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Seth Tummins's avatar

I had a lot typed here, but realized that I don’t know anything, so I deleted it. Twice. Learning about ideas and viewpoints is good. Needless exposure to explicit material is not.

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Michael Mohr's avatar

Yep. Very sad. We’ve seen the progressive left shift over the past decade from believing in democracy to becoming arbiters of censorship. It’s amazing how much tap-dancing people on the New Left will do to rationalize creating an illiberal, censorious environment. This latest iteration of banning startled culturally on the left circa 2013. Very few lefties said a word about cancellations, de-platforming authors, books being pulled, etc. Then far-right extremists start doing it legally (also bad) and suddenly the left is outraged. I don’t care what side it comes from: it’s anti-American. Art has always been offensive and transgressive. Writers don’t write to be safe; we write to explode society’s assumptions. People are *supposed* to get “triggered.” (By the way I really loathe New Age Millennial Woke language like “problematic” and “trigger.” Can’t people see how this makes a whole generation sound like toddlers?)

Hypocrisy.

Here’s my piece on book banning on both sides.

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/book-banning-happens-on-both-sides

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