successes in pitching a minimum wage of low single digit dollars per hour which has been rubbed out by inflation.
Even the child labour one is interesting - children are unemployable regardless of the law, they don't have the skill, stamina or strength to participate meaningfully in a modern economy. It makes a difference, but this is a ban on something that doesn't make much economic sense to start with. This isn't a meaningful political question these days, the economy has no use for children. Child labour went the way of slavery - any society attempting to utilise it will get steamrollered by capitalists using productive techniques to do an order of magnitude better.
It certainly wasn't hollow when work weeks could go anywhere from 60 to 80 hours during the industrial revolution. The fact that the minimum wage has been rendered sub-optimal after several decades of inflation and a dramatically different economy from when it started isn't really a great argument against having a minimum wage. It is a great argument for updating it though.
Your point against child labor is however complete nonsense. The fact that most so called "modern economies" are propped up by overseas labor often performed by children in the developing world is not an unfortunate accident. It's the consequence of the obvious fact that there are many jobs where businesses will happily choose low cost and high volume of labor over individual "skill, stamina, or strength".
Meanwhile, the GOP in America are trying to overturn long standing child labor laws in an attempt to battle increasing demands for higher wages by service workers so don't try to sell me the idea that it was businesses that decided to end child labor instead of the reality that it was activists and strikers - often facing heavy violence from the state in response - that ended the practice.
I think if I even started to talk about the laughable notion that slavery ended because of (instead of being massively bolstered and spread by) capitalists, I would be here all day so I'll save that diatribe for another time.
I actually think you're all misunderstanding what you're discussing.
No, I won't expand as to why, I just wanted to continue this alleged misunderstanding train.
Presumably all with stage 3 cancer from the radiation on our way to a mandatory shift to pay off our several million dollar fare over the next 300 years of multigenerational indentured servitude.
I thought this would be an interesting comment about the article but it came right out of the gate with The Message (Wokeism Bad!) and I lost interest.
In all seriousness though, do you not see how incredibly self absorbed and outright anti-empirical this comes across as? The article briefly mentions the directly relevant and real existence of sexism in computing in the first paragraph (40 years ago mind you!) and then goes on to be almost entirely about the woman and her game, and you couldn't manage to contain your faux outrage at being reminded of uncomfortable truths.
I think the fact that you thought being a minority gives you a free pass for not reading the article and giving this nonsense sermon about wokeism tells me you don't really understand the movement you're lecturing against.
Yes, I know. Another enlightened Woke One eager to tell the “minority” how ignorant he or she (see what I did there?) is for not understanding just how much The Message is truly helping him or her.
If only the minority would shut up and listen all the troubles would woke themselves out.
Nope, not even close to the truth. You should probably stop spreading FUD when it's apparent you don't know one iota about history.
When an idea is transparently horrible, it's proponents are not interested in discussion except as a means to propogate their message to others. In a reasoned debate, fascists always have to work the least because it always takes more mental effort to debunk a terrible idea than stating said idea.
Meanwhile, adhering to the rules of respectability means the fascist gets to expose far more people to their message in a format where they get to express their message without interruption.
The only reason why you should ever talk to a fascist is to ridicule them. Jean Paul-Satre put it best when talking about anti-Semites (though it really applies to all strains of fascism):
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
What if you get called the fascist then? Anything you say to defend yourself is just fascist mind tricks. Denials are just more evidence of guilt. I would still defend your right to call for us to be silenced.
Again, this is just more absurd hypothetical scenarios. The reality is never as ambiguous as you're painting it. What you're describing is how a fascist would conduct a confrontation, not anybody who believes in truth. Nobody here is saying "denials are evidence of guilt" and fascists are not Jedis.
Also, nobody is being silenced here either because there is no obligation built into the first amendment or even the very concept of Free speech to provide a platform for anybody.
Why do people keep making this same tired, frankly stupid, and entirely ahistorical analysis?
Fascists don't need any "martyr", even leaving aside the fact that nothing being done to Andrew Tate here is worthy of that label, because fascists are perfectly capable of fabricating a strong sense of victimhood in their own heads. The antidote to fascism is overwhelming opposition, not appeasement.
They don't respond to truth, civility, or compromise - though they may on occasion weaponize such ideas when it serves their own ends - because they don't believe in either of those things. This is just liberal brainrot. It didn't work in the Weimar republic and it certainly isn't working in the USA.
In truth, not banning people like this from society just teaches others that their sick ideas must have some sort of validity to them. Otherwise, why would it be on display?
