I’ll take “broad questions that can only be answered in context” for $200 Alex.

Seriously, ask me this question on 10 different days in 10 different ways and I’ll never give the same answer.

Even in the context of your vanilla perfume hypothetical I don’t have enough context to answer. How severe a reaction, what percentage of the population is affected, where is the perfume wearer at the time, why hasn’t it been banned and/or what makes me an expert who’s oppinion is worth a damn, etc etc etc?

From what little info I have on the hypothetical, no, I wouldn’t be upset. I didn’t see anyone being harmed, the perfume wearer wasn’t doing anything illegal, and I’ve got my own shit to deal with.

derogatory slang

What did you call me!?

Nah, the Republiklan got Trump elected twice by rejecting reality and substituting it with their own. Reality isn’t winning elections anymore (hell, maybe it never was). People who inspire passion are. I would back AOC before another milquetoast Dem any day.

Plus, it wasn’t just “women candidates” who lost. Hillary had decades in politics for the Right Wing Propaganda machine to attack. And Kamala had literally no time to build up support. AOC on the otherhand is honestly quite popular amongst her constituency and progressives nationwide. She is someone people vote for.

I placed my votes for Kamala, Biden, and Hillary, but they were all votes cast because of Trump. It would be so fucking nice to cast a vote for the candidate I want to win again.

…but you can’t make it think

“Here at Zohran Grocers, we’re chopping prices down to size! Don’t lose your heads over these great deals!”

Oh that one, yeah… no fuckin clue. Maybe a cyberman from Dr Who, but like… wearing a suit?

My anger at that insinuation is only surpassed by my apathy!

I’m thinking the silhouette of a classic Area 51 style alien.

oh… well… fuck… I was happy that he was gone…

That’ll teach me to get my hopes up…

100%

Not sure I would want my company involved the top three. Bottom two for sure tho!

Hey thanks! Good luck with your shitshow country too!

Does entropy get prep time?

Literally came to say this.

Well, I guess in that case the Governor of Cali should probably just let the military attack U.S. citizens in his state.

/s

Compared to the usual game console os windows offers a A LOT of freedom

Compared to the usual jail cell, the prison yard affers A LOT of freedom, just because you personally hate prison does not make the statement any less true.

Can you change your DNS again to test? Just pick Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or google (8.8.8.8) or something. It’s plausable that you actually can connect to the internet and are instead just unable to perform name resolution. Presumably the vpn is using a different dns server, hence it solves your problems when connected.

Or I guess you could try to ping a known good ip to see if the dns is the problem. I just pinged google and got this if you want to try it. 142.250.72.14

I’ve got my beliefs sorted, I want to be able to express myself however I choose. Including using censored curse words if I so choose.

And my point is, as I’ve said a few times, that I find it funny how censorship has gone from “polite” to “offensive”.

What if I don’t “not want to swear”, what if I want to used self-censored curse words?

Should I sacrifice my freedom of speech to appease others? Cuz that sounds an awful lot like censorship to me.

Edit to answer your edit: Oh, and this is not missing the original point… at all. It is more than fair to say who ever originally censored the post was doing so against whoever originally posted it’s wishes and that’s obviously uncalled for and uncool.

But when that was screen capped and posted here, OP didn’t care to un-censor it or look for an uncensored version. They were forced to preform a kind of “Topsy-turvy” censorship, in which their original post was considered “offensive language”, and had to re-upload the image to appease the crowd (though OP clearly appreciated the effort the other lemming put into changing it, so it’s not like they were “un-censored against their will”. So not really a big deal frankly). Still, that leads very nicely into my original (and thus the original) point.

My original point is just that I find it funny how censorship used to be polite speech, and is now considered impolite in circles such as these. And that point is aging like fine wine with how much people are trying to tell me that my freedom of speech is offensive to them. (Sure, you could say you don’t find it technically offensive, but you are asking me to change it or otherwise telling me it’s the “wrong” way to speak).

Depending on the circumstance, I completely agree. There are certainly many cases where censoring yourself is giving away your power and freedom of expression.

However, it’s not disingenuous to say that if I want to censor myself, for any reason, on the internet I will likely be shamed by folks who want to assert their values over mine. And as such, acquiescing means I am once again giving away my power to the people who want to dictate what I do with my life.

Perhaps I want to do it because I find it funny. Or perhaps I want to do it because I’m trying to emulate a classic comic book speech style, which often had to use censorship because they were being controlled, but now has become a recognizable convention. Or perhaps, as I already mentioned, I simply want to do it to assert my right to speak how I choose,despite the “higher authority” of the crowd.

For whatever reason, giving up my freedom of expression, as you already mentioned, f*%king sucks actually.

For example, take this post. OP didn’t care if it was censored or not, they just wanted to share something funny and didn’t want to work to do it. Yet most of the comments are about the rage felt by folks who wanted OP to do more work so they didn’t have to see a black bar.