south park is a product of the 1990's! its origins lean heavily on the still-true left/democratic party's pro-censorship leanings

just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)

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atmavatar 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I feel it worth pointing out an important distinction between censorship coming from "the left" vs. that coming from "the right".

On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile, which, in some cases, results in some extreme cases where the individual loses their job in addition to becoming a social pariah.

However, all of this is merely an exercise in free speech and free association. The person in question suffers no legal consequences for their speech. Instead, it is a large number of onlookers who decide they disagree with the individual and choose to counter him/her with their own speech and/or dissolve any association they have with him/her.

I won't say I condone how little it takes for the crowd to react sometimes or the extent to which they do, but everything is well within First Amendment rights of free speech and association.

In contrast, when something the right doesn't like is discovered, they take legal action. Books are removed from public and school libraries. Laws are written to target anyone who is guilty of the offensive speech (e.g., Florida's Don't Say Gay law). More recently, it's been popular to write these laws such that the offending individuals are opened to civil suits by third parties rather than suffer jail time, as a loophole trying to avoid the Supreme Court striking them down as blatant First Amendment violations.

	▲	cr1895 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile Not sure it’s correct to characterize that as a reaction of only the “left” - case in point, the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death.

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edoceo 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?

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liveoneggs 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tipper Gore targeted music and Hilary Clinton targeted video games (remember - 1990s)

	▲	k12sosse 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The PMRC. Megadeth even wrote a song about it.. in '88 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8 https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics

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21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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henryfjordan 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance.

Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.

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GJim 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the R-word

	▲	nosioptar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The r-word is "retard".

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coloneltcb 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

broadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word.

Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)

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henryfjordan 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access

Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship

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sapphicsnail 18 hours ago | parent [-]

What's wrong with empathy?

	▲	seba_dos1 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Broken people consider it a weakness.

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liveoneggs 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are more subtle forms of censorship, continuously employed by the government to prop up or push down various things. Covid had many such examples of pressure tactics from the government come to light but I'm sure it happens constantly.

For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.

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ipaddr 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship

Cancel culture is literally censorship. Deplatforming is censorship. Debanked is censorship.

I don't know what the R word is but there is a group of people you can't even look down at because they have been deplatformed and cancelled.

The left has passed laws and people do get jail time for social media posts in the UK.

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joquarky 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If Tipper Gore weren't such a prude, there might have been enough votes to overcome that butterfly ballot issue.

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Whoppertime 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?

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ipaddr 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Christian right was trying to ban books in the 70s/80s. Fought heavy metal music in the 80s. Then you have 911 censorship. But after 2008 the left brought woke to power which saw banning people from twitter, social media, right speech. Then we reached covid which saw banning of facts. Deplatforming / banning / doxing became the norm until the return of Trump who then moved the needle and started pro Jewish censorship which has pushed the needle for the anti Jewish censorship crew which is taking over.

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liveoneggs 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Harry Potter is the funniest example because it started out being a target of the evangelical "right" and has become a target of the culture-war "left"!

	▲	kyboren 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism. The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker. I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper. Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.