The line is incredibly simple actually. Ideas that are diametrically opposed to the freedoms of others should not get to spread off the back of the institutions that are supposed to be protecting those freedoms.
A free society isn't something that can magically sustain itself without active effort and intolerance should not be tolerated. Sure, you can paint this as a "paradox" but aside from fascists cry bullying about being oppressed (while actively salivating about acquiring the ability to oppress everyone) and naïve liberals who can't remotely imagine the idea of bad faith actors in politics, I don't think anybody is getting oppressed here.
As far as I know, there is no violation of the First amendment here so even if you think hate speech should be protected free speech (which I don't agree with), nobody's freedoms have been breached here.
How about when the idea itself is directly calling for the opposition of the freedom of others? Fascist and racist ideas are not difficult to parse and there is generally little to no ambiguity in their interpretation. If you're not even capable of understanding the surface level reading of a proposition, then I frankly don't really care about who you trust and neither should society at large.
> Fascist and racist ideas are not difficult to parse and there is generally little to no ambiguity in their interpretation.
Interpretation by who? The things I’ve seen labeled as fascist and racist in recent years have led me to believe this is not true. But then again many of the people doing the labeling not only are quick on the trigger to make accusations of fascism and racism, but also seem to see the world in very black and white terms and seem to have little interest in things like nuance or context. I suppose all ideas become easy to parse with no ambiguity in interpretation when you have zero interest in introspection or countenancing views that differ from your own.
You do realize that we are specifically discussing ideas that are so reprehensible as to warrant being kicked off platforms, right?
Also, I'd love to see examples of the things you're talking about that are simultaneously filled with nuance and context, but also elicited an internet death penalty.
I love how you claim there is no line and then almost immediately afterwards establish that you do in fact have a line - that line being if a person is a conspiracy theorist or dangerous person. Unfortunately for your argument, Andrew Tate is both of those things.
You might also have forgotten about the inconvenient fact that Tate is facing credible accusations of human trafficking which he has so far narrowly avoided facing due to being based in Romania.
The book "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy" suggests that when what you are arguing for is obviously bad to most people, you end up falling back on 3 main arguments.
This will make the problem worse.
This will not fix the problem.
This will hurt something unrelated.
Basically the same as FUD deployed by incumbent tech giants. You don't need to even try to claim your product is better. People are familiar with your product and know that it's crap. You just have to introduce enough uncertainty into the conversation to slow progress towards other solutions.
People keep saying this because they’ve read up on history and know that never before has banning speech led to any positive outcome.
The resentment builds up over time, the bans add fuel to the fire, and the “ bad speech” only comes back later in greater numbers and even worse forms.
What’s worse is the “bad speech” goes underground and begins communicating in less obvious ways.
You’re looking at this through a 10 year lens thinking “we vanquished Alex Jones, and we will defeat the next one.”
Look at it through a 100 year lens and you might see a different picture.
Bullshit. For one, no speech has been "banned" here. Andrew Tate and others of his ilk are free to preach their hateful message but they're not free to do it off the backs of others.
As for the 100 year view, you don't have to do anything for bigots to "build up resentment" and last time it reached boiling point, we had a civil war where we kicked their ass. The biggest reason why racism prevailed so strongly in the South (and to a lesser extent, the North) had nothing to do with resentments. It was because Lincoln deciding to play the appeasment game and picking a Confederate ex-slave owner as VP who promptly halted and reversed Reconstruction post Lincoln's assassination.
No matter what time scale you view things, reality contradicts your view.
Andrew Tate is definitely guilty of TOS violations on more than one platform (and a whole lot more egregious offences like quasi-legal sex trafficking but I digress) so I'm not sure that a millionaire who does not require social media to peddle his brand of fascistic garbage is the best example of big tech censorship.
1. That is actually how "wages work". The state decides what is the minimal possible wage and then businesses will pay that amount to low status workers because businesses seek to maximize the surplus value out of their workers. Suggesting that businesses will opt into paying their workers a living wage without an external pressure is laughable and ahistoric.
2. Nobody serious is suggesting that $15 is some magical number but given political reality, it seems like an easier sell than proposing a minimum salary that dynamically adjusts based on local cost of living and inflation. It would also be a massive increase relative to the abysmal figure it is today.
"There is a very real chance that the more of those battles they win, the worse the outcome will be."
Such as the battle for minimum wage, the weekend, the 40 hour work week or the abolition of child labor?
I'm waiting for a credible example of a pro worker regulation having overall negative consequences for workers.