"Far right buffoonery" starts with people batching about how they're being """censored""" for saying slurs or trying to have "honest conversations about race" or whatever.

Nip 'em in the bud and voila, no Nazis on your kbin.

What stuff of yours was censored?

That is the key question.

fascism doesnt play fair in the marketplace of ideas, if you invite a nazi to sit at your table you've made it a nazi table. free speech is necessary and important, but we still draw lines for things like defamation and hate speech. another line is not offering a platform to fascists, they arent entitled to a seat at the table to spread fud.

you're like "but i'm not a nazi" , great, let's keep it that way.

It certainly doesn't. It's just that alt rtght absolutely abuses good will and rules to the extreme and systematically hijacks certain phrases.

See Elon Musk's Twitter as a light example (giving in to authoritarian censorship, and skewing content visibility, while constantly touting himself a "Free speech absolutist"), or the_donald from Reddit, which was mostly made of bots, conspiracy theorists and some sane, but malicious people, banning anyone who's even slightly misaligned.

Some people like the previous commenter are then incorrectly shortcutting hijacked slogans to the alt right. Which was their goal to start with - increasing the friction, uncertainty and division.

To elaborate about free speech we want to mantain sensible environment. So we need to give a boot to astroturfing bots and far, far right neonazis. Though as with most things, moderation is the key.

Yes, but the "censorship" and "freedoms" they talk about isn't about malicious censorship (I.e. Spez going around quietly editing dissenting comments) or freedom about how our content is used (I.e. Reddit refusing to let people delete their comments).

Their version is about spreading misinformation and hate speech of all kinds, alongside racist and facist ideologies unfiltered and unimpeded. They're malicious actors acting like victims.

We don't want any of that, we want all folks to feel welcome, which is why we have to shoot that down. To maintain a tolerant society, we must only be intolerant of the intolerant.

I really liked /r/latestagecapitalism but I got banned for talking smack about China, and how the authoritarianism of the USSR and its child states didn't line up with the values they tried to espouse.

Permanently banned. Appeal ignored. Disappointing, but good riddance I suppose.

What OP doesn't seem to want to understand is that Left vs Right is Up vs Down.

The origins of Left vs Right as terms come from the days of the French Revolution. There was a vote called to ascertain the power of the King. Those who wanted to grant the King an Absolute Veto were asked to sit on the right side of the speaker's podium, those who were against, or wanted no king at all, were asked to sit on the left. There were many such votes.

Thus left vs right was born, the left represented the power of the people, and the right represented the power of the nobility.

Then conservatism was created, replacing birthright nobility for those who were merely rich and powerful.

Right and Left then became shorthand in the press for Conservatism vs those with more Democratic ideals, be it communist, socialists, or merely those who believed in taxing the rich and using that money to improve the lives of everyone. The press in Europe used the terms from almost the beginning, but it took a while for those terms to reach America.

Sadly, the Right figured out pretty quickly how to suppress and demonize the Left. They also figured out how to turn hatred to their advantage, to expand the ranks of the Right Wing supporters at the expense of the Left. Because you don't personally need to be super rich if the people you're taught to hate are super poor.

The thing is, the Left cannot abide attacks on those people. Which is why minority and lgbt+ rights are such a big part of the platform. Because those people are in fact part of The People, and the Left is the Power of the People. The goal is to lift everyone up, to protect everyone equally under the law.

After all, as Frank Wilhoit said;

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"