Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Free Speech and Power in the Time of Ukraine
Russians are being cut off just as Canadians were cut off, and just as Americans were cut off. This is not to equate the three causes — the cut-off Americans were pro-Trump, the Canadians were anti-mandate, and the Russian government is currently killing its way through Ukraine. Different cases, right? Yet the same tools are being used to silence individuals who have opinions contrary to the “dominant paradigm”. That similarity is the real danger. In the middle to long term, this is worse even than the horrors currently inflicted on Ukraine – globally homogenized censorship is a recipe for unending invasion and suppression. It is the boot poised above the human face.
Conventional wisdom has nothing to do with it. A paradigm is not wisdom, and convention has folded before dominance. I recall a bumper sticker artfully pinned to the door of some facultron in the English Department at my university, “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm”. This was an explicit, if cheeky admission of Brando’s defiant answer “Whaddya got?” when asked in The Wild Ones, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”. But now we simply Meet the New Boss. They rebel against nothing; they carry out their instructions, and curry favor with The System. They decide and the shotgun sings the song. The radicals are now the establishment, and they have mortgages.
