In the early 2000's I finished high school and went to college.
I was so stressed out, and in many ways very stupid, and didn't appreciate it at the time.
But god do I wish we could go back.
Pop culture seemed so dumb, but today it's even dumber.
The post 9/11 world seemed so dire, but today things feel even worse.
The Patriot act was the height of tyranny! But it was just a stepping stone to even more authoritarianism.
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You know one thing I really miss?
When most people still understood how important freedom of speech was!
I think it was the height of free speech in my lifetime:
- The Evangelical Christian Conservatives had lost the cultural power to enforce their prudishness and were mocked by comedians.
- The 80's/90's PC movements from the leftist academics had not gained any traction, and were mocked by comedians.
- People who got themselves all worked up and offended by things were rightfully mocked as the weak morons the are.
- It was "anything goes" when it comes to comedy, horror, political discourse. And everyone recognized it as a good thing.
- Xbox live voice chat.
But then at some point it seems like the progressives realized that the Christians Conservatives didn't have the power to censor anyone anymore, and that was the signal that the left no longer had to pretend to care about free speech. Thus began an ever growing snowball of political correctness which continues to this day and busted open the doors for all sorts of impending speech controls in the name of bullshit like "misinformation", "disinformation" and the new term they made up as an excuse to censor verifiably true things: "malinformation